The God Who is There: Part 5. The God Who Reigns

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical theology from 2 Samuel 7:1-27.

Hello. My name is Don Carson. You are watching the fifth in a series of 14 talks designed to introduce you to the God who is there, that is, to the God of the Bible. Today we are reflecting on the God who reigns. Many of you who are watching this series live in a republic, so the notion of a king is a bit alien. Others of you live in a constitutional monarchy (the United Kingdom perhaps) where the monarch’s powers are strictly limited.

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To get used to the frequency and ease with which God presents himself in the Bible as king demands we try to understand what was expected of a king in the ancient world. The entire subject becomes more important yet when we recall how often Jesus himself announced the dawning of the kingdom.

It is impossible to gain much of a grasp of Christianity without tracking some of what the Bible says about such notions. Ultimately, Jesus is presented in the Bible as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. The last book of the Bible tells us the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ. What kind of a takeover is this? What does it mean? What bearing does it have on understanding God?

We come now to the God who reigns. What do we conjure up in our minds when we hear a word like king or monarch? The last king America had, King George III, by and large is not held in very high regard. We’re a republic, thank you, a democratic republic, and we probably don’t want to go quite so far in our anti-royalty and anti-clerical assessment of things as Voltaire who said he would be satisfied when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last bishop or the last priest.

Still, whatever kings there are in the world and whatever monarchs there are, we’re pretty glad they’re over there. If we’re in a more positive mood, we might think of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and then we concede royal pomp has its attractions. They sure know how to put on a decent royal wedding, don’t they? With prancing horses and gold-encrusted chariots and spectacular crowns and those long trumpets with such a shrill, piercing sound. There’s something pretty nice about that, isn’t there?

Mind you, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is a constitutional monarch, which is really a polite way of saying she doesn’t have much power. She is limited by a constitutional structure. Apart from whatever moral suasion she has, apart from any advice she gives to her prime minister.… In fact, she really only has two powers constitutionally left, and if she exercises them without the sanction of her prime minister, in fact, there would be a general election and she wouldn’t get her way in any case.

That’s very different, let’s say, than the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Although there is some constraint from the larger family, yet this is closer to an absolute kingdom. It’s different again from the kingdom of Thailand. The Thais love their king. You really cannot speak any word against royalty in Thailand. The people wouldn’t have it even though the limitations on his power there are really quite significant as well.

Perceptions of what we even mean, in other words, by king and monarch differ in different parts of the world, don’t they? Certainly, in biblical times there was no understanding of what we mean today by constitutional monarch. If you’re a king, you reign. That’s what kings do. You have the authority. The fact of the matter is God is often presented in Scripture as being the king.

The psalms say, for example, that his kingdom rules over all. He does what he wants amongst us here on earth and in the armies of heaven. His kingdom rules over all which is another way of saying the exercise of his sovereignty covers absolutely every domain. That was built into the very creation account we saw yesterday, wasn’t it? He made everything. It’s all his. He continues to reign. He’s sovereign over the whole lot.

In that sense, you’re in the kingdom of God whether you like it or not. You can’t not be in the kingdom of God. Even those who disbelieve him, even those who hate him, even those who think there are other gods are in this God’s kingdom if he really does reign over all. The notion of the kingdom of God, the reign of God, is, in fact, very flexible in Scripture, and you have to pay attention to the context to make sense of what is being said in some particular passage or other.

In the Old Testament, once God has called his people (the Hebrews, the Israelites) to himself, first for the covenant with Abraham and then with the covenant under Mosaic leadership, God is still understood to be the king of his people. God himself is to be their ruler, their king. In that sense, the Israelites constitute his nation. You’re only under his kingship in that sense if you belong to this covenant community.

But after the people eventually got into the Promised Land, they went through cycles that were really depressing. Two or three generations and what they remembered of God’s kindness in the past of how he had spared them, how he had secured them, how he had provided for all of their needs was forgotten, and they became virtually in differentiable from the pagans all around them.

Eventually, God sanctioned temporal judgments of various kinds. They were attacked by other tribes living in the area, Mideonites or others, and eventually they cried to God again for mercy, for forbearance, for forgiveness. God raises up a judge. These judges lead the people in renewal and in small-pitched battles against some of their oppressors, and the people reestablish themselves, renew their covenantal vows, and promise to be faithful before God.

