King
I’m not a fan of the “just open your Bible and read whatever page it opens to” kind of Bible study. But
every once in a while, doing just that reveals something interesting.
I was flipping
through my Bible the other day and it opened to Deuteronomy 33:5 which reads, “Thus the
LORD became king in Jeshurun, when the heads of the people were gathered, all the tribes of Israel together.”
The kingship of God
is huge! But unfortunately, we don’t always grasp this necessary point of theology. We will be discussing this in an upcoming sermon series, but I wanted to mention a few things about it in this
article.
Ecclesiastes 8:4
says, “For the word of the king is supreme, and who may say to him, ‘What are you
doing?’”
If we consider this
verse it tells us that what the king says is law. We are not to question him. If the king says to be loving, we don’t get to question that. If the king says to forgive, we don’t get to question that. If the king says we are to be servants, we don’t get to question that. We don’t make the rules
or even vote on them!
Unfortunately, we
have all been raised in a democracy. I say ‘unfortunatley’ not because I don’t like the freedoms we have
in our form of government, but because we tend to think that God’s kingdom is a democracy as well. And it’s not.
In our country we
have a “Not my president” movement. And in our country, you have the right to feel that way. If you
don’t like the way the current president is conducting the business of the country, you have the opportunity to vote against him every 4 years. Some people, however, choose to ignore his policies and
legislation since they don’t agree with him.
The problem comes
when we start bringing that same attitude into God’s kingdom and the church. This is why I say it’s
unfortunate that we have all grown up in a democracy. We feel we have the ‘right’ to ignore the commands of the king when we don’t agree. We don’t want to be loving when someone does something we
disagree with, so we aren’t loving. We don’t want to forgive when someone has hurt us, so we don’t forgive. We don’t want to be a servant, (we don’t want anyone else telling us what we should do), so
we don’t serve. Instead, we think we know what’s best, we know what’s right and we will do what we want to. And all the while we consider ourselves ‘good
Christians.’
In reality, what
happens when we act this way is we deny that God is king and we make ourselves king of our own lives. And when we deny God’s kingship, we really aren’t Christians at all.
So,
who’s king of your life? If you say, “God,” do you truly follow everything the king has spoken? Or do
you ignore his teaching when it is uncomfortable for you?
Think about it.
Lance
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