Are you a “good king”?
I chose the name “The Good King” after spending some time in the Old Testament account of God’s people and their journey out of slavery, through the wilderness, into the promised land, and through the times of the Judges, and the Kings.
This story—in addition to setting up the Gospel story and Jesus’ entry onto the world stage—can also be understood through the lens of the human story of becoming.
We leave the tyranny of Egypt (our old limiting systems of belief and action) and we go through a season of wandering in the wilderness, learning to be truly human and being formed by the presence of God, and finally into the promised land of our life, where we walk in union with God, overthrow the false idols and kings that need to be dealt with, and hopefully, leave a legacy of abundance, love, and flourishing for generations.
The Pattern That Repeats:
I started to notice the pattern that kept repeating itself in the Old Testament stories: there was a long succession of good and bad kings on the throne in Israel. There were a few things I noticed about this succession.
When there were “good” kings on the throne, the people flourished. The enemy kings did not succeed in their attacks against God’s people. The individuals in the community were able to be more fully “human” and become more alive. Things were oriented in proper relationship to each other.
When there were “bad” kings on the throne, the opposite happened. People became less human. Their lives devolved into chaos and destruction. If the succession of “bad” kings went on long enough, the tyrant would come and overthrow the nation, murder their sons, rape their daughters, and make them their slaves.
The difference between the “good” kings and the “bad” kings in the story is presented primarily as the object of the king’s worship.
When the king worshipped the One God, the people flourished.
When the king worshipped false gods (lower level / profane gods), things fell apart.
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Are you a “good king” or a “bad king”?
To the extent that our decisions impact a certain “domain”, then we are “kings” over that domain. That might the domain of your own life, your family, or perhaps you lead a community, church, or business.
In the same way as the Old Testament kings, what YOU worship affects the quality of life in your domain in much the same way that the stories in the Old Testament reveal.
When you worship the One true God, your domain will flourish, and you will set up flourishing for generations.
When you worship a profane god, your domain will falter and your enemies will take it over.
This “good king / bad king” dynamic isn’t an arbitrary moral system set up by a capricious deity that demands your loyalty and obedience.
It’s not merely a top down moral order that you have to explicitly consent to.
It’s a revelation of the nature of reality, from the bottom up.
It’s a revelation of the “rules of the game of life”.
There are many examples I could share with you from my own personal experience and from observing the culture, but I’ll limit this for the sake of time.
Take for example our culture’s worship of hedonism and the elevation of the pursuit of impulsive pleasure to one of the highest values in the land.
Every act of worship involves the sacrifice of something.
To worship impulsive sexual pleasure, for example, you have to sacrifice children.
This has always been the case.
One of the symptoms of a “bad king” being on the throne in Israel was that the Israelites would worship the false god Molech, and would sacrifice their children in the fires of Molech.
When a “bad king” is enthroned and the culture follows him in the worship of idols, it usually ends up in sacrificing children . It’s just the way things are - if you worship a false god, it will cost you your children.
You see that playing out explicitly in this country, where the murder of children (a sacrifice to the gods of sexual hedonism) has become the leading cause of death for infants, by a huge factor. Every month, more than five times as many babies are slaughtered in the “fires of Molech” as the amount of babies that die in a whole year from other causes.
This is just one example of the “bad king” dynamic playing out. When you worship unworthy gods, you do so at the expense of your children.
The good king’s worship
Think of “worship” as analogous to “attention”. Whatever get’s the lion’s share of your attention, love, & desire is (by definition) what you worship.
What you “attend to” (give your attention to) is dictated by what you value.
You pay more attention to things you value more.
You pay the highest attention (either in the “quality” of your attention or the “quantity” of your attention) to the things you value the most.
Of all the things that you give your attention to, if you arrayed those things across a hierarchy, the thing that sits at the very pinnacle of your attentional hierarchy is, by definition, what you worship.
It is at the pinnacle of the attention hierarchy because it receives the most high quality attention.
It receives the most and the highest quality attention because you value it the most (regardless of whether or not you are consciously aware of that).
I think many modern Christians would say that they “worship” God, but there is very little evidence in their lives that that’s the case. Their family dynamics, nervous system, marriage, and relationships don’t “bear the fruit” of union with God.
Worship isn’t something you can just decide to do and say “I worship this” in an arbitrary way, by going to church and singing the prescribed songs.
Worship is something that is lived.
It’s the sum total of where your passion, desire, love and attention is directed as a result of what you value most.
