SEEKING GOD’S KINGDOM (NOT MILLENNIUM) PROACTIVELY The following article, the fifth in a series, is to be published in the October issue of India’s FORWARD Press, is written for backward caste intelligentsia. Yet, it addresses a debate that needs to take place in America. Are we to wait for the Rapture or are we called to seek God’s kingdom proactively? America cannot be transformed without reforming evangelicalism’s pessimistic pre-millennial Dispensationalism. Your robust participation in this serious debate is invited. Making India a Great Nation – 5 ECONOMIC KALIYUGA AND THE BELIEF IN PROGRESS [Kaliyga = Dark Age of Kali that ends in total destruction] The National Food Security Bill, 2013, is a massive admission that Indian economy has failed. • Seventy-five percent of the rural and 50 percent of the urban population need to depend upon a corrupt bureaucracy to buy five kg of basic food grains per month! • It is terrible that those who help produce our basic grains cannot afford what they need for bare subsistence. But, • If the government pays the producer less than the market, why would the peasants produce it? Or, • Should the 3 percent Indians who pay income tax, subsidize the government to purchase grain at a satisfactory price, store it, protect it, transport it, and resell it at a loss to 67 percent poor? • Why would bureaucrats, who don’t own the produce, take the required trouble to preserve it from robbers, rats, and rain? The compassion behind the act is laudable. It may return the Indian National Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) to power for a third consecutive term. Yet, it is likely to lead the country away from the idea of progress. The intellectual pedigree of this act, as we shall see, goes back to 1904, when Mahatma Gandhi discovered John Ruskin’s book Unto this Last, which applied one of Christ’s parables about the kingdom of God to economics. The Economics of Gloom We Indians ushered in the year 2013 with tremendous optimism. We were en route to become the world’s greatest economy in foreseeable future (if, somehow, we could control our corruption). But, yesterday’s optimists are no longer enthusiastic about investing in India. • The annual growth rate has come down from 9 percent (between 2003 and 2008) to 4.5 percent. • The global market still trades in rupee, but few care for it all that much. • The stock market is down by 25 percent (in dollars terms). • Trade deficit has increased from US$ 169.81 in 2011–12 to US$ 182.09 billion in 2012–13. • Foreign-exchange reserves have not yet hit 1991 levels, but seem headed that way. • Back in 1991, we had to fly our gold reserves to the Bank of England and accept economic “reforms” enforced by global institutions. Those reforms-under-compulsions, not our own economic proficiency, gave us our visions of possible grandeur. Doubt a Dark Age? Because the economic data argues for pessimism, hope has to rest on non-economic factors that undergird economic behaviour. Do we have a credible basis for rejecting one of India’s core religious beliefs: that we are headed down to a socio-economic Dark Age – Kaliyuga, the coming era governed by the demon Kali? Even some Indians reject our traditional doctrine of kaliyuga because they accept the Western theory of evolution. Biology is always evolving; therefore, they reason, economy will also evolve. Evolutionists themselves say that misfits always perish; however, blind chance had no compassion even for mighty dinosaurs. Unintelligent ‘chance’ can turn Syria’s silly war or Iran’s nuclear threat into a wider war that raises petroleum price. That alone will make India’s already weak manufacturing, uncompetitive. Chance gives grounds for anxiety, not hope. Modern Indian Idea of Progress Historians have deceived themselves about the real source of our modern faith in progress. Mahatma Phule called it Baliraj; Gandhi named it Ramrajya. But both studied it in the Bible, as Christ’s teaching about the Kingdom of God. That is also the original, even if unacknowledged, source of Sonia Gandhi’s food act. The Lord Jesus saw the oppressive, exploitative kingdoms, including the Roman Empire, as the kingdom of Satan (e.g., Luke 4:5–7). Therefore, he defined his mission in the words of Prophet Isaiah: “to proclaim good news to the poor . . . to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4: 18). He had come, he said, to inaugurate God’s kingdom on behalf of the “poor” and “hungry”; whose spirits had been crushed, who “mourn” because of the kingdom of Satan; “weary and heavy-laden”; “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” whose rulers had become wolves (see Luke 6:20–26; Matthew 9: 36; 11:28–30). John 10 and Ezekiel 34 tell us that in Christ’s Jewish culture, the idea of a “leader as a shepherd” was associated with abundant life, showers of blessings that bring in abundant grain and crops. To the hungry and naked, anxious about food and clothing, the Lord Jesus said, “Seek first his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:32–34). Because seeking God’s kingdom is our responsibility, the Lord Jesus asked those tired of the kingdom of Satan, to pray to God, “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6: 10). What Is the “Kingdom of God”? Matthew 13, Mark 4, and Luke 8 record several parables that the Lord Jesus used to teach the meaning of God’s kingdom. Understanding the first, the parable of the sower, is a key to understanding the rest of his teachings (Mark 4:13). Matthew 13 records the parable in these words: A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. A parable is not a story. It is an analogy from everyday life. It gives clues to help us get to the layers of deeper meanings. The Lord Jesus, the one who was sowing the seed of the kingdom of God (Matthew 13:37), gave the first clue that the kingdom of God is like a seed (Mark 4:30). The seed is the word of God (Luke 13:11). The listeners are the soil. The “good soil” that receives the seed by faith and multiplies it into abundant fruit is the one which is prepared through deep repentance for sin (Luke 3: 3-20). This soil is the people with “noble and good heart” (Luke 13:15), who enrich their minds with healthy nutrients, and adequate water (Psalm 1, John 15, 2 Peter 1: 4–7, etc.) Jesus gave several other clues to help us go to the deeper layers of the meaning. To receive the seed of the kingdom, the “word of God” (Logos), is to receive the king himself (John 1: 1–17); to make Him, rather than Satan, the Lord of our lives. Jesus also summarized the “word of God” as the command to love God