THE POWER OF INFLUENCE

Genesis chapter 1






Today we are walking in: The Power Of Influence








Genesis 31:29




It is in the power of my hand H3027 to do you hurt: but the God of your father spake unto me yesternight, saying, Take thou heed that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad.



















POWER







Today we look to the word-POWER-H3027 yad-- strength, power













The Torah testifies...............




Deuteronomy 32:36




For the LORD shall judge his people, and repent himself for his servants, when he seeth that their power H3027 is gone, and there is none shut up, or left.


















The prophets proclaim..................




Nehemiah 1:10




Now these are thy servants and thy people, whom thou hast redeemed by thy great power, and by thy strong hand. H3027



















The writings bear witness...........................




2 Kings 19:26




Therefore their inhabitants were of small power, H3027 they were dismayed and confounded; they were as the grass of the field, and as the green herb, as the grass on the housetops, and as corn blasted before it be grown up.












The Power of Influence


Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


I found myself sitting between kingdom and colony.


I was the guest of the United States ambassador to the Bahamas for an official state function at his residence. Also attending this function were both the premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands, and His Excellency, the royal governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands.


This group of islands lies off the southeastern coast of my country of the Bahamas. At the writing of this series, the Turks and Caicos is a colony of Great Britain. The colony is overseen by the royal governor, who was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. He is the highest authority in that colony.


The premier, however, is an elected official, approved by the Crown, who heads the local government. The premier was the special guest of the American ambassador. The ambassador had also invited other members of the diplomatic corps, as well as distinguished governmental officials and guests from around the world. Previous to this gathering, I had already become well acquainted with the premier. At his invitation, I had visited his beautiful island territory to address governmental and civic leaders in a special national event, and we had become good friends.


During the state function at the US ambassador’s residence, I also came to know the royal governor fairly well because I was seated between him and the premier for over three hours during the proceedings. While the premier is a native-born Turks and Caicos Islander, His Excellency the Governor is pure British. When he spoke, you knew immediately that he was not from the islands.


As I conversed with these two distinguished leaders, one on either side of me, I realized once again the principle of kingdoms and their impact on their colonies. It refreshed my perspective and reminded me of my personal experience as a citizen of a former colony of the kingdom of Great Britain. There I sat between the crown and the colony, the governor and the administrator, the authority and the power. The governor was sent from the kingdom to live in the colony, among the people, to represent the Queen and execute her wishes and will in the colony. His primary purpose was to maintain the kingdom’s influence and presence in that territory.


The Kingdom Life


Years of research have led me to the conclusion that the practical outworking of kingdoms points us to truths and principles that transcend the mere political fortunes of individual empires. Seeing how they function actually:


- provides us with a deep understanding of our own nature as human beings,


- reveals the key to our remarkable life purpose, and


- enables us to exercise our full potential in the world.


These things have tremendous implications for the human race personally, professionally, socially, and politically; for our families, communities, nations, and the world.


I am in a somewhat unique position to discuss the nature of kingdoms and their colonies, having grown up in a land that was a British colony for nearly two hundred years, and having witnessed its peaceful transition to independence. I well remember what it meant to live under a monarch—both the mind-set of a kingdom and its functioning and procedures. Yet I also understand what it means to live in an independent nation, having eagerly followed our transition to self-government as a young person. My close acquaintance with these two ways of governing has been extremely beneficial to me as I have explored the nature of kingdom and what it means for every person on this planet.


My investigation into the concept of kingdom has convinced me that the success of your life and mine depends upon how well we understand and live out what I will call the kingdom life. I am not referring to a political system or to any particular national government, but to a way of understanding and living everyday life.


An Anti-Kingdom Perspective


The concept of kingdom may seem antithetical to the contemporary mind. Empires and their colonies seem outdated in the twenty-first century, just fading remnants of the past. Many nations today have representative governments. A number of former colonies and protectorates have gained their independence. Opportunities for self-government have expanded greatly throughout the world, and we rightly celebrate the political freedoms and opportunities these changes have brought. Human history has seen enough tyrannical kingdoms and dictators to want to move on to a different form of government.


