Systems and Kingdom

Dan Edelen has written a must-read essay on sin that transcends individuals and resides in demonically influenced systems. Here's a sample:

Our society today runs entirely on systems in a way that it did not just forty years ago. Even our churches have become systemized. Some paleoconservatives have deemed this shift “The Managerial Society,” and it’s a form of socialism like the kind we Americans used to routinely mock in the old Soviet Union. Nearly every encounter we have in daily life within the US today has a system lurking behind it. Those systems explain why we have no great men in government now, only systems. Great men and women stand up against political injustice, but systems toe the system line, even if it’s bad for the whole the system operates within.

Young people today are bitter and cynical because they’ve grown up within these systems and they can’t see any way to transcend them.

Sadly, the one group designed to beat the system, the Church, can’t seem to get off its duff and do what Christ charged it with: tear down strongholds. The glaring error I see within the Church, even in those churches that understand strongholds, is the failure to acknowledge that they go far beyond individuals. We may talk about strongholds in a person’s life, but do we ever talk about strongholds in the entire culture? Not very often!

Dan is right that the battle is more than each individual Christian fighting against his or her own sin. It's a war between the Kingdom of God and the realm of darkness in the world order. He and I are most familiar with the systems in the United States, but every culture is dealing with this issue in some form. Dan doesn't believe Christians should merely sit back and let these systems have their way:

Too many of us fail to see that systems that break people’s spirits get their power from demonic sources, and we Christians must wrestle against them. . . .

Throughout history, Christians have been at the root of bringing down unholy systems and kingdoms–and not just because they forgave, but because they understood that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Amen.