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THE KINGDOMS OF THIS WORLD and

THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson

Published by World Wide Web Witness Inc.

March 2009

ISBN 978-0-9806138-4-1

PREFACE

First of all, consider Him who is first - and last. There is no competition there for the primacy of position or the outlasting, enduring end of the matter. He is BOTH. Nor is there any emulation within Him, for He delights to give His kingdom to His Christ, He who is the Father, and the Spirit of God is sent by the Son from the Father. Thus when in Revelation it declares the unutterably musical, majestic, simple, solemn sentence:

the kingdoms of this world have become
the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ,

there is no sense of striving together. That is the way of this world. Rather the One delights to give it and the other delights to receive it and both, one God, delight to send the Son so that many might be moved from the kingdoms of this world to His own.

There is nothing meretricious: for merit is total and pervasive. It does not need to be earned, for it is there; and its disclosure is not for assessment for it assesses and is wrought over all. What is, precedes what is done, as a car precedes its mileage; but this One, He is eternal. The alternative of nothing (which gives nothing, but we are something) or something inadequate (but by definition that CANNOT do it) leaves only one opening: what is eternally sufficient from the first for everything to the last. Nor is He composite, as if synthesised, nor contained, as if Another were over Him, for that is not God but a subject and what subjects is God.

Nor is He less than personal who makes persons, gives them that liberty which is the groundwork of responsibility and that law which is the basis of morality and that fervent function of spirit which is the underground work for creativity in our race, the results of which are nobility and disaster, wonder and woe, calamity and consummation, in a perfervid mess of mangling called the kingdoms of this world.

It is great to envisage their loss, as Shakespeare phrases it, we dote on their very absence and yearn for their decease; for it is then that these kingdoms become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, that Messiah who being sent from eternity, the Word of God living and lively, who created all things (Colossians 1:15, John 1:3, I John 1:1-4) whose is eternal life and from whom it is obtained, that door for entry, that Lamb for atonement, that Destroyer of death and deployer of life that cannot finish, for He gives of His own.

In this volume, our concern is the movement from the one to the other, the quality of the one compared to the other, the politics of frustration and the power of reformation, the ending of an Age and the coming of the King whose kingdom is over all, whose trinitarian magnificence with His Father and the Spirit leaves an eternal light that nothing can obfuscate, a glory which nothing can penetrate and a life that nothing can end for the citizens of that realm (Philippians 3:20-21, Revelation 7, John 11).

His it is, and on the weigh bridge on the way, the heaviness of the kingdoms of this world is found to be but in the heart, and their weight as nothing. Their replacement is the greatest of mercies and their end a matter for no mourning, but delight, just as their avaricious maws chomp continually on Christians, as if to end once and for all the kingdom of grace and measure, life and beauty of holiness, kindness and love, in the interminable recesses of spite and folly, hatred and meaningless self-elevation, competitions of rats for the relish of smelly food that is mere offal.

An earlier volume, The Kingdom of Heaven would serve as a useful introduction.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE

THE STATE OF THE ELECTION IN ISRAEL FEBRUARY 2009

The State of the Case and the Signals of the Chase

in the Light of the Bible's Forthright Foretelling

Chapter 2

GIANT SURF FOR DWARFS

THE STATE OF THE KINGDOM OF AHAZ A WARNING TO MANY ANOTHER

Chapter 3

SPECIFYING A PARTICULAR CAUSE IS AS PERILOUS