Then in another two or three generations everybody forgets, slides down in ignominium shame to really forms of pretty awful debauchery, let alone the idolatry that underlies it. Then God raises up another judge, and the cycle begins all over again. You read the book of Judges and the cycles downward are so appalling that in the last two or three chapters it’s really difficult to read them in public. They’re so grotesque and barbaric.

As the book progresses, you begin to hear a refrain: “In those days, everyone did that which was right in their own eyes; there was no king in Israel.” It’s the way the book ends. Bloody mayhem. “In those day, there was no king in Israel; everyone did that which was right in their own eyes.” O God, how we need a king!

As the story advances, you start discovering some people want a king, not so they can be a little more secure or so somebody in authority can hold them to be covenantally faithful or any of that sort of thing, to police things when the moral fabric is being torn apart. No, no. Some of them want a king simply so they can be like the pagan nations around, all of whom have their petty kings. “We would like to be them. They seem to have things in civil order. We would like to have exactly the same sort of constitutional arrangement.”

God says, “All right. You asked for it. Choose the best man you can find.” Eventually, they choose a strapping young man by the name of Saul, who seems suitably humble and diffident. He doesn’t really want the job. Careful, he loves the Lord. Within his lifetime, he becomes a corrupt, paranoid, fearful, ungodly man who, unsatisfied with just being king, also wants to be priest, and anybody who he sees as a threat to his authority he wants to kill. It’s a mess.

But God raises up yet another king. He says, “Let me show you at least, in principle, what a good king would be like. Here is a man after my own heart. His name is David.” After Saul is gone, David becomes king, and initially, he turns out to be a very good king, an able administrator. He secured the frontiers. He united the tribes. Eventually, he moved his capital from the little town of Hebron to modern Jerusalem and established himself there, brought a measure of order and peace and prosperity.

Now we pick up the account in 2 Samuel 7, a little less than a quarter of the way through the Bible. You can find it in your index at the beginning of the Bible if you don’t know how the Bible is put together. Second Samuel. That is, there are two books that bear the name of Samuel, 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel. This is 2 Samuel, chapter 7. I’m going to take the time to read this chapter.

“After the king …” That’s King David. “… was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, ‘Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.’ ” That’s the ark of God we spoke of in the last session. The ark, this box that held certain elements in it including the Ten Commandments in the Most Holy Place where the blood was sprinkled on the Day of Atonement, it’s still in a tent, a tabernacle.

“I’m living in a cedar palace, the place where God meets with his priest,” is a pretty scrappy tent by this point. This is about 1000 BC now. “Nathan replied to the king, ‘Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you.’ That night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, saying:

‘Go and tell my servant David, “This is what the Lord says: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’ ”

Now then, tell my servant David, “This is what the Lord Almighty says: I took you from the pasture and from tending the flock and appointed you ruler over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you. Now I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men on earth.

And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed. Wicked people will not oppress them anymore, as they did at the beginning and have done ever since the time I appointed leaders over my people Israel. I will also give you rest from all your enemies.”

The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you: When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod wielded by human beings, with floggings inflicted by human hands. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.’

Nathan reported to David all the words of this entire revelation. Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said: ‘Who am I, O Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? And as if this were not enough in your sight, O Sovereign Lord, you have also spoken about the future of the house of your servant. This decree, O Sovereign Lord, is for a human being?

What more can David say to you? For you know your servant, O Sovereign Lord. For the sake of your word and according to your will, you have done this great thing and made it known to your servant. How great you are, O Sovereign Lord! There is no one like you, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears.

And who is like your people Israel—the one nation on earth that God went out to redeem as a people for himself, and to make a name for himself, and to perform great and awesome wonders by driving out nations and their gods from before your people, whom you redeemed from Egypt? You have established your people Israel as your very own forever, and you, O Lord, have become their God.

And now, Lord God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, so that your name will be great forever. Then people will say, “The Lord Almighty is God over Israel!” And the house of your servant David will be established in your sight.

O Lord Almighty, God of Israel, you have revealed this to your servant, saying, “I will build a house for you.” So your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you. O Sovereign Lord, you are God! Your covenant is trustworthy, and you have promised these good things to your servant. Now be pleased to bless the house of your servant, that it may continue forever in your sight; for you, O Sovereign Lord, have spoken, and with your blessing the house of your servant will be blessed forever.’ ”

The king was supposed to be God’s vice-regent, the under king. God still remained the king, the final sovereign over all the people, but the king was supposed to mediate God’s justice to the people, to mediate God and his ways and his laws to the entire people. Here we have a remarkable set of relationships.

