We need to learn how to read the Gospels as accounts of the greatest political confrontations of all time. The excitement and relevance of the Gospels are revealed when we do. Jesus is the initiator of the great reset. Bill Gates, George Soros, Obama, and the rest are way behind the times.
Time is an important element of God's creation. Many Christians talk about how God lives outside of time, which is true, but He also created time with a purpose. Time is not irrelevant. In fact, many of Jesus' confrontations in the Gospels were associated with the question: "What time is it?" When confronted with this question, Jesus would answer, in effect: "It is time to get a new calendar altogether. I am starting the world over."
Consider this interaction in the Gospel of Mark.
This is how Jesus reset the world calendar:
"Once more, Jesus went to the synagogue. There was a man there with a withered hand. People were watching to see if Jesus would heal him on the Sabbath so that they could frame a charge against Him."
Mark 3:1-2
The leaders of the synagogue had their own opinion about what God was currently doing in their world. The Sabbath was a marker in time. The synagogue leaders believed that good Jews must wait on the Sabbath for their God's inevitable deliverance. Their opinion was so strong that if Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath, He could face criminal charges.
The Sabbath appears as an item of importance many times throughout the Gospels. Somehow, the way you approach the Sabbath indicates what you believe concerning God and His purposes in the world. In our modern times, the traditional understanding of Sabbath observance is merely a matter of imitating God's behavior. As we read Genesis, we see God working for six days and then taking a day off to rest. For Westerners, all we perceive about the Sabbath is a vague notion that at one time in history, God didn't want us to go to work or play sports on Sunday or Saturday, depending on which day you considered to be "the Sabbath."
The modern understanding of the Sabbath (what is left of it) does not get us where we need to understand Jesus or Genesis, where we first encounter the sabbath concept.
The sabbath issue that people in Jesus' day concerned themselves with was not a matter of rules as though God is personally offended by certain behaviors on certain days. Sabbath is a matter of faith and a marker of time.
The way we view time and the way we view God is intricately connected. The Jews observed the Sabbath because the Sabbath declares:
The Creator God has an order to the world. Seasons, days, and years (time) are His design, a mechanism for ordering the world. Acknowledging God's order of time is acknowledging God's sovereignty and intention for the world.
God's creation project is going somewhere. The Sabbath is holy because it represents the day in the original creation when God "moved in" to rest in His cosmic Temple. Israelites observe the Sabbath to declare their faith in God who created and will re-create all things. In the new creation, God will join the two spheres of God's creation: Heaven and earth, thus creating a new reality of peace and rest. This new creation and this coming rest are anticipated through observing the Sabbath in the original creation.
To observe the Sabbath is to indicate your loyalty to the plan and purposes of God and your faith in His power to accomplish it.
Psalm 127 is a good Sabbath day confession:
"Unless the Lord build the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless the Lord guards the city,
The watchmen keep awake in vain.
It is vain for you to rise up early,
To retire late,
To eat the bread of painful labors;
For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep." Psalm 127:1-2
Someone who fears God rests on the Sabbath because they trust God to bring about the renewal of all things as He promised, "even in (our) sleep." "Sleep," in this case, does not mean complacency but rest and confidence in the one who is fighting with us and for us. Jesus' healing activity on the Sabbath was a Gospel claim about time. Jesus healed on the Sabbath to declared that the great reset of the calendar world was underway. The ultimate Sabbath has arrived in a great wave of the new creation that will usher in the days of rest and healing. In John's Gospel, Jesus defended His Sabbath-healing activity with the declaration:
"My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working." John 5:17
God's "work" is always new creation, and it is not a lack of faith that creates new things on the Sabbath. When God "rested" on the seventh day, he wasn't simply not working in the Genesis account. Why would God have to take a day off? The "rest" of God is the action of God moving into a house after constructing it in six days. The seventh day is for enjoyment, not inaction. The most enjoyable thing for God is a new creation. According to Jesus, it is the wrong time to observe Sabbath in the old way because the new creation is just getting started. "Check your liturgical calendars," says Jesus, "or better yet, throw them away. I am what the calendar anticipated. It's time for a new calendar."
