THE COMING KINGDOM OF CHRIST
“We are not fighting with flesh and blood, but with principalities, with powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the spiritual armies of evil in high places.” Ephesians 6: 12
“And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended.” Revelations 20: 2-3
It’s fashionable in Christian circles to muse about our world today as the time of the apocalypse. Over the course of the last few years a different, almost exactly inverted, conception has been forming in my mind: that the reign of Christ is what’s actually on the horizon.
As I see it, every attempt to make sense of the world today falls bankrupt and defunct without a consideration of the world as a battleground for spiritual forces in high places. Human history is the threshing floor for the conflict between good and evil. Each human soul is an arena for the contest between darkness and light. Behind battles, behind conflicts, behind confrontations there are battles between the armies of heaven and the armies of Satan playing out. Satan is not some ambiguous force of darkness; Satan is an individual substance, a being of pure intellect with agency and will, and he is dead set against the order of creation and the order of grace.
As the powers of governments, of world leaders, of multinational corporations grow, and they set themselves directly against the faith and morals of God, it’s easy to presume that the Devil’s power is mounting to its final climax. And of course, that may be the case. But what I’m going to lay out here is a conception of the near future where the reign of Christ triumphs in humanity, because I think that reality is on the horizon, and there’s direct evidence that Christian revelation declares such a worldwide triumph will happen.
I: Contra European Christendom
I do not think the Middle Ages, the time of “European Christendom”, was the triumphant reign of Christ. It wasn’t a human-wide triumph of Christ, and the devil still roamed about the earth, subverting whole cultures and whole kingdoms. Much of the world had yet to hear the gospel at all. Much of the world hadn’t even been charted from any single culture’s perspective. The scope of the world was unknown, and the inhabitation of the world was unknown. This by-default limited the reach of Christianity as a consequence.
II: The Global Human World
Today there is a global humanity. The majority of the world knows of the rest of the world. We are in communication and contact with the rest of the world. We have a very good idea of what inhabits the world. And so the scope of our humanity-wide self-knowledge spans the entire world. The 2nd industrial revolution connected the world physically, and the 3rd industrial revolution connected the world digitally. For some decades now, the networks of human interaction have proliferated to a global scale unlike they ever have in human history. This is undoubtedly a momentous shift in the history of our species.
III: Why Now?
Why now?, we might ask; or, Why soon? I think there are two parts to this answer: first, because we’re now equipped for a worldwide reign of Christ, having a global self-conception of humanity; and second, because the psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual situation of humanity, and the human individual, is in dire crisis. Things are getting ever more despairing for individuals and communities. Happiness is the central aim of human life. And Christianity has a profound advantage in resolving questions of despair, purpose, and happiness. All of this sets the stage for mass swaths of humanity to voluntarily choose a life with Christ.
IV: Perfecting the Intellect
Fides et ratio. “Faith and reason.” There is no separation between faith and reason; further, faith actually perfects reason. We are living in a time where knowledge and rational capacity is in high esteem. This is not something that undermines Christ, but something that substantiates Christ. The error our modern time is running into is one of philosophical deficiency. We have abandoned metaphysics, and our entire logical framework has disintegrated as a consequence (as it would). The question of life is not how did it, in our particular circumstance, get here; the question of life is one of existence: how does anything exist instead of nothing? To answer this you need metaphysics. You need a philosophy of being. You have to conceive of the prima-being: Self-possessing, self-establishing, eternal, immaterial, self-contained, perfectly powerful of being itself, perfectly knowing of being itself. You can’t answer anything if you don’t first answer the dilemma of God.
Lucky for us, we possess rational intellects that are well capable of doing just that. And so the holes existing at the foundation of modern peoples psyches are metaphysical holes. They are gaps in their knowledge and worldview that, without, the psyche crumbles and disintegrates.
There is a premium of value for those who perfect both their metaphysical knowledge and their material knowledge. Material knowledge orients you in the world, metaphysical knowledge orients you in existence. The ones who do so predispose themselves to secure mental stability, peace of mind and heart, and experienceable happiness.
V: Why Christ? Why not just “God”?
Take those benefits of mental stability, peace of mind and heart, and happiness that come with metaphysical clarity and knowledge, add to it the transformative love of a personal God, add to that a God that took on human flesh that our human species might better know Him, and add to that the perfection of love in a triune God, and you begin to conceive of the singularly transformative potential of faith in Christ.