1. A king with religious initiatives restrained

Chapter 7, verses 1 to 11. King David wants to do God a favor. He is now settled. The very first verse says they were enjoying rest (there’s this theme of rest again) now from their enemies, rest in the Promised Land. He looks around and he has been in the capital city long enough that he has a fine palace for himself, and still the center for corporate worship for the entire nation is this now slightly ratty tent.

He remembers, indeed in the book of Deuteronomy back at the time of Moses, there had been promise ultimately of a permanent center, so he thinks, “Well, it’s about time. Why not me? That’s what I would like to do.” Nathan the prophet says, “Great idea. God is with you. Go right ahead.”

Then God intervenes and says to Nathan, “Not quite so fast. This is not the way it’s going to happen.” He gives two or three reasons why it will not be so. First, verses 5 to 7: God alone takes the initiative in these turning points in the story of the Bible. He alone takes the initiative. Haven’t we seen that already? Think back to Abram. Does Abram wake up one day and in his devotion say, “God, quite frankly this world seems to be sliding to hell in a teapot; I think we should do something about it. I think we should start some new race amongst the human race, a kind of sub-unit.

I’d like to head it. I’ll be the great-granddaddy of this entire new humanity. We’ll call them Hebrews. You can be our God and we will be your people. You tell us what to do; we’ll obey you, and we’ll start off this whole new domestic structure. Isn’t that a great idea? This new race, this new covenant community, will show the world what it’s like to be in right relationship with you.”

Is that the way it happened? No. God took the initiative, called Abram, moved him to the land, and gave him the covenant. Even in that scene in the middle of the night where God puts himself under a kind of covenant vow to look after his people, God is taking the initiative again and again. God takes the initiative in chapter 22 of Genesis to provide a lamb.

Or think of Moses. When he was a young man, Moses did wonder about the possibility of starting a revolution and leading the people out. In fact, he got caught up in a murder and had to run for his life and lived on the backside of a desert for decades, for the next half century or so. When God did take the initiative, Moses wasn’t too keen on going. “God, I’m getting a bit old now, and I have a speech impediment. I’m no leader. I’m a shepherd, for goodness sake.” God takes the initiative and, in due course, uses Moses.

God will not share his glory with anyone else. God is really not open to our suggestions about how to run the universe and that is, in effect, his first objection. “Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says: “Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? All along I’ve been living in this tabernacle.

Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’ ” It’s not that it will not be built. In fact, it is going to be built in the next generation. The task is going to be assigned to David’s son, King Solomon, but God will take the initiative.

There is a second reason. “Tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I took you from the pasture and from tending the flock and appointed you ruler over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you. Now I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men of the earth.’ ”

Deep down David is beginning to think he’s going to do God a favor. If he can build a bigger temple than the pagans around build for their gods, then isn’t he showing their God is even more magnificent? So David is going to magnify God’s name and almost, as it were, do God a favor, and God says, “It doesn’t work like that. I’m the one who makes your name great.”

You see, in a certain context it is wonderful for believers to try to magnify God’s name, but not ever because they begin to succumb to the feeling they’re there by doing God a favor. Worshiping God, magnifying his name, ought to be the response of gratitude and adoration and thankfulness not somehow saying, “The pagans worship their gods; we can out-worship you because in a competition we can make your name greater than they can make their names great.”

God says, “You have this entirely wrong. I make your name great. You were a shepherd boy. Not only have I made you a king, I’m about to make your name resound across the ages.” Today there are countless tens of millions of Christians all over the world who know the name of David. They’ve never heard of Alexander the Great, they don’t really know about King Tut, but David’s name has come down to us across 3,000 years. In that context, God gives this amazing promise.

2. A dynasty with unending promise disclosed

The chapter begins, as we’ve seen, with a king with religious initiatives restrained, but now a dynasty with unending promise disclosed (11b). “The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you …” There’s a pun here. David wanted to build a house, that is, a temple for God; God’s going to build a house, that is, a household and, thus, a dynasty for David. There’s a pun.

“You want to build a house for me?” You can almost see God smiling. “I’m going to build a house for you. Let me tell you what it’s like. When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my name …” Solomon. He would build the temple.

