Community in person and online

We’ll be moving our first monthly meetings from Tuesday to Thursday evenings. We’ll still meet at 6:30 PM in the Church Office. We’ll just be meeting the first Thursday of every month, instead of the first Tuesday. This move will allow us to arrange for child care in future months for those who need it.

I’d also like to start meeting on a weekly basis, though I’d like to delay that change for another month so that we can arrange for other additions to the group, and to talk more about what we’ll do with the additional meeting times. That said, I’m going to leave my Thursday nights open for the foreseeable future, and would like to use that time to meet with people in the group.

So, without further ado, here’s the preamble to next month’s topic.

In the Old Testament, God setup legal and political institutions to govern the people of Israel through designated representatives like Moses, the Judges, and the Davidic line of kings. In the New Testament, God seems to do something quite different; he encourages Christians to be members of whatever nation they find themselves under, to submit to its laws (insofar as they don’t contradict God’s law), and generally to be salt and light in whatever political framework they found themselves under.

Yet many of the New Testament writers, themselves Jews, hearkened back to the Old Testament political institutions to explain Jesus to their fellows. Jesus is our High Priest (Hebrews 4:14) and the King of kings (Revelation 1:5). Jesus Himself said that He came to fulfill the Old Testament Law, not abolish it (Matthew 5:17), and frequently spoke of His kingdom.

Today, Christians in America and much of the rest of the world find themselves with unprecedented access to change their government, without the authoritarian absolute rule of the Holy Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. Christians of different persuasions have used this access to make the case that all Christians should be concerned about how their government handles particular issues, from the treatment of unborn children to state provision for orphans and widows.

Rather than focusing on these particular issues, I’d like to ask a more general question: Is there a Biblical Statecraft? Do the Scriptures, Christian history and tradition, and our own experience of the Holy Spirit teach us anything about what a Christian government (if there could be such a thing) would look like? That’s pretty abstract, so for a framing text, I’d like to offer Leviticus 25 as a starting point for the discussion. It details the Sabbath years and the year of Jubilee. I expect the discussion will branch out from there, but what can we learn about God from this particular regulation?

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+25&version=NASB

We’ll meet at the Church on Thursday, September 1st, at 6:30 PM to talk about the subject. I look forward to seeing everyone.

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