Dennis Tuuri

I sing that song. I remember back nearly 20 years ago when this church started meeting and one of my fondest memories is going over to the Lord’s house, Valerie playing piano and learning to sing these Genevan psalms, so-called Genevan jigs, because of their syncopation and enthusiasm and power. Psalm 2 is a wonderful rendering of this psalter that was produced at Geneva in the time of Calvin of this important truth found at the very opening of the psalter. Psalm 1 and 2 form an introduction to the whole psalter and here the crown writes of King Jesus so clearly portrayed and very clearly is it not. We can see what we’ve been discussing in John chapters 18 and 19. Here is the fulfillment of what Psalm 2 is speaking about: kings of the earth, the land, the rulers of the people, the gentile rulers all come together—Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas—in compact against the Lord Jesus Christ.

And yet, as we turn again today to the text we used last week, we see at the very center the enthronement of Christ, mock enthroned by his enemies, but a picture of Jesus Christ, even in the middle of that scene of horrific rejection of him and mocking of him by church and state. Nonetheless, the sovereign Lord is pictured as being enthroned as he goes to the cross. Our sermon text for today is found again in John chapter 18.

We’ll read the same text that we read last week. I’ll begin in verse 28 and read through 19:17. This is a unit you can follow along. I’m reading in a little different version than the outline. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Then they led Jesus from Caiaphas to the praetorium and it was early morning but they themselves did not go into the praetorium lest they should be defiled but that they might eat the Passover. Pilate then went out to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” They answered and said to him, “If he were not an evildoer we would not have delivered him up to you.” Then Pilate said to them, “You take him and judge him according to your law.” Therefore the Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled which he spoke signifying by what death he would die.”

Then Pilate entered the praetorium again, called Jesus, and said to him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus answered him, “Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this concerning me?” Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”

Pilate therefore said to him, “Are you a king then?” Jesus answered, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews and said to them, “I find no fault in him at all, but you have a custom that I should release someone to you at the Passover. Do you therefore want me to release to you the king of the Jews?”

Then they all cried again, saying, “Not this man, but Barabbas.” Now Barabbas was a robber. So when Pilate took Jesus—then Pilate rather took Jesus, scourged him, and the soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe. Then they said, “Hail, King of the Jews.” And they struck him with their hands.

Pilate then went out again and said to them, “Behold, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no fault in him.” Then Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, “Behold the man.” Therefore, when the chief priests and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “You take him and crucify him, for I find no fault in him.” The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to our law he ought to die because he made himself the son of God.”

Therefore, when Pilate heard that saying, he was the more afraid and went again into the praetorium and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. Then Pilate said to him, “Are you not speaking to me? Do you not know that I have power to crucify you and power to release you?” Jesus answered, “You can have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore, the one who delivered me to you has the greater sin.”

From then on, Pilate sought to release him. But the Jews cried out, saying, “If you let this man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.” When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus out and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the Pavement, but in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Now it was the preparation day of the Passover and about the sixth hour. And he said to the Jews, “Behold your king.”

But they cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him.” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your king?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” Then he delivered him to be crucified. And then they took Jesus and led him away.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the clear declaration of the kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that you would burn these texts into our hearts. Help us to recognize in our own hearts the desire to say that we have no ruler but those whom are around us as opposed to your sovereign authority and rule coming from above. Forgive us, Father. Strike us by your word. Now cleave us. Cause us to come to repentance for the many times that in our sin we try to throw off the peaceable, gentle reigns of the Lord Jesus Christ to our own folly and hurt the way that these visible saints as it were did.

And help us to be assured that Jesus Christ does indeed reign and he has called us here not simply to cause us to come to sorrow for our sins, but to assure us of our forgiveness and to call us to go forth from this place proclaiming his crown rights. Empower us, Lord God, by your Holy Spirit to this task by your spirit and word. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. I want to focus for just a few minutes this morning as we kind of just finish up this section that we talked about in longer exegetical detail from last week explaining the structure and explaining the sovereignty of God in the context of this structure. I just want to kind of focus on this last declaration of the Jews that ends this trial and interrogation that as we saw last week is really not the trial and interrogation of Christ so much as it is the trial and interrogation of Pilate. But even more than that, the Jews.

Here they assemble on the pavement. The same word used in the Septuagint describing the forecourt of the temple where they would meet with God and declare his praises that he is their king. They are here. As I said last week, the verb that says that Pilate went to the judgment seat and sat down on it seems like it should have an object which would imply that he sat Jesus down on the judgment seat for just a moment at least. All the pictures in this text of the sovereignty of God and the judgment of the Jews. And ultimately what’s revealed here is the nature of God, as we saw last week at the very center of the section, that this is a God who doesn’t rule by coercion so much as by service.