“… and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod wielded by human beings, with floggings inflicted by human hands. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you.”

Do you hear what is being said? There are two or three things that help to clarify what the passage is saying. First, David is aware his predecessor, Saul, started well and ended badly, and in consequence, Saul’s son Jonathan never got to the throne. There was no dynasty ever established. It was a one-generation dynasty, if you can speak of a dynasty in one generation.

There was so much wickedness by the end that God said, “This is not going to continue.” Even if David remains faithful all his life.… And in point of fact he had his pretty horrible lapses too, but even if he remains faithful all his life, who guarantees what happens in the next generation and in the generation after that? If you’re royalty, your concern is to preserve the family line. Your concern is to preserve the dynasty, the house, whether the House of Windsor for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II or here, the house of David.

God says, “I’m going to build a house for you, such that even if your son does something wrong, even if he is really wicked, I will not remove him from the throne the way I removed Saul, such that Saul died and there was no successor. I will not do that. I will preserve your house, your household. There may be some temporal infliction, there may be some chastening, some human punishment, there may be nations that rise up against your nation, there may be things of that sort, but it will not be the final sanction that wipes out the line.” That’s what is promised to David.

The second thing to clarify is this. What does verse 14 mean when God says, “I will be his father, and he will be my son”? We need to think about that just a wee bit. For us, sonship has to do with DNA, so endless programs, the various programs like CSI on television, are constantly using DNA to discover who the real father is, and bound up with this are paternity suits. It’s all a matter of genetic descent, but the ancient world saw things a bit differently, in part because there was a descent not only of familial connection but of work and identity.

You men, now.… Just you men, for a moment. How many of you are doing vocationally what your fathers did? Let me see your hands. Look around, folks. I see only three hands. You women, how many of you are doing vocationally what your mothers did? Look around, folks. In the ancient world, if your father was a baker you became a baker, if your father was a farmer you became a farmer, if your father’s name was Stradivarius then you made violins.

In other words, in an agricultural tradecraft pre-industrial society, the son ended up doing in the overwhelming majority of cases what the father did, and the daughter ended up doing what the mother did. Our notions of freedom such that we go away from home to university or to technical college and get a job somewhere else and pursue some other course are so common to us today. It was unthinkable a mere 300 or 400 years ago. As a result, you became identified not only by the family name but by the family’s profession.

That’s why Jesus can be called the son of the carpenter, because his punitive father Joseph was a carpenter, and in one place he can be called himself the carpenter. Apparently, Joseph has died and Jesus himself has taken over the family business. Joseph was a carpenter. What do you expect Jesus to be? He was a carpenter.

This meant the father then, in the case of the son, taught the boy as well. In later Judaism there were synagogues where kids learned reading and writing and things like that. There were little village schools of some sort or another, but your trade (what you learned, how you learned to make a living) … If you were a farmer, when to plant the seed and when to irrigate and how to read the weather and how to build a decent fence and all of that, that was all taught by the family.

Because of this family identification of the son with the father and the task and the clan, the notion of sonship has a whole lot of different rings than it does on CSI. Out of this come a whole lot of biblical metaphors. For example, here and there in the Bible someone is called a son of Belial which means a son of worthlessness. This is not saying the father is Mr. Worthless. What it is saying is this person’s character is so worthless that he must belong to the worthless family. That’s the only thing that explains it.

In the time of Jesus, Jesus gives us some beatitudes where he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.” The idea is God is himself the supreme peacemaker, so if you make peace then, in that respect at least, you’re acting like God. In that respect, you’re a son of God. It’s not telling you how you become a Christian; it’s saying, in that respect, that’s what God does so you’re acting like God. Do you see?

Elsewhere, when Jesus is debating with some Jewish opponents in John, chapter 8, he’s claiming to be sent from God, and they’re saying, “How can this be? We are ourselves the true sons of Abraham. We are the true heritage here.” Jesus says, “It can’t be. Abraham rejoiced to see my day.” They reply, “Abraham has been dead for 2,000 years. You’re not yet 50 years old. What do you mean, ‘He rejoiced to see your day’?”

Jesus won’t back down and they up the ante and say, “We’re not only sons of Abraham; we’re sons of God.” Jesus says, “This can’t be. I come from God. God knows me; I know God. If you don’t recognize me, then you can’t be sons of God. You don’t recognize me at all. Let me tell you who your real daddy is.” He turns to them and says, “You are of your father, the Devil. He was a murderer from the beginning, and you’re trying to murder me. He was a liar from the beginning, and you’re not telling the truth.”

