33 Pilate therefore entered again into the [q]Praetorium, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews? 34 Jesus answered, Sayest thou this of thyself, or did others tell it thee concerning me? 35 Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done? 36 Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my [r]servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. 37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, [s]Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. 38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?
And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find no crime in him. 39 But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews? 40 They cried out therefore again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.
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On the Church Calendar, this Sunday is designated as “Christ the King” Sunday. The recognition of this day has an eschatological dimension and so points to the end of time when the kingdom of Jesus will be established in all its fullness to the ends of the earth. As such “Christ the King” Sunday naturally leads into the Advent season, when the Church commemorates the first Advent of Christ.
As the modern Church only gives lip service to Christ’s office as King I find it incumbent to speak on this subject with every chance available. It is a place where the contemporary Church is falling down. It is a subject upon which it is good for all of us to be reminded.
In this passage in John Christ asserts His Kingship. This morning we want to examine how it is that Christ comes to this Kingship and what some of the implications are for Christ being King.
Here Jesus Christ confesses to Pilate that He is a King,
37 Pilate, therefore, said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, [s]Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world,
I.) Christ is the King by Divine Right
Since the Father is Sovereign… the Son is Sovereign
The idea that Jehovah is King is everywhere posited in the Old Testament.
Here are just a few examples,
Psalm 29:10
But of the Son He says, “YOUR THRONE, O GOD, IS FOREVER AND EVER, AND THE RIGHTEOUS SCEPTER IS THE SCEPTER OF HIS KINGDOM.
And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.
So based on this unity of the Trinitarian Divine being, as God is sovereign every member of the Trinity shares in that sovereignty.
According to one of the Important ECF, Cyril of Alexandria,
“Christ, has dominion over all creatures, a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but his by essence and by nature.”
As Jesus Christ is very God of very God, He shares in Sovereignty with the Father and the Spirit. As such Christ, by way of His divinity, is King over all creation. As we have seen this is what Scripture teaches. Christ is King over all men and over all Creation.
II.) Christ is the King by Acquired Right
I Cor. 6:20 you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body
For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers,
I. Cor. 7:23You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men.
‘ We are no longer our own property, for Christ has purchased us as Peter teaches, “with a great price” and so our very bodies are the “members of Christ.”
The heart of our Catechism presupposes Christ’s Kingship,
Here the emphasis is that Christ has paid the Ransom-price which grants Him the Divine Right of Kingship.
III.) Christ is the King by Divine Inheritance
A third ground of sovereignty is that God bestowed upon Christ the nations of the world as His special possession and dominion.
In the Great Commission Christ, Himself testifies to this,
“All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (Matthew 28:18)
John 3:34For the One whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. 35TheFather loves the Son and has placed all things in His hands.
John 5:22 Furthermore, the Father judges no one, but has assigned all judgment to the Son, 23so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.…
So what are the Implications of Christ being the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? Thus far, I think one could get most of the Church on board with what has been said. But it is the implications of the Kingship of Christ which begins to stir the proverbial pot and so it is on the tangible impact of the Kingship of Christ wherein Christians begin to fall out with one another.
Implication #1 — Caesar must bow to Christ’s Kingship
If Christ is King over all then all must bow to the authority of Christ.
According to McGoldrick, in his book on Reformed giant Abraham Kuyper,
Kuyper believed that, “Christians must served God within the world, and not flee into seclusion as Monks and some Anabaptists have done. When Christians obtain positions of civil authority, they must operate in obedience to God, since the Lord has ordained their authority (Rom. 13:1-7). This, Kuyper argued, means that the civil government must “restrain blasphemy, where it directly assumes the character of an affront to the Divine Majesty.” The constitution of the state should acknowledge God as supreme ruler, and governments should set aside its regular activities on a Sunday and protect it as a day of worship. Magistrates… should regard themselves as responsible to God in the discharge of their duties. They should punish public attacks upon God as crime against civil law, which acknowledges God as the source of the state’s authority.”
Contrast, this Christian conviction with something just written recently by Baptist Minister John Piper,
So how do we express a passion for God”s supremacy in a pluralistic world where most people do not recognize God as an important part of their lives, let alone an important part of government or education or business or industry or art or recreation or entertainment?
