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Politics and Messiahs

I’m not really a political junky, although I like watching shows and reading news articles on politics. With the current budget crisis in the U.S., in particular California (where I live and work), and the corruption problems with the main leaders of the Philippines (where I was born and raised), I have a pessimistic outlook on the capacities of the citizenry to immediately cause significant changes in a nation. We have conflicting expert opinions about extremely important matters that can supposedly be addressed objectively. We have politicians with selfish personal agendas. Most voters are pretty much ill-informed about what’s really up with the political world. We have business-minded popular media. We have speculations and suspicions about people in power, which are entertaining enough to be manipulated by the popular media for monetary gains. All forms of government somehow encountered failures. Political theories often have significant limitations.

Look at the results of the so-called “People’s Power” in the Philippines several years ago. Until now, Philippines still deals with pretty much the same problems, e.g. corruptions, blatant injustices, etc. It doesn’t matter who you vote: highly educated or minimally educated, male or female, religious or non-religious, etc. Most of them eventually fail. Human government is somehow doomed to fail. A political messianic figure is inevitably anticipated.

Jesus was originally viewed by some of his early followers as a political messiah. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. The mistake of some of his early followers was to assume that Jesus would take conventional political office. However, in the Christian tradition, Jesus will reign in a divine government that transcends the limitations of human government. As a matter of fact, it will be the ultimate replacement for the fragile human government. It might sound illusory. But it’s definitely the grandest hope that we can imagine.

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