Jesus is not denying they really are sons of Abraham genetically. They are! He’s not denying they carry the Israelite heritage of genes, nor is he suggesting for a moment that somehow the Devil has copulated with women to produce some sort of bastard crew. That’s not what he’s suggesting either. He’s saying at the level of behavior, they’re acting like the Devil so that makes them sons of the Devil.

That’s the sort of language that is going on here. It’s sonship language that is used especially with respect to kings. If God is the supreme King, if he’s the King over this people, then when the human person takes on the throne, when this Davidic heir becomes king himself, then he becomes God’s son. It doesn’t mean he’s born again or anything of that sort. It simply means he is now acting as God’s son in God’s place in the king family, as it were.

That’s the nature of the promise that is given here. We read, “He is the one who will build a house for me, this heir of yours, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. He will represent me.” That’s the nature of this kingdom. “When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod wielded by human beings, but my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul.”

The last thing to understand from this passage is, “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me. Your throne will be established forever.” In other words, God is not only promising it will endure into the next generation, the generation of Solomon when the temple will be built even if Solomon turns out to be quite wicked, he is saying this dynasty will go on and on. It will be established forever.

There are only two ways that’s possible. One is for every generation to produce a new Davidic heir so that you go to the next heir and the next heir and the next heir world without end. That’s one way this promise could be fulfilled. There’s only one other possible way. It’s not even mentioned here. If you could eventually have an heir in the Davidic line who himself lived forever, it could be fulfilled that way. There’s no hint of it yet here. This is about 1000 BC, this promise, and it leads to a number of other promises to Davidic kings across the centuries.

Most of us, I’m sure, have listened to Handel’s “Messiah,” which cites Isaiah 9. In the eighth century, Isaiah in his ninth chapter envisages a coming king. “Unto us a child is given, a son is born.” A son. “He shall rule on the throne of his father, David.” In other words, it will be a Davidic son who is, thus, son of God standing in under God as God’s vice-regent.

“Of the increase of his kingdom there will be no end.” Then we’re told, “He shall be called the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” I don’t imagine Isaiah himself fully understood all that meant, but on the face of it, it seems to be promising that somehow there would be a Davidite, someone in the heritage of David, who himself would rightly be addressed as none less than God himself. We’ll shortly see there are other prophets who make similar promises.

3. A king with spectacular privileges humbled

In the rest of this chapter (2 Samuel, chapter 7) we find a king with spectacular privileges humbled. In verses 18 to 27, David is hushed and crushed by what has been promised him. Basically, his plea now is not, “Let me build a temple for you and do something for you.” Now it’s all gratitude. “I don’t deserve this. This is wonderful. All I ask, dear God and sovereign Lord, is that you keep your promise.”

That’s about 1000 BC. There are a lot of intervening steps that go on. After several centuries, the Davidic kingdom itself has become corrupted. After two generations, after the time of Solomon, the kingdom splits. There’s a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom, and David’s line only rules over the south.

Two and a half more centuries go by and the northern kingdom never has established a dynasty. Kings come and kings go. The new usurper comes in and slaughters all the children of the previous one. It’s a bloody mess. Eventually, they get carted off into captivity under the Assyrian Empire.

Another century and a half and the Davidic dynasty itself is so corroded and corrupted despite times of revival and renewal that at the beginning of the sixth century (about 587 BC) it shut down. The Babylonians had taken over, and the people go into exile. In due course, God brings some of them back. First of all, only about 50,000. They rebuild the temple that had been burnt down, but now it’s just a pathetic little affair. There’s still no king. By this time, they’re living under the Persian rule.

All the way down to the turn of the ages from BC to AD, there still is no restored king of David on the throne. They’re always under one authority or another, and in the first century of our era, they’re under the power of Rome under regional governors and half-breed kings like Herod and so on.

Then you open up the pages of the New Testament, the accounts, the foundation documents of our book of our Bible that begin to tell us what happens in the time of Jesus, and what is the very first line of the very first book? “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David the son of Abraham.” That is the fulfillment of the promise of a Davidic king.