Democracy is essentially humanity’s reaction to perverted kingdoms. The founders of the United States rebelled against what they considered an oppressive government, and the very genetics of contemporary Western society are anti-kingdom. Because of the strong influence of political and social ideas of independence and freedom, this perspective has permeated the world and affects many areas of our thinking, not just the governmental realm. It shows up in how we view and conduct ourselves in personal relationships, business, media, education, and even religion because our cultural experiences produce our definitions. This is why the concept of kingdom is dismissed by most people today as irrelevant and is even considered out-and-out frightening by others.


In the light of these developments, however, many people no longer understand what life in an authentic and uncorrupted kingdom entails. I believe this lack of understanding has hindered them in the way they’ve approached their lives. Most of us have forgotten why kingdoms historically had such a profound impact on people and nations for thousands of years, some of which is still being felt. They haven’t recognized what the concept and history of kingdoms reveal that is vital to us today.


I therefore want to present to you, step-by-step, how the practical working of the kingdom life answers essential questions about our human existence, purpose, and fulfillment. We have approached our personal goals and problems, as well as our national and global crises, from many vantage points, but not often from this perspective. Democracies are valuable political institutions for us today, but I’m referring to something that transcends our contemporary politics and government—something that speaks to the basis of our very being as humans. It has significance for people of all nations, religions, and creeds. It lies at the heart of the existence of every person on earth, whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, agnostic, or atheist.


Just as I found myself sitting between kingdom and colony, you and every other person on the planet are, in a sense, supposed to find yourselves in a relationship between kingdom and colony, and to experience that dynamic in your own lives.


Kingdom Power


The character of this kingdom is, again, nothing like the political kingdoms of the past and present that seek to force others under their control based on territorial power, greed, or religious doctrine. Those kingdoms enslave. But the very nature of humanity, as well as the personal and corporate progress of the world, are designed to develop and thrive from the outworking of this kingdom.


I mentioned that the principal issue of humanity is power, defined as “the ability to influence and control circumstances.” We all want to direct and influence our lives in a positive and fulfilling way. The nature of this kingdom speaks directly to this need.


Understanding our association with this kingdom begins with an exploration of what all human kingdoms have shared in common and how they were different from the contemporary experience of government most of us are familiar with today. Then we can move to the larger context of what these qualities reveal about our human existence and purpose.


The Nature of Kingdom Government


I define a kingdom as “the governing authority and influence of a sovereign ruler who impacts his territory through his will, purpose, and intentions, which are manifested in the culture, lifestyle, and quality of his citizenry.” A king must have his dominion, or his territory. We call it his “king-dominion” or his kingdom. You cannot be a king without having territory; you have to be ruling over something. And you cannot be a king without having kingdom citizens who live and work in the kingdom.


In a true, traditional kingdom, all power is vested in the monarch. The king actually, personally owns the country, including the people. In contrast, a president or prime minister in a representative government doesn’t own the country; he governs it on behalf of the people.


The king implements his vision for the kingdom. There is no congress or parliament to discuss which laws they’re going to create. There is only the monarch, and he has immediate access to his handpicked, trusted council, who carry out his wishes. The job of these advisors is to take the will of the king, translate it into the law of the land, and make sure it is enacted throughout the kingdom.


A kingdom is therefore the governing influence of a king over his territory, impacting and influencing it with his personal will. In a kingdom, the king’s personal interest becomes policy, and the king’s personal will becomes law. Thus, the effectiveness of a kingdom and its power is its ability to influence and control the territory according to the vision of the king.


The Goal of the Kingdom: Ruling and Gaining Territory


Most kingdoms throughout history have sought to take additional land, sometimes at some distance from the home country, because the power of a king is related to the territory he owns. The more territory a king had, the greater he was respected by other kingdoms, especially if the territories had abundant natural wealth. The home country of the king was his domain, and the outlying territories were his colonies.


