First of all, lest I be accused of blasphemy, I do not believe Jesus is incompetent. So, let’s get that out of the way. However, what I sometimes find in Christian circles are competing worldviews that, if brought into the light, would force this question to the forefront.
Christians readily acknowledge that Jesus is King, and not just any kind of king, but the King of kings and Lord of lords. He has “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt 28:18). Nothing in this world is outside His realm of dominion. Great. No issues here.
Now, ask many Christians the following question—in fact, ask yourself this question, and see how you answer it.
Is the world getting better or worse?
Many Christians will respond to this question with the resounding belief that the world is getting worse. Depending on what Christian tradition you find yourself in, there may even be entire eschatological (end times) systems that reinforce this idea. (Thank you, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.)
So, if we take these two beliefs, the first being that Jesus is King, and the second that the world is getting worse, we end up with a conundrum. If Jesus is the King of kings and has been for 2,000 years, why would the world be getting worse? Is Jesus just a bad manager? Is Jesus incompetent?
Now, of course, we can’t say that, so it’s tempting at this point (if you find yourself holding these two beliefs simultaneously) to bring in the sovereignty of God. Well, Jesus is King, and He’s in control, so He is allowing the world to get worse.
To be honest, this might be worse than saying Jesus is incompetent. Instead of Jesus not being able to handle it, we make Him out to be someone Who is capable of improving the state of the world but for whatever reason will not.
Perhaps we need a better way of thinking about this. Jesus is King. If you’re in allegiance to Jesus, we can agree on that. So, let’s address the second question and reframe it. Could it be possible, that in spite of all the craziness we witness in the world on a daily basis, that the world is actually getting better because Jesus is King?
Let’s clarify what we’re talking about here. The question is not whether the world is getting better at every moment in every home and every city across the globe. The question is whether Jesus has had and is continuing to have an overwhelmingly positive effect on the world, so much so that we can look at the macro picture of history and easily see that the world is getting better.
To get the 30,000 foot view of whether the world has changed for the better in the last 2,000 years, let’s see what types of issues the Apostle Paul had to address to the church in Galatia in the first century.
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:19-21 ESV
Um, Paul needed to warn the church in Galatia about not taking part in sorcery and orgies? How about idolatry, which by the way, was demon worship (1 Cor 10:20)? Know anyone in your church today who practices sorcery or goes to an orgy on the weekends? Have any friends with a shrine in their living room or who party by doing unspeakable things at their local pagan temple on Friday nights (e.g. see Lev 18, which mentions, among other things, worship rituals that involved incest, child sacrifice, child prostitution, and self-harm)?
Today, for many of us, this sounds pretty ridiculous. Sure, things like this may happen in some places in the world. For those of us in the West, maybe we hear about these kinds of things from missionaries on occasion. But otherwise, these “works of the flesh” are far outside the norm for most of us.
And I would suggest that the Person Who gets the credit for this change is Jesus. These barbaric practices associated with idol worship didn’t stop because the world became scientifically enlightened. These abominable ways of worshipping demons went out of vogue gradually as the message of the gospel—the victory of Jesus Christ over sin, death, the devil, and the forces of darkness—spread. Everywhere the gospel has taken hold, these barbaric practices and the idols that went with them disappeared, too. And this all was happening for over a millennium before the modern scientific era (see “The Gates of Hell” chapter in The Epic Gospel We’ve Forgotten for more on this).
Now, the argument against the betterment of the world today is fairly predictable, particularly for those of us in the West. Issues of abortion, gender ideology, or society’s overall penchant for depravity might be offered as problematic to the worldview I’ve presented. So, we need some nuance here.
At the macro level, the improvement of the world is pretty much undeniable when you look at it over the last 2,000 years. But what about today? And this is where wisdom leads us to consider not only the sovereignty of Jesus (He is King after all) but also His justice—His rendering of judgments because He is the King.
This is particularly evident in the craziness of modern gender ideology and the deconstruction of any boundaries regarding gender or sex in the modern West. Romans 1:18 and following sheds light on how the wrath of God is revealed when people insist on this kind of madness. He gives them what they want. He hands them over to the results of their foolish decisions. And as the pattern in Scripture of the Day of the Lord (see this also) reveals, eventually the pride of man expressed in this craziness will lead to their destruction. May we hope and pray that the West at large repents before that happens.
The nuance we need in order to understand how we can simultaneously say that the world is getting better and that it doesn’t always look like it is provided in Hebrews 2. After quoting Psalm 8, indicating that everything was put in subjection under the feet of Jesus, the writer of Hebrews goes on to say:
Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he [God] left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.
Hebrews 2:8 ESV
Jesus is King. Everything is in subjection under His feet. But as Hebrews indicates, it doesn’t always look that way. At the micro level (looking at whether the world is getting better or worse over the last 75 years in the United States, for example), it’s easy to say that things are getting worse (although things are certainly getting better in some areas if we’re willing to look—i.e. slavery in the U.S. was outlawed 150 years ago, and racial segregation, which used to be a law, was legally banned in 1964). But if we look at it from the macro level, it’s easy to see that the world has improved immensely over the last 2,000 years.
This tendency to see the world as getting worse seems to be fairly pronounced among the Western church. But it’s easy to find ourselves living in our Western bubble, not only not seeing how God is moving in the West, but also being oblivious to what God is doing in the world at large. The church globally continues to grow, with the most notable growth happening outside the West. For instance, the number of people who identify as Christians in Africa and Asia increased by 67% since the year 2000, while Europe and North America saw only a 2.9% increase over the same time period (see #3 here).
Jesus is not incompetent. Look at the big picture. It can be hard to understand what God is doing at any given moment in history. For instance, how must Christians have felt in the middle of World War II when victory over Hitler’s hate seemed impossible? But, over the long haul, the betterment of the world is undeniable. If Jesus is the Competent King, then it is only logical to assume that His management of the world’s affairs must inevitably result in the betterment of the world at the macro level as His kingdom grows to fill “the whole earth” (Dan 2:35).
This ongoing fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy and the betterment of our world is the historical outworking of Psalm 110:1.
A declaration of Yahweh to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”
Psalm 110:1 LEB
Psalm 110 is the most quoted or referenced Psalm in the New Testament. Paul paraphrases this Psalm as he expounds on the victorious nature of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15.
Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
1 Corinthians 15:24-25 ESV
“He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” This is an ongoing process. As He continues to reign, His enemies continue to be conquered. The betterment of our world over the last 2,000 years is occurring because Jesus is the King who has disarmed the forces of darkness (Col 2:15) and is continuing to conquer them through the church (e.g. Rom 16:20). Jesus reigns, and as He does, He gradually continues to subdue the spiritual forces of darkness until, eventually, all of them, even death itself, will be subdued under His feet, never to rise again.
So, let’s think more consistently about what’s going on here. Let’s think in a way that honors Jesus as the King Who cares, Who is invested in the betterment of the world, and of Whom a term like “competent” doesn’t even begin to describe the overwhelmingly positive impact His kingship has made on our world since He sat down as the God/Man at the right hand of the Father 2,000 years ago.
Epic Gospel 