Two Sons of God

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Augustus occupied the throne in Rome the night the Baby was born and wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in the manger. There is no indication he ever knew about the visit of the angelic choir, but even if he did, he probably gave no thought to the idea that the visitation signalled the birth of the greatest revolutionary in the long turbulent history of mankind. To Augustus, every male child born to Galilean peasants was a potential revolutionary, but he knew how to extinguish these smoking firebrands.

     Without realizing it, though, Augustus had been readying the world for the great clash which would eventually topple the imperial throne. And it all came about because of the feeling that Rome was decreed by the hand of Fate to become the kingdom of the heavens, the administration of the gods through whom peace and goodwill would be brought to men. And the Caesars would be the scepter in the hands of the gods for the accomplishment which would usher in the long-sought for "Golden Age."

     Originally called Gaius Octavius, Augustus was the grand-nephew of the great soldier and statesman, Julius Caesar. He was only nineteen when his uncle was murdered by the republican forces at the instigation of Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius, causing fear and turmoil to settle like a pall over Rome. He was present when the Senate formally deified his uncle after death, exalting him to the court of the gods, and he recalled how even during his life his uncle had often been saluted as "Jupiter Julius."

     Octavius must have listened intently to the arguments which equated the empire with the rule of the heavens, and he was prepared to receive seriously the Latin title Augustus, the majestic one, when he became the emperor in 27 B.C. He petitioned to be called Divi Filius, that is, "Son of God," and the request was granted by the Senate. Acceptance of divine status became a part of the strategy by which the Empire would become united and the loyalty of the provinces secured. To rebel against the emperor would be to rebel against God. Rome was to be "the Eternal City," the abode of the gods.

     The things which had happened in the immediate past gave impetus to the Caesar cult. When the will of Julius Caesar was read, it was learned that Octavian was named as heir and a legacy was left to each citizen. Mark Antony had taken advantage of his political position to seize the property and refused to surrender it. Octavian paid the people the sum of the bequest out of his own resources, and raised an army which defeated the forces of Antony, who fled across the Alps.

     In 43 B.C. Octavian invited Antony to return and gave him equal status in the

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government. The two of them defeated Brutus and Cassius at Philippi the following year. Both of the beaten generals committed suicide. Later, Antony became fascinated with Cleopatra, the famous sexpot of the Nile and queen of Egypt, and Octavian was forced to fight a naval battle against the combined fleets of Antony and Cleopatra. He soundly defeated them at Actium in 31 B.C., and at the age of thirty-four became sole master of the Roman world.

     In 29 B.C. he returned in triumph, hailed by the frantic populace as Jupiter come down in the flesh to dwell among them. He closed the temple of Janus for the first time in two hundred years, and a great calm settled over the whole earth. Two years later he was accorded the title "Son of God," and began his personal friendship with the Roman writers Ovid, Horace, Vergil and Livy. A great beautification project began in Rome to make it worthy to be the seat of the gods, and Augustus could boast that he "found Rome brick and left it marble."

     Finally, the supreme triumph was accorded him. It was deemed by Rome a mark of divinity to change the calendar. The gods presided over time and for time to be regulated by one's birth or life was a proof of deity. January was the month of Janus, March the month of Mars, and June the month of Juno. The Senate met in solemn session and changed the month Sextilis to August. Then an unseen hand began to move among men!

     Centuries before, a Hebrew prophet had almost casually spoken about the little city of David, "But you, 0 Bethlehem Ephratah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days" (Micah 5: 2). The future ruler was to enter the world like those whom he would rule. The vehicle in which he would ride was the womb of a peasant girl, a virgin. There was one problem. The pregnant woman was in Nazareth, a long way from Bethlehem, and there was no sensible reason for going to the latter village.

     But the universal launching headquarters for the planetary visitation had command of the situation. At precisely the right minute in far-away Rome, Octavian, who considered himself as master of the universe, pulled a switch that set the whole world in motion. "In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled...And all went to be enrolled each to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee...to be enrolled with Mary his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered."

     Now there were two "Sons of God" on earth and their goals were identical. One was created by the Roman Senate and one by the Holy Spirit. Each was dedicated to the task of bringing about universal peace, and each believed that it could come only through acknowledgment of his sovereignty. Behind one was the mightiest military machine the world has ever seen. It was augmented by another army of statesmen, ambassadors and envoys, who were superb in diplomacy. Treaties and compromises welded together a great political complex which had no rival. It was a kingdom of the gods, woven of raw power and intrigue, and it was obsessed with the thought of its own invincibility. It was eternal and undying.

