Socio-economic alternatives: a theocratic model founded on divine principles

The fourth way is maybe a work in progress, something that has to emerge and defend itself, but it is God’s way. Let me explain. I explored the primary socio-economic models of socialism (which has many flaws, but is still making an unavoidable comeback) and capitalism (which has its merits but is too threatening to social and environmental order). The third way was socio-capitalism, a blend of the best of both worlds. But humans are not too good at preserving order, so don’t go looking for solutions in social models.

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The original Mosaic model was the first act of constitutional government or rule of law. It satisfies all the requirements of a constitutional framework. The ten commandments were foundational principles - a constitution is otherwise expressed as a ground rule, so it satisfies that principle. A constitution is also a set of principles that informs law making as the Mosaic law also did in guiding and empowering oral traditions.

Exchange theory of leadership: push vs pull

Contemporary leadership theory is substantially about driving. It presupposes that the energy of the leader can energize the organisation, whether that energy is nervous, vital or passionate. The bible does not support that perspective.

In Romans 8, Paul compares the leading of the flesh to the leading of the Spirit. The former refers to carnal or hedonistic pursuits, including drivers like instinct, nervous energy or the ego. Such forces do drive behavior, the way that empires were built around the impulse of great leaders. Unfortunately, whatever they built failed to stand up to another, irresistibly greater force.

Designed for glory

We are not our own. God our maker, called us to serve His purpose and fulfill our design potential.

I read a quote recently, which implied that we cannot reach our potential without Jesus.

That sounds good enough, but I am never happy to just accept motherhood and apple pie. I need to dig into an expression like that and get to its soul.

In 1947, Howard Hughes built a huge, eight-engined propeller powered aircraft out of wood (due to wartime shortages of metals). Critics soon dubbed it the “Spruce Goose”. The eccentric billionaire had taken flying to the edge on many occasions, but he invested all his passions into building this great aircraft: the largest flying boat ever and the reigning world champion for all aircraft in terms of wing span (97m) and overall height (24.2m) – compare that with dimensions for the world’s largest passenger aircraft at 76m wingspan and 24.1m height and you get some idea of how big the Spruce Goose was.

But, alas, the Spruce Goose only flew once at a height of 70m and a speed of 135mph. Critics argue that she lacked the power to climb and only achieved her maiden flight through ground effects. Well, whatever the truth, I am sure the plane was never designed to be parked in a museum, in Long Island. It was designed to fly and carry cargo. But it never reached its potential.

Everything in life is designed. Go and look at the smallest insect and you will see design and logic. Each has its place in the cycle of life, the food chain and the functional balance of nature. Nothing is wasted.

It is as true that we were built to specification. We may not be Spruce Gooses, but each of us is uniquely designed for a purpose. God created humans to serve many general and specific purposes, but He never intended any aspect of His creation to become a mere museum artifact. We were made to live, breathe and be of value.

So, when we speak of reaching our potential, we at least refer to the fulfillment of the potential invested in us by our maker. But there is a more subtle point here. We have not reached our potential merely for the fact of doing or achieving many things or through the exploitation of our talents. We can only reach our potential within the context of God’s will and purpose for our lives – He is the sole judge of what we are supposed to be and whether we realize that potential.

So it is right to say that without Jesus we cannot reach our potential – we can do much and achieve great things, but we can only reach our potential on the terms of our maker.

This introduces two key leadership issues.

Firstly, are you a leader at all, by God’s standard, if you merely achieve. No you are only a leader insofar as you achieve His purpose. That is not at all unreasonable. When shareholders elect a CEO they entrust the stewardship of their investment to the chief executive, which may or may not center around profit growth. In return, the CEO entrusts issues of compensation to them. No CEO who is truly worth his own salt exists for himself. An executive exists to satisfy the objectives of his shareholders and his performance will be judged by them alone.

Church leaders are there to execute God’s mandate. In effect they are really just midwives who oversee the outworking of God’s potential and the realization of Christ-likeness in the lives of individuals.

That brings me to the second point. You are not a leader if you mold followers to your ways or your patterns and make them replicas of yourself, for you are not and shall never be the standard by which their potential shall be measured. You can only consider success in terms of the degree to which Christ is formed in the hearts of people and that is exactly what Paul defined as the whole purpose of ministry (read it for yourselves in Ephesians 4). As partakers of the divine nature of God He has given us all we need for life and Godliness, so that the outworking of His potential may redound to His glory without ever being the product of human ingenuity or original thinking – indeed, no flesh shall ever glory in His presence.