with all our heart, strength, and mind and to love our neighbor as ourselves. These two commandments, he taught, encapsulate the Ten Commandments – the “very words of God” (Romans 3:2). The Ten Commandments are the basis for our “fundamental” or “inalienable” human rights. God’s commands “You shall not kill” and “You shall not steal” mean that we have God-given rights to life and property. No individual or government can deprive us of these rights. An inalienable right to the property that we inherit or create is the foundation of economic growth. Economic development means creative and responsible harnessing of natural resources. That is one of the points of the first two of the Ten Commandments. On the one hand, those two commandments require us to seek and believe the Truth: to not make idols that cultivate faith in myths. They ask us not to worship nature because we were created to govern nature as God’s stewards. It was the Ten Commandments, which first required God’s people to neither covet, nor steal what belongs to others, but to create wealth by working for six days and share it with the needy. Sociologist Max Weber and others popularized this key to the West’s economic success as “Protestant Work Ethic.” In fact, it came as God’s word to the Jews. It began to be obeyed at mass scale in Europe after the Protestant Reformation. Just as a seed contains the DNA of a giant tree and the potential of a huge forest, words of God contain the DNA (information) of His Kingdom of justice and mercy. For example, Prophet Malachi said that the command, “You shall not steal,” bans stealing what belongs to God: that is, our “tithes.” Ten percent of our income has to be given to God for the religious needs of the community, which includes care of the poor, the widows, and orphans (Malachi 3: 7–9). Expanding upon that theme, Jesus said that during the final judgment, “The King will reply [to the righteous], ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’” (Matthew 25:40). Jesus further expounded his theme of “the least of these” in a parable in Matthew 20. Because God is love, his kingdom is not merely about cold economic justice. It is also about the warmth of godly compassion. John Ruskin (1819 –1900) saw the horrors of the Industrial Revolution and critiqued it in an 1860 essay that took its title, “Unto this last” from Christ’s parable (Matthew 20: 14). His response to the critics expanded that essay into a book (1862) critiquing capitalism without compassion. Mahatma Gandhi discovered Unto This Last in March 1904, and it changed his life. He translated and published it into Gujarati, under the title of Sarvodaya (Wellbeing of All). In 1951, Valji Govindji Desai, translated it back to English as Gandhi’s economic philosophy, which, unfortunately, became a philosophy of sharing poverty instead of wealth. Be that as it may, Acharya Vinoba Bhave became the best known champion of Gandhi’s Sarvodaya, a noble caricature of Christ’s teaching on God’s kingdom. Today, that seed of Christ’s parables has produced a number of programs branded, more appropriately, as Antyodya (Wellbeing of the ‘Last’). The National Food Security Bill is the latest of these; even if it is motivated more by politics than morality. One difference between Christ’s teaching and the food act becomes obvious when we consider the fourth parable recorded by Apostle Matthew (13: 34–43). In this the Lord Jesus takes the analogy of the seed and the kingdom to yet another level of meaning. He says that those who receive the word of God as the seed of the kingdom, in turn, become the seed of the kingdom of God. When they choose to die like a grain of wheat they bear much (fruit and) seed (John 12: 24). When the righteous become seed (John 12) or branch (John 15), they produce the fruit of God’s kingdom. They shine like lamps . . . like a city on a hill . . . like New Jerusalem . . . giving light to those living in Satan’s kingdom of darkness. (Mark 4: 21–25; Luke 8: 16–18; Matthew 5:14–16; Revelation 21:22–27). God’s seed or kingdom, Jesus said, grows along with Satan’s weed. In the final judgment (Revelation 19–20), however, the diabolical weed that corrupts God’s creation will be removed and burnt (Matthew 13: 36-43). A major difference between Christ’s teaching on the Kingdom of God and the National Food Security Bill is obvious: God requires us to create wealth and take care of the poor. The food act encourages the poor to covet their neighbor’s wealth. They are bribed to vote for a government that will tax productive citizens, so that the government can feed itself and the poor. Spirituality for Progress God’s compassionate kingdom transforms politics. But it does not come through politics. We enter it, Jesus said, when we are born again (John 3: 1–18). This new birth happens when we invite the Spirit of God to plant in us the transforming seed of God’s word. This spiritual birth turns us from our sin and starts us on a new spiritual journey—on a path to progress that gives hope to the hopeless. Charles Grant and William Carey (whom I have quoted elsewhere) were the first to present this optimistic perspective for India in 1792. Their books and example inspired thousands of disciples to bring hope to India. Phule and Gandhi tried to make Christ’s teaching even more attractive by clothing it in indigenous myths. For Christ’s disciples, however, Satan’s kingdom was no myth. They witnessed the Chief Justice declare Jesus innocent before handing him over to be brutally nailed to the cross. They had every reason to be pessimists. Except that they met the risen Christ and learnt further about the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). They could see that the devil’s kingdom of death had indeed been defeated. The triumph of God’s kingdom was no longer a “pie in the sky” resting on pious myths, stories, theories, and fluctuating data. The disciples changed history because they were eye witnesses of the resurrected king. Their hope, anchored in the rock of history, enabled them to confront Satan’s kingdom of despair. They did not wait to be raptured into heaven. Their knowledge of truth and the Spirit of God gave them the the power to serve God even when it meant dying as a grain of wheat. They knew that they will bring much fruit. And they did: even in India. Vishal Mangalwadi’s 1997 classic, “India: The Grand Experiment” is selling for $3967 on Amazon but will be available this weekend for FREE from RevelationMovement
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 18:31:33 +0000
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