The King of God’s Kingdom

The good news is that with Jesus Christ on the throne, then there’s nothing that the Lord Jesus doesn’t rule over. There’s nothing that he cannot, and does not, and will not defeat. The Lord Jesus Christ is the only king, which means that there is only one kingdom.

Christ is our king, and we see that first of all in his ascension and all that precedes it in the Gospels.

Think about what the Lord Jesus Christ preaches. He preaches the kingdom of God. He says, “When I’m near, the kingdom of God has come near.” And what’s required in response to that kingdom, Jesus says, is that we repent. And he was speaking specifically to Israel, to the people of God. They were to repent in response to his coming as the king of his kingdom.

What’s more, the Lord Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, which we know from Daniel chapter 7 is the title of the one given all authority in heaven and on earth. One of the themes of the book of Daniel is that the kingdom of Christ overthrows all human kingdoms, all empires.

And so, when we see Jesus rising from the dead, we see him teaching his disciples about the kingdom of God. At the beginning of the book of Acts, what we have is an example of what it looks like for God to be in charge of all our lives.

Now, you might expect the rest of the New Testament, after the Gospels, to be repeating that theme that we get at the beginning of the Gospels: the kingdom of God has come near; repent. But actually, it’s not articulated in exactly the same way as that. Rather, what the apostles do is that they draw our attention to Jesus Christ. They draw our attention not so much to the kingdom, but to the king of the kingdom.