If Jesus Is King, No One Is

God never wanted his people to have a human king. Sure, He gave some instructions in the law of Moses for what an Israelite king would need to do (Deuteronomy 17), because he knew the inevitable future. Human kingship, however, was conspicuously absent when the covenant was forged between God and Israel at Mount Sinai. In 1 Samuel 8, when God’s people clamored to appoint a human head so they could imitate the surrounding nations, God told his prophet that “they have rejected me from being king over them.” Redeeming the darkness of that sin, God promised David, Israel’s second king, that He would make one of his descendants sit on an everlasting throne (2 Samuel 7). It was always God’s plan that Jesus be our king. What are the implications of this for us? Let’s consider two points.

First, if Jesus is King, he must be the very center of the organization of his people, the church. Because he is the undisputed conqueror of Satan and creator of all things, he is “the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1.18). Although he laid a foundation of many apostles and prophets, Jesus himself is the cornerstone of his church (Ephesians 2.19). Some religious groups claim to follow his gospel, but if a human man sits at the hub of their organizations, it is a different church from the one we read about in the New Testament. If Christians wanted to imitate the surrounding nations (like the Israelites from 1 Samuel 8), we could develop a world-wide headquarters and a fancy human hierarchy like we see in corporations and national governments. We could introduce all kinds of organizational changes in the name of efficiency and convenience. But like the Israelites of old, those plans would be a rejection of the King we already possess. And our King does not tolerate attempted coups on his throne (see Psalm 2)!

If Jesus is King, he should be our method of changing the world. When Christians in the book of Acts did their work, they had no interest in infiltrating the power structure of Rome’s government. Their strategy for proclaiming the gospel was not to get Christians into the Roman senate or the emperor’s throne. They already had a King, to whom they kept referring in their teachings and addressing in their private prayers (Acts 2.33, 4.24-26, 6.31, etc.). Therefore, if Christians today become focused on moving political levers as a way of spiritually fixing our culture, we have exchanged the glorious message of an eternal King for a pitiful substitute. We have forgotten that shining the “light of the world” (Matthew 5) has nothing to do with “our side” seizing the megaphone of politics. We are not tasked with out-voting our spiritual enemy, using the methods of the world, in the hope of getting “our man” into office. The right Man is already in office, sitting forever on his throne! If Jesus is King, we must not seek for another.                ~Nathan Combs