Death of an Alien King

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism from John 18:28-19:22.

I went to England and lived there for a number of years and met the woman who became my wife. Then some years later, we moved back to Canada. I was going home. She became a “landed immigrant.” That’s the Canadian equivalent of a permanent resident here. But “landed immigrant” sounds like a first cousin to a beached whale.

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Then after a few more years, we moved down to the United States. There we became “resident aliens.” Legally, I am an alien. This means, I suppose, I am not from the US, nor am I a naturalized citizen in the US. I may live there. I certainly pay taxes there, but I am not a citizen. I can’t vote. In a variety of respects, I don’t belong.

In some respects, of course Jesus was an alien too. Though he was a first-century Jew and he never traveled more than about 250 kilometers from his birthplace, in some respects, he didn’t belong. He was an alien. Legally, of course, he belonged. He was born there. But he kept insisting in various ways that, unlike all other men and women whose origins go back to their mother and father copulating, his origins uniquely go back into eternity with God himself. That’s an astounding claim!

Moreover, his perspective on all kinds of issues (truth, morality, power, authority, religion, life, purpose, values, and much more) was essentially as alien to his own culture as they still are to ours, though in different ways. This means if we are going to hear Jesus today and not merely a domesticated and sanitized version of Jesus, it is important for us to try to distance ourselves a bit from our own assumptions, our own presuppositions, and try to listen to him in his own terms.

Let me warn you frankly this is more than a merely intellectual exercise, though it is not less than that. Above all, the fact that Jesus is so alien to his own culture cost him his own life. His very alienness made him so strange to the people of his own day, his own fellow citizens, that ultimately his crucifixion was bound up with his otherness. His alienness cost him not less than everything.

So be careful what you listen to in the next 35 minutes or so. It could make you an alien, and it might cost you something. The best accounts of Jesus have come down to us in four short books, mini-books really, found in the Christian Bible. We label them today by their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were all written within a few decades of his life and death.

All four of them have many things in common. After all, they’re all describing Jesus. Some have different complementary perspectives on him. The chunk of text we’re looking at today is from the fourth of these: John. All four of these books show how Jesus’ life and teaching and mission bring him to his death, to his public, shameful crucifixion. Now we are picking up the account at John 18:28, and we can, usefully, break the narrative up into three parts.

1. An alien king with a strange understanding of his kingdom.

I should explain to you a little of the political background. Verse 28: “Then the Jews led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor.” Now the regional superpower at the time was the Roman Empire. Rome’s power in Palestine was mediated through a Roman governor whose name was Pontius Pilate, well known to us from secular sources in history.

Under this military governor, there was a Jewish ruling council. That’s the Sanhedrin. It was presided over by the chief priest. It had religious authority. It had political authority. It had judicial authority. Under the Roman power, it had a lot of authority. The head priest at the time was this chap Caiaphas. Jesus is now being led from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor, we’re told.

“By now it was early morning, and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness the Jews did not enter the palace. They wanted to be able to eat the Passover.” Of course, these are merely the Jews in power at the time responsible for the Jewish preservation of order, and they had already found Jesus to be a right pain, so much so that he was jeopardizing their authority. We’ll come back to some of the reasons for that in a few moments.

Yet at the same time, this is taking place in one of the great festivals: Passover. It’s a one-day festival that swings on for another festival for a whole week. Once it starts, then those who are observing Jews naturally want to be very careful to keep a kosher table, to observe the food laws, and so on so they can actually keep participating in the festival.

In those days, to enter the home of a Gentile was likely to incur some kind of ceremonial impurity. That would mean they wouldn’t be able to continue to eat the festival meals and so forth. They would have to wait till sundown, go through certain ablutions, and wait until the next day before they could participate again. To avoid that, they stand outside, and they want Pilate to come out to them.

Even here of course, John has a bit of irony going. They’re very concerned for certain ritual purity, but they don’t really give a rip if there’s massive social and judicial injustice with respect to this man Jesus. That’s a background theme that starts playing right through the chapter. “So Pilate, therefore, comes out to them and says, ‘What charges are you bringing against this man?’ ‘If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.’ ”

Now they’re replying with a certain truculence, because Pilate the night before had already provided them with a detachment of troops to pick him up. They thought he was already on side in this exercise. Now that he seems to be maintaining distance and wanting to go through some sort of judicial process, then they answer with a certain sour taste in their mouth.