When Jesus comes on the scene, he announces the dawning of the kingdom, and he uses the word kingdom in a variety of ways. He can say this, for example: “The kingdom is like a man who plants wheat (good seed) in a field, and at night some routers come by and plant a lot of weeds. The wheat and the weeds are growing up together, and the servants of the man say, ‘Should we go out and try to pull out the weeds now?’ ‘No, no. Let both grow until the end, and there will be a final separation at the end.’ That’s what the kingdom is like.”

In other words, here you have a picture of the kingdom that is embracing this world with both good seed growing and bad seed growing. It includes John Piper and Adolph Hitler. It includes them both. There are weeds and there is good seed, and they’re both to grow till the end when there will be a final division. That’s one notion of kingdom.

Elsewhere, in John 3, in a passage we’ll look at next week, Jesus says, “Unless you’re born again, you cannot see or enter the kingdom.” With that notion of kingdom, not everybody is in it. Everybody is in the other one; you’re either wheat or weeds, but in this notion of kingdom, you now have a subset of God’s reign, of God’s rule, of God’s kingdom under which there is life. Only those who are born again can enter or see that kingdom.

Further, sometimes Jesus speaks of the kingdom as already having dawned. It’s already here. It’s operating secretly, as it were. It’s like yeast that is put into dough. It’s already quietly working and having its affect. In other passages, he speaks of the kingdom as what comes at the end when there’s a new heaven and a new earth and consummation and tremendous transformation. So the kingdom is here (it’s already here), and it is not yet come. All these notions of kingdom, but they all center on Jesus the King.

After World War II, there was a Swiss theologian by the name of Oscar Cullmann who used one of the turning points in World War II to explain some of these notions. He drew attention to what happened on D-Day, June 6, 1944. By this time, the Western allies had already cleaned out North Africa and had started pushing up the boot of Italy. The Russians were coming in from the steps. They had already defended Stalingrad. They were pushing their way to and through Poland and other Eastern European countries.

Now on D-Day, the Western allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. In three days, they dumped 1.1 million men and tons and tons of war material. There was a second front. Anybody with half a brain in his head could see the war was over. After all, in terms of energy, in terms of war material, in terms of the number of soldiers, in terms of the way all these lines and trajectories were working the war was over.

Does that mean Hitler said, “Oops, I goofed” and sued for peace? No. What came next was the Battle of the Bulge where he almost made it right through the coast of France again, except he ran out of fuel, and the Battle for Berlin was one of the bloodiest of the entire war. It wasn’t over yet.

A year later it finally was in Europe, and there was this gap, thus, between D-Day and VE-Day (Victory in Europe). He says it’s like that for Christians. The promised king came. That’s our D-Day, the coming of Jesus and what he did on the cross and rising from the dead, and in rising from the dead, he says in the last verses of Matthew’s gospel, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.”

He’s the king, but does that mean the Devil says, “Oops, I goofed; I think I better sue for peace”? Does it mean human beings say, “Okay, you’ve risen from the dead and you’ve won; we better bow the knee”? No. What it means is you have some of the stiffest fighting left because Jesus has not yet defeated all of his enemies.

He reigns. All of God’s sovereignty is mediated through King Jesus. The kingdom has dawned. It is here, and you’re either in this kingdom in the new birth sense or you’re not. If you conceive of Jesus’ total reign (all authority is his), you’re in this kingdom whether you like it or not. The question is whether you bow the knee now cheerfully in repentance and faith and thanksgiving or you will bend the knee in holy terror at the end because the end is coming (VE-Day is coming), and there is no doubt who will be seen to be king on the last day.

When Paul writes to Christians in the city of Corinth about the middle of the first century, he describes Jesus being the king with all of God’s sovereignty mediated through King Jesus, and he says, “… and he must reign in this fashion until he has put his last enemy under his feet,” and that last enemy to be destroyed is death itself.

Death will die, which is, of course, picking up exactly what happened in Genesis 1, 2, and 3 with this massive rebellion that tried to de-God God and brought only death and decay. Now Christ, who has himself beaten death and come back from the dead, will continue as God’s own king in the Davidic line, yet the One who was also called the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and he will reign until he has destroyed the last enemy, death itself.

This is why the church stands up and sings again and again, “Hail! King Jesus!” We need a king, one who is perfectly righteous and cannot be corrupted, who is entirely good and is never any taint of evil. He transforms, he saves his people, and he is to be acknowledged as our Sovereign.