This is a God who is of his very nature to die for his people, to serve them, and bring to them salvation. Certainly, he commands us what he bleeds for us. And this is the nature of God. But also, we see here very clearly the nature of apostate civil authority with Pilate’s pragmatism. He’s almost postmodern in his rejection of any implication of truth or definition of truth whatsoever. He doesn’t just say “It’s my truth that rules.” He says there’s basically no truth or truth is irrelevant to anything that happens here in this place. And in a way that’s postmodernism. So not too new and novel really.

But we also have the complete revelation of the apostasy of the Jews painted out in letters writ large. In this concluding statement we have no king but Caesar. This verse receives some publicity about four years ago. John Ashcroft at that time a senator who was nominated for attorney general since confirmed of course spoke at Baylor University and he gave a talk entitled “No King But Jesus” and he talked about this text. He talked about the fact that in the early colonial period some of the catchphrases was that we have no king but Jesus. The representatives of the King of England would come and demand taxes or demand submission and Clark and other patriot pastors would reply, “We have no king but Jesus.”

So Ashcroft talked about the implications of a culture that builds itself upon an affirmation of the kingdom of Christ as opposed to those that say, “We have no king but Caesar.” So this is kind of a—it was a big subject of controversy at the time. Attorney General to be declaring allegiance to King Jesus at an explicitly Christian university. Democrats got all upset about it. Released the text of the speech to the news media and the result was that more and more people heard about the crown rights of King Jesus and that’s the way God works. It’s the same way he worked 2,000 years ago in the text before us as you know they mean it for evil but God intends it for good and for the establishment of his people.

I want to talk today then a little bit about this phrase and about kingdom. Now I talked about this last week that really what Jesus is saying, so frequently misinterpreted, is not that his kingdom has nothing to do with this world, but its authority does not derive from this world, but it certainly has an impact. He rules by means of truth. So from this text, we should take away a commitment to truthfulness and that truthfulness is linked to the expansion of the kingdom.

Jesus doesn’t say he’s not a king. And in fact, he says over and over again, “Yeah, I’m a king, but I don’t rule like you. Ultimately, I rule through witnessing to the truth.” And so there is this relationship to truth and kingdom rule in the text before us.

Now, the idea of Christ’s kingship is certainly a factor that is stressed throughout the text. I read the text in such a way as to draw our attention to that with the many references throughout the text to king, kingdom, and what he is. You can sort of see, by the way, as you read through those references that it seems like Pilate always wants to talk about Jesus as king of the Jews. Jesus never restricts himself to being king of the Jews. And in fact, when Pilate asks him if he’s king of the Jews, Christ’s response is that everyone who is of the truth knows me and my followers come to me and that’s the way my kingdom is built. He’s speaking the truth to Pilate and he is by way of implication, calling on Pilate to acknowledge him as the king.

See, so Jesus’s kingdom is far broader than Pilate’s vision trying to encapsulate it down to just the Jews. And that’s critical. It’s critical for proper understanding that Psalm 2 tells us that God says that these—as Pilate and Caiaphas and Herod plot against Christ—God is installing his king on Zion. And now remember, we know a little more of what that means. We’re not bound to think of Zion as somehow related to the temple and a particular priestly nation and have nothing to do with us because we know that Zion is where the tabernacle of David worship was established where Jew and Gentile came together into the presence of God to worship and in fact it appears that Gentiles were on the worship team. So we know that Zion was the picture ultimately of what would happen when King Jesus appears—that his kingdom would encompass all nations of the earth no longer restricted in a kind of a visible sense to a particular priestly nation.

Now I put the very center of the text in another little form that shows kind of the center of the narrative. Remember we said that this text is at the center of the whole passion narrative of John. It takes place in five kind of scenes. This is the middle scene. This one here, this trial of Jesus before Pilate. So it’s kind of the center. And very obviously at the center of this narrative is the scourging of Christ and his mock enthronement. But what I didn’t point out last week was what some commentators have noticed—that really at the very center of the center, we see yet another center.

And what I’ve done here is given you a little structure on your outline. If we throw in the reference from before and after of the scourging. What we have is Pilate therefore takes Jesus. He scourges him or causes him to be scourged. They then put the crown on his head. Remember this is not just a kingly crown. It is a divine kingly crown. It’s the rays. It was to portray not just kingship but divine kingship. So they put the crown on his head and then right at the very middle he’s robed in the purple robe and then there’s the affirmation, “Hail King of the Jews.” And then they smite him with their hands. So we’re back to scourging. And then Pilate is mentioned again. He goes forth to talk to the Jews again.

So what this shows us is that at the very center is scourging and enthronement, but really the scourging are the brackets for the middle three stanzas of the picture of the enthronement of Christ as king. Mocking in the context of the Roman soldiers. But we know that what’s really going on is God is saying that Jesus Christ is being enthroned by means of his suffering for his people. So at the very center of the passion narrative in John’s gospel is really not even the scourging. It is rather the enthronement of Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords in some new sense now that the Jewish nation no longer serves its priestly function any longer.