     The Nazarene quietly and unobtrusively began to build his force of freedom fighters. By its very nature his had to be an underground movement. Hardy fishermen were summoned from their nets, a customs agent was called from his desk at a port of entry. Another was a daggerman of the Zealot party, a group of raiders pledged to undying hostility to the occupation forces of Rome. It was a strange and motley crew. But for three years they were constantly by his side, and they came to share his sense of mission and destiny.

     To them he disclosed strange facts. He said, "The time has come for the Son of man to be glorified. I tell you truly that

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unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain of wheat; but if it dies, it brings a good harvest." Again we can read, "From that time onwards Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he would have to go to Jerusalem, and endure much suffering from the elders, chief priests and scribes, and finally be killed; and be raised to life again on the third day." When one of them remonstrated with him he told him that he looked at things "from man's point of view and not from God's."

     The rest of the story is too well known to require repetition. He did die, and was buried and rose again. He met the last enemy, went down into his lair, conquered him and wrestled the keys of death and hades from his frantic grasp. For forty days he appeared to the men whom he had trained. They heard him, saw him, scrutinized him and touched him. There was no question in their minds that he had overcome death, and by doing so had transformed into a grand strategy of "Mission Possible" what had before seemed an impossible mission.

     Before he left to return to his glory, he revealed that theirs was a task of world conquest, and he instructed them to wait until the power to accomplish the work was provided them. Immediately upon receipt of this power they were to launch an attack which must be prosecuted by them and their successors until his return for the Grand Triumph, the climax of all the ages. They were to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. But they were to unleash upon a world of evil and malignancy the greatest dynamic force in heaven and upon earth.

     The war to capture men's minds began at Jerusalem, and was an attack against the world citadel of legalism. For a very little while the invading forces were popular. Each day they met by common consent in a temple rendevous, and then repaired to private homes to break bread together. Numbers of people enlisted cheerfully under the banner of the world liberation front. Suddenly it began to dawn upon the defenders of the status quo that they were not dealing with a bunch of harmless eccentrics. They arrested the recruiting officers and jailed them but it was to no avail. "During the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and led them out, saying, 'Go and stand and speak in the Temple. Tell the people all about this new life.' After receiving these instructions they entered the Temple about daybreak, and began to teach."

     The enemy next summoned a meeting of the council to discuss how to kill them. Fortunately, a very prominent leader, Gamaliel, who was respected by all of the people arose and said, "My advice to you now therefore is to let these men alone; leave them to themselves." Later it was claimed that he was secretly allied with the Messianic movement, one of whom wrote, "Gamaliel, a chief of the people . . . who was secretly our brother in the faith, but by our advice remained among them" (Clement, Recognitions, Book 1).

     Already there was developing a strategy of penetration with intelligence agents planted in key spots, but the program of world conquest was proceeding slowly and was all too limited. If the world was to be set on fire the burning brands must be scattered. The upper control room awaited the proper moment and then made use of a Cicilian hot-head who harassed the freedom fighters, violating their civil rights, battering down the doors to their houses, and dragging men and women out to commit them to detention cells.

     But "those who were dispersed by his actions went throughout the country proclaiming the good news of the Message as they went." Then a tremendous thing happened. After he had been used to scatter the fire the Tarsian leader of the Jewish storm-troopers, "still breathing murderous threats" came into direct confrontation with the Risen One, was captured and changed sides. Immediately he turned his enthusiasm and fanatical zeal toward advancement of the new cause.

     Up to that time Rome had taken no particular notice of the movement. It had been confined to a remote province and appeared to be nothing more than an-

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other sect in an already hopelessly fragmented Judaism. But the Caesar cult was creating widespread opposition and revolt in Palestine. The Roman cohorts were having great difficulty in maintaining order. Feeling began to run high even in the "Eternal City." And then the Messianic movement began to spread. It crossed seas, climbed mountains, traversed plains and spanned continents.

     There is every reason to believe that the Romans often misunderstood its nature and misinterpreted its purpose. They were aware that Jewish political agents were active everywhere, fomenting revolt, and had a cell even in the ghetto in Rome itself. In desperation their personal property was confiscated. It was easy to mistakenly identify the Nazarenes as allied with the political revolutionaries. In Thessalonica Paul and Silas were dragged before the civic authorities by a shouting mob, yelling, "These are the men who have turned the world upside down and have now come here, and Jason has taken them into his house. What is more, all these men act against the decrees of Caesar saying there is another king called Jesus."

     It is not to be wondered at that the Caesar cult mistook the teaching of the resurrection of Jesus for something else, and interpreted Anastasis Christou as "the Messianic insurrection." We must not forget that there is not one thing in the word "resurrection" which has to do with death. It simply means a raising up, or an uprising. When word reached Rome that all over the Empire men of Jewish background were enlisting slaves and others by proclaiming the rising up of the Messiah, and that groups were being formed which met secretly after dark, or before daybreak, where participants pledged anew their allegiance to another king, it was decided that drastic measures would have to be taken. The political sovereignty of the Caesars was being threatened and this new cult must be ruthlessly obliterated.

