2025 11 23 Christ the King
Living in Australia,
we are a little distanced from the King and the royal family, and certainly,
modern royalty plays a different role to what it has in the past. Today we are celebrating Christ the
King. What does it mean to have Christ
as King? What does it mean to have God
as King? More importantly, is Jesus our
King?
To give you an
overview of Kingship in the context of the Bible, I’d like you to cast you mind
back to the stories about when Israel was in slavery in Egypt. God saved them
by mighty works and by parting the sea they escaped and crossed over into the
desert. At this time those people
recognised that God was their saviour, but he wasn’t their King. Many of them didn’t really know God, and they
had been brought up with the influence of their Egyptian culture, who had many
gods and most of them were tyrants who needed appeasing and then a tit for tat,
kind of relationship existed whereby the people would do something for the god
and the god would in turn reward them. This
is still how people sometimes view our God – but it isn’t the way that God
works. Our God gives, and rescues and is
gracious to us even when we don’t deserve it.
Through the time in
the desert God showed himself to be holy and powerful. He gave them water from a rock and fed them
with bread from heaven. Eventually they
entered the promised land, and after some time they cried out that they wanted
to have a King.
In the time of the
prophet Samuel, it was God leading the people, through his faithful
prophets and judges, but Samuel was getting on in years and the people demanded
to have a King. Samuel saw it as a
rejection of himself and was upset, but God told Samuel, that it was actually God
who the people were rejecting. So, God,
who always respects our free will, gave the people what they wanted;
Saul, son of Kish, of the tribe of Benjamin was anointed King. Saul led the people into victory over their
enemies, but he didn’t always follow God’s ways – in all honesty, he is
actually a lot like all of us. Saul reacted
to public opinion, worried about what people thought of him and because of
this, he didn’t put God first in his life. God then had Samuel anoint David, son of Jesse
of the tribe of Judah.
David, the youngest
in his family, had been a shepherd. He
understood looking after a kingdom to be like looking after his sheep. And he was a good shepherd. More than anything, he knew that all things
were possible for the person who trusted in God. It was him who wrote most of our psalms,
including, “The Lord is my shepherd.” King,
David was both a spiritual leader who governed the land, and a mighty warrior
King. This blend of priestly qualities
and Kingship would be a prophet sign of the Kingship of Jesus. The kingly succession went from David to David’s
son, then to his son… and so on.
However, many of these descendants were nothing like David. Finally at the time of Exile the descendant
of David who was king, was Zedekiah. His
name means, ‘Righteousness is the Lord.’
In the prophecy from Jeremiah that we read today we have a play on the
name of King Zedekiah. Jeremiah declares
that God will raise up a righteous branch, and he declares, “And this is the
name by which he will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness."
(LORD being in capital letters, indicating that LORD is God Almighty)
While using the
current King’s name to make this play on words, the statement shifts the
kingship to God and indicates the deity (the divinity) of the Messiah. Indicating that Jesus is God -and King. I wonder if you have ever considered the
phrase at the end of the Christmas Carol, Silent Night. It says, “Jesus, Lord at thy birth”. This phrase refers to the fact of Jesus’
divinity at his birth, and his kingship.
Also in the song, We Three Kings are the word, “Born a King on
Bethlehem's plain, Gold I bring to crown Him again. King for ever, ceasing never. Over us all to reign.” The Israelites while
wandering in the desert, had to learn to accept the Kingship of God – and many
did, and many did not. It was a 40 year
long journey for them. How long, do you
think, will it take us?
This Kingship is
different from what we expect, therefore, there are some who, like the thief on
the cross, reject Christ as King. After
all- here is our mighty King, nailed to the cross! How can this be “Yahweh Tsidkenu” – which
is the original Hebrew phrase in Jeremiah’s prophecy, meaning - The LORD our
righteousness”?
The letter to the
Colossians tells us that the fullness of God dwells in Jesus. He is our King, but he is also our
saviour. He is the Good Shepherd who
lays down his life for us. Colossians
also tells us; “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us
into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the
forgiveness of sins.” We certainly need
a saviour! Just look around at the world. Ask the person down the street and they will
tell you that they are a good person…. But they will point the finger at someone
else and tell you that person is not! – yet that person will think that they
are actually really good. What is the
truth of the matter? TRULY we need a saviour! It seems to go against human nature to admit
our need for a saviour, and certainly, it goes against our nature to accept Christ
to be our King. This goes right back to
the garden of Eden – the original sin – It was to reject the authority of God
and take action to be our own God…. Be our own authority.
Christ showed us a
different kind of Kingship to what anyone expects. He is the Good Shepherd who laid down His
life. We are told in Colossians that he
was before all things and in him all things hold together. We know from the Gospel of John that the
world was created through him. In case
you aren’t sure where Christ was back in the beginning of the book of Genesis
when God created, it was when God spoke.
Jesus is the word of God.
Throughout the Old Testament the WORD of God is mentioned often, then
John’s Gospel tells us that the WORD became flesh and dwelt among us.
From Heaven you came
helpless babe… is our song, The Servant King.
Jesus, though King, came to serve and give his life. While on the cross, he was mocked. It is written in the scriptures, Deuteronomy
21:23, that cursed is he that hangs on a tree.
Jesus, nailed to the tree (cross) the letter to the Galatians explains,
became a curse for us, thereby redeeming us from the curse of the law – the perfect
law of God that none of us can keep.
Christ lived as a
perfect human. He was LORD and King from
his birth. The gifts the wise men
brought also were prophetic declarations – Gold for the King, Frankincense
declaring his deity and Myrrh to signify that he would die sacrificially. This KING would be the Good Shepherd who laid
down his life for the sheep. All that
this King would do, would be for the benefit of his people. All that Jesus accomplished for us was
because God so loved the world that he sent his only son, so that whoever
believes in him would not perish, but have eternal life. This is our King, our servant King – he calls
us now… – presented with these facts the only response should be to bring our
lives as a daily offering of worship … to the servant King. Come let us worship!
We aren’t perfect and
will continue in our fallibility all the years we are in this frail human
flesh, yet we acknowledge this and strive to serve our King. His ways are perfect. His laws are perfect and what’s more he loved
us and gave his life for us. We can
trust our lives to him and accept his authority because he loves us so
completely. Our lives are more precious
to him than they are even to ourselves – this is why he willingly came and died
to make restitution for sin. There truly
is nothing left but to bow before his majesty - Come, let us worship.
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