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March 07, 2004
Why Christ Alone Must be our King
Why Christ Alone Must be our King
I Samuel 8: 10-22 / Romans 13: 1-7
March 7th, 2004
Something I think about when I take walks in our beautiful Indiana countryside, particularly after coming back from another country, is that we live in a wonderful, free land. How wonderful to feel safe when I walk out on back roads and into the woods.
But despite the delight of our land and our marvelous freedom I see evidence that a lot of people are not very happy. I see more long faces than smiling faces. A lot of people in our free land are not happy. A lot of Christian people are not happy. Why?
Our Declaration of Independence says that among our rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When it says, “among,” it means we have other rights too. These are spelled out in the Bill of Rights appended to our Constitution. We have more rights than any other people on earth. Our rights guarantee our pursuit of happiness. Why, when we have so much freedom to pursue happiness, is happiness so rare?
I believe the problem goes way back. What we call Paradise, or the Garden of Eden, found our first parents very happy. They lived in harmony with God and each other. They had everything they needed. Patterns of authority weren’t spelled out so much as simply understood. They needed no Constitution, no Book of Order. God was God. God was the Creator. Adam and Eve were created beings. There was a natural hierarchy. It was all based on love. God loved people. He created them in such a way that they would naturally reflect His love, back to Him and across to each other.
The whole man-woman thing unfolds the mutual attraction God wanted to characterize human life. It would reflect His affection for what He created. “Love” is what we call this attraction that makes a man want to care for a woman and a woman want to care for a man. Love makes people behave well to each other. It could not get better. How happy our first parents must have been.
But, the Bible tells us sin entered the world. It got worse quickly. With sin came death. The first death was violent. A fellow killed his brother. He hated him. Sin messed up love. It turned it on its head. Hate and love are a lot alike, only hate is love turned upside down. What we call “lust” is merely disfigured love. Lust has still all the ingredients that made Eve alluring to Adam and Adam to Eve, but sin messed with the chemistry of love.
Hate caused Cain to murder his brother whereas once he cared for him. In a way anytime we don’t care for each other, it’s a step in the opposite direction. Murder is sin, big time sin, we say.
But sin brought other causes of death too. Sin is why we don’t care for each other. In fact, sin makes us not even like ourselves. Carl Menninger’s book, Man Against Himself is a tragic, realistic story of what prompts suicide.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism that most Presbyterians once had to memorize defines sins as “any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.”
Maybe a less theological but more to the point definition is that sin is the attitude that I am the center of everything. It’s not God. It’s not other people. I am at the center. When everyone says that, there’s a real problem. Sin brought stress and anxiety because everyone said, “I’m at the center.” So I’m angry with you because you stand in the way of me at the center. You’re angry at me for the same reason, only it’s because you are at your center. In fact, I’m afraid and you’re afraid that we don’t intend good to each other. We have hostile centers. That produces stress. Stress tightens our blood vessels and causes heart attacks.
Other physiological effects come from the stress of sin so that the body develops many different ways to get sick and die, perhaps to escape the awful consequences of self-centered living. In heaven the big alteration in us all will be that we’ll lose our self-centeredness, which will remove stress so that living forever won’t be something we fear. Now death can seem a release. Then we’ll need no release.
Sometimes you and I can feel the ill effect on our bodies that anxiety produces. My wife tested me with a little device that registers whether we’re calm or under stress. I won’t tell you how I tested out. But I was surprised at the result. There is much going on in us that we never feel. This is partly why we’re not happy. This is why we get sick. We live burdened with stress that has effects on our bodies.
We are told that every seven years our bodies change completely. God made us so that new tissue replaces old tissue regularly. In this way we are always being renewed. This must be how God planned that we should live forever, always being renewed every seven years, on and on and on.
Then, why don’t we live forever, always being renewed? Why don’t scars disappear after seven years? Why doesn’t heart disease simply disappear every seven years? Why don’t cancer cells simply de-materialize after seven years, gradually weakening before that time, dwindling down to nothing when the clock strikes “seven years at midnight”?
Something happened. That something, I believe, was self-centeredness, or sin which is the cause of all our sadness and may have a lot to do with sickness. I don’t know if they talk about that in medical school.
So God caused the idea of government to rise from within human society. People chose authority figures they called “kings.” It was a survival instinct. It was a way people held themselves in check so they wouldn’t kill each other off.
