22nd December 2024

The Lion King and Christmas

Passage: Matthew 1:1-2, Daniel 3-4
Service Type:

The Kingdom of God operates as a divine monarchy, not a republic. While God the Father maintains His rule from Heaven, He established His Kingdom on Earth through Christ’s birth into the royal line of David. This truth appears even in modern children’s stories like The Blood of the King, which mirrors the Christmas narrative of royal lineage. The Church flourishes when it embraces this monarchical structure, recognising Jesus as its sole ruler rather than operating by democratic principles. Through Christmas, God demonstrated that He not only rules from above but comes near to His people.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] In this Christmas season, we look with hope maybe something new about Christmas that we might see coming in the media or in our community. And my estimate is that this season there are less Christmas things on than I’ve noticed in previous years. But there is one child, children’s show, which is coming on to our TV audiences. And the name of it is The Blood of the King. The Blood of the King. Mufasa, the Lion King. And it’s a set for children. It’s an African lion expose. And the storyline tells us that this lost and alone orphaned cub, Mufasa, meets a sympathetic lion named Taka, who is an heir to the royal bloodline of lions. I paused and thought through to myself, what am I observing here? It’s actually a public Christmas storyline for children, but it’s drawing from a lot of the motifs and ideas that are quite Christmas. The idea that there is a bloodline, a human line where there’s a king, King David, he was in the Old Testament.

[00:01:39] And into his bloodline or his heritage comes a baby. And so the royal background of the born baby Jesus at Christmas is heralded to us in the scriptures. And that’s quite different from how some people had understood Christmas because there’s another half to the story of not only that Jesus is born of royal blood. In actual fact, Matthew’s Gospel in chapter 1 and verses 1 and 2, we’re looking at, we’ll put it up on the screen there, that the genealogy of Jesus comes down from Abraham and David. But when you track it right down at the tail end or right before it gets to Jesus, it’s actually Joseph that they’re talking about, who’s not the physical father of Jesus, but the person who represents the family that he was born into. So the heritage comes down to him through Joseph. And in some of the other Gospels, you get more a storyline that tells you about Jesus’ background through Mary. But most of all, what we read in the explanation of Christmas has to do with Jesus’ birth being because of the Holy Spirit,

[00:03:06] overshadowing Mary so that which was born in her was of the Holy Ghost. It was Jesus being brought from heaven. Now, I said it wrongly. It was the eternal Son of God being brought from heaven and to be born baby Jesus. And that is why, as I’ve said a few times, the Bible tells us that God the Father said this day, a son was begotten him, because in his humanity Jesus was born and the Father gained a son who was human as well as being divine. This is all a part of the storyline that is reflected in the lion cub taka being from royal background and the little baby or young lion Mufasa getting into the heritage of that. And it amazed me thinking over it just how much the things have been turned around backwards because previously it used to be that people deliberately had storylines that were much obviously from Christmas. But now we discover that Christmas has been behind what they’re not telling us.

[00:04:21] This bloodline and the title, the blood of the king, or how that does match who Jesus went on to be, the king who gave his life for our sins and died on the cross and by his blood we have the forgiveness of sins. Well, that turnaround of who was copying who was in one sense rather unnotable to me, but a little bit of hope in my mind that the Christmas story can’t be suppressed too much if it turns up in the cartoon stories that we give to our kids. What is interesting, however, is that when we do have a look through at the way that the Old Testament people understood God, they understood a very important aspect of him that we should never lose. In our church we have teaching that is from both the Old Testament and the New. It’s actually a mistake to set up your church and only teach from the New Testament because it’s the latest. It certainly is based on the New Covenant that superseded the Old Covenant.

[00:05:38] Certainly the temple worship has been bypassed, how should I say it’s been fulfilled in something more accurate, where now where the temple is is in heaven. And Jesus in heaven with the Father is now what is our solace when we pray. But the Old Testament in the beginning parts of it in particular is very strongly about the purpose of explaining how there is one God who is the head of the whole kingdoms of the earth, and that we see particularly in the book of Daniel. So if we turn to some of the stories that are in the book of Daniel, we’ll see just how God is the God of heaven, is the major thing the Old Testament presents to us, and which people who were completely not religious in the sense of being a Jew or religious in the sense, because it’s pre-Christian days anyway, these people nonetheless were taught by God that he was still the God of heaven. And so we have here on the screen from Daniel in chapter 3. And it’s a bit of the story of three Jewish boys who had been taken off to be in captivity,

[00:07:00] and how they had to face the burning fiery furnace. And so we read about these. There are certain called Deans, they’re not the Jewish ones, they’re the enemies of the Jews, there are certain called Deans who came forward and maliciously accused the Jews. The Jews are these some young fellows, late teenagers probably, who are there having been taken away from the land of Israel and are now in captivity in Babylon or in some of the heathen areas. And these called Deans declared to King Nebuchadnezzar, O King live forever! The O King have made a decree that every man is the sound of the horn, the pipe, the lyre, the trigon, the harp, the bagpipe… they always did it in severe big ways back then, when it was the King who was having the parade. And every kind of music. When you hear that, you have to fall down and worship the golden image that King had set up. And whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast into a burning fiery furnace.

