Eternally Identified With the King and His Kingdom.

According to the King’s Commission {Matt. 28:16-20}, those who watch our words and listen to our lives are to be evangelized, “baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” then enlisted as Disciples and disciple-makers. This public ‘declaration of allegiance’ associates them with Jesus, as baptize always did in the ancient world, it ‘identifies’ them with the person of Jesus Christ and the Triune God.

The Greek verb baptize which, when you add up all the aggregate ideas underlying it, means at its base- ‘to identify,’ that is, ‘to identify with a purpose.’ It was used by poets, dramatists, and historians in ancient Greece to connote the identification of one object with another to such an extent the very nature of the first object is altered dramatically from that point forward. Baptizo was used in Classical Greek of blacksmiths immersing hot iron in water to temper it, and of Greek soldiers placing the points of their swords, and barbarians the points of their spears, in a vat of pig’s blood. By identifying the spears with blood, they transformed the nature of the spear from a tool for hunting to a weapon of war.

Baptizo was also used of a dye-maker, someone who dyed wool or cloth for another by dipping the garment into the dye, bringing it up, then drying it. What do you think: has this material been radically altered, vastly changed from its former condition {from snow white to royal blue or bloody crimson}? The kingdom of culture, ever vying for our attention and affection with the Kingdom of God, seems to be preoccupied with the issue of ‘color’ ...with the mingling of the races in America and how to accomplish its vision of equality. While I’m neither a political scientist nor a sociologist, from the vantage point of liberty and common sense I can give you a couple of hints here.

Treat everyone equally, to begin with: as citizens under the same Constitution. Not one set of rules and laws for the rich, and another for the poor, one for those who can afford quality legal counsel and one for those who can’t, one for certain races or classes and one for the rest.

America now has what can only be classified as a Prison-Industrial Complex, a for-profit penal system where states which have embraced this form of privatization are required to keep occupancy at or above 90%. And guess what? No surprise: we have more criminals, more convictions, and longer sentences than ever before. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. From 1980 to 2008 our prison population quadrupled— from 500,000 to 2.3 million— the vast majority of this incarceration increase due to two things: an horrific failure popularly known as the ‘War on Drugs’ and federally mandated ‘minimum sentencing guidelines.’ This means for many non-violent drug-related offenses a judge cannot hand down a sentence less than this {whatever ‘this’ is mandated to be}. There’s something wrong with this picture, this mass Prison-Industrial Complex… whatever your race!

Give us a tax code which is fair and flat: where people making $30,000 a year are not paying more in taxes than Exxon-Mobil does while raking in record-profits.

Make the only qualifications for employment, public or private, one’s personal qualifications for employment: not what you look like or where you come from, i.e., race, color, class, etc.

Let the government at every level stop playing class warfare, race warfare, party warfare: and watch how people band together and rise up, regardless of color.

And on a personal level, a relational level, it’s a simple as “treat others the same way you want to be treated... do for everyone what you would want done for you” {Matt. 7:12; Lk. 6:31}. This is genuine respect between human beings; it’s also a proactive holiness in action! And wouldn’t that make for a refreshing change in human relations?

Ric Webb, Shepherd
Heart's Journey Community
hjcommunity.org