Once a colony was gained, the sovereign’s number one goal was to exercise his personal influence over it. The


Transformation of Colonies into the Kingdom


A colony is comprised of “a group of emigrants or their descendants who settle in a distant land but remain subject to the parent country.”1 The word colony comes from the Latin word colonia, derived from colere, meaning “to cultivate.” In this sense, a colony is:


- the presence of a distinct cultural citizenry in a foreign territory that is governed by the laws and customs of its home country.


- established to influence the territory for the home government.


This means that a colony’s purpose was essentially to:


1. be an extension of the home country in another territory.


2. establish a prototype of the original country in another territory.


3. represent the values, morals, and manners of the home country.


4. manifest the culture and lifestyle of the original nation.


When a kingdom takes a territory, therefore, its goal is to make that territory exactly like the kingdom. The purpose is not only to gain lands, but also to transform those lands so that they mirror the country in its mind-set and lifestyle, its characteristics and culture. In this way, the kingdom not only extends its power, but it also expands the influence of its very nature.


The Roman Empire had a specific way of ensuring the permanency and effectiveness of kingdom influence over its colonies. When the Romans conquered a region, they planted a group of about three hundred of their own citizens, as well as a larger number of those allied with the empire, and a number of settlers, within it to serve as a type of military outpost. These constituted a “colony of Romans citizens” (colonia civium Romanorum) or a “little Rome.” A colony of Roman citizens was free from taxation and military duty. It had its own constitution based on the Roman constitution and was allowed to elect its own senate and other offices of state. The original inhabitants had to adhere to this new government and its constitution. These “little Romes” brought the culture and values of the Roman empire throughout Europe and northern Africa.


Characterizing the Kingdom


A striking picture of the power and influence of kingdoms over a territory and the lifestyle of its inhabitants can be seen in the various nations of the Caribbean and West Indies. You can always tell who controlled a colony by studying its culture. The Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados are former colonies of the United Kingdom. Cuba was a colony of Spain. Haiti was a colony of France. The cultures of all these islands are distinctly characteristic of the countries that claimed them.


You can still see the kingdoms’ influence in the daily lives and customs of the people. If you visited the Bahamas, you’d see the influence of Great Britain in our narrow streets, our driving on the left-hand side of the road, and our habit of drinking tea. When I was a young boy attending school, my classmates and I grew up singing “Yah Save the Queen.” We were being taught to be a “little Britain.” Similarly, if you went to Cuba, you might think you were in Spain as you observed its architecture and food. Significantly for their cultures, each of these former colonies speaks the language of the kingdom that conquered it.


Most kingdoms in the colonial period had to fight for new territory because there was a limited amount of land in the world. Under European control, the Bahamas was initially claimed by the Spaniards. The French tried to conquer it, but the Spaniards held them off. Finally, the British won out over the Spanish. If the British Empire hadn’t won, I might be speaking Spanish today. So even though the Bahamas, Haiti, and Cuba are all part of a chain of islands, whoever controlled the domain controlled the language and culture of the people. If you really want to investigate the power of kingdoms, study the island of Hispaniola, home of both the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Two kingdoms grabbed the same island, and now there’s a border separating the eastern part from the western part; one side speaks French, while other side speaks Spanish.


The Most Important Person in the Colony


The transformation of a colony into the culture of the kingdom didn’t happen automatically. A purposeful development was involved. The king didn’t usually directly extend his influence to his colony by physically going there. He administrated his will through his personal representative, called a governor or regent. He sent his representative to physically live in the colony in his place. Therefore, the royal governor was the presence of the absent king in the colony.


With the governor in the colony, you didn’t need the physical presence of the king to experience and be changed by the king’s influence. I mentioned that the British monarchs who influenced the English-speaking Caribbean nations didn’t frequently visit their colonies. Yet, in the Bahamas, we all learned to speak English, drink tea, wave the Union Jack, and sing the songs of Britain. We became part of the United Kingdom. And the royal governors were the direct instrument of that transformation.