This is what Jesus told the Pharisees in other ways previously.
"How can the wedding guests fast if the bridegroom is there with them?" (Mark 2:19)
"No one puts new wine into old wineskins. New wine needs new skins." (Mark 2:21-22).
In other words, your old way of looking at the world is out-dated. This reality is also true of those who seek to reorganize the world for their exploitation in "the Great Reset" today. As Psalm 2 predicted of the Messiah, Jesus "laughs" at them because God has already installed Him as Lord of the Cosmos.
PSALM 2
1 Why are the nations in an uproar
And the peoples devising a vain thing?
2 The kings of the earth take their stand
And the rulers take counsel together
Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying,
3 "Let us tear their fetters apart
And cast away their cords from us!"
4 He who sits in the heavens laughs,
The Lord scoffs at them.
5 Then He will speak to them in His anger
And terrify them in His fury, saying,
6 "But as for Me, I have installed My King
Upon Zion, My holy mountain."
7 "I will surely tell of the decree of the Lord:
He said to Me, 'You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.
8 'Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance,
And the very ends of the earth as Your possession.
9 'You shall break them with a rod of iron,
You shall shatter them like earthenware.'"
10 Now therefore, O kings, show discernment;
Take warning, O judges of the earth.
11 Worship the Lord with reverence
And rejoice with trembling.
12 Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way,
For His wrath may soon be kindled.
How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!
Jesus offers everyone a new calendar, but accepting this new calendar means giving up the plans you wrote on the old one.
"Why are you doing what is illegal on the sabbath?" Mark 2:24
The Pharisees stumbled here because they had too much to lose if they accepted Jesus' claim about time. They didn't want to believe that anything new was happening outside of their control. They wanted the old demarcation of time, marked by the Sabbath observance, to remain until an improvement could occur after the imaginations of their own hearts. Jesus' healings threatened the Pharisee's way of life and the social status as the gatekeepers of Jewish culture. By denying Jesus' work, the Pharisees condemned themselves to be people living outside the promised land. In Jesus' world, the new creation is reality. In the Pharisees' world, fasting, mourning, and sickness continue unabated, even today. Just like many of today's leaders, the Pharisees wanted to be the solution to the problem even if they could never succeed. Their end was to have power, pleasure, and prestige, not to fix problems.
The rich and powerful of the world believe that there is so much wrong with the earth: overpopulation, global warming, poverty, disease, etc. Anyone with discernment knows that these elites want problems to exist so that they can present their "solutions," which are thinly cloaked agendas of malevolence. The last thing the global elites want is a messianic figure who brings solutions without using them. They hate Donald Trump, who believes that the average person will be much better off without these elites' involvement. But will he succeed in warding them off as He has tried?
The question is not whether Donald Trump will succeed; the question is whether or not Jesus already succeeded two thousand years ago. Obviously, I believe the answer is yes. Jesus succeeded in establishing God's kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven. This will never be undone. This is the good news of the Gospel. For this reason alone, Donald Trump or John Doe, or any other human being can confidently stand against the globalist. The globalists are attempting to wage war they have already lost. It only remains for the followers of Christ to stand in the Truth of the Gospel, which is true even if we don't stand in it (we may suffer the fate of the world, but the Gospel remains true). This fact is also why God can use Donald Trump or anyone else for powerful good even if he or she is not truly a believer or even a person of pure intent. The point is that evil, and all those who collude with it, have already been defeated. Their collapse, failure, and judgment are inevitable. We can and should stand in this truth. In fact, we can "rest" in it. This does not mean complacency but confidence in the finished, victorious work of Christ. If we compromise, we compromise ourselves because we compromised with the evil dealt a death blow on the cross.
The war has already been won.
The calendar has already been flipped.
The Great Reset has been accomplished.
Johnny-come-lately globalists will fail.
You and I will help them fail by standing with Jesus.
Now, in that peace, let us go to war with the assurance of faith and the assurance of victory.