It’s all about power, isn’t it? All the political wrangling whether it’s about the potential validity of election results or who sits on the Supreme Court, people, parties, coalitions, are all jockeying for power. That was the problem with the debate, wasn’t it? And according to an article I read recently, it has always been thus, in the US all the way back to the transition between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Here’s how it starts:

If you want to know the roots of the country’s present polarization over the Supreme Court, we have to go back. No, not to the contentious hearings for Brett Kavanaugh two years ago, nor to Sen. McConnell’s decision to deny a hearing or confirmation vote to Merrick Garland, who was President Obama’s 2016 pick to replace Justice Scalia. We must go even farther back than the drama of the Clarence Thomas hearing in 1991 or the attacks on Robert Bork’s character in 1987.The real point of origin is one of the first judicial controversies in the history of the American republic, decided in the landmark 1803 Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison. If you think judicial politics is polarizing and opportunistic now, consider what John Adams and his partisan allies did in the closing days of his one and only presidential term. Why We fight so Ferociously over the Court, by David French, Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2020

I had all this in my head when I read this text:

However, your real source of joy isn’t merely that these spirits submit to your authority, but that your names are written in the journals of heaven and that you belong to God’s kingdom. This is the true source of your authority.” Then Jesus, overflowing with the Holy Spirit’s anointing of joy, exclaimed, “Father, thank you, for you are Lord Supreme over heaven and earth! You have hidden the great revelation of this authority from those who are proud, those wise in their own eyes, and you have shared it with these who humbled themselves. Yes, Father. This is what pleases your heart and the very way you’ve chosen to extend your kingdom: to give to those who become like trusting children.. (Luke 10.20, 21, Passion Translation, emphasis mine)

It’s about God’s Kingdom, not our petty little kingdoms. 

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?… Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust…. All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. (Isaiah 40.12,15, 17, ESV, emphasis mine)

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. (Psalm 2.1 – 4, ESV)