     At last the two great powers must face up to the fray. Now it was Christ or Caesar! One was a usurper in the universe because there could only be one Lord, and one universal King. The Caesars readied for the strange conflict. Unseen by them the angels in heaven also prepared. So did the demons. The cosmic struggle was now centered on earth. The purpose of the ages was now "zeroed in" on one of the smallest spinning planets. But this was the headquarters for the "prince of the power of the air." Here lived the sons of men, and here for a little while had lived the Son of Man. His coming had made the war inevitable.

     Rome had gained dominion over the soldiers loyal to the Emperor, but the many thousands, even millions, of slaves who were captured proved the eventual undoing of the state. The slave was regarded not as a person, but as a thing. He was a labor-saving device, a gadget to respond immediately to the call of the master. The result was that Roman society grew more decadent as its constituency grew more affluent. The people were tired--of life, of the gods, and of religious performances. Suddenly they were introduced to a new and virile Message and the Way was alive, and powerful and enthusiastic. That last word means "inspired of God.'' The Way was revolutionary.

     A genuine revolutionary movement must possess certain well-defined characteristics in order to achieve its objective. Without these it will founder and fade out without transforming the entrenched status, or overthrowing the existing order. Fuzzy thinking still stifles

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more reform movements than any other factor. Let us think about the necessary and indispensable requirements.

     1. There must be a sense of destiny which imbues the revolutionary with a dream of tremendous scope out of all proportion to present strength and power. That vision must be so majestic that the one who holds it will be called a fanatic, and his peers will say, "Behold, the dreamer cometh."

     2. There must be a recognition that the forces of revolution are always the aggressors, relentless and unswerving, and that any temporary setback must be overcome at once and turned into occasion for victory.

     3. There must be an acceptance of the idea that the cause is more valuable than any person engaged in its prosecution and that to die for it is heroic and constitutes actual gain.

     4. There must be a full support of the headquarters with unquestioning trust in the Intelligence Department to direct the forces in the field.

     5. There must be a flexibility in the strategy which will make for adaptability of weaponry to changing conditions and circumstances. By their very nature, revolutions can never be tied to the methods of the past.

     6. The ultimate goal must be transformed from an ideal into a positive idea, and this must be seen and envisioned in its completed state by the projected imagination.

     Every one of these principles is accepted and adopted by every school for revolutionaries on the face of the earth. An examination of every political, social, economic, and religious revolution of the past, will show that those who launched it, were all fully cognizant of and committed to these principles.

     We thus have the proper criteria to measure what we refer to as "Christianity" and determine whether it is a revolutionary force in our day. And the apt students are immediately aware that whether Christianity faces up to these or fails, there is a force extant in our day which meets everyone of them. It is world communism. And it is the fastest growing religious ideology on our earth. It has captured the minds of multiplied millions during my own lifetime!

     It is also dramatically evident how dynamically the early Christians met every requirement and thus composed a tremendous fighting force. Their vision was universal. They were commissioned to go into all the world and contact every creature. They were convinced that every knee would bow, whether in heaven, on earth, or under the earth.

     They followed a trumpet which would never sound retreat. Their watchword was "Go! "Go ye into the village; go ye into the highways, go stand and speak in the temple, go toward the south, go into Damascus, go into Jerusalem, go into all the world, go teach all nations, go in peace." Go! Go! Go! And every go is matched with an "arose and went." When their way was barred in one direction they circumvented it and pressed on. When Paul and Silas came to Mysia, they attempted to enter Bithynia, but encountered a divine roadblock. So they passed by Mysia and came down to Troas which they used as a launching-pad to open up a new continent to the revolution--Europe.

     They did not have a false estimate of the value of this life. The cause was everything. This is shown by some of the statements which they jotted down. "It all accords with my own earnest wishes and hopes, which are that I shall never be in any way ashamed, but that now, as always, I should honor Christ with the utmost boldness by the way I live, whether that means I am to face death or go on living." "What do you mean by unnerving me with all your tears? I am perfectly prepared not only to be bound but to die in Jerusalem for the sake of the Lord Jesus."

     There was an unquestioning obedience. "I thank God there is a way out through Jesus Christ our Lord." "The life of a man of divided loyalty will reveal instability at every turn." "But they cannot chain the Word of God, and I can endure all things for the sake of those whom

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God is calling." "I am not in the least ashamed. For I know the one in whom I have placed my confidence, and I am perfectly certain that the work he has committed to me is safe in his hands unto that day."

