Personal Power and the Synthetic Community

Synopsis     1Sam 14:44-15:1     9/21/2018

As the battle of Michmash wound down, God stopped communicating to King Saul. Through a process of divine discovery, God revealed that Jonathan was the cause of breach between God and Saul.

Saul demanded Jonathan’s confession. And so, Jonathan acknowledged eating honey before the battle was complete. Although, he had only eaten the honey before being told about Saul’s ill-advised edict.

So, Saul determined to kill Jonathan for the offense. But the Israelite soldiers saved Jonathan.

After the battle, Saul consolidated power. The kingship became formal. Saul built up the standing army. And Israel entered into a period of near constant military engagement. They fought in turn with most of their historic enemies as the Israelite hold on the Promised Land became more firmly established.

Israel Took Power The Way Anyone Takes Power

Saul learned to recognize political power. Unlike the judge Jephthah, who sacrificed his innocent daughter because of an ill-advised oath, Saul was prevented from sacrificing Jonathan. He deferred to the political power of the soldiers.

This is the way of Saul. He consolidated his power by building up a standing army. As Samuel had predicted, he took the best of the young men and women from around Israel, and pressed them into his service. He paid for it all through conquest over the surrounding nations. In other words, for the most part he led Israel the way any king leads any nation.

He kept up a relationship with God not out of devotion to God, but because he could use it to support his ambition to consolidate political power.

Personal Power and the Synthetic Community

The wisdom of God challenges me to work in the world from the inside out.

I control my attention. I control what my mind engages in the world I experience. God’s wisdom meets me there, at every moment of choice.

This is natural. God created me with a unique essence. But He also created me in a unique time and place. So, I meet the challenges of my life moment-by-moment. And I do this in a way that only I could.

Political power is the opposite. It works to control the outside, no matter what is happening on the inside. It produces a synthetic kind of  community where the glue that binds people together is not the Holy Spirit of God, but the imposition of political power through force of more-or-less arbitrary laws.

God did not call me to be a culture warrior. I am not called to impose from without, even what is evident as natural moral law. Reality is what it is. I don’t have to defend it to other human beings.

But, I am a Christ follower. So, I am called to love in truth. This is essential. And it will always be true in every time and place.

“For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens” Eph 6:12