Answer: We express a passion for the supremacy of God…
5) by making clear that God himself is the foundation for our commitment to a pluralistic democratic order-not because pluralism is his ultimate ideal, but because in a fallen world, legal coercion will not produce the kingdom of God. Christians agree to make room for non-Christian faiths (including naturalistic, materialistic faiths), not because commitment to God”s supremacy is unimportant, but because it must be voluntary, or it is worthless. We have a God-centered ground for making room for atheism. “If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight” (John 18:36). The fact that God establishes his kingdom through the supernatural miracle of faith, not firearms, means that Christians in this age will not endorse coercive governments-Christian or secular.
So, we are considering the implications of the Kingship of Jesus Christ and already we have come to a huge fork in the road between those claiming Christ. One expression holds that the implication of Christ’s Kingship is the Christians should rule as Christians. The other holds that the implication of Christ’s Kingship is that Christians should rule in such a way to make room for Atheism. Both would affirm the Kingship of Jesus Christ. Each is defining Kingship very differently.
The upshot of this is that while Christians each may affirm statements that are linguistically the same, they may very well being affirming very different things.
Implication #2 — Our Law Order must reflect the Law Order of the King
Christians and non-Christians alike fail to understand how much of the fabric of the Law Order that created Western Civilization was Christian in its beginnings.
Harold J. Berman’s Massive two Volume Set “Law and Revolution,” notes this repeatedly.
“The Church … would work for… the reformation of the world through law, in the direction of justice and peace…. Law came to be seen as the very essence of faith. ‘God is himself law, and therefore law is dear to him, ‘ wrote the author of Sachsenspiegel, the first German law book, about 1220…. Law was seen as a way of fulfilling the mission of Western Christendom to begin to achieve the Kingdom of God on earth.”
Elsewhere Berman notes,
“The Law of King Alfred, for example, start with the ten Commandments and a restatement of the Law of Moses, a summary of the Acts of the Apostles and references to the monastic penitentials…. Christianity broke the fiction of the immutability of folk law.”
And again in Vol. II Berman notes,
“The English Puritans… shared the belief that human history is wholly within the providence of God, that it is primarily a spiritual story of the unfolding of God’s own purposes…. They believed, further, that God willed and commanded what they called the ‘reformation of the world,’ and they emphasized the role of law as a means of such Reformation.”
Time does not permit to mine all the rich quotes from Berman’s two volumes that demonstrate that our Father’s understood that one of the implications of the Kingship of Jesus Christ was that social orders were to be governed by His Law Order. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, we are discovering anew that if ‘man will not be ruled by the Ten Commandments he will be ruled by ten thousand commandments.”
This denial of this implication of the Kingship of Jesus Christ is all very recent comparatively speaking. We have grown up in this rebellion so we tend to see the rebellion as the norm but up until about 100 years ago men understood the connection between God’s law and the law that guided the civil order in the West.
Harold O. J. Brown notes,
If there are no laws made in heaven, by what standards should human society organize itself? We do need laws by which to organize and structure our lives, but if God has not given them, where shall they come from? There is only one answer: We must make them ourselves. Of course, if we make our own laws they will have no more authority or force than what we ourselves possess and can assert by means of the power at our disposal. In other words, law comes to represent not the will of the Creator but the will of the strongest creatures. This became the widespread view, sometimes unexpressed but frequently explicit, of most Western societies in the first part of the twentieth century. America’s great legal statesman, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., thought no differently in this respect from the great dictator, Adolf Hitler. Both of them believed that laws simply represent the will of the dominant majority. Holmes was a courteous, urbane, sophisticated gentleman, but his idea of law would have offered no opposition to the enactments of Hitler, who for a time reflected the will of Germany’s dominant majority.
Harold O. J. Brown, The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization Between Chaos and Transformation (Dallas, TX: Word, 1996), 88.
Implication #3 — We will be considered intolerant because we are intolerant
Illustration — To make this concrete let’s consider that the same can be said of the relationship in physical organisms. Your body can’t develop a tolerance to a deadly parasite in your body. That parasite is trying to take over your whole body and kill you, while your body’s autoimmune system are doing their flat level best to kill the parasite. The two are at war. To tolerate an alien law system into your social order is to court death.
We are the King’s men. As the King’s men we cannot abide the King’s law and character being set aside and so we will oppose all that which opposes the King. Concretely, this means, as we have taken Christ as King, we live in a time as the loyal opposition. In this epoch, so set against Christ the King as it is, we must practice the virtue of intolerance. We must practice a confrontational disposition out of love for Christ the King and for other people.
There can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law system as a prelude to a new intolerance… Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide.
R.J. Rushdoony