Jesus has come and all the world now will stream up to Mount Zion to celebrate the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. So that’s the overall picture. And I want to focus here now on this last statement: we have no king but Caesar. Here we have first a rejection of the reign of Jesus Christ by the Jews. And Pilate says, “Don’t you want him to reign? He’s your king. He’s supposed to reign over you.” And there is this first—this statement as Calvin says, how does Calvin put it here? He says, “This is a display of shocking madness that the priests who ought to have been well acquainted with the law reject Christ in whom the salvation of his people was wholly contained, on whom all the promises depended and on whom the whole of their religion was founded.”

So first there is this shocking madness of the Jews rejecting this person in front of them, Jesus Christ, as their king. Remember what he’s done. He’s healed people. He has changed reality. He has pictured that his coming is affecting a new creation in which all the ritual uncleanness of the Old Testament that prevented people from serving in near capacity to God are all being rolled back by Christ and the world is being changed. He feeds those that are hungry—a picture that he will affect complete reversal of the orders that are then in place. He brings the gracious rule of his kingdom to them and they reject him. And this is a horrible shocking thing that goes on.

But of course their statement doesn’t end there. It doesn’t just reject this man Jesus as being the king over them. Their statement doesn’t say, “Well, we will have Messiah but we don’t want this guy for Messiah.” No, they reject not just Jesus but their rejection of this Messiah in front of them is a practical denial of the whole basis for which they have been called as a people—that is the theocracy of God. This is a shocking statement not just because they reject Jesus that we know so well by this point having read all four gospels, but this is a shocking statement because they reject any sense of Messiah at all. They don’t say, “We’re awaiting Messiah to come.” They say, “We have no king but Caesar.” They are saying we have no king.

And yet their whole purpose of existence as a people was to assert the kingship of Yahweh—that he would reign in the context of the nation and that this ultimately would have this effect upon the nations of the earth. Their heart nature is shown by this concluding statement. Remember the sun has moved from the very dawning of the day of judgment, the beginning of the narrative. Now it’s high noon according to the text. A time frame is given and everything now is disclosed. We have disclosed the nature of Pilate and his pragmatism, his rejection of truth. We have disclosed the sacrificial nature of God who lays down his life for his people. That he is a God who ultimately comes to serve and not to be served. Although we serve him in response, of course, that’s made plain at the center of the narrative. And here at the end of the narrative, the light shines brightly that these Jews are not just mistakes or misguided. They have thrown off all notion rather of theocracy at all. They have rejected their very purpose for being in existence as a nation.

Now what they do God will grant. They will no longer be a nation. They’ll be destroyed in AD 70 and even after that there’ll be a further destruction in 132 or so after the revolt of Bar Kokhba and the final Jewish revolt. And then they’re completely dispersed to the wind. And what we have now today is Judaism is not New Testament Judaism. New Testament Judaism is destroyed by God. This affirmation of them that they no longer desire theocracy at all is taken as God’s final verdict against them, made clear to all, and then he destroys them.

We remember the story of Samuel. Yes. Samuel and God’s people reject Samuel and we don’t want you to rule over us anymore. We want a king like the nations around us. And Samuel understands. He goes to God and God brings him to understand that their rejection of Samuel—God says—is not a rejection of Samuel. It’s a rejection of the theocratic kingdom of God over them. They have rejected me, God tells Samuel—or you rather, God tells Samuel. They rejected me from ruling over them. When they reject Jesus Christ, they reject any notion of Yahweh’s rule over them at all. That’s how horrific this statement of theirs is. They reject their whole purpose of a nation.

Commentators go wild on this. I could read commentary after commentary to you of the utter madness of this statement. In fact, some have even questioned the historical nature of this statement because it is so shocking—that not just, you know, some crowd, some mob crowd, but the text identifies the chief priests and there’s no opposition pointed toward them. The nation of Israel through its leadership here truly representing them has rejected Yahweh altogether. The text is making clear to us their heart’s position. And their heart’s position is not just a rejection of Christ. But when Christ’s rule is rejected, they’re those who are trying to throw off the entire yoke of God upon them. They’re moving crazily, madly away from any notion of theocracy. And worse than that, okay, they’ve done horrible things. They’ve rejected this gentle savior who will come to rule over them. And not only that, they’ve rejected Yahweh’s rule over them as well. But they’ve not rejected it even in substituting their own rule. No, we have no king—not Jesus, not Yahweh, but we do have this king named Caesar.