From the Jewish perspective, an awful lot of Jesus’ obstreperousness in their eyes is that he is claiming to be a king, a certain kind of king. We’ll see what kind in a moment. They know they can’t bring their theological debates to the Roman court and hope to get any sort of decision. They have to recast the thing in terms of categories the Roman governor could understand, because in those days, only the Roman governor had the power of capital decisions (that is the power to execute a criminal).

They couldn’t do it by themselves. They had to get him on side if they were to put Jesus to death. At this point, Pilate has already sussed out that some of these debates are merely religious, merely theological. He says, “Oh take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” Verse 31. They replied, “ ‘But we have no right to execute anyone,’ the Jews objected. This happened so the words Jesus had spoken concerning the kind of death he was going to die would be fulfilled.”

That is some deaths did take place in a kind of mob violence, by stoning and so on. There are plenty of reports of that in the New Testament in the Christian Bible and elsewhere, but Jesus had kept speaking of his death by being lifted up. It almost becomes a technical expression in John’s gospel. He is going to be lifted up. He is going to be lifted up on a cross. He is going to be crucified.

In the Roman world, crucifixion had just massive repugnance associated with it. It’s hard for us to appreciate that. They had different methods of judicial execution. You could be stoned in some parts of the empire. You could certainly be beheaded. But the scum of the earth, the worst criminals, not a Roman citizen unless sanctioned by the emperor himself, could be crucified. Crucifixion was associated with shame, with ugliness, dirt. I’m going to come back to that one on a later talk.

They want Jesus to be executed, and they want him to be crucified, which only the Romans could authorize, only this governor could pronounce upon. Now Pilate goes back inside the palace, and he summons Jesus and asks him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” In the exchange that runs between here and verse 36, it’s important to understand that there are three different notions of kingship being played upon. Then it all becomes very clear.

First, there was kingship in Jewish expectation. The Jews had a long history, of course. From about a thousand years earlier, there was over them a king and his successors, a king by the name of David followed by his son Solomon. Then the kingdom divided. In one-half of the kingdom, all of the successors continued and continued, continued. This was the great Davidic dynasty.

In its heyday, it was powerful, rich. It was wise. It was influential. It exercised influence far beyond its puny size in the ancient Near East. Part of their noble heritage was looking back to the golden years. Do you see? The last Davidic king had been kicked off the throne in 587 BC, and there had not been a king from that line ever since then.

Nevertheless, in the Jewish Bible, what we call today the Old Testament, the first two-thirds of the Christian Bible, there was promise after promise after promise that God would one day bring along another king from the Davidic line. In those days, genealogical records were still kept in the temple. You couldn’t prove today that somebody really came from the Davidic line, because there are too many breaks in the genealogical records.

In those days, records were still kept. People knew who was the rightful heir, but the politics were such that others had come to the throne. The structures were different. There was no place for a Davidic king. But still God had promised one day there would be a king from the line of David. Many people thought that when he came, he would restore the nation then to a certain kind of political power.

It would get rid of the Romans. It would make justice prevail in the land, and it would extend the kind of hegemony over the local nations around. The kingdom of David would be powerful and influential again. This figure was sometimes called Messiah or Christ. That is an anointed one. The kings in the ancient world and some other figures were anointed to mark them aside as endowed somehow with this right. They were expecting some kind of messiah who had the divine right of the Davidic line.

Many, many thought this would be a political figure above all, but from another perspective, of course, that was largely a religious notion. It was cast in the terms of their Scriptures. Pilate doesn’t care about that, which brings us to his notion of kingship. From his point of view, the only thing that worries him is if there’s some new pretender to the throne, someone who is going to challenge Caesar’s authority. That’s what he has to protect.

If there is some new king who is coming to the throne who is advocating revolution or throwing out the Romans, then from his point of view, that’s treason. The guy goes. He is going to be executed. There’s no question. He will be crucified. Inevitably, therefore, the Jews, in order to get him on side, have cast Jesus as a political problem who is threatening Caesar. He comes back at Jesus and says, “Are you a king of the Jews?”

He replies, “Is this your own idea, or did others talk to you about me?” You see, he couldn’t answer just yes or no straightforwardly, because no matter what he said, he would have been misunderstood. If he said, “Yes, I’m the king,” well, from Pilate’s perspective, that meant he would be executed. He was a threat to Caesar.

On the other hand, if he said no when he did have these lineal connections with David and when, as we shall see in a moment, he does see himself as a king in some sense, he’d be lying through his teeth. He says, “Now wait a minute, Pilate. Think this one through. Are you asking me this out of your own political world, or has someone put you up to this?”

