“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39). To be honest, I’ve always had a shaky notion of what is meant by “principality” in the scriptures. I’ve done a little research and there’s some talk about positions of authority or areas of influence or different classes of heavenly or demonic beings. But I’m just going to fall back on a more literal interpretation of the word “principality.” Principalities were essentially limited monarchies that arose during the feudal period in Europe. In large kingdoms, different Princes would come into their own Principalities, technically still subordinate and subject to the king, but with authority in their own realm. Some of these Princes began to siphon off so much power and authority into their own principalities that they started to fracture the Kingdoms of which they were a part. They enacted their own laws and customs that in some cases ran counter to the laws of the Kingdom. But what does all of this mean for us? Well, each of us is a son or daughter of a King, and thus in some sense we are all Princes and Princesses in our own right. Or, at least, we have the potential to be. We have not yet come into our inheritance. But some of us, like the Prodigal Son, want to cash in our inheritance now. We want to carve out our own little Principality that is separate from and perhaps even opposed to the Kingdom of our Father. We reject God’s laws and we institute laws of our own. Laws that make sense and that we are all too happy to follow. Never mind that we lack the authority or the standing to usurp such powers of governance unto ourselves, the real tragedy is that if we succeed in convincing God to grant us our own little principality, the end result is that we will be cut off from God’s Kingdom, a Kingdom that is infinite and ever-expanding, whereas our little principality is limited at the very least by our imagination which, be it ever so rich and vivid, can only ever stretch to cover a very tiny, tiny fragment of God’s worlds without end. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer defiantly claims, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” It’s really not though. Even if you have the best seat in hell, it’s still full of fire and brimstone and the relentless and hopeless cries of the damned. I have no doubt that after five or ten minutes in the depths of hell, most of us would gladly spend the rest of eternity polishing the pearly gates and raking up stray clouds rather than go back to hell for one more minute. But hell is exactly what our little principalities will turn into if we reject God’s laws and cut ourselves off from the love of Jesus Christ. However clever we think we are, however wise our policies, however just our laws and decrees, at the end of the day we will be designing our principalities according to our own flawed understanding, and, crucially, contrary to God’s laws. The forces that we ignorantly set into motion will sooner or later turn even the most carefully designed utopias into nightmarish and agonizing hellholes. However much it feels like it, we don’t know better. We can’t do better than God’s plan for us, so we might as well quit kicking against the pricks and meekly and humbly submitting ourselves to all that the Father sees fit to inflict upon us. The moment that we do, we will discover that everything He does is to prepare us to receive all that He has, even Kingdoms and worlds without end. I hope we will not allow our little principalities to cut us off from the love of God.