[00:08:03] Probably most of us are familiar with the story of the three Jewish lads, I can call them, who were thrown into the burning fiery furnace, and when that happened they refused to bow down to the king’s request, and they were thrown into that fire, so fiercely was the order to make the fire hot that the flames that licked out the top from which the men of the army had to throw our three friends in through, licked out of the top and killed the men who carried them up there to get that done. But Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego fell down into the burning fiery furnace, and then what’s interesting is that Nebuchadnezzar came to look, because the way the furnace was had the hole that you threw them down into, and had a great big window, probably have one at each end, where people could stand at a distance further back so you don’t feel the scorch of the heat, and you could watch

[00:09:05] the sizzle, and you could hear the screams, and you could smell the smoke, it was a barbaric age, and this decree of the king was one that he and his important people around him were there to watch and to hear. And Kimya Ganesha, I’m reading verse 24, was astonished, and he rose up in haste, and he declared to his counsellors, Did we not cast three men bound into the fire? And they answered and said to the king, True O King, True O King. He answered and said, But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt. And the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods. Interestingly, if you read this passage in a more modern or especially a paraphrase translation, it sort of makes a bit of an assumption, or it’s not wrong assumption, but it makes a statement bigger than what was actually said. And they put into the mouth of the king, and the fourth

[00:10:13] is the son of god. Now, what is actually happening there in the writing of the Scriptures, and in the translation of the paraphrase, is that they’re taking knowledge from the New Testament. That’s actually what we would believe, that the fourth was the son of god. But who are we talking about the son of god, but not the one who yet is Jesus? But we’re talking about the person of the second person of the Trinity, and that is who I would agree probably was that fourth person. But the actual wording that at least Nebuchadnezzar understood was that the fourth is like a son of God, which meant there was something God like divinely was there, something miraculous was happening. So he says, the fourth is like a son of God. This is because at that particular time in the Old Testament and the revelation of God, people did not really know about what we now call the Son of God and were referring to

[00:11:17] Jesus because His coming to earth at Christmas was yet to occur. They didn’t understand anything that there is one God that was getting through to them and saying he’s the one in charge, but they just knew him as the one God and didn’t have any idea, although it was to be seen if you read the Old Testament carefully, there’s plenty of hints, but their understanding was not to take on board that there was the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as we understand. The rest of the storyline goes on that Nebuchadnezzar is very awed by this. If you follow the book of Daniel through to the next chapter 4, you’ll find that Nebuchadnezzar speaks about how he gets humbled in Daniel in chapter 4, and so he begins to speak and it’s in verse 41 that we’ll start with.

[00:12:17] He’s spoken about how he wants to say what God has done for him, and in verse 41 he says, if my eye can catch it, actually where you’ve got might have been good. Go back, please, earlier, and we need to be in Daniel 4, in fact we’ll pick it up in verse 6. Nebuchadnezzar was at ease, he’s giving a bit of a testimony, it’s a rather interesting part in the book of Daniel where the King is giving his testimony as to how God dealt with him. Nebuchadnezzar was at ease, he says, I was at ease in my house and prospering in my palace and I saw a dream that made me afraid, as I lay in my bed the fancies and the visions of my head alarmed me.

[00:13:12] So I made a decree that all the wise men of Babylon should be brought before me and that they might make known to me the interpretation of the dream. So all of that crew of people who were meant to be ones who could interpret things were brought in and of course they couldn’t explain the dream. And so they’re told that their bad things are going to happen to them unless they can. And eventually Daniel, who’s understood to be someone who’s still around the kingdom, is scouted for and he is asked to come and brings an explanation to the King. if we can get down to a little further down, all right so where the king speaks in verse 9 verse 9, O Belshazzar, now that’s Daniel’s name that they given him in his role there in Babylon, O Belshazzar, chief of the magicians because I

[00:14:09] know that the Spirit of the Holy Guards is in you and that no mystery is too difficult for you he’s got quite a reputation as Daniel tell me the visions of my dream that I saw on their interpretation and the visions my head as I land these and he tells what the vision was at this point there’s another dream he has later that he wants the people that tell him what the dream was before they tell the interpretation but this one he does tell the hint for what the dream was verse 11 a great tree was there and it was in the midst of the earth and it was great. And the tree grew and became strong. And its top reached to heaven and it was visible to the end of the world. Its leaves were beautiful and fruit abundant and in it was found food for all and the beasts of the field are fed from it.

