The Empty Thrones

I have to begin with a sorrow, because the whole story turns on it.

Before there were people, God was not alone. He had made a great household of spirits — beings of fire and light, older than the mountains, present before the earth had a face. The book of Job lets us overhear God remembering it. Where were you, He asks, when I laid the earth's foundation, while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Picture it. The first morning of the physical world, and a whole choir of ancient beings singing because they could not help it, because what they were seeing was so beautiful that song was the only possible answer.

And to some of them God gave a trust. He divided the nations of the earth among them and said, in effect: govern these. Care for them as I would care for them. Defend the weak. Lift up the poor. Do justice. Be, to these people, a little like Me.

They did not.

There is a short, terrible psalm — the eighty-second — where God stands up in the middle of that council and brings the charge against them. How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted; rescue the weak and the needy. They had been handed the most God-like work there is — the lifting of the low, the defending of the helpless — and they had used their power for themselves and let the helpless fall. And so the sentence comes down, and it is the saddest thing in the whole council: I said, you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you — nevertheless, you shall die like men.

You are gods. You shall die like men.

Hear what that leaves behind. Thrones with no one on them. A trust betrayed. Nations without their shepherds. The work of God in the world — the lifting, the defending, the loving of the unlovely — left undone by the ones who were supposed to do it.

The seats are empty.

Now. Keep that emptiness in your mind, because the rest of this book is about who God chose to fill it. And I will tell you now, so you are not in suspense, because the wonder is not in the surprise — the wonder is in the kind of thing God did.

He did not make new and better spirits. He did not promote the angels who had stayed faithful. He reached down into the dirt of a small planet, picked up the youngest and weakest beings in all His creation, breathed His own life into them, and said: these. These will fill the empty thrones. Not because of what they are. Because of what I am going to make them, and Who I am going to put inside them.

He chose us.

Now hear how high that calling is, because you should feel the weight of it before we go on. The seats that stand empty are not small seats. Scripture says the people of God will one day judge the world — and more than the world, that we will judge angels, the very beings who were old when the earth was young. We are being prepared for a governance higher than the ancient sons ever held, a place at the side of the Son of God on His own throne. That is the calling. It is so high that if you let it land on you all at once it should make you a little afraid.

But here is the thing that keeps the height from going to our heads, and you must hold onto it through every page that follows: we are only just beginning. The fallen sons of the council had everything — power, knowledge, ancient glory — and failed the one lesson that mattered. We have almost nothing, and we have only just enrolled. We are first-day students in a school whose subject is the very life of God. The calling is impossibly high, and we are impossibly new at it. Both of those are true at once, and holding them together — the high calling and the beginner's emptiness — is the whole secret of walking this path without falling off it the way the proud ones fell.