So many failures of understanding in the Christian life are a product of conflating the metaphorical and the literal. It strikes me that the monarchy enthusiasts who gave rise to yesterday’s post serve as a fine example of the confusion that so easily results from taking figures of speech literally and from allegorizing that which was intended to speak of an immediate physical reality.
If you haven’t read it, we were discussing the origins, biblicality and implications of the popular phrase “Christ is King”. Which is totally fine, until it isn’t.
Words and Meanings
I pointed out that apostolic usage points Christians away from formulations like “Christ is King” and toward formulations like “Jesus is Lord” and “Lord Jesus Christ”. It is not that the first is untrue or heretical — far from it — but rather that the wrong people are saying it for reasons that may not be transparent. Some of them are even saying it to the right people.
In New Testament language, “Jesus is Lord” describes the Savior’s relationship to the Christian, recognized and accepted voluntarily in our present era of grace. “Christ is King” (extra-biblical, though not anti-biblical) at best describes the relationship of Messiah, first to Israel, then to the surviving nations of this world, devout or unbelieving, like it or not, in a coming day when there will be no other option. The only reason for a Gentile Christian to prefer the latter over the former when signing off online is that he can’t tell the difference between himself and a Messianic Jew. If he has been taught by John Piper and his Supersessionist ilk, his confusion is entirely understandable, but no less confused for all that.
Let’s try thinking a little further about literal and spiritual kingdoms.
My Kingdom
When the Lord Jesus told Pilate “my kingdom is not of this world”, Pilate was quite unoffended by the revelation. We know this because he immediately went back outside and told the Jews, “I find no guilt in him.” If claiming a kingdom outside this present world were an affront to Caesar, this would not have been the case. Whatever unregenerate Pilate understood by “not of this world” — whether he thought Jesus was speaking figuratively, extraterrestrially or from the lunatic fringe — he did not perceive any sort of kingdom based in another dominion as a threat to the current political order he represented. In short, the one way he didn’t take the word “kingdom” was literally. Spiritual concepts are often less scary than they should be.
What was the Lord saying? We may not be able to say with 100% certainty, but we can quickly eliminate certain possibilities.
Three Possibilities
First, the King of kings and Lord of lords was not denying he was qualified to be the literal, actual, king of Israel in his day. He absolutely was. The genealogies in Matthew and Luke are there to assure us of that. Stories litter the Old Testament of God’s interventions, both circumstantial and miraculous, in order to preserve Messiah’s legal right to the throne of David inviolate and unimpeachable. God thwarted the sexual advances of three foreign kings who might have impeached the Messianic line through the cowardice of Abraham and Isaac. He struck down two half-Canaanite grandsons of Jacob, keeping Satan from contaminating the Messianic line through Judah. He gave a past-his-prime Judean from the Messianic line with no marriage prospects an improbably virtuous young wife in Ruth. He struck down David and Bathsheba’s bastard, ensuring nobody could claim the father of the next king of Israel was actually a Hittite. He enabled Joash, the last remaining link to David in his family, to escape murderous Athaliah.
So then, the genetic qualifications of Jesus for the throne of Israel were impeccable; God saw to it with his usual 1000% efficiency. If Jesus of Nazareth were in any way unqualified to sit on the throne of Israel, why the triumphal entry? Why the plot to murder him? The available evidence that Jesus was legally entitled to reign over an earthly, literal kingdom of his fellow Jews convinced even his mortal enemies. We can be sure one day he will do so, notwithstanding his words to Pilate.
Second, the Lord was not telling Pilate he would never claim his legal right to rule and sit in his embodied state on Israel’s throne. He surely will, and Pilate probably would not have cared provided it didn’t make his day in court more complicated. But Jesus certainly was not going to do it during his first advent. That ship had sailed. When he comes again, there will be no question that while his kingdom may not originate in this world or be tainted by the history and character of this world’s leadership style, it will indisputably be imposed on this world very literally in a future day.
Third, he was not saying that the subjects of his kingdom are not physically present in this world. We certainly are. When the apostles told the Jews, “We must obey God rather than men,” Peter was making that reality very clear indeed. There is a line where obedience to earthly rule stops, and it’s wherever God draws it. That precedent goes back to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
Earthly and Heavenly
So then, there is a physical, literal, very tangible kingdom of heaven spoken about in scripture that will involve the physical, literal rule of heaven on earth in the midst of God’s enemies and to the great joy of its willing subjects, of whom the most prominent and proximate will be Jews. May it come soon! In this looking-forward-to-his-millennial-reign sense, we can certainly speak of Christ as Israel’s king-in-waiting, and pray “Your kingdom come.” Yes, in this sense Christ is King. That sort of statement is both a promise and a threat, depending on your disposition toward him.
But the relationship of the church to the spiritual kingdom concept is a little more complex and hard to work out, and it doesn’t surprise me we have trouble getting our heads around it. The church is not a literal kingdom, anymore than it is a literal body, literal building or literal bride. These are metaphors coined by the Holy Spirit of God to describe aspects of our relationship to Christ. Where the church is concerned, let me strongly suggest that Christ’s throne and scepter are no more literal and physical than the ligaments that join spiritual Head to spiritual body, the cement that joins Capstone or Cornerstone to the rest of the building, or the robes worn by the spiritual Bridegroom to greet his spiritual bride. They are figures, metaphors and spiritual pictures designed to reveal precious truths to the human mind. Christ does not need his genetic descent from David to reign over his church, and his reign over us would in no way fulfill his Old Testament literal, national promises to the patriarchs of Israel. These are separate domains of rule related only by the fact that the Bible calls both “kingdoms”. We do ourselves no favors by taking two concepts, congregations and callings which the Bible distinguishes and mixing them together.
Non-Literal vs. Insubstantial
To insist these metaphors, including the kingdom, are not literal where the church is concerned, is absolutely not to say that they are insubstantial, inconsequential or have no real impact in the world. The church is a kingdom of priests without robes, miters, altars or animal sacrifices serving a king who rules from a spiritual city that one cannot drive up to in either an SUV or even a spaceship. Our war is waged with the sword of the Spirit, not iron and steel. That said, the gates of hell will not prevail against us, gates that no combination of literal tanks, mortars and ballistae could ever breach.
For that matter, Satan is far more concerned about sinners believing the gospel and crossing over from death into life than he will be about losing entire cities and even nations to the rule of Christ during the millennium. Freed from the pit after 1,000 years, he will win back the allegiance of institutions and earthly powers with his trademark deception. On the other hand, one former subject of the kingdom of darkness in the hand of Christ is lost to Satan for all eternity, deaf and blind to all his manipulations and freed forever from his chains. The troops of the redeemed will never perish or be reclaimed by our former master. There will be no effectual return engagement with the tempter for hearts that truly belong to the Savior.
So then, Christ’s sovereignty over his saints spans two domains, two realities, two eras, two types of kingship, and no simple, easily explained way of thinking about them. Arriving at a mature understanding of this subject is not a project accomplished with a few quick and easy lessons in systematic theology.
Based on what the Bible teaches about both, if you could be part of an earthly kingdom or a spiritual kingdom, which would you choose? Right. Me too. And if the spiritual kingdom is really what matters to the Lord in the long run, why not live like it here and now?
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