Not only does this self-conscious statement of theirs reject Christ’s general reign and reject any notion of theocracy, but see on your outline, this is the acceptance of pagan rule by the Jewish nation. Caesar obviously is a counterfeit Christ. Now, God has raised up the Roman Empire. He’ll protect the church still through the Roman Empire. Paul will use his Roman citizenship here. The clear villain is the Jewish people, not the Roman Empire so much. But remember that this Roman Empire itself has no longer understood its nature in terms of God’s raising it up for protection of his church. Rather, Caesar Augustus is the one who wears the divine crown. He’s the one that claims to be God incarnate. He’s the one who brings about the peace, the salvation of all the world by the advent of Caesar—Parousia, which is the term that Paul uses in the New Testament to refer to the advent of Christ—is originally a term used about the advent of Augustus Caesar to a place.

We know about the hills being brought down and the valleys being brought up—picture from the Old Testament about the coming and advent of Christ and making preparations. Well, that was literally done when the Caesars would approach. The Caesar was God. He was God incarnate. And these Jews have accepted the demonic rule of a man who is crazed and thinks he is God. They accept pagan rule over them.

Now Jesus is the God-man and that is pictured in the text for us in multiple ways but we know this—they reject Yahweh’s authority ruling in them through the incarnate Christ and by doing that they reject the transcendent God in terms of any rule or authority over them as a nation in terms of civil matters. That’s what the kingship is being talked about here. And what they’re doing is rejecting the creator in favor of the creature. Caesar is the creature. He’s a man. And they’re shifting from a whole perspective that God the creator will become incarnate to deliver his people that way and link man and God through the God-man of Christ to Caesar—who is the picture of man growing up to become God from below. So they’re doing some very big demonic things here. It is being revealed to us why these horrific judgments of AD 70 described in the book of Revelation will come upon them.

This you can think of this as the formal court statement because that’s what this whole section of scripture is about. It’s a court scene and this is the formal statement of their guilt. They have rejected Jesus. They’ve rejected the theocratic kingdom and now they accept pagan rule over them. Westcott in his commentary puts it like this. They’re a singular force in the exact definition of the speakers here. They are not simply described as the Jews nor yet as the chief priests and the officers—the official organs of the theocracy themselves proclaim that they have abandoned the faith by which the nation had lived.

The sentence “We have no king but Caesar”—the foreign emperor—is the legitimate end of their policy. The formal abdication of the messianic cult. The kingdom of God in the confession of its rulers has become the kingdom rather of this world. In the place of the Christ they have found the emperor. They first rejected Jesus as the Christ and then driven by the irony of circumstances they rejected the Christ altogether and accepted the pagan ruler Caesar who would rule over them.

So that’s what we have here at the center of this narrative is this declaration of Christ’s kingship and the Jews in rejecting the theocratic rule of God through Christ then embrace the demonic rule of Caesar.

Now second point in your outline is—and as I mentioned earlier when we brought the two households into membership—is that there, this is, you see this is really in this text we have the sovereignty of God the kingship of Christ and the sovereign rule that will continue to expand over all the world nicely summarized for us at the very heart of the passion narrative in John’s gospel. Theonomic perspective was never a debate 20 years ago in Reformed circles nor today over whether the moral law of God was important for us—everyone in the Reformed world asserted that. The question was what relevance do the scriptures have to the rule of civil rulers? This is the flash point of theonomic writings of 20 years ago or transformationalist writings of today. Do we believe in theocracy or not?

And of course, even good conservative Christians that occupy the halls of power in Washington DC will be the first to say that we reject theocracy. We affirm theocracy as a people at this church, not ecclesiocracy. The church doesn’t rule. But we say that we want to do exact opposite of what these Jews do and say indeed we believe in the kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ. We believe in his civil rule in the context of this land and we believe that all civil rulers should imitate their rule after the law of Christ and his commandments.

And in this we have received renewed support from a from a—from a strange source. We talked about the new perspective on Paul somewhat at family camp and it’s not all that difficult. There are liberals involved, but it’s much broader than what I’m going to talk about. But for our perspective, what it basically says is that Reformed and Lutheran circles have gotten it wrong for many years. Reformed churches have tended to take up the Lutheran view of who Paul was and what he was saying. And the Lutheran view is that Paul on the road to Damascus goes through a conversion experience and all of a sudden he’s a Christian and breaks all ties to Judaism. So Judaism is here and Christianity is here. The law is here and grace is here. See, the idea of a theocracy is back here someplace. And now we are New Testament Christians, and none of that stuff applies to us.

But one of the great things that’s being rediscovered by Pauline scholars of our day, including men like N.T. Wright, is that this is just wrong in terms of interpreting the scriptures. Take a text like this from Romans 1 concerning his son Jesus Christ, our Lord. Jesus Christ Christ is the New Testament designation of Messiah, anointed one from the Old Testament. Concerning his son Jesus Christ our Lord which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh. So here Paul in his opening lines to the church at Rome wants it to understand that Jesus Christ Jesus is Messiah—he reasserts Messiah’s reign and he actually ties it to monarchical terminology by saying he’s made of the seed of David according to the flesh.