I get the feeling that the modern shepherd has become more of a cowherd, living with the notion that leadership is all about herding people from meeting to meeting and doing relevant crowd management through good music, entertaining ministry, creative programs and comfortable auditoria. Well that’s all good and well and may have its place, but when you stand before Him one day, the sole shareholder of this divine enterprise will only be concerned with the faithfulness of your stewardship. If we fail to implement the patterns He has prescribed for us, we have not achieved at all and we will have missed our potential.”

Look, simply put, the church is not a good ideas club. It is God’s design for bringing us all (not an exclusive few) into unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man. That is what we are about and what we must achieve, nothing more, nothing less. If people do not grow up into the head, which is Christ, and thus become like Him as true disciples, well then you can only really claim to have formed a museum artifact, something with unfulfilled potential that was designed for greatness.

(c) Peter Eleazar at http://www.bethelstone.com/

Stand in the gap

The power of precedence, is a key biblical principle. It was the watershed of major historic events.

The act of one man, Adam, less so much his wife, determined the future of the entire human race. The act of Saul, when he disobeyed Samuel, blighted his descendents and cut them off from the throne of Israel. A single act of obedience by one old man on a lonely Canaanite outpost, blessed all of Abraham’s descendants from that day onwards. When Esau sold his birthright for some stew, he could never get it back though he sought it with tears, but what he lost to Jacob would remain Jacob’s inheritance forever.

Ultimately these principles point to the cross where the second Adam, paid the price to right the precedence of sin and death that came through the first Adam, so that now through that one man righteousness and life must accrue to all who believe in Him.

These principles allude to the weightiness of leadership and the substance of our stewardship. It is why I, like many other men, drew a line in the sand and declared that whatever errors defined our forefathers, the rot would stop with us.

It is evident from 1 Samuel 10, that God anointed Saul and placed His spirit on him, but that did not prevent his failure because Saul had never been through the forging furnaces of life that are so necessary for preparing us for greater responsibility. But David first proved his heart, then was anointed as a future king and then faced years of struggle and only then was He commissioned to rule as King. That made him a far more resilient and wise leader, but it also ensured his own teach-ability, humility and sensibility.

The problem with leaders that have power without substance, is that they are all too often impulsive, reckless and egocentric, just as Saul was. They also suppress all opposition, just as Saul did. They can break organizations and do untold harm to the teams they inherit, but their insecurity makes them the centre of attention so that everything revolves around the dominant individual, just as it was for Saul. And like Saul, some of them never outgrow their flaws but eventually just fall on their own swords.

A seasoned campaigner has fewer chips on their shoulder and is more likely to be magnanimous, tough when needed, but otherwise unthreatened by other aspirant leaders.

So as moments of decision or key individuals made telling differences to succeeding generations throughout history, so one leader can and often does make a telling difference to the future of modern organizations, including churches. That demands a very accountable, servant-like heart that is in touch with the weight of their role and willing to humbly execute their mandate in obedience to God.

Look what Abraham did after he secured God’s blessing. He paid great attention to detail in ensuring that Isaac was mentored, had the right wife to support him and was otherwise adequately prepared to carry his legacy into the future. I could paraphrase the man’s sense of his blessing and the implications thereof: “Heck, I will not let anyone take this blessing and corrupt it. Listen to me Eliezer, this is not a matter of life and death: it is much more than that. Place your hand on my groin and swear by an oath that you will not fail to ensure a proper wife for my son and a mother to my grandchildren.”

I may have used nice airy-fairy biblical language thus far, but the previous paragraph brings the concept of stewardship into a richer perspective. The kind of heart it takes to carefully watch over and shepherd all that God entrusts to a leader, is the kind of heart that has paid too great a price to ever drop the ball.

Leadership is not a game, nor is it a title, rank, career or symbol for our fragile egotism. It is a fearful and significant thing for God to delegate the weight of His kingdom to us and to call us watch over His beloved people.

When we wound the sheep and drive them away to preserve our own rights, we stand guilty of the presumptuous sin that David so despised. But when we fearfully determine that none shall be lost of those so entrusted to us, then and only then will we have grasped the heart of leadership.

