The Two Hands of The Kingdom of God: Chaos Struggle & Mercy Mission

One Hand Clapping

The Kingdom of God advances with two hands. One restrains evil for the protection of others… brutally if necessary. The other reaches out to redeem those held prisoner by their own sinful natures.

Some Christians seem convinced that the Kingdom of God advances with only one hand. They are the theological equivalent of those Eastern philosophers forever pondering the sound of one hand clapping. I have long noted the tendency for any given individual to favor one over the other, and the general inability of most to maintain a healthy regard for both as equally Christian endeavors.

Missionary Leading

We had a home-missionary to our Church this past Sunday that reminded me again of the natural tension of the Christian Mission between promoting divine order and being on a mission of mercy.

He and his wife have, for the last decade, been involved in prison ministry. They reach into the lives of those whose sinful choices mark every aspect of their existence. They minister to them while incarcerated, to their families outside of prison who have been injured by both their presence and absence, and they strive to build a ramp for them to become productive members of society upon their release.

I have, since meeting the husband over a year ago, been impressed with their ability to maintain a healthy balance between recognizing creatures of darkness AS creatures of darkness that must be constrained with the sword in the right hand while simultaneously reaching into that darkness seeking their redemption and transformation into children of the light with their left.

They support the stringent efforts of society at every level to constrain the evil doer for the sake of others AND to punish them for their own sake… because sin needs to hurt; it’s part of the remedy for disciplining the wayward heart of every fallen image bearer from childhood on through the eldest of years. This mirrors the reality of human existence as both corporate and individual; each of which demands our attention. We must protect society and the individuals who make up society.

One of These Things Does Not Cancel Out the Other

It is easy to commit the sin of fixating on one to the neglect of the other, as any remark made on social media will prove. Support law enforcement and other necessary processes for a healthy society and a swarm of believers will attack you for failing to love “the least of these.” Express compassion for those whose every life choice has led to personal and social disaster, and some believers will attack you for eroding the foundations of civilization.

But They Do Cancel Out This One

Then, of course, you have those who will attack me for suggesting in that last sentence that these poor darlings are in anyway responsible for their own dreadful lives; they are victims you see… victims of society… of the systems that sustain society. So, naturally, the system has gotta go and that society needs to be punished… deserves to be punished. The very presence of “criminals” is viewed as a testament to society’s guilt, and the justice system is, in their eyes, just a tool of ongoing oppression over those whom society has already wronged… marginalized.

This is echoed, whether satirically or honestly I am uncertain, in the words of Thomas More in his book Utopia when he complains, “For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?” The wrongness of these words, if meant honestly, is subtle and tricksy… and if meant satirically are too subtle for most. It speaks to the truest source of evil in the world.

A Two Fisted Preacher

This is why both hands are needed in the exercise of a truly biblical struggle that understands that the ultimate source of all societal ills is found in the human heart. It bleeds naturally from there into the systems that human hearts design. We cannot perfect people by perfecting our systems because people themselves are the everlasting monkey wrenches in every system. Therefore, every attempt to perfect people or the systems they build are fraught with unforeseen consequences emerging from the imperfections of the human heart itself. In such a world, we must always remember that everything is a trade-off… no good deed goes unpunished… and every cloud has a silver lining… including a mushroom cloud.

Old Doesn’t Mean Mold

Many Christians conceive of this issue as a tension between the testaments. Law and order and the oppression that law and order bring are deemed the stuff of the Old Testament, the work of the angry Old Testament God Yahweh… terrible is He. But mercy and empathy and sympathy are regarded as the true mark of the new way of the New Testament, the work of the gracious New Testament God in the person of Jesus who went about snuggling sheep and blessing the little children that those mean people stuck in the Old Testament ways shunted aside. And they couldn’t be “wronger”… on both sides of the testamental divide.

The New is Built on the Old

The New Testament is the growing edifice built on the foundations of Old Testament systems and hopes. Law can’t save you, but neither is it a curse upon you.[1] Law is celebrated as a gift from God in both testaments. It is an instrument of beautiful society. (Proverbs 29:18) It is the mirror that shows you your need. (James 1:23) It is the preservative to restrain the heart from its darkest paths. (1 Timothy 1:8-10) Law is the disciplining tutor that brings you to Christ and prepares your heart to receive the mercy and forgiveness that He purchased with His own blood and now offers to you… in spite of the fact that you have offended all of heaven with so many of your choices in life previous. (Galatians 3:24-25)

This idea of growth from and fulfillment of is important. Not only has the mission of the Church always been an obvious part of the plan as part of the mission of Israel, (Genesis 12:2-3; Exodus 19:5-6; Isaiah 2:2-4, and Isaiah 42:6-7) but it’s fullness does not leave behind the expression of that mission as a whole life chaoskampf.