What is Paul doing here? He is empty rights is saying—is this just a throwaway line, little thing stuck in, you know, sort of no. This is central to what Paul will develop in the rest of the book of Romans—that Jesus Christ now reigns as a theocratic king goes on in verse four to say declared to be the son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead. The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is the demonstration that he is Messiah and the fact that he is Messiah and Paul designates him as such brings in all the freight from the Old Testament.

It brings in the very things the Jews have rejected in the text before us and which all too often the Christian church for the last hundred years has rejected as well.

Let me read a quote or two from a wonderful talk by N.T. Wright that I told many of you about. It is still up at the website of Calvin College. You can do a Google search on “Calvin College January 2003 lectures” and there’s a talk by N.T. Wright there of what he what he means in terms of this new perspective on Paul. But he says that you know what’s very important is to understand that for Paul he was not—he did not see a radical break from his Judaism. He saw in Jesus Christ the fulfillment of all the Judaistic sayings of the Old Testament relative to Messiah. And that changes everything in terms of our understanding of who Jesus is and its relationship to you to civil politics specifically.

He says this is a direct quote from his talk. “If you put messiahship back into the picture—Messiahship, Old Testament prophecies, the anointed, Psalm 2, we just read, other texts in the Old—Isaiah primarily being the source of his messianic hope. If you put Messiahship back into the picture, you get the strong Jewish sense of the Messiah’s task of being to bring God’s justice to the world with all the political significance that comes with.”

You see the new perspective on Paul saying that we have to understand his writings in terms of him seeing himself as Judaism fulfilled in Christ, not broken off and then something new sprung out of the head of Zeus as a Christian. No, continuity—that drives us to see the political implications of Messiah because it brings all that freight to the Old Testament that Jesus will now reign. Messiah will establish a kingdom and this kingdom will reign over all the kingdoms of the earth and indeed all the kingdoms of the earth in Revelation will become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, his anointed, the Messiah.

Again to quote Wright, “On the other hand to marginalize Messiahship in Paul was and is a way of de-Judaizing and therefore depoliticizing Paul and Jesus Christ.” See, it’s to the advantage of civil rulers who don’t want to have to bow the knee to King Jesus in what they do and say. What they do and say it is to their advantage to seek a departure, a strong cleavage between the Old and New Testaments, between law and grace, between the Jewish faith and the Christian faith. The very term “Judeo-Christian” was originally coined in Germany in an attempt to do this very thing—to say that as Christians we’re not of the Judaistic school of the Old Testament. And as a result, it’s got nothing to say to us. All we have is the New Testament and all those things about Jesus being Christ and Messiah. Well, that just means “Lord” in the sense of being the Lord over your life personally because they don’t want all the texts from Isaiah, Psalm 2, and others asserting the kingship of Christ in terms of its political dimension as well. They don’t want that freight carried into the New Testament.

So, praise God that through the Reconstructionist movement, through the transformationalist movement, through lots of different ways, and now through a reassertion of Paul’s sense of messiahship when he uses it being found as a fulfillment of the Old Testament, we are seeing reasserted again the very thing the Jews rejected—that Jesus Christ is Messiah and that if Jesus Christ is Messiah, Messiah rules theocratically in the midst of his people.

So the reassertion of Jesus as Messiah by the new perspective on Paul or members these—some who are associated with that field N.T. Wright specifically—the reassertion that Jesus is Messiah is the reassertion of the theocratic rule of God and as a result it is a direct challenge to the rule of civil magistrates who refuse to bow the knee to King Jesus. So everything that the Jews gave up—all the horrific statements they made to roll things back—are now being factored back in in the church of the of Jesus Christ, the reacceptance of Messiah as the basis of theocracy and the rejection of pagan rule. All right, this is what’s happening. Praise God.

Let’s talk a little bit more now about what Ashcroft said four years ago. And what I have in your outline is the other ditch. “No king but Jesus” or “King of Kings.” One ditch is to say that Jesus Christ is irrelevant to civil rule. Right? And when we go about fashioning civil governments, we really have no need to think of the truth of Christ’s kingship. He is not king in the theocratic sense. The other ditch, however, and I don’t know the patriot period well enough to understand how they used this catchphrase. I couldn’t actually find a specific quote of “No King But Jesus.” I could find quotes somewhat like that by Jonas Clark and others. And I don’t know the patriot period well enough to know what they meant by it. I think the patriot response was a response to the declaration that King George was sovereign. They were objecting to the term “sovereign” in the sense of his kingship. I don’t think they were doing what many would do today who would use the slogan “No King But Jesus.”

