The last shall be dead?

When we think about defining the “kingdom of God,” do we spend too much time thinking about “kingdom” and not enough about God?

“Kingdom” suggests castles and soldiers, ruffles and flourishes—but those impressive things are drops in the ocean of time. Jesus taught often that the last shall be first and the least shall be greatest. He made that teaching graphic by washing Peter’s feet. In many kingdoms, only the fittest survive. For His kingdom, God chooses the weak and despised, not the great.

Mary the mother of Jesus sang of God, “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he sent away empty.”

In the kingdoms we create, we are like reception attendees scanning the crowd so as to snag moments with those who can aid our ascent. In the kingdom of GOD, we go to talk with the person showing his unfitness by staring at a wall. In our kingdoms we yearn to meet the powerful. In God’s kingdom we look for teenage moms surprised by pregnancy.

Emphasizing the most important part of the phrase—kingdom of GOD—provides one more indication of why evolution is a dogma utterly opposed to Christianity. All of us who hope in Christ are unworthy, but while we were yet sinners He saved us by grace. The story of evolution, though, is graceless: It is a prosperity-gospel survival of the fittest, with the strong winning out.

If we believe God cheers for the strong and kills off the weak, we turn the biblical story upside down. That’s why “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creation” are oxymorons. The plain reading of the Bible’s prose is clear, and so is the logic: Why would God create the world using one story, survival of the fittest, and redeem it by another, survival of those who realize they are unfit?

In the kingdom of GOD, we are all unfit: We enter by Christ’s sacrifice and slowly learn to sacrifice ourselves for others. Do we have a schizophrenic god, or at least a hypocritical one who says “live by sacrificing yourself” but sets up rules that say “die if you sacrifice yourself”? Do we have a god, as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights believes, who knits us together in our mothers’ wombs but smiles as those wombs become killing fields?

Robert Ingersoll, the most popular American orator of the late 19th century, said Darwin’s “doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity.” Darwin showed “that the Garden of Eden is an ignorant myth; that the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the atonement is an absurdity; that the serpent did not tempt, and that man did not ‘fall.’ Charles Darwin destroyed the foundation of orthodox Christianity.”

Over time Darwinist thought also undercut the 19th-century U.S. pro-life movement. In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man and The New York Times published its classic attack on abortion, “The Evil of the Age.” Darwin found it harmful that “the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.” The Times, still influenced by Christian founder Henry Raymond, demanded protection for unborn children, as do those today who stand outside abortion businesses and plead with women making a rendezvous with death.

In 1973, as the Supreme Court embraced abortion, true believers in survival of the fittest occupied key positions in the Nixon administration. For example, Reimert Ravenholt, director of the USAID Office of Population, printed business cards on condoms, said one-fourth of women should be sterilized, applauded China’s abortions, and said it was “harmful to African societies” to offer immunizations and antibiotics “when the deaths prevented thereby are not balanced by prevention of a roughly equal number of births.”

Other Nixon appointees were also pro-abortion, but that’s a story for another day. The question we need to answer is: Do you believe the last shall be first, or do you believe the first shall be first and the last will be dead?

God chooses the weak and despised, not the great.

Email molasky@wng.org