     To understand the conquest of the Way one must see it in the context of conflict and against the background of battle. It cannot be explained when divorced from the terminology of war in which it is described. To try and refine it and clean it up for sensitive ears and squeamish hearts is to reduce it to a sham and a show. It is to look at a diorama in an auditorium instead of being involved in a real life situation. One of God's commandos described his ministry by talking about "danger from rivers and floods, from bandits, from my own countrymen, and from pagans." He said, "I have faced danger in city streets, danger in the desert, danger on the high seas, danger among false Christians. I have known exhaustion, pain, long vigils, hunger and thirst, doing without meals, cold and lack of clothing."

     Let me make no bones about it. Let me be clearly understood. I want to serve as a revolutionary. I want to be an active member of the world liberation front. I am sold out to "the man from outside." I want to join hands with every other person on the face of this whole wide earth who is committed to following "the leader on the white horse." I do not care whether you are black, white, red or yellow. I do not care whether you are Jew or Greek, male or female, bond or free. I do not care if you wear faded jeans or a Botany 500 suit. I do not care if you wear curls over your coat collar or if you are as bald as a billiard ball. What I am concerned about is whether you are willing to suffer hardship for his name, whether you are carrying the cross daily and if you are willing to die cheerfully and smilingly for his sake. He said, "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

     If you are in Him I am in Him with you. We are in the One! We are listening to the clear tones of the same trumpet. I have no time to indulge in the luxury of cultivating vegetables in a sectarian garden, fenced off from life. I have no time to play religious chess inside the walls of a partisan monastery. There is a war on. The winds of battle are blowing in my face. I have no desire to lean on the fence and argue with you about your trivial deductions or to engage in nit-picking. A soldier who is under fire and pinned down by whining bullets cannot waste mental energy in a heated argument whether to part his hair on the right or left side. When the house is on fire it is no time to get up and nail a stray shingle on the roof of the garage.

     Let the religious gold-bricks behind the lines debate, argue and fuss about all of the nitty-gritty which appeals to those who go blithely on without knowing that the fight is on, but for God's sake, let us get on with the battle. Let us not get hung up on what kind of rug to put on the floor of the mess-hall or commissary, or strung out on whether Jesus is going to return before the thousand years or after it. While we are fighting among ourselves the demons are laughing up their diabolical sleeves and the devil is picking his teeth with a flame-proof splinter in happy anticipation of a ghoulish feast.

     The time has come to live dangerously! It is no time to sit around mumbling and talking out of the corner of your mouth about the "institutional church." This is a cop-out, and those who do most of the grumbling and belly-aching would not do anything for Jesus under any circumstances. I have watched the spiritual dropouts through the years, and without exception they are people of divided allegiance, and they are unstable in all of their ways. It takes men in times of battle and they are a little less than men. One does not have to be very brilliant to sit around and find fault and to inform his longsuffering wife of the mistakes of everyone else on earth. If you know what ought to be done, get with the action and stop the reaction.

     If you are a preacher of the word, revolutionize your message so you can revolutionize your hearers. There is not too

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much to be gained when a group is spoon-fed the same pap or pablum week after week, and know before they arrive that they are going to be "filled up with regular." Risk your financial life and live up to your commitment. Trust in the Lord to see you through. If you are driven out of one city flee to the next. If the Message is absolutely rejected sound off your exhaust against the city. Few preachers walk enough any more that they can shake off any dust from their feet!

     I eagerly urge you to read again the absolute essentials to the revolutionary stance. Study the tactics of world communism. See why the proponents of it are so successful. Let us learn from the enemy! How can they sweep the world and never hold a revival? How have they been so successful in the cities of the globe without a crusade? What is the difference in the approach of "The Daily Worker" and the papers that we publish?

     My heart is thoroughly convinced that we have the power of heaven on our side in the struggle. We are following a leader that even death could not hold. The sayings of Chairman Jesus in the little black book are so much more revolutionary than the sayings of Chairman Mao in the little red book, that there is no comparison. Then the difference must be in the attitude of the followers. Are we willing to admit that the brainwashed millions are more powerful than the heart-washed hosts who follow in the train of the Son of God?

     Arouse from your apathy! Comrades, let us unite! We should be the militants! We should be the workers throwing off their chains. We should be the world liberators! We should be the vanguard of the forces storming the heights, freeing the captives, rescuing the weary and despondent. Banish the thought of defeat. We cannot be overcome! We cannot be destroyed! I summon every person in the world who loves Jesus to throw off the sectarian bonds and free men from the stranglehold of party shackles. For freedom Christ hath set us free! Our necks were not made to bend beneath the cruel chafing of sectarian yokes. Hear the call of him who said, "Take my yoke upon you, for truly my yoke is easy and my burden is light." Hear the call. Heed the invitation. There's a place in the ranks for you. Right on, brethren!