Jesus and the Kings of Earth

As I read the gospels, the continuous story of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom is a story that captivates me far more than any of the dramatic water-into-wine or healing-the-blind moments, though the latter certainly make for better television. This story does not begin in the Gospels, of course—it begins far before the man ever walked the earth. It is absolutely everywhere in the Old Testament, as we see creation groaning and man failing time and again to create the kingdom for himself. But in the New Testament we see, at last, a kingdom not just being longed for and prophesied about, but a kingdom come!

This startling revelation has perhaps its most poignant roots in the poetic words of the mother of Christ, as the boy who would one day rule over a kingdom that would never end nestled and kicked within her womb. According to Luke’s Gospel, Mary, in the Magnificat, uttered a beautiful song, whose themes would be echoed by her son during His ministry:

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.”

Here is the strange and bold truth of a Kingdom that had not yet come, for it would only come with the child in her womb: Jesus would not become mighty, but he would establish a kingdom that would bring the mighty low; He would never be rich, but he would establish a kingdom that would render worthless the riches of the earth. Five chapters and thirty years later, when Jesus gave his Sermon on the Plain, His message was the same as his mother’s: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.”

From the beginning of Jesus ministry—yes, even well before the beginning—the message was the same: the worthwhile things of the earth were not the worthwhile things of His kingdom. All the riches of the world were left worthless when compared to the incomparable riches of His kingdom that will never end.

Jesus knew this, of course, when He was tempted. Had he not understood His own message (as we consistently fail to understand it today) He surely would have given in to Satan’s devious machinations. Malcolm Muggeridge was right in noting that Satan’s great secret in offering Jesus the kingdoms of the earth, is that at its core the offer is bogus. “There are no kingdoms for him to bestow; only pseudo or notional ones presided over by mountebanks masquerading as emperors and kings and governments.” Jesus, who would be called King of kings and Lord of lords, who came to usher in a glorious kingdom, who would send out His forces in the form of a church destined to conquer the earth, was being offered the mirage of earthly rule and authority. Satan offered Jesus nothing more than the laughable, passing pleasure of meaningless authority. Imagine Jesus actually giving in! Imagine Jesus sitting on a paper throne when there was a heavenly one waiting for Him! Imagine the inanity of Jesus ruling over a Potemkin kingdom that, like every nation and kingdom of earth, would be blown away again and again by every light breeze. Jesus declined earthly rule not because he was too humble, but because there is no earthly rule to be had! There never has been. Jesus alone knew that the offer was not just beneath Him; it had no value whatsoever, just as the sustenance of a loaf of bread has no value when compared to the pure, eternal substance of God’s Word. Though truly tempting to we of such little perspective, for Jesus to take these things would not be to accept something good, it would be to lose something of supreme value!

But the Jews failed to understand this in the first century, just as we continue to fail, even though we have the truth at hand. “To what should I compare this generation?” Jesus asked in Matthew 11. “It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, ‘We played the flute for you, andyou did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’” The people of Israel expected something different in their Messiah—and though they may have thought that their expectation was greater than the reality, in truth it was far less. They expected a king, to take a physical throne in their physical palace, for they hadn’t yet learned that every physical throne is destined to collapse; every physical palace to crumble and decay. Jesus may have been truly afraid when, “perceiving then that they were about to come and take Him by force to make Him king, He withdrew again to the mountain by Himself.” (John 6:15) What a mockery this would have been! For Jesus to be lifted up to be king of the Jews would have been the greatest tragedy to ever befall that nation—a greater tragedy, even, than the destruction of the temple a few decades later. To raise up Christ as an earthly king would have been to deny Him the eternal throne to which He was headed. It would have been to sacrifice something unbelievably great for something unbelievably worthless.

The story of Christ’s kingdom reaches its denouement, of course, at Golgotha. On the cross Christ put to death every pretense of Earthly rule; just as in His resurrection He made the first movement to take His seat on His eternal throne. But the truest perspective can be found in the hours leading up to the cross, with the mockery of Jesus by the guards and, surely, the priests of Israel as well. In mocking Christ, they were bringing judgment on themselves; in draping Him with the clothes of royalty and cruelly crowning Him with thorns they were demonstrating Christ’s decisions in the wilderness—they were mocking not just a would-be king, but the man who would be King of Kings. Jesus’ destiny was to rule over everything, bringing low the powers of men, and, ironically, it was His death that made this possible. While mocking Jesus, these people were enabling His rule, helping to usher in His kingdom, dramatically sealing their own fate.

So Jesus was killed, and so He rose, and so did His Kingdom find its foundation, on which it continues to be built today. Since Christ died, ostensibly ending what had been a vibrant, but brief, ministry that might even have led to a revolution had it been allowed to continue, two thousand years have come and gone. With those years, decades, centuries and millennia have come the world has seen the Roman Empire fall from dizzying heights; it has seen the Mongol Empire on the edge of conquering the known world; it has seen a British Empire, a French Empire, Portuguese, Belgian, Japanese Empires all rise and fall. Bitterly and tragically fall. Empires built by human hands, withering and dying with age after just centuries.

Christ’s Kingdom continues to grow; it shows no signs of aging.

Had Hitler been successful in his dream of establishing a German Reich so pure and so powerful that it did indeed last a thousand years, it would still perish and be replaced, in the end amounting to less than nothing when standing before the sheer weight of Christ’s eternal kingdom, which has persisted already for twice that.

If Christ’s Kingdom has indeed persisted, then Mary’s prophecy concerning her son is made even more beautiful, for it is being fulfilled even today, before our own eyes. If Christ’s Kingdom is alive and thriving then His temptations in the wilderness remain both relevant and urgent to every man and woman who has ever been caught up in the things of the world; for, as Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “...in (Satan’s) three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature.” If Christ does indeed sit on a throne, reigning over an eternal kingdom, then those present at His trial were not mocking their victim by pretending that He was a king, but mocking every king and emperor who has ever lived by pretending that they might be anything like Him. “Who,” asks Muggeridge, “among the motley collection of spectators of so obscure an event could possibly have envisaged that there before their eyes another civilization was being born, which would last for two thousand years, shining so long and so brightly? Not even the Apostles could have thought of that; what they looked for was an apocalyptic Second Coming and the end of the world, not the beginning of Christendom.” God’s ways, we need to be reminded time and time again, are not our ways. They are far, far better.