Pilate replies, “Wait a minute. Am I a Jew? It was your own people, your own chief priests, who handed you over to me. What is it you’ve done? You’ve got to be a right pain to have got them so mad at you. What is it you have done?” Then Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place,” which then clearly brings us to a third notion of kingship.

Intertwined in this are two wonderful themes that course through the Bible. On the one hand, in the Bible, God himself is above all the King. He made us. He rules over us. The heart of all that’s wicked in the Bible is to deny his kingship, to sort of sing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way.” There’s a sense in which the very heart of evil in the Bible is to thumb your nose at God and say, “Hey, this is my world. I like things the way I like them. You don’t have the right to tell me what to do.”

There is a sense thus in which in the Bible, God is the Supreme King, and he is sovereign, and he rules. But then there’s a notion (it’s hard to know what to call it), an inbreaking kingdom, a kingdom in which God invades this rebel order and starts taking people for himself and transforming them. He makes a kind of new kingdom of citizens.

His understanding of this promised kingly Messiah from the line of David, well, he would actually break in God’s ruling power in order to capture people, transform them, turn them around, change people, individuals, even the culture itself, because people become his citizens. They bow to his authority. They are reconciled to God. That’s the kind of notion he has of king.

He says, “Well, I am a king. But my kingdom,” he says, “is not of this world. I’m not a political king as if I have authority from a certain legislative body or from the Roman senate perhaps or I’m a usurper. It’s not that at all. If that were the sort of king I am, then I would start a guerrilla campaign.” The Jews were very good at this.

I don’t have a military background myself, but I’m told that at West Point, which is America’s premier military college, they still read Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian, and his description of Jewish guerrilla warfare two centuries before Christ. The Jews invented guerrilla warfare at the time of what’s called the Maccabean Revolt.

Jesus is saying in effect, “Look, if I were the kind of king you think I am, I’d have a bunch of guerrilla warriors back up in the Judean hills. That’s what I’d be doing.” He says, “But I’m not that kind of king. That’s not why I came. Now my kingdom is from another place.” This is so foreign and alien to all we think about kingship that I need to say a bit more about it.

From the Bible’s perspective, originally there was God. Then he made human beings. In the world he made, he made human beings in his image. They were like him in certain respects. Originally, they were so ordered, so made, that if they woke up, they would dream of him as it were. They would think of him. They were oriented toward him. They loved him. They acknowledged their dependency upon him.

Far from being an enslaving thing, it was their delight. God was at the center of everything, and they were rightly related to each other, because they were rightly related to him. Eventually rebellion broke out, such that each person now thought of himself or herself as the center of the universe. “Now if God exists (he, she, or it exists), this God jolly well better serve me, or quite frankly, I’ll find another God.”

Because each of these human beings now wants to be God, wants to be at the center of the universe, then other people must serve them too. Then we break out in all the kinds of things we think of as social plagues: war and rape and hate and one-upmanship and “corrupt-manship” and whatever.

Now we’ve come to the place, however, at the end of the twentieth century where, in much of the Western world, we’ve come to the conclusion that all such notions of evil are merely socially or culturally defined. Every group looks at evil a little differently we’re told. There’s no such thing as evil in a transcendent sense, in a sense of real wickedness.

Oh, I wish I could go over that one with you at great length, but let me just say a couple of things. A few months ago (last November), I was lecturing in Poland. The last day of lectures, I was down in the Krakow area down in the south. Normally when I go somewhere to lecture, I take the last plane in; I take the first plane out because I want to get home to my family. That day I broke my rules. I warned my family in advance I was going to take an extra day. I was that far south in the country, I went down to Auschwitz.

I had read a lot about Auschwitz and Birkenau, which is Auschwitz II, but I wanted to see it. There was nothing I saw that surprised me. I had read about everything I had seen. But there is something stunning, shameful, about being there. You could stand in front of the gate of Auschwitz I, and there over the gate the words are still there in this ironmongery: “Arbeit macht frei,” work sets you free.

You can still go in the old Polish army barracks, which dot the place where you first come in. You can walk through them all. They’ve preserved them just as they were at the end of World War II. This one was used as a torture chamber. This is where the officers were. This is where the isolation cells were. You can go into the little courtyard where they shot tens of thousands of people.