The governor was therefore the most important person in the colony. We get a greater appreciation for why this was true when we look at his purpose. The Governor’s Purpose The governor’s purpose was sixfold:


1. Relationship: The governor was the guarantee that the kingdom could always have access to the colony. The interrelationship between king and colony was totally dependent on him.


2. Communication: Anything the king wanted the colony to know or to receive, he would send through his governor, his avenue of communication.


3. Representation: The governor was the chief representative of the king and his kingdom in the colony. He also represented the colony to the king.


4. Interpretation: The governor understood intimately the king’s desires, ideas, intent, purposes, will, and plans; therefore, he was the only one who could effectively interpret these aspects for the colony.


5. Power: The governor was the only one empowered with the authority and ability to execute the king’s desires and commands for the colony.


6. Partnership: The governor was effectively the king’s partner in rulership.


The Governor’s Qualifications and Roles


The qualifications and roles of a governor were significant in terms of kingdom and colony:


1. The governor was appointed by the king.


Unlike the governors of representational governments, the royal governor was not voted in; he was appointed by the king.


2. The governor came only from the kingdom, never the colony.


Governors were never chosen from the indigenous peoples of the colonies. They were always appointed from the home countries. Why? A governor had to be steeped in the original culture of the kingdom. He had to be a person who knew the kingdom and understood the heart, mind, desires, will, and intent of the king in carrying out the kingdom’s purposes in the territory.


3. The governor represented only the king.


Again, the difference between the governors of colonies and the governors many of us are familiar with in representative governments is like night and day. Every state in the United States has a governor who is voted in by the people and can also be voted out by them. He or she is ultimately accountable to the people of the state, not to the federal government or its leaders. In contrast, the royal governor was responsible and accountable to the king alone in his allegiance, attitude, actions, and responsibility.


4. The governor only expressed the mind and will of the king.


The governor was not there to promote his own personal policies or agendas. He was to take the vision and will of the king and communicate them to the people, translating them into policy and law.


5. The governor was responsible for converting the colony into the kingdom.


Once more, it was the governor’s job to oversee and carry out the transformation of the colonies according to the character of the kingdom. The governor was “planted” in the colony to sow the seeds of the home country into the culture of the new territory. Colonization was for the purpose of conversion—to exchange the culture of the territory for the culture of the kingdom. Whatever was happening in the kingdom was supposed to happen in the colony, as well.


6. In converting the colony, the governor transferred the kingdom’s culture, values, nature, language, and lifestyle to the people.


The governor made sure that every subject of the kingdom took on the kingdom culture in language, attitude, dress, food, and so forth. The colonists were even to take on the history of the kingdom as if it were their own, which in fact it now was, because they had become a part of the chronicles of the nation. The subjects were to take on the mind-set and lifestyle of the kingdom until, if you visited the territory, you would think you were in the home country itself.


7. The governor prepared the subjects for citizenship.


When a king took over a colony, the people essentially became his possessions. The inhabitants of the colony did not automatically become citizens; they were called subjects. For example, when the Bahamas was a colony, the people were not citizens of Great Britain. We couldn’t vote, and we didn’t have other rights of British citizens.


In a kingdom, citizenship was a privilege. Who became a citizen was the king’s prerogative, and he personally granted it. The reason citizenship wasn’t automatic is that, once a person was appointed a citizen, he had special benefits and protections in the kingdom. In the Roman Empire, citizenship was a high honor and privilege involving many rights. In the first century, Paul of Tarsus was arrested in Jerusalem by the Roman commander for allegedly disturbing the peace. He was about to be whipped when he declared to a nearby centurion that he was a Roman citizen. Immediately, the soldiers’ attitude toward him changed. The following exchange dramatically reveals the power of kingdom citizenship in the Roman Empire, especially if you were born a citizen:


As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, “Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?” When the centurion heard this, he went to the commander and reported it. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “This man is a Roman citizen.” The commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” “Yes I am,” he answered. Then the commander said, “I had to pay a big price for my citizenship.” “But I was born a citizen,” Paul replied. Those who were about to question him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains.