[00:14:59] And I saw in my vision, in my head as I lay, behold a watcher, maybe some supernatural person, an angel perhaps, a watcher, a holy one, came down from heaven. And he proclaimed aloud and said, thus, chop down the tree, lop off its branches, and strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts of the field flee from under it, and the bird from its branches, but leave the stump of the roots in the earth. And then what happens is a rather drastic thing, and King wants Belshazzar to be able to give an explanation of it all. So we’ll continue on, and he has this promise of what he’ll do for the person who can interpret, and Daniel is the only one he finds who’s able to give it a go. And so King says to Belshazzar, let me make known to the interpretation, no Belshazzar

[00:16:05] says to him, no, if you’re able, the spirit of the holy gods is in you, you’ll be able to interpret. So then Daniel, whose name was Belshazzar, was dismayed for a little while, and his thoughts alarmed him, not because he couldn’t do it, because of what he understood those thoughts to mean. And Belshazzar Anson said, oh Lord, may the dream be for those who hate you, not for you and its interpretation for your enemies. The tree you saw which grew and became strong so that its top reached to heaven, it was visible to the end of the whole earth, whose leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in which was food for everybody, for all under which the beasts of the field found

[00:16:55] shade and in whose branches the birds of the heavens lived. That is you, O King. You have grown and become strong, your greatness grown and reaches to heaven, your dominion to the ends of the earth, and because of what the King saw, the Watcher, the Holy One coming down from heaven and saying chop down the tree and destroy it, but leave the stump and its roots and the earth bound, bound with iron and bronze. So the answer to that is brought out by Daniel that the tree is actually Nebuchadnezzar himself and he’s going to be cut down. And he says, O King, it’s a decree of the Most High. Now notice how, as in the Old Testament understanding up to now, there is this revelation of the

[00:17:50] one God being the God who is on high and he always is on high. He doesn’t leave heaven, he’s always in heaven. You know how you know that by the very prayer that Jesus taught his prayed himself, we call it the Lord’s Prayer, and how he taught his disciples to be the way to pray which they carried on into the church, our Father who is in heaven. We never get past the facts of the centre of the rule of God on high as in heaven and whatever he does in coming to earth in the person of his Son, it’s not that he leaves heaven. And that is why when someone comes to Christ and someone comes and asks, can I become a Christian, the prayer that I lead them in is a prayer that begins like this, O Father

[00:18:43] in heaven, O God in heaven, I know that I have sinned, please forgive me for all of my sin, please make me clean in the deepest part of wronging me. And that prayer addresses just the fact that there is a God in heaven. That’s not anything that ever gets superseded. God inhabits heaven, it is the seat of his authority. But when we say God, it’s unspecified exactly, except we know the Father is the one who’s in charge in heaven. In Jesus’ prayer, the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that. And at the end of that Lord’s Prayer it says, may your kingdom come, may your will, listen, be done on earth as it is in heaven.

[00:19:31] And so the whole idea of the kingdom of God on earth is not that God transferred then his rulership from heaven down to something on earth, but that the Father, through the fact that our one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the one God in three persons, the second person of that trinity was sent to become the baby Jesus. And the baby Jesus was born to be royal. And so his birth wasn’t only that he came from heaven because the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary’s womb to deliver him from eternity to her womb. But also that he was born into a line of people, Joseph being the Father, Mary also as mother has a line going back to David. And it is a royal line and a royal birth that happened at Christmas.

[00:20:30] And that Christmas birth was one that brought the kingdom of God to earth under the rulership of a person who has the right lineage to be the Messiah. He had to be a, from the pedigree of David, he had to be a Jew, which is from Abraham, which is just wise. Last week, Sunday morning, we were talking from Matthew 1, verses 1 and 2, about the lineage of Jesus at his birth was both from Abraham and from David. Because he came to put up a monarchy where there is a king and there are subjects. He didn’t come to start, as it were, that other style of government where you have a democratic way in which everybody is taking a part of the rulership, a republic is what it was called.

[00:21:22] And that monarchy or republic, when it comes to spiritual things, is never a republic. I think it’s nothing wrong with republics, by the way, I’m not giving a