You can find the little cell downstairs where generations of Christians in that cell, which was a death cell, actually scraped out a figure of Christ with their fingernails on the solid stone. Then you can go farther back, and you can go to the gas chamber. I walked through the gas chamber where you could knock off 2,100 people every 20 minutes or so using Zyklon B.

The ovens in Auschwitz II were all blown up. They were all blown up by the Nazis as they retreated before the Red Army came in. They’re not there anymore. In Auschwitz I, they’re still there. You can still see the ovens. You can go into the various display areas where you see mounds of human hair that have been collected in order to ship them off to Germany to make fiber.

Do you know what? I think we’ve learned the wrong lessons about Auschwitz. We’re inclined to view Auschwitz as if it were, in this century, an aberration. Oh, in some ways it was awful. I don’t want to relativize that evil. It was so efficient in its killing, so heartless. This most civilized and learned of all Western nations slunk to such barbarity, but in this twentieth century … this bloody twentieth century … we’ve also killed 20 million Ukrainians, up to 50 million Chinese, one-third of the population of Cambodia, endless genocide in Africa. We have the Balkans going on now.

One of the reasons why we know more about Auschwitz is that the survivors who came out were literate. All of us have read books by Elie Wiesel or others. None of us have read any books, I suspect, by Cambodian survivors. Moreover, the Germans kept records, and they didn’t manage to destroy them all before the Red Army got in. We have the evidence!

In this bloody twentieth century, it wasn’t even an aberration in one sense. A little more efficient perhaps. Now we in our wisdom at the end of the twentieth century have come to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as evil. It is staggering beyond words. I find that the Bible’s description of evil is far more believable just in twentieth-century history. We want to be God, so we will determine who is good and who is bad. We will wipe out whole races. We will be number one.

In our homes and in our jobs, we have to be number one or else somebody will get hurt. All of these social manifestations of evil finally go back to just one problem. Just one problem! Just one problem: “I will be God.” But God the King won’t have it. God the King won’t have it! The nature of Jesus’ kingdom is that he comes not, first of all, as a challenge to Caesar’s Roman Empire, although it’s going to have a bearing on that empire and on any culture.

It comes in, first of all, to reconcile men and women to God and to bring men and women under God’s kingship. He is an alien king in the first place with a strange understanding of his kingdom. Then in the second place, he is …

2. An alien king with a strange notion of truth.

Verses 37 to 40. Pilate has understood very little about this. All he knows is Jesus has made some sort of claim to be a king, so he pushes farther. He says in verse 37, “ ‘You are a king, then!’ Jesus answers, ‘You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’ ”

You see, Jesus has said enough about his kingship that he must now say a little bit more. What he means by saying he is on the side of truth or that he testifies to the truth or the light … In the context of John’s gospel, he means more than that he doesn’t lie. Sometimes truth in John’s gospel has to deal with propositional truth. That is, saying things as they really were, being an honest witness.

Sometimes they have to do with something more, with ultimacy. In one stunning place, Jesus says, “I am the truth.” In the context, he is claiming to be such a manifestation of God himself that he can actually turn to his disciples and say, “Don’t you understand? He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

He is the very manifestation, he insists, of God himself. His exercise of the kingdom is also his display of the truth, his testimony to what is going on, to what God is doing. It’s part of the very display of his kingdom. That is what he is saying. When he says this very exclusive sort of thing in verse 37, you need to understand it in a certain framework. “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

Now if you or I said that, we really would be rightly dismissed as arrogant characters with no sense of proportionality. “Everyone who agrees with me is on the side of truth. Everyone who disagrees with me is on the side of error.” If you go through life saying that sort of thing, then you are contributing to the very breakdown we’ve just talked about because I’m only finite. I make all kinds of mistakes. I’m in error much of the time, and so are you.

When you come to study this man Jesus, you either have to decide if he is the same sort of person as we are and no more, in which case here he is saying something so daft, you should dismiss him forthwith and never have anything more to do with him. Or if his claims make sense, then what he is saying in effect is because he is the very manifestation of God, sooner or later you have to come to terms with his orientation of things, with his way of looking at things, his value structures, his very person.

The result then is a cynical remark from Pilate. “What is truth?” He is not asking some major philosophical question here so we have to respond, “Well, Pilate, it depends on the context in which you wish to get the definition. Do you have some presupposed definition yourself?” It is not of that sort of thing. One could have a lot of fun philosophically with this question here, but Pilate is just a cynical second-order Roman magistrate.