The situation I learned about in Colombia recently where homicide is the number one problem in the Province of Antioquia points to the disaster of very many people seeing themselves at the center of everything. If I am the center of everything, your life is disposable if it interferes with what I want. Bang. You’re dead. The problem is eliminated.
Paul wrote in Romans 13, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” “He is God’s servant for your good.” Paul wrote this when Nero was emperor of Rome. Nero was a bad man, a cruel man. But still it was not as bad to have an evil emperor holding society under fear than to have a nation of people at war with each other. Where there is no government, it is a worse situation than to have a bad government.
When God chose Israel from all the nations of the world to be His special people, He didn’t want them to have any kind of king. God wanted to be their king.
God gave them a very good and humble man named Moses at the beginning as the intermediary between Himself and Israel. Moses had a speech impediment. He was shy. He was fearful by nature. He wasn’t charming like President Kennedy. He didn’t walk like President Bush does, showing how fit he is. Moses did not have an imposing presence. God chose a humble man to be the go-between between Him and Israel.
Moses had no tendency to be a dictator. He was a public servant through and through. We never read anything in the Bible about Moses using his special position with God to his own advantage. He didn’t boss people around. He didn’t take all the wives he wanted. He didn’t get rich. He lived in a tent like everyone else. When Solomon built the Temple it was after building his palace, which was more imposing than the Temple. Not so Moses. Moses was never anything but a servant to Israel.
Through this humble man, Moses, God set the pattern by which He could rule people from within. God gave them what we call “the Law,” to rule their hearts. The Law was good. God wanted their assent to it. They listened to it and God wanted to hear them say “Amen” after they heard it. Why? Because God wanted then and wants still to rule us from within, with the full agreement of our hearts. This rule means care for each other as well as allegiance to God. How wonderful it is when we live together “under God.” Our currency says that is how it is overall in America. How wonderful when we make it seem so in the church.
Many of the things we do here at Faith Church are for that purpose. We not only worship together on Sunday. We meet to sing together, to study together, to eat together on Thursday evenings. We come together to give shape to what we believe. If you want to be part of us, come take part with us. This is God’s design. It is a tragedy when anyone in the church feels alone, because the purpose of the church is unity among ourselves before God. Come, take part with us. Come, help shape what we are.
In Deuteronomy 26 we read that when the people of Israel came to the Promised Land, there would be a solemn ceremony every one was to enact every year. Each person was to take a basket of produce from their harvest and go to the priest at a place the Lord would choose, and say to the priest, “I declare this day to the Lord your God that I have come into the land which the Lord swore to our fathers to give us.” The priest would take the basket and bring it to the altar of the Lord. There were a lot of baskets brought together then as a lot of people did this together. They talked together when they came together. They came to know each other. This was part of the purpose of the command.
It was like what we do on Thanksgiving Eve. You come with your sacks of foodstuffs to give to the Food Bank in town. There is something that happens in you when you get up from your seat and walk to the front with others each of whom brings a gift of food. You bring this not only for the sake of other people who need it, but to say thank you TOGETHER to God. This is one of the high points in our life together, I think many of you would say.
Thus, every person, every year remembers that we owe everything to God’s goodness. God, this generous and loving God, gives us life and all that sustains us. How happy a thing it is to remember this--together!
When God gave Israel a Law, He taught them how to live kindly with each other and with their Creator. Actually what we call “the Law,” wasn’t law at all the way you and I think of it. The word we translate “law,” (Torah) actually meant “teaching.” It is based on another word that means “teach.” The whole idea of Law began as teaching how to live rather than as commands.
A good teacher is a wonderful thing. A good teacher loves her students and they know it. And because of the love she has, the teacher can communicate a lot more than information and facts. She molds something in her students’ hearts.
I have in mind a piano teacher who teaches a lot more than music. She gets into the heads and hearts of her students and teaches them about life, about self-discipline, about good manners, about kindness, and about God. This was what God had in mind in the perfect government He planned for Israel. He would teach them how to live.
The longest of the Psalms mentions 176 times how happy a thing is the Law of God. “Thy word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path always.” How helpful it is to have a light when you’re walking on a path at night. Life can so often seem like walking on an unlighted path at night. We can’t see the way ahead. God gave us knowledge of His ways so we would know how to keep from stumbling in the dark.
But it didn’t work. God would not force this happy way on people. The condition came where everyone did what was right in his own eyes. When everyone does what is right in his own eyes, something has to give.
Perhaps it was for this reason that the people of Israel came to Samuel and demanded a king to rule over them. “Give us a king like every other nation has,” they demand rather than requested.