Leadership is not eloquence or learning, but may involve both. But when leaders are anointed because they look, sound or seem the part, they are nothing but empty vessels, sounding gongs and clanging symbols (1 Corinthians 13: 1). But when we shepherd faithfully, in a covenant of love and a full understanding that we can make a difference for the kingdom in preserving His legacy, then you will understand why, “love is patient and kind, without boasting or pride. It is never rude (offensive to the sheep) or self-seeking. Nor is it easily angered and it keeps no record of wrongs. It always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres and it will never fail” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8).

© Peter Eleazar at http://www.bethelstone.com/

The heart of God

Leadership transcends practical and theoretical considerations till it translates the heart of God.

The bible is so deftly written, with such economy of style, that sometimes we can miss quite obvious truths. The problem with theology is that it deals with facts at the surface, without necessarily delving into the heart behind those facts.

God has veiled His Word in mystery so that we will search for meaning beyond the two-dimensional context of the written word. That is why, in Hebrews 9, He covenants to write His laws on our hearts, not in our minds.

Don’t get me wrong, I deeply appreciate the contributions made by theologians throughout history, for they have helped in our interpretation of text and context, but we also need to know the heart of God and that comes from walking with Him. No other man knows my wife as I do, because no one has walked a lifetime with her as I have done, not even her parents. There is a degree of knowledge that others have, but it is limited. There is a depth that I have plumbed that no one else has and it has been derived through relationship, not factually. That is the depth we must plumb in our walk with God.

This brings me to the nub of this article. There is a factual, mechanilistic level of understanding on the principles of leadership that is attainable to most of us. It is largely valid although a lot of worldly influences have come into modern biblical leadership and whilst some of those influences are valid, many are not. We would be wise to look into the bible for principles, lest we be beguiled by Satan into humanistic models that feed the soul and build soulish strongholds or power-bases that ultimately end up serving Satan more than they serve God or His people.

True leadership, biblical leadership that is, must devolve from the heart of God. The reasons are many-fold:

Firstly, spiritual leadership implies accountability for God’s heritage. It is a process of stewardship, not ownership. He is the only shareholder for they are His people. He entrusts them to our care, but never cedes them to us. We should be fearful and very careful about how we handle God’s people. Jesus left a great example, saying, “Of those you gave me I lost not one (save the son of perdition)”.

Secondly, spiritual leadership follows God’s vision. I have heard leaders ramble on about vision and inevitably it amounts to a somewhat humanistic exercise and a thin disguise for centralized control. The only vision we really need is to implement the mandate of God, the patterns He showed us on the mount. Many churches today have a cultural or social bias that bears no resemblance to biblical models for church life – they may be very popular and trendy, but that is not the point. The church is not an incorporation or fiefdom: she is the bride of Christ and the heritage of God.

Thirdly, spiritual leadership reflects His heart. God loves His people and that is what drove Him to the cross. He does not bless us out of some sense of duty, nor does He function on a give and take, win-win principle. He loves unconditionally and gave Himself expecting nothing in return, so that we might love Him who first loved us. There is no higher reason for serving God than to demonstrate our love for Him, for thus He said thrice to Peter, “If you love me, feed my lambs”.
Fourthly, spiritual leadership is not an end in itself. We don’t lead to establish a following or to build numbers underneath us. We lead to equip the church to fulfill her divine mandate. Leaders are merely the midwives, the lowest order servants who wait come alongside His people and provoke them to be what He called them to be. The sheep were not meant to be co-opted by the shepherds for their own gratification, but were called by God to be a peculiar people, a royal priesthood and a nation of God. We can at best facilitate that, but we must be careful never to hijack the process to build our own thrones or to frustrate the flow of God’s spirit. In Old Testament parlance, we can only really establish the framework, the tent, but God must inhabit it so that it becomes a living, vital thing and a place of union between Him and His people.

I am reminded of the vision of a valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37). God’s spirit came on the bones, linking them with sinew, muscle and tissue until the whole rose up as one army. Leadership provides the bones, the framework of spiritual living, when they set the church in order and plant a basic working replica of God’s model. But the indwelling Spirit of God must then transform the faithful implementation of His divine framework into a living reality, else it will remain a lifeless organization. By His spirit, God fills it, adds flesh to the bone and knits lives together, to give it muscle and fabric: until the institution becomes a living, vital organism. The Life within us then establishes us as the whole, the only army of the Living God, where every member is vital to the whole, as stakeholders (not laity) in the life and thought of His everlasting kingdom.