Once you are a citizen, your privileges, rights, and demands upon the throne change. The king is responsible for taking care of you. Therefore, the governor’s role of preparing subjects for citizenship was a tremendous responsibility. If the governor believed a subject was ready to be a citizen or especially deserved citizenship, he recommended the subject to the king. Since the governor lived in the colony and knew the subjects firsthand, the king accepted the suggestions of the governor in this regard.


8. The governor lived in a residence built by the government of the home country.


A kingdom would build a residence in its colonies specifically for its royal governors to live in. This emphasized that the governor, the chief representative of the kingdom in the colony, was not just a visitor; he lived there, he was there to stay, and this was his legal residence. The British built a governor’s mansion in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, specifically for the royal governor to live in, which today is called the Government House. Great Britain similarly built governors’ houses in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and in every colony where it ruled.


9. The governor’s presence in the colony was evidence that the kingdom itself was in the colony.


As long as the governor lived in the colony, the kingdom itself was present. The first time the Bahamas was declared a British colony was when a royal governor drove out the remaining Spanish garrisons, solidifying its ownership by the kingdom of Great Britain.


10. The governor left if the colony declared independence.


Either by force or recall, the royal governor would leave a colony if it declared independence and the kingdom was no longer officially governing. In the American Revolution, the royal governors of the colonies were forced to withdraw from their posts. When the Bahamas received independence, it was through negotiation with Great Britain, and the governor was recalled because he no longer had a legal right to be there.


The Value of the Governor


In kingdom terms, then, the governor was the most powerful and important person in the colony. Because he introduced the kingdom’s culture, language, and lifestyle—every unique aspect of the kingdom—to the colony, he had great value for the kingdom and its larger purposes. To summarize, the governor was valuable:


1. As the presence of the government. Without him, the kingdom would not exist in the colony.


2. For representing the government. If he wasn’t there, the king would not be adequately or effectively represented.


3. For the enablement of the colony. He was the one with the authority and ability to supply power and resources to the colony.


4. For protection. As long as the kingdom was represented in a colony by the governor, the king was obligated to protect the territory from outside threats and danger.


5. For his ability to know and communicate the mind of the king. The governor represented the king’s interests and will to the colony and made sure they were carried out.


6. For enabling the colony’s citizens and subjects to fulfill the will of the kingdom. The colony received its instructions only through the governor and therefore was dependent on him for its effectiveness. The citizens and subjects would not be able to carry out their kingdom mandate without the governor’s guidance and empowerment.


The Influence of Another Kingdom


These were the main features of a kingdom-colony relationship, including the pivotal role of the governor in the process of transforming colonies into the home country. This brings us back to the kingdom I mentioned earlier in this teaching, which transcends our human governments and speaks to the basis of our very nature and existence as human beings. This kingdom has properties that are similar to, but go beyond, those of the traditional earthly kingdoms we’ve been looking at.


Two millennia ago, a startling young teacher described this transcendent kingdom. When Yahusha of Nazareth began traveling and speaking around Palestine, the first thing he is recorded as saying is, “The time has come…. The kingdom of Yah is near.”


This statement intrigues me and brings up several questions for us to explore in terms of kingdom:


- What “time” was he speaking about? And why then?


- What was the nature of the kingdom he was referring to?


He was announcing the imminent return of a kingdom and its influence on earth. Notice that he didn’t proclaim the entrance of a new religion, nor did he announce the beginnings of a democratic form of government. We have to ask:


- Why would he use this particular governmental reference at the beginning of his public life?


- What did it signify about his message and purpose?


- If the influence of a kingdom was entering the world, what new culture would emerge for the citizens of earth?


To understand the context of these thought-provoking statements and their implications, we need to go back to the first book of Moses, the book of Genesis, to the origins of this kingdom. For this wasn’t the first time the transcendent kingdom had entered the world and impacted its inhabitants…