Using Politics for Spiritual Illustrations: How Foreign Policy is a Metaphor for the Relationship of Christ's Assembly to Other Religious Communities

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The holy nation of the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:9), the citizens of which are all believers in Him, has its own foreign policy.

Being, in this time before the Lord's return, a spiritual entity and not a geopolitical one, the church of Jesus Christ's foreign policy will be rightly understood by 1) considering what makes the church the Christian nation and 2) abstracting those qualities from their particular Biblical context and using them as checkpoints to identify other nations (also spiritual, not geopolitical), the foreign entities to which the church relates. First, what makes the church the Christian nation is the fact that all its (true) citizens have put their ultimate trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, and Him alone. Because they, by definition, trust Christ supremely, Christians also love Christ supremely. And, for clarification's sake, Christ is the One He reveals Himself to be in the Bible, the 66 Books of the Old and New Testament that comprise the Word of God. Second, abstracting these qualities from their specific Christian context and making them general checkpoints to identify other spiritual nations, we see that other spiritual nations are groups of people united by their respective objects of ultimate trust (which are also, consequently, the objects of their ultimate love). These are the other religious communities. These are the foreign nations that the Christian nation relates to, and for which it needs the Biblical and right foreign policy to relate rightly to them.

As for the church's foreign policy, I will briefly describe it here to give readers a rule that is both general enough and specific enough to give them a sufficient idea of what Biblical/Christian foreign policy is. The Christian foreign policy is the sum of Christ's commands in His Word to His people concerning how they are to relate to unbelievers. Christian, write this section of your King's Law on your heart by trusting it! And, by that trust, do it, all for your God and Lord's pleasure and glory!