What many would do today and what we would be tempted to do is to fall to the other ditch. Okay? So we assert the kingship of Jesus Christ. But because Christ is king then we don’t care. Any civil ruler that comes to our door is illegitimate. They’re all Pilates. They’re all Caesars. We have nothing to do with them. Our allegiance is only to Jesus Christ. You see, one ditch is to say there’s no relevance of Christ to civil politics. And the other ditch is to refuse to acknowledge that God works through civil magistrates, civil authorities, whether they’re kings, elected officials, or inherited aristocracy, whatever mechanism is in place, the Lord God is working through them to affect his rule in your life.

So the other ditch would be to take this slogan “No King But Jesus.” Okay, we don’t—we want to avoid “No King But Caesar,” but we want to assert maybe “No King But Jesus.” But maybe a better way to say that is that Jesus Christ is the King of Kings. We don’t deny the legitimate civil rule of kings or elected officials. The scriptures themselves provided in Deuteronomy 17 for the sort of theocratic king that God would see established on his throne. He says when you choose a king, this is the kind of king he must be. He must be one who is dedicated to the covenant people and one of them. He must be a king who writes out the rule of law found in the Pentateuch—found in God’s law here—for civil ruling. He must be the kind of king that meditates on and actually writes it out verbatim a copy of it for himself and then regularly reads it to inform his civil policies.

This is the kind of king you should set in place. And this king shouldn’t multiply horses and use offensive weaponry. He shouldn’t multiply wives or money to himself either like tyrants do. There were restrictions placed upon him. But nonetheless, God didn’t say having a king in and of itself was evil. The evil the people committed in their declaration to Samuel was that we want a king like the nations around us. That’s why God said they rejected me. They have a king who is submissive to the King of Kings, Yahweh. This is made provision of in the very law of God in Deuteronomy 17.

But to have a king like the nations around us, to have a king like Caesar, to have a king like Pilate—who don’t acknowledge their submission to the truth of Christ’s kingdom. This is what an apostate sinful people want. They want to reject Christ’s theocratic kingship. We want to say that what God does is he rules through the established powers that be. We want to witness to the civil magistrate. Jesus didn’t say, “Pilate, you have no authority at all.” He said, “Pilate, even in your apostate state, your postmodernist view of truth and its relevance or irrelevance his existence or not. Pilate, you’re serving Caesar who thinks himself emperor and god.” He didn’t say you have no authority. He said that the authority that you have has been granted from above from my heavenly father ultimately through Caesar and then to Pilate.

Jesus asserts that we are to understand the obligation to witness to civil magistrates that their action should submit to the truth of Christ’s kingdom. But he does not give us leeway to be rebels against the kings that he has established in the context of civil rule.

So this declaration by the Jews—”We have no king but Caesar”—is seen in its awfulness. And we see then by implication the awful state that the Christian church has fallen into when somehow along the path of reformation we the church stopped proclaiming the crown rights of King Jesus over civil matters and somehow ended up, you know, delegating Christ’s kingship to being lordship over our personal lives as opposed to the corporate entity.

You know, if you go through the New Testament and bring in that Old Testament phrase about Messiah, what you—there’s no way you can read the New Testament and think of it primarily as a book about what Jesus is going to do for me personally saving me. No, the New Testament is about Messiah has now come to earth. The theocratic kingdom will blossom and bloom. The new creation has been affected. And it’s what God will do in the context of the nations that is the Gospel. N.T. Wright says something like the gospel is the message of Isaiah confronting the emperor of Caesar who asserted his own method of salvation in the person of Christ and that’s our task for today as well. The gospel we preach is not ultimately a gospel of personal salvation. It’s that—it’s very importantly part of that—but ultimately the gospel is the good news the theocratic kingship has been established by God and we want to confront the modern Caesars of our world in our day and age with the same truth that Paul confronted the Roman Empire with, the same truth that Jesus confronts Pilate with, and the text confronts us with, that every ruler is to bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ, that the civil magistrate is obliged to apply the general equity of the Mosaic judicials in terms of Westminster Confession language to the modern-day setting and have rules and laws framed that reflect God’s system of justice and reflect ultimately the King of Kings, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this is a very important message for our day and age. That’s why I wanted to take a separate Sunday to talk about it. We exist in what was whispered about two or three years ago amongst some people seeing what was coming. The discussion began as America a new empire with the fall of the Soviet Union particularly and the rise of its great military might. Now it’s not whispered or talked about, you know, behind doors. You could watch C-SPAN or the news stations and within the course of a week you’d hear several people talking explicitly about the kind of empire America is now building. This is what we’re in the midst of. There is now a new American empire that’s ruled over by the president of the United States that is now exerting more and more force and influence and sway in the world.

