Questions about the Kingdom (ICEWS, eb 08)

For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt

This week was a really enlightening week on the Kingdom of God and how big it is, how active it is in our earthly world. Often when I am finding out more about a subject, I always become more and more aware of how much I DON’T know. That was certainly the case as I came up with a couple questions this week.

My first question arose as I was watching the video of Don Williams Who is it that we worship? He talks about how God is not crowned because the lesser is crowned by the greater and there is no one greater than God. I didn’t realize God has no crown so I did a search in the NIV for the word “crown”. I really was not able to find a verse about God having a crown! I found one about God being a crown:

Isaiah 28:5 In that day the LORD Almighty will be a glorious crown, a beautiful wreath for the remnant of his people.

I am interpreting that to mean that any glory that the remnant of his people has will come from the LORD. He will be their pride and joy.

Then later in Isaiah it talks about Zion being a crown in God’s hand:

Isaiah 62:3 You will be a crown of splendor in the LORD's hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

This one makes me think that the crown would mean a prized possession.

In Hebrews I found a verse about Jesus being crowned:

Hebrews 2:9 But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

If Jesus is God and there is no one greater than God, then how can he wear a crown? It must have been God the Father that crowned him. Does that mean that Jesus is lesser than the Father? After thinking about this for a bit I thought that maybe the Father crowning the Son has less to do with who is greater and more to do with the different roles of the Three Persons within the Trinity. It would be the role of a father to crown his son king. The son then becomes as great as his father was.

The difference here would be that God is outside of time. While earthly kings reign one at a time from generation to generation, the heavenly Father and Son have no beginning and no end. So perhaps being outside of time is what allows equality within the Trinity?

That brings me to another question: Is God incomplete without all Three Person in the Trinity the way a human is incomplete without body, mind and spirit? The more I think about it the more it makes sense that He would be. This would automatically discount all other gods as being less and therefore not God. These thoughts were spawned from the following quotes from this week’s material:

- “Exclusive focus on the Creator will weaken the church; we need to worship and adore the Redeemer. But focus on the Creator and Redeemer to the exclusion of the Sanctifier will also weaken the church. It is the Spirit who brings New Birth, empowering, revival, gifting and community – conformity to Christ.” (Who is it that we worship? By Don Williams, Brenton Brown)

- “The God we worship is a Trinitarian God. We know no other God than the one revealed in Jesus Christ - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. John Calvin put it well, “Unless we think of God as Trinitarian we have no knowledge of God at all, only the word ‘God’ flutters through our brain naked, and void of meaning” (Quoted by Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine Of The Trinity, p.15).” (The Divine Dance, Berten Waggoner)

- “I would recommend the doctrine of perichoresis for your study. The term means mutual indwelling or, better, mutual interpenetration and refers to the understanding of both the Trinity and Christology. In the divine perichoresis, each person has “being in each other without coalescence” (John of Damascus ca. 650).” (The Divine Dance by Berten Waggoner)

So these are my thoughts and questions for this week. I really don’t think there’s any room for arrogance when studying theology because the more you learn, you realize what little you know!