It’s good to know this, because of the relationship between “worship” and “human flourishing” that I talked about earlier.
When your passions, desires, values, and your attention are consciously aimed at a transcendent unity (God), then your life will come together in harmony, and your perception will open up to the wisdom of reality. Your life will “come together”. You will be oriented properly in the world, in a way that aligns with “being itself” (God).
When you are aligned with “being itself”, then you will “be” or “exist” in harmony with “the way things are”.
Things that exist in harmony with the way things are are “eternal”. If they align with the deepest principals of “being”, they will always “be”.
This is why when you orient your life around the paradigm of Jesus, who came as an explicit representation of what it means to “be”, you will have “eternal life”.
Jesus is the perfect human embodiment of “I AM”.
Jesus is the highest pattern of what it looks like to be fully human. Fully alive. United to the ONE God.
When your passions, desires, values, and your attention are (unconsciously or consciously) aimed at something less than the Divine, frittered away, fractured, pointed in many lower, profane, or unworthy directions, then your life, your psyche, your nervous system, your family, your marriage, your “domain”, will reflect that fracturing.
Your life will be at odds with “being itself”, you will be running headlong into the fan blades of life and you’ll get chopped to pieces.
Your “domain” will reflect this reality.
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This is why many Christians who go to church, worship, and hold firmly to the explicit beliefs of Christianity still end up with fractured lives, relationships, and families.
Their actual acts of worship (the preponderance of their attention, passion, and desire) are directed at their phones, TVs, Trump, work, sports, or something else profane. Hear me out - these things are all fine as they are, but they will not bear up under the weight of your worship.
They are something less than the Divine, and as such if they are lifted up to the highest place, where most of our attention, passion, and desire is placed, it will fracture and our lives (and our “kingdoms), will fracture along with it.
God is, among other things, the only truly “high place” that bears up under the weight of our worship. God is the only transcendent unity that will bring our lives together in coherence.
When you worship (or give your primary attention to) something less than God, you are being the “bad king” of the Old Testament story. You are worshipping the false gods of the culture, and your life (your kingdom, your domain) will crumble accordingly.
If aliens from Mars or some other completely “other” kind of observer would visit us and observe us, what would they deduce that we worship?
If they could read our brain wave energy and watch our behavior, but not hear our words, what would they observe us to “worship”?
I think it’s obvious that they would deduce that most of us worship our screens.
I wrestle with this too, so I’m not being judgemental.
It’s just self-evident.
Another way that you can think about “worship” is through the lens of your primary nervous system regulation.
Our nervous system is designed for union with God, and anything less than that leaves us feeling dysregulated in one way or another.
Whatever we primarily seek to throw into that gaping maw of nervous system activation to bring us to a more tolerable state - that’s a replacement for God - an idol perhaps.
The coffee, the porn, the stress, the busy-ness, the scrolling of the phone, the carbohyrdates, the gossip, the codependent relationships are all things that we use to soothe our nervous system in the absence of the healing we experience in God.
God is meant to be our deepest source of nervous system regulation.
When we develop dependencies on other things to soothe ourselves, you can think of that as “worshiping false idols”.
Again - I’m not pointing fingers here, I’m guilty too.
Have you noticed that sometimes you simply cannot bear to be with “what is” in the moment?
You’re sitting at the table with your family all around you, and there’s nothing wrong, but your nervous system simply cannot bear it. It longs for the soothing feeling of looking at your phone, and you pour your attention and love into the screen instead of bringing your loving consciousness to the human beings all around you.
This is, at one level, an act of worship.
Avoiding the “Imago Dei” (Image of God) right in front of you, and pouring your attention into the device in your hand.
All of the little ways that we do this (and there are many), shape our families, our marriages, our lives.
When the object of our worship is true, our lives come together in unity and harmony. We are “the good king”.
When the object of our worship is false, our lives come apart in chaos and trauma. We are “the bad king”.
What kind of king are you?
What kind of king do you want to be?
This is one of the foundational questions in the men’s group I lead, The Good King. Our aim is union with God, that we can lead our families in love, towards flourishing. Towards full humanity, alive in God and present with “what is”.
The enemy has many strategies for trying to get us to “take our eye off the ball”, to aim lower, to set our hearts on things below instead of things above.
We seek only to be shaped by that which is highest.
That which is Divine.
That which is Good, and True.
The Ground of Being.
Love.
Nothing else will do.
