Insurgence

I took this book, by Frank Viola, with me on my trip to Tanzania, Africa. It’s about 440 pages and pretty hefty but it’s broken up into small segments which makes it easier to read. On my first leg, from Phoenix to D.C., I had to put the book down. I found myself getting teary eyed around page 60.

Rather than describing this book, I’ll just quote from the back cover.

Have we lost the explosive, earthshaking gospel of the kingdom that Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles preached? Have we exchanged this dynamic, titanic, living gospel for a gospel of religious duty or permissiveness and “easy believism”?

Highly recommended if you believe the answer to the above is “yes”. Let’s stop arguing theology with one another on social media and start building His kingdom here. Below is an excerpt.

For far too long, the kingdom of God has been shrunken and reduced to mean either individual salvation or social transformation. But to define the kingdom this way is to distort what it means.

When Jesus said, “The kingdom is at hand,” He meant that the world was about to have a new king. It was also about to see a new reign on the earth in and through a new people.

There is no kingdom outside of Jesus, the King. And there is no kingdom outside the ekklesia, the people who are governed by the King.

For this reason, there is a close connection between the kingdom and the ekklesia. In both places in the Gospels where Jesus refers to the ekklesia, He ties it into the kingdom (see Matthew 16:16-19 and 18:15-18). Binding and loosing is kingdom language.

No kingdom exists without a king. The same is true for the kingdom of God. Caesar was called “the son of God.” When people called Jesus the Son of God, they were claiming that He was a king. In the Old Testament, both the terms “Messiah” and “Son of God” carry the meaning of “king.”

When Peter preached the gospel of the kingdom on the day of Pentecost, he ended his message with these sober words:

Save yourselves from this corrupt generation. (Acts 2:40 NIV)

My word to you is to save yourself from this corrupt generation. How? By coming under the rule of the realm of the kingdom of God.

As Tozer once put it,

We need men and women who have fought their way to endure scorn and may even have been called fanatics-scoffed at and called everything but a Christian. We need men and women today who are willing to push in and bear their way past the flesh, the world, and the devil, and cold Christians and deacons and elders. They will have to push themselves until they are fascinated by what they see in Christ. Those who have truly seen Christ in His glory have eyes for nothing else.

When the Lord’s first disciples heard Jesus say, “Come, follow me,” they left everything and followed Him.

To follow Jesus today means to leave everything and follow Him wherever He leads. It means and requires cross-bearing. It means and requires self-denial. It means and requires self-sacrifice. It means climbing on the altar as a living sacrifice to God and leaving the world behind.

Sin, with its selfishness, idolatry, pride, and independence, can be juiced down to our desire to be king, to be in control, usurping the place of Jesus as King. Entering and enjoying the kingdom, then, means surrender.

As Jesus-followers, our calling is to live in the world without being captured by its spirit. We are the people who live in the divine parenthesis, living between the end of one age and before the age to come. We are those “on whom the culmination of the ages has come” (1 Corinthians 10:11 NIV).

The insurgence doesn’t square with the idea that Christians should retreat from the culture and throw rocks at it from afar. Neither does it square with the idea that Christians should try to fix the problems of the world through political power and activism.

Instead, the insurgence is about living in a different kingdom and putting that kingdom life on display before principalities and powers as well as before fallen women and men.

The insurgence is marked by radical generosity. That is, using our material goods for the good of others, not just for ourselves.

The insurgence looks toward God’s final judgment, which is about adjusting what’s wrong in the world and making everything right.

When Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” He was referring to a new way to live (John 18:36 NIV). The way that Jesus orders our social life is radically different from the top-down pecking order that’s found everywhere in human civilization. The way of Jesus is a completely different way to live, be human. and interact socially (Matthew 20:25-28; Luke 22:25-26).  

The kingdom of God is a social order in this world that’s a stark alternative to the kingdom of Ceasar (the empires of the world).

The insurgence calls us to model the true “radicalization,” one that’s in and for God’s already-but-not-yet kingdom.  A kingdom of which we are called to be faithful witnesses.

The call of the insurgence is to forsake all and follow the new King and His peaceable kingdom, which is here now but will come in full someday.

Frank Viola, Insurgence

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