What do we have to say to this empire as Christians? What do we have to say to the city council here in Oregon City about sweethearts? Our message has to be one that asserts the crown rights of King Jesus the need for God’s people to be submissive to the established powers, but also the need for God’s people to witness to the civil magistrate that they must bow the knee of King Jesus and assert his crown rights over the empire. We have a Christian president. We have Christian men in the administration. But doesn’t it seem to you that the message primarily of this empire is that Christianity is one religion among many? And so we go to Iraq and assert the complete okayness of Christianity, Islam, whatever else you believe in, these things are all legitimate. It is a pluralistic empire.

And we sort of, you know, we sort of like that because our president’s an explicit Christian and we know that Christian values are being imparted, but we’re sort of uncomfortable with that as well, aren’t we? That’s why you have such back and forth by, you know, political leaders or Christian leaders rather, who address the political sphere today. It’s very much a mixed bag. It’s very tricky business. But let me suggest this. When the empire is characterized by pluralism instead of the crown rights of King Jesus, it seems to me then we’re moving in the direction of Caesar. Then we’re saying that any god will do as long as it’s part of the pantheon.

You see, and ultimately what we’re saying is that none of those gods are particularly relevant to the assertion of authority and control of our empire which rules by civil might or by military might. That is the road we are getting dangerously close to as a nation. And we’re doing it because we want to be nicer than Jesus. We want to be more pluralistic than Paul was. We want to assert the freedom and liberty of all people to exhibit or engage in whatever religion they want. And that all sounds so nonthreatening. It sounds so nondirect. And yet it is the very thing that leads to despotism and tyranny because what you ultimately say is we could all have our opinions. We can all have our religions. But at the end of the day, it’s the decision of the military might of this empire that will exert itself in foreign lands for our pragmatic purposes.

You know, Rome was engaged in the Middle East to protect bread supplies 2,000 years ago. And now we’re engaged in the Middle East, some people think, to protect oil supplies. Now, all I’m saying, you’ve heard me say that I’m proud of what, you know, we’ve done in Iraq trying to bring liberation and there is a legitimate role, the Christian civil magistrate, to exercise self-defense of his people. But understand that what the scriptures tell us is that we must confront any secular empire that refuses to bow the knee to King Jesus and call upon it to recognize the messiahship of Christ and that civil policy must be based on it.

We should self-consciously, I believe, let our president, our governor, our city council people know that their job is to be reading Proverbs, their job is to be reading the law of God, not to apply it, you know, willy-nilly. We don’t just cut and paste from the Old Testament into today. That never was portrayed as a theonomic view or the transformationalist or theocratic view. It always has to be filtered through redemptive historical truths. It always has to be brought into the context of our particular place in history. But it must be brought into that context is the point. Otherwise, we’re just like the Jews of that day.

If the church of Jesus Christ in our day and age, in the midst of the conservative and liberal pulls and tugs that we have on our heartstrings and in our loyalties and allegiances. If we end up saying that Jesus Christ and his revealed truth of scripture is not the ultimate value by which our civil leaders should rule, then it seems like we’re rejecting Christ as Messiah. And it seems then that we must be very careful because when the Jews rejected Christ as Messiah, they rejected their entire purpose as a theocratic people for God Yahweh to reign over them. And in their rejection, God turns them over. If you will not serve God, Joshua said, “Choose which other God you will serve. The God of the Amorites, the God of the Hittites, the God of, you know, the Quran, the God of the denied Christianity that doesn’t proclaim the crown rights of King Jesus.” Serve what idol you will, but it will be an idol nonetheless.

And when we do that, we suffer the same fate as Judaism as these men who asserted these truths of their lips. Their hard attitude was revealed. They were in bed with the serpent of serpents. They were in bed with the dragon who rules through supposed pluralism, the assertion of military might and a failure to bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. And that’s where we’re headed if we don’t proclaim a theocratic perspective on the messiahship of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We know that at RCC. Our strategy map, you’ll see the prayer requests each week and the announcements now are put in the context of our strategy map: Worship that produces mission. Worship that produces discipleship. Worship that produces community. And under mission on our strategy map is a mission to speak the truth of God’s kingdom and its rules by which men are to govern to the civil magistrate. This is a goal and responsibility of this church. We understand that here. We understand the implications for understanding the scriptures going through them. God says that we come to the particular place where we do today in very much light terms as the Jews as the church of the text we read today came to. We have expanding empire. Will the empire rule for Christ or not or will it rule instead in the context of pluralism?

God says that we have a message to bear—truth. We don’t force people. We don’t advocate rebellion in our children. We don’t say we shouldn’t submit to a ruler unless he’s explicitly Christian. No. If Jesus said that Pilate and Caesar were established by God the Father, then surely the nations and municipalities and states we live in are governed by God as well. We must be submissive. But the other side of that is that we must bear witness to the crown rights of King Jesus in all that we do and say.

