GOD'S NEW WORLD, DAY 16 (King of the nations)
“Great and amazing are
your deeds,
Lord God the Almighty!
Just and true are your ways,
King of the nations!
Lord, who will not fear
and glorify your name?
For you alone are holy.
All nations will come
and worship before you,
for your judgments have been revealed.”
(Rev. 15.1-4)
As we have seen, Paul talks about the
“glory about to be revealed to us” and the fact that “the creation is
impatiently waiting for the ‘revealing’ of the children of God” (Rm.
8.18-19). In Gn. 1.26-31, God created
human beings in his image in order that they may “have dominion” over his
creation. Human beings mediate the
Creator’s authority in his world. Psalm
8 picks up this theme and says that God has “crowned mankind with glory and
honour” (Ps. 8.3-8, esp. v. 5) – the glory of God is manifested when human
beings exercise their God-given mandate to “rule” over creation. One way to summarize human history is in
terms of humans presuming to “rule” over the world (through civilization and
empire) without reference to the Creator but rather, through the amassing of
power, setting themselves up as “gods” with prerogatives which rightly belong
only to the Creator.
Indeed, Yahweh – the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob – is consistently shown in Scripture to be anti-imperial. The Creator’s campaign against evil was
launched following the blatant display of hubris which consisted of the construction
of the Tower of Babel (=Babylon: Gn. 11.1-9).
Following this failed attempt to establish a memorial to human
arrogance, Yahweh called Abram to leave the civilized comfort of Sumer/Babylonia
(the very cradle of civilization) and to become a nomad, called to “go” to an-as-yet-undisclosed
destination (Gn. 12.1-3). Abra(ha)m and
his extended family eventually settled in Canaan (the Levant), and three
generations later, due to a famine, the family’s fate would become entwined
with the other major civilization of the Ancient Near East – Egypt.
It is in Egypt that Abraham’s descendants
fall victim to the dark drives of empire – provoking Pharaoh’s fear as an
ever-growing ethnic minority, the “Hebrews” are enslaved for 400 years. Finally, Yahweh hears the cries of his oppressed
people (cf. Ex. 3.7-8) and sends Moses back to Egypt to deliver the people of
God. During a protracted struggle – enacted
“in heaven” between Yahweh and the gods of Egypt and “on earth” between
Moses/Aaron and Egypt’s sorcerers/Pharaoh (himself believed to be the embodiment
of Ra, the Sun-god[1]) –
the Egyptian empire is subjected to a series of humiliations, culminating in
the “exodus” of the Hebrews (cf. Ex. 3—15).
So, already in the first two books of the Bible, the God of Israel has
set himself against the pride and domination of empire – whether it be that of
Babylon or Egypt. The people of this
God (i.e., Israel) are called to demonstrate a radical alternative to empire –
they are to be a tribal confederation on the march to the Promised Land, led by
a prophet (Moses) and living under the rule of Yahweh, the truly divine king.
[1] Believed to have been the first Pharaoh. This “divinization” of the rulers of empire
would continue throughout the ancient world, culminating in the “apotheosis” of
Roman emperors upon their death (their inclusion in the pantheon and their
becoming the object of worship). Indeed,
in the Eastern part of the Roman empire, it was common for the emperors to be
worshipped as divine during their lifetime.
This pagan tendency to make a god out of the person at the pinnacle of
the imperial hierarchy is radically undermined by the Incarnation of (the Word
of the true) God as Jesus of Nazareth, a powerless peasant, born in dubious
circumstances, whose early years were spent as a refugee in Egypt, and
who spent most of his life in a Galilean backwater that was despised even by
his fellow countrymen (cf. Jn. 1.1-18, 45-46).
The Bible is a collection of documents that are deeply subversive…
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