Forcing "Jerusalem" to Happen

A Dallas Willard quote in response to Steve's question about if the American Experiment has failed:

[On the new earth and] in this new city--"Jerusalem," or "the peace of God," is its name--"all cultures and languages will come together to see God in his glory (Isa. 66:18). They will transmit that vision of God throughout all of the earth, and all humanity will come regularly to the center of divine presence on earth, to delight in God and worship him (vv. 19-23).
The power of God's personal presence will, directly and indirectly, accomplish the public order in and among nations that human government has never been able to bring about. Truth and mercy will have met and kissed each other at last, like long-lost friends (Ps. 85:10). Grace and truth are reconciled in the person of the Son of man (John 1:17).
The greatest temptation to evil that humanity ever suffers is the temptation to make a "Jerusalem" happen by human means. Human means are absolutely indispensable in the world as it is. that is God's intention. We are supposed to act, and our actions are to count. But there is a limit on what human arrangements can accomplish. The alone cannot change the heart and spirit of the human being.
Because of this, the instrumentalities invoked to make "Jerusalem" happen always wind up eliminating truth, or mercy, or both. World history as well as small-scale decision making demonstrates this. It is seen in the ravages of dictatorial power, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the death by minutiae that a bureaucracy tends to impose. It is well known how hard it is to provide a benign order within human means. For the problem, once again, is in the human heart. Until it fully engages with the rule of God, the good that we feel must be cannot come. It will at a certain point be defeated by the very means implemented to produce it.

feel free to stop reading there (that's the main responce), but Willard continues:

God's way of moving toward the future is, with gentle persistence in unfailing purpose, to bring about the transformation of the human heart by speaking with human beings and living with and in them. He finds an Abraham, a Moses, a Paul--a you. It is this millennia-long process that Jesus the Son of man brings and will bring to completion. And it is the way of the prophets, who foresaw that the day would come with God's heart is the human heart: "the law of God would be written in the heart." That is, when what is right to God's mind would be done as a simple matter of course, and when we would not be able to understand why anyone would even think of engaging in evil. That is the nature of God's full reign [i.e. the Kingdom of God].
All of the instruments of brutality and deceit that human government and society now employ to manage a corrupted and unruly humanity will then have no use. As, even now, the presence of a good person touches, influences, and may even govern people near-by through the respect inspired in their hearts, the focused presence of the Trinitarian personality upon the earth will govern through the clarity and force of its own goodness, and indirectly through its transformed people.
Thus we see repeated portrayed in the prophecy the gentleness of this government--for the first time a completely adequate government, in which the means to the good do not limit or destroy the possibility of goodness. The beautiful prophetic images portray the divine way of operating: "Your true king is coming to you, vindicated and triumphant, humble, mounted on a donkey. His word will bring peace to the nations, and his supervision will take in all lands, from where his presence is centered to the farthest reaches of the earth" (Zech. 9:9-10).
Divine presence replaces brute power, and especially power exercised by human beings whose hearts are alienated from God's best. "I will focus my being in their midst forever. And the nations will know that it is I the Masterful Lord who makes my people different" (Ezek. 37:26-28).

The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, pp. 380f.

As long as we humans act like we're God (and God's not) there's no real hope for any human institution. But the day described above will come. I long for it. Don't you?

Maranatha, Lord Jesus!