I think we bear that witness every Lord’s day. If worship is what drives all this stuff, the difference of our Lord’s day, this day owned by the Lord—let’s say King, right?—Jesus Christ is Lord. He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. This is the King’s day. This is the day the King comes to meet with his people. When you pay tithes and offerings to God, you’re giving tribute to a king. You’re declaring the messiahship of King Jesus that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and all powers must submit to him, whether it’s in the family, the church, or the state.

When you refrain from commerce on this day, that’s a civil implication of the Ten Commandments that Nehemiah brought to bear in the taking of covenant, a covenanting time in his particular time. You’re changing the nature of the day and you’re calling for the civil magistrate to once again move to restrict commerce the way the civil magistrate Nehemiah did. Now, other men may disagree that application of the Ten Commandments, but I believe it’s sound. I haven’t heard a good exegetical argument to talk about why that’s not a civil implication of the fourth commandment or why we should exist as a culture and wait for the civil government to shut down commerce instead of us living out the new creation as it exists today.

The church in the Lord’s day is the insertion of the sovereign new creation reign of the Lord Jesus Christ into history and culture. This is what we should live like, you know, this teaches us how to live the rest of our lives, right? We receive grace. We become a people of grace. We’re called on mission. We go back to our jobs and our civil callings and our families with a mission and purpose to teach and train them in the law of the Lord Jesus Christ. We live life as it ought to be lived today. You see, and we set apart this day in a special way. This is the King’s Day for us.

It’s interesting that in the Old Testament, the assertion—not just the assertion rather that God is king—is found in several passages. Psalm 10:16, “The Lord is king forever and ever. The nations have perished out of his hand.” Psalm 98, “With trumpets and the sound of a horn, shout joyfully before the Lord the King.” Worship is the declaration of the kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when we sing praises, when we sing Psalm 98, when we sing Psalm 2, we’re bearing witness that Jesus Christ is Messiah and King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Psalm 47, which we know so well by heart, singing its tune again last week—are the words the paraphrase “God is the king of all the earth. Sing praises unto him with understanding.” We sing praise because Jesus is king, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Malachi 1, he says, “Bring forth your offerings to me for I am a great king. My name is to be feared among the nations” and “Come before the king in worship.”

This is why I stress so often, you know, our appearance, our demeanor, our resting up for our appearance before the King of Kings on the Lord’s day. If we can’t assert the crown rights of King Jesus and the difference it makes in a culture on the Lord’s day, then we have nothing really to say the rest of the week. The Lord’s day is the beginning of all the rest of our assertion that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Why do we have a nation perilously close to asserting a new Roman Empire, a Pax Americana, built not upon an explicit statement of the crown rights of King Jesus that he must reign, you know, wherever the sun is found, but rather upon a religiously pluralistic basis. Why do we see that dawning in our day and age? Because American Christianity for a hundred years has denied the same thing the apostate Jews of our text denied and that is the kingship of Jesus Christ. Somehow it’s seen as some kind of new and novel theonomic, theocratic doctrine. It is not that. The great cry of the Scottish Reformation was our great slogan for many years here at Reformation Covenant Church—that are proclaiming the crown rights of King Jesus. Not just in our homes, not just in our church, not just in our voluntary activities, but in the civil arena, in our cities, in our states, in our nation, and in the empire that Jesus Christ claims absolute sovereignty over.

This is part of the message of Jesus Christ. This is the gospel that is proclaimed every Lord’s day that Jesus is King of Kings. And it is the gospel that we then take to the nations by asserting an understanding of God’s word as it applies to political reasons as political areas as well. And it is the failure of the church corporately to do this that has produced the kind of confusion, dismay, and perhaps the beginning of a new apostate empire being founded in our day and age.

God says the fault is ours. The fault is ours for not acknowledging Christ’s kingship over us personally. But God brings us together to hear the good news that just as Pilate and the Jews turned their back upon Christ, yet Jesus was ruling at the center of the text. The purple robe of authority and kingship is given to him. He shall rule from sea to shining sea. He shall manifest his kingdom. The only question is, will we as a people, individually, as a church, or as an American culture, be thrown in the dust bin of history the way the Jews were in AD 70 and then in 132 and the way the Roman Empire was eventually? Or shall we engage in this and be part of the growth of his kingdom. Question is up to us.

Let’s pray. Father, we do pray that we would acknowledge Christ’s kingship in all affairs. Help us as a church and in our homes and particularly the men of the church to think of ways to fulfill this mission statement to take the message of the crown rights of King Jesus to the civil arena. We thank you for the opportunity that Sweethearts is to us. We thank you for Dan Prentice’s persistence and try to think through ways to influence and exhort the city council to continue to work on this public evil in the midst of our community.

Thank you, Father, for this small example to us once more of the need for your church to speak forth a voice that is not based ultimately on pragmatism or logic, but a voice that is based upon the clear revelation of the crown rights of King Jesus in your word. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.