The sources we have of him describe him as a relentless, cruel, hypocritical, somewhat fearful man. “What is truth?” he says. “With this he went out and again spoke to the Jews, and he said, ‘I find no basis for a charge against him.’ ” The man is not politically dangerous as far as Pilate is concerned. He offers them another option. “It is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover.” That was a custom that had been passed down.

“So why don’t I just release this King of the Jews, and we’re out of our judicial mess here?” The crowd begins to cry back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!” Barabbas was one of the guerrilla fighters. He was one of the guerrilla warriors. Here’s an alien king with a strange notion of the truth. Then in the next section, we find …

3. An alien king with a strange perspective on power.

Chapter 19, verse 1: “Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.” Now this might seem strange to us. The judge has just declared the man innocent, so he has him flogged. The ancient Romans had three kinds of flogging. They called them, respectively, the fustigatio, the flagellatio, and the verberatio.

The first was the kind of vicious beating with whips that was administered to hooligans and punks and people who were causing trouble in the streets, that sort of thing. The second one was far more severe. It could leave you severely crippled.

The third one was administered with thongs with metal or bone stuck in them. Soldiers could be exhausted by the time they had finished beating a person. The victim’s bones would often be exposed. Sometimes his entrails were hanging out. It was a vicious, vicious thing and always connected with some other form of punishment like crucifixion.

If I understand how the various stories of the Gospels go together, this first beating is the fustigadio. That is it’s a fairly light one because no sentence has been pronounced yet. “Light.” I mean, I wouldn’t want it, but it still isn’t the horrible one he suffers later before he goes to the cross after he has been sentenced.

It appears Pilate’s program here is to beat Jesus up to a bloody pulp and then parade him out before the people to try to get some sort of sympathy. “Oh look. This is your king. Is this somebody you really want to send to the cross? I mean, this creep. Do you really want him executed?” That’s what it begins to look like.

What you have next is a bit of vulgar barrack-room humor. It’s crude, but at one level, it’s not more than that. They put a robe around him, pretending it’s an imperial robe. They take some date palm thorns, which can have spikes as long as 12 inches. They twist the branch around and plunk it down on his head. Blood is streaming down his face. They’ve beaten him up, and then they go and bow before him, “Hail your majesty,” and punch him across the face.

It’s that kind of scene in order to make him a bloody pulp. Once more we’re then told, “Pilate takes him out and says to the Jews, ‘Look, I am bringing him out. There’s no charge against him.’ When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, ‘Here is the man!’ ” Instead of mollifying them, they start crying, “ ‘Crucify! Crucify!’

Pilate said, ‘You take him. You take him. You crucify him,’ ” which he knows they can’t do. He is just trying to get rid of them. “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.” From their point of view, there’s a blasphemy claim. He claims not simply to be that messianic King. He claims to be so related to God that he is unique. He is threatening the very deity of God from their perspective.

But Pilate comes from a pagan background. He is superstitious. “Maybe Jesus does have something sort of religious going, some kind of divine man, some kind of magic figure in the ancient Near East.” There were a lot of Latins who believed that at the time, so he is a bit nervous now. He goes back, and he says, “Where are you from? Who are you anyway?” Now Jesus gives not a word.

“ ‘Do you refuse to speak to me? Don’t you realize I have power to free or to crucify you?’ Jesus answered, ‘You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.’ ” This is a stunning response. How does Jesus view all these goings-on around him? You see, he doesn’t see himself as a martyr caught in some web he can’t control.

Jesus is finally taken out (verses 17 and following) to be crucified. There’s a title put up over him. At first he was carrying his own cross. The way they did it in those days, after you were beaten up with a verberatio and you really were a mess, they would put the cross member of the cross on your shoulder. You’d have to carry it out of the city. The upright stake was already in the ground.

Elsewhere we’ll discover in later talks, Jesus was so weak at this point that he tripped over and fell and couldn’t get up anymore at the edge of the city, and someone had to help him with this cross member. Here he is carrying the cross out to the place of the skull, as it was called. Here they crucified him, with two others there who were executed on other charges. “… one on each side, Jesus in the middle.”

It was common for the person as he staggered along carrying the cross to have around his neck a little sign with the charge written on it. Then when you got out there, you were laid down on the ground, and the cross member was put under you. You were either tied or you were nailed to the cross member. Then the cross member was lifted up on the cross and you with it, and you hung there.