God told Samuel, who grieved at this, “they have not rejected you; they have rejected me from being king over them.” Samuel explained to Israel what having a king would mean. Apparently they hadn’t watched what it was like in their neighboring countries. All they saw was the beautiful pageantry. They saw the rich robes and golden crowns. They didn’t see what was underneath the pomp.
Samuel said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you . . .” and he went on to spell out how he would dominate every detail of their lives for his own purposes. He would use them and abuse them. It would be as though the whole nation existed only for the king’s sake. “We don’t care,” they said. “Give us a king like all the other nations have.” An idea called “The Divine Right of Kings” would develop as the centuries moved on which finally had to be checked because it had gotten out of hand.
In the West we still remember the donnybrook between King John of England and his nobles in the early 13th century. Enough was enough already. They forced him to sign the Magna Charta, the first legal document restricting what a king could do. Oddly, the head of the church didn’t like the idea.
Well, let me tell you where all of this is going. When Jesus was crucified, Pontius Pilate had a placard nailed above his head that read, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” John’s Gospel tells us that he had this written in three languages, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, so it was clear to everyone.
God sometimes uses unusual ways to make important lessons clear. Jesus is the King God has provided to rule our hearts from within. In a way we might say Jesus is to us what God wanted to be to Israel. But how differently we look at Jesus than ancient Israel looked at God, surrounded by thunder and lightning up there on Mt. Sinai.
We look at Jesus’ suffering for our sake and it seems the very opposite of power. How totally helpless Jesus seems in the hands of His tormentors. All the while they do what they do only because He lets them. The power of the cross looks pretty weak until you realize that it was the power of love inside Jesus that let it happen. Jesus’ authority over you will be a power that grips you from within. It can never be successfully imposed on you from without. It makes Isaac Watts’ words pertinent to you, “Love so amazing, so divine, demands, my soul, my life, my all.”
But it’s one thing to sing it in church, and another thing to sense its demand in your heart. You must visibly respond to Jesus’ demand or the reign of Jesus in your heart and mine will remain only a theory. If there is no evidence your life is under Jesus’ authority, it probably means you’re the boss. Theories of Christianity are tragic shortfalls of the real thing, no matter how correct they are. Jesus did not reign over creation from the cross in order that we should have theories about Christianity.
I saw Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” on Monday. I’ve read reports that people sobbed during the movie. No wonder.
But it is a scandal if the only result of this vivid portrayal of Jesus’ suffering for us is that we have momentary spasms of tears. Jesus did not die to make you cry. He does not ask for your pity.
The big question is, “Is Jesus really king in your life? Does He really rule in your heart? Or is He a religious idea precious to you as you live governed fully by the big number one, numero uno, me, myself, and I?
A King rules with absolute authority. Are there any aspects of your life where you deliberately obey what you know is Jesus’ will, because you read it in the Gospels? You do this even though doing it moves against what you want to do? A king isn’t like a president with checks and balances to his authority. A king isn’t like a dictator who rules only by right of power. A king rules, he believes, by Divine right. Only Jesus has Divine right. And He will never impose this right over your will. Jesus wants to rule you from within. You are free to reject His rule, but don’t blame Him that you’re unhappy. If you will let Him rule you from within, you will be happy.
You will live in a way that is a blessing to other people so many of them will like you. You will live in a way that asks to serve rather than to be served; that asks to forgive rather than to be forgiven, that asks to understand rather than to be understood.
You can’t love other people if you have a keen sense of your rights, of what you want, if you are tight with your time, with your abilities, with what you say you own. You can’t be happy that way either. Happiness and loving other people have a lot to do with each other. If you are not happy it is a good clue that you are the Lord of your life, and you don’t like it at all. You say you are a Christian. Then give your life to God. Give Jesus the command of your life, and you will be happy.
Happiness has nothing to do with our rights. It has everything to do with who governs our hearts from within. Christianity has only a little bit to do with what we say. It has a lot to do with what we do. It is a life to be lived more than a creed to be discussed.
Give your heart to Jesus, actually. And you will find happiness creeping in to you. Do it. Begin, if you need to begin, as you take Communion this morning. Continue to do it, if you have begun, as you take Communion. Don’t take Communion if you have no intention of making Jesus Lord of your life. Taking Communion is like a re-enactment ceremony of Jesus’ coronation in our hearts.
Let us pray: O Lord Jesus Christ, whom we call our king, rule our untamed hearts, and make us free indeed. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at March 7, 2004 09:30 AM