WHEN THE KINGDOM OF GOD COMES IN POWER

What does it mean to see the Kingdom of God come with power?

     Certainly, we know what it is for an earthly kingdom to arrive, as when Germany invaded Belgium, or the Communist Revolution in China toppled the government of Chiang Kai Shek. How might the coming of the Kingdom of God be similar, or different? Just as we know about the coming of earthly kingdoms from experience or learning, so too do we know about the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.

     First, we have to be certain we understand all the terms.  What is the Kingdom of God? Is it the Church? Yes, it is the Church, but the Church as we experience it is not the Kingdom in its fullness. It is like a seed that is awaiting its fruition.

     We know for example that in the Kingdom in its fullness, there will be no death, for the promise of the Kingdom is everlasting life. While we are in this world, death is always around us, but we experience everlasting life by means of virtue.

     Our society and culture tends to diminish virtue in one of two ways. First, it will try to reduce virtue to behaviour. We will hear, for example, “so and so gives money to the poor or to charity. This is virtue.”

     Or society will reduce virtue to a value, an ideal that is never actually reached. But for the Kingdom of God to come in power, virtue has to be real and attainable. Virtue has to come in power.

     The most powerful Kingdom is the one that bows its head to no other Kingdom, and the Kingdom of God is that Kingdom, which by necessity exerts a lordship over all other kingdoms, as it exercises a direction and dominion that is as peaceful as the flow of water, and yet undeniable and unbending in its resolve.

     A good example can be taken from Prince St. Michael of Chernihiv. Michael was brought with his servant Fedir before the Khan, and required to renounce his faith in Chirst, under the pain of the ultimate penalty—the penalty of death. But in Michael and Fedir the Kingdom of God had come in power. The so-called “ultimate penalty” was no longer ultimate. The Khan’s power and kingdom had been reduced to nothing, and when the Khan at last took their lives, they stepped very easily across into the fullness of Christ’s Kingdom, where they could devote themselves with constancy and ease to the salvation of their people. 

     To see the Kingdom of God come in power is to achieve the perception of the world in which Christ reigns in all things. This perception of the world is a danger to the world, because it is imperturbable, impassible and rich in the face of even the direst poverty. Yet, the converse is not true. Those who have made their alliance with the permanent see no threat in the impermanent, and those who have sought communion with the Power can hardly dread or perceive a threat in the various earthly powers.  Just like Michael and Fedir, all those who have cast in their lot with the Kingdom of God are free to act from compassion for their fellow human beings and seek to extend the influence of the Kingdom of God by means of their mercy.  In such people, virtue becomes very real, neither isolated from behaviour, nor abstract from the ideal, but a mode of being, a way of life.