Then they would take this thing that was around your neck, and they would put it on top so everybody passing by could see what the charge was. The idea, of course, was to intimidate the populace. That’s what it was. The charge Pilate had arranged was, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”

He made sure it was written in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. Aramaic was the common language of the folk in Jerusalem. Latin was the language of the military overlords, the Romans themselves. Greek was the common language throughout the empire, the lingua franca, just the way Swahili is the language of East Africa today. It was the trade language.

Anybody who was there could see it. The chief priests take umbrage. “Don’t write ‘The King of the Jews,’ but that this man claimed to be King of the Jews.’ ” They don’t want to be associated with him. “Pilate answers, ‘What I have written, I have written.’ ” That’s stunning. Pilate does this, of course, not because he is a man of great principle but because he is still digging the knife in. He is saying in effect, “This is the only king you will ever have. I am in charge here. He might claim this, but this is the only king you will ever have, and don’t you ever forget it.”

Yet Pilate’s malice serves God’s end. John, the writer of these lines, is very capable of using symbol-laden language to show people are speaking better than they know. He is the King of the Jews. Then the very multiplicity of languages reminds the reader that in John’s gospel, Jesus is not only the King of the Jews; he is the King of Kings. He is the Maker. He is one with God. These very people who are crucifying him at one level are his subjects, whether they like it or not.

He goes to the cross not as some pawn in history but the one who goes down this track because this has been God’s plan for him, and he dies. Three days later, he rises again. “The Crucified One thus is the true king,” somebody writes, “the kingliest king of all; because it is he who is stretched on the cross, who turns an obscene instrument of torture into a throne of glory, and he ‘reigns from the tree.’ ”

The idea is this. When Jesus came as king, he didn’t come and simply impose rules, because he knew we couldn’t live up to them. Our problem was precisely that we had rebelled against all of God’s kingly authority. Even when he gave us teaching and told us how to live, we couldn’t do it. How does that reconcile his image bearers to himself?

He knows, moreover, that all of our rebellion deserves a certain punishment. By God’s own decree in the Scriptures, it deserves death. But God, instead of writing us off as we deserve, as he could do with perfect justice, instead of that, he sends his own Son, our King, not just to give us more rules, tell us to try harder (“Come back in line, or I’ll zap you”), but to bear our place, to take our punishment. He reigns from the tree. He dies our death. He takes our guilt.

Then he demonstrates that this has been satisfactory to his Father by rising from the dead on the third day. His kingly power is exercised by capturing men and women today, capturing them so they come before him on the one hand and simply trust him because he died for them and bore their sin. They trust him!

On the other hand, they vow to acknowledge him as king. That is, they turn from their own self-centeredness. In principle, they bow to him as king. They say, “Jesus is King. Jesus is Lord.” It’s a fundamental confession of the Christian church. They discover he transforms them, works in them. However often they fail, he goes after them and gradually molds them into a different kind of people. There’s a kingdom that is forming within the culture, as it were.

The text asks us is this alien King your king? The alternative is not freedom but enslavement … enslavement to ourselves, enslavement to the cultural mandates of whatever is faddish, enslavement very often to our own destruction. This alien King demands to be our king. Someone has written (and it puts the whole thing in a kind of perspective) …

Why do we choose what can last but an hour

Before we must leave it behind?

Why do possessions exert brutal power

To render us harsh and unkind?

Why do mere things have the lure of a flower

Whose scent makes us selfish and blind?

The cisterns run dry, and sour is our breath;

We dwell in the valley of death.

Why is betrayal attractive to us?

Who often are hurt and betrayed?

Why barter faithful devotion for lust,

Integrity cast far away?

Why do our dreams, then our deeds, beggar trust,

Our guilt far too heavy to pay?

The cisterns run dry, and sour is our breath;

We dwell in the valley of death.

O Jesus—why do you promise to quench all our thirst,

When we have despised all your ways?

Why do you rescue the damned and the cursed,

By dying our death in our place?

Why do you transform our hearts till they burst

With vibrant expressions of praise?

The well flows with life—we are satisfied—

The fountain that flows from your side.

I’m going to pray. This may all seem very strange to you. You need more study. But if you’re at the place where you are ready to bow before this King, then in your own mind, you pray these words as I pray.

Lord God, we confess we have longed for our own way and our own supremacy, and we are ashamed. Forgive my sin. Help me to see that Jesus’ death was offered up to pay for my sin. Oh Lord God, I trust him, and I want to bow before his lordship and know this alien King as mine. Receive me for Jesus’ sake, amen.