Chaoskampf Rising… always

Chaoskampf??!!! You scream into the night like a frustrated college student over his school work. Yes, Chaoskampf. Got that word memorized yet? Let me help. Chaoskampf…. Chaoskampf… Chaoskampf. That’s six repetitions so far. There will be more.

Chaoskampf is a scholarly word used to describe part of the worldview of ancient near eastern people including Israel as concerns their own struggle (Kampf) for survival in a hostile environment (Chaos).

The Three Forms of Chaoskampf

Every society must contend with the destructive bents of many spiritual forces and of nature itself. For this, pagan kings and priests advanced Myth & Ritual… i.e. Sacred word and right worship. This looks a lot different in Israel than elsewhere, because they are monotheists, but that is for another discussion.  

They must contend within their own communities with malicious people bent on doing harm and the natural consequences of so many ignorant and foolish people trying to live together. Against this, was rallied Law and Wisdom.

They must also contend with the dangers of so many other peoples out there bent on taking from them the things they have acquired… people whose armies are ready to kill and rape, rob and kidnap to enrich their own. For this, we find war and covenant making.

I call these cosmic chaos, internal chaos, and external chaos.

Yes, They Are in the Bible Too

In fact, we are introduced to this quickly in Scripture.

One of the key Hebrew words associated with this idea is found in the opening of Genesis 1:2. 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” or some translational version of that. Then Gen 1:2a says, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” “Without form and void” is rendered out of TOHU WABOHU. BOHU appears three times always paired with TOHU whichis used about 20 times in the Hebrew Scriptures and stands in for the idea of anti-creation, emptiness, an unproductive state.

Thereafter, we find the combat. Genesis 1:2b-3 says, “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. The Spirit of God contending with so much nothingness to bring life and light coming to banish the dark. It is both conflict with forces of chaos and the redemption of that which is trapped in chaos.

This must not be missed. A pattern of life presented in the opening verses of Scripture and carried through to the final page—conflict and redemption against anti-creational forces… death and darkness—should not ever pass from our concern just because we, as Christians, have inherited the ongoing mission of Christ.

Two Hands Clapping is Key to Chaoskampf

Just as the ancient chaos struggle (Chaoskampf) worked at promoting wisdom (self-rule) AND law (constraint of fools) and worked at BOTH covenant (a mechanism for divinely overseen peace between would-be enemies) AND war (forced constraint of those who will not pursue peace) so the struggle for the human soul in the Gospel Mission engages BOTH the fight for justice (aggressively defending natural rights and viciously punishing those who violate them) AND the attempt to win souls away from darkness and call them into the light. That’s a crazy sentence. Go back and read it carefully.

The Gospel is Part of Biblical Chaoskampf

The Gospel does not leave justice behind. The Gospel does not ignore human sin. The Gospel does not eradicate the need for divine order in society. The Gospel does not castoff concern for civic order, scorning law and even war as evil holdovers from that OLD Testament. The Gospel does not relegate all Chaoskampf to unbelievers, leaving the dirty work of maintaining civilization to the most wicked and foolish among us.

The believer, like Christ, should have a sword in his right hand, and the offer of healing and hope in his left. It can be a difficult tension to maintain, but maintain it we must if we hope to truly do the work of the Kingdom of God.

Thus, I am grateful for both the prisons, the police, the courts, and the prison guards… as well as the death penalty and executioners… AND I am also grateful to those who take up the hard task of ministering the Gospel of Jesus Christ inside prisons to call those rightfully captive there[2] out of darkness and into the light.

~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD

[1] The curse of the law referenced by Paul from which Christ delivers is NOT the law itself. Gal 3:13  Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law.  No, but it is the curse of death that sin demands by nature and law demands as an instrument of God’s holy justice. Gal 3:10  For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” 

[2] Personally, I think we can do better than our present prison system, so this is not a carte blanche praise for the whole system, just a recognition of the need for ruthless justice. In truth, any system I designed would be far more ruthless against the violent, and far more redemptive for thieves through forced labor and mandatory multi-fold repayment of what was stolen.