The question that faith in Christ can answer in a way that no other human faith can is the one of why God created the universe (or universes) at all? For every non-triune God, the answer inevitably defaults to creation being a way for God’s fulfilment (through creation, God added something missing in Himself – relationship); in the triune God, there is nothing communal missing in God, there is nothing relational needed by God, nothing of relationality and love that can be added to God by adding creation (for the triune God has community, has relationality, and has love in Himself), and so creation becomes a function of pure grace.
You need Christ for this transformative metaphysical understanding to be possible. This mends the holes in the metaphysical framework of man, shrouded in darkness and mystery to our human eye, and provides that full possibility of mental stability, peace of heart and mind, and happiness that cannot be matched separate from Christ.
VI: International Christendom
This is not a National Christendom I’m suggesting, where some country perseveres as the torch bearer of Christianity in a dark and fallen world, but an International Christendom, where a radical conversion of hearts, spanning the entire globe, pervading every rung of society, and every level of power and influence, takes place. What I am suggesting is a conversion of the mind and heart of humanity, globally, to the recognition of Christ and the triune God as the God of all existence.
It’s clear that the psychological, relational, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual health of the human person is so unequivocally elevated in and through Christ that the stage is set for a widespread conversion to faith in Christ Jesus. The thousand-year reign is still to come; it will come in the global era of humanity; and its triumph will be universal in a way it couldn’t be prior to the global age.
VII: Christ vs. Atheism
“The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” Psalm 110:1
In this new stage it will not be a pluralistic religious landscape, but a unified one. The intellect of the human person will be voluntarily subordinated to Christ, and there won’t be religious competition for that crown. The religion of humanity will be Christ or nothing, as everything else will fail to satisfy the goods of heart, mind, soul, relation, and intellect that Christian faith does, and as the clarity of that distinction crystallizes, all other alternatives will voluntarily fall into obscurity. It won’t be anyone forcing people to believe in Christ, nor will it be anyone forcing people not to believe in any other religion, it will merely be the subsiding of all other faith systems in light of the faith of Christ.
This is not a decree, or a call to theocracy, but a conviction welling up in the heart.
VIII: Christian Globalism
The only acceptable form of globalism is a Christian globalism. It is the unity of the world under the banner of Christ. It’s a philosophical transformation in the accepted norms of ethics and metaphysics. It’s a consensus outlook toward the nature of reality, substantiated in the incarnate God, Christ Jesus. It is not a political globalism, but a cultural globalism. It will be fought in the minds of men and women and children, and its conquest will come in the hearts and happiness of those same men and women and children. The current global cultural push is toward iniquity and sin, which only breeds unhappiness and despair. But it is precisely because of that widespread personal misery and unfulfillment that the incentive for the global, humanity-wide Christian cultural revolution is so primed to come. That is what international Christian globalism looks like.
In Closing
The end of times will come, and the revolt of the Antichrist will one day happen. It will be under the banner of a world leader, charismatic and gifted in copious leadership qualities, but not until the reign of Christ, and the binding of Satan occurs for some significant stretch of time. Whether that time be 1,000 years, a million years, or more, I do not know, but first will be the reign of Christ in the hearts and minds of humanity, and then will come the tribulation and the great apostasy. What we are seeing in the apostasy of our modern day is but a preview of the final apostasy that will come at the end of time. When people cower away from God—which they often do today—it is innocent in comparison to what will come.
My thesis here is that the reign of the kingdom of Christ is still to come, it is for a global humanity, one that we only started to have in the last half-century; it will elevate the hearts, minds, and intellects of our broader human community; and it will be a voluntary consensus, only after which will the end times approach.
I, of course, have no way of knowing if this is right. My instinct for it largely arises from the sense that Christian revelation so robustly and solidly answers the existential questions of the psyche (hope, despair), so robustly and solidly elevates the intellect of man (metaphysical clarity, unity of faith and reason), and so robustly and solidly improves the tangible happiness of the believer deeply transformed by a consciousness of the saving reality of Christ, that the fruits of this Christian tree are yet to really bear themselves out. It is my instinct that says that these fruits will grow ever more in our modern human community, and the efforts put forth by a megalomaniacal secular-globalist culture will fall short not because of the second coming, but because they fail on the grounds of happiness to such an extent that people will voluntarily choose away from them as they witness people around them being transformed by a life of grace in Christ.
The time for the end has not yet come—that is my sense of our current circumstance. What is to come is a reign of the international Kingdom of Christ.+
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” John 12: 32
That is INCREDIBLE! #Godspeed