© Peter Eleazar at http://www.bethelstone.com

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Authority relates to stewardship

Leadership is the highest form of stewardship that imposes the greatest call to personal submission.

Power closely relates to sin and sin feeds on self. Self awareness was the first change that happened in Adam and Eve after they ate of the tree of knowledge. It is the crux of all temptation and has been used by Satan to draw us away from God into deviant purposes. Self-knowledge is a key consideration of the tenth Commandment: “Do not covet”.

It is no coincidence that the grand prize in Satan’s temptation of Jesus, was to get Him to displace His Father’s authority and rule in His own right. That was completely against the grain for Jesus, but it reflects the soul of self-awareness: the instinct to advance ourselves. Whilst I am all in favor of self-development and self-respect, the insidious spirit of self-centeredness relates directly to original sin: the rebellion of Satan against God’s throne.

We tacitly align ourselves with that rebellion when we promote self over the kingdom, for in so doing, we effectively subvert the throne and authority of God. Indeed, whether self-awareness manifests as pride or debasement, as overt or covert behavior, it still detracts from the glory of God, diminishes the power of the kingdom and makes us an unwitting channel for Satan’s subversion of God’s purposes.

Self is a key factor of the power struggle between leaders and followers. Both parties struggle within themselves for mastery and recognition and the issues compete with the healthy attributes of leadership. Most leaders would agree that laying ourselves down to serve the greater cause, in cooperation with leaders, significantly reflects spiritual maturity. I agree and I also adopt the bible’s bias towards leaders. Even imperfect leadership is better than no leadership and taking the law into our own hands is perverse, for leadership represents the whole and the whole is always more than any one individual.

But for submission to be relevant at any level it must be relevant at all levels. Leaders must also be subject to authority and if not they have no right to require submission from their followers, for the essence of all leadership is stewardship of the mandates entrusted to us. If we lose touch with that principle and strike out on our own independent agenda, we will also place ourselves beyond the limits of God’s authority.

It is no wonder that the bible calls “Rebellion, the sin of witchcraft” (1 Samuel 15:23), for it is the heart of corruption, insurrection, conflict, wickedness, vice, malice and lawlessness.

For a leader to give full effect to their own submission, they must take deliberate steps into the context of authority. They must respect that the principle of authority is independent of the person, but dependent on God. This is not just about being accountable to other leaders: we must start with submission to God and His Word.

Now this is where the rub comes. When leaders misinterpret leadership as something sacrosanct, an imposed right of way, they miss the raison d’etre of their calling: which is all about God entrusting His Kingdom and His purposes to our frailty. Indeed, it is about a whole (the kingdom) that precedes us and will outlive us, but nonetheless extends to us (individuals) the privilege of participation.

The reason that Abel and Jacob found favor with God over their brothers, was because they brought back to God what God first entrusted to them. Their brothers tried to impress with the labors of their hands and the originality of their thinking. But Abel and Jacob feared God in the spirit of true stewardship. Abel despised sweat capital and only laid before God a lamb that was first entrusted to his shepherd heart: it was a costly part of his own heritage and the sacrifice was sensitive to the heart of God (he offered a lamb without being told that such a sacrifice would be a recurring symbol of godliness).

Abel brought to God what God wanted, but Cain brought what he wanted. Jacob, on the other hand, showed profound regard for the legacy handed down from Abel through succeeding generations, whilst his foolish brother was willing to trade that legacy for some stew (you could stew for popularity, power, position, symbols or reputation).

Our legacy, the Kingdom of God, has a six thousand year heritage established through faithful hearts, whom God sustained through enormous personal sacrifices. How dare we assume that what we have inherited is our fiefdom or an expression of our own original thinking? Moses would have raised his rod over this generation, saying “He called us only to implement the patterns shown on the mount”.

It is a fearful and noble thing to be called to steward something of such priceless value and we must needs do so with fearful, faithful hearts. Like Joshua we need to apply great attention to detail in handling the wonders of God. That implies personal discipline, submission to the Word, holy living, accountability for our conduct and respect for the pillars of divine governance: the prophetic, the priesthood and ruler-ship.

In closing, may I hint at the next chapter in this discourse. The wise leader needs to realize that when biblical principles are applied to their leadership, it will enhance their ability to lead effectively. It is incumbent on all good leaders to study divine patterns and principles in the knowledge that real authority is independent of their personality, personal power, charisma, original thinking, vision or any other humanistic concepts of leadership. Real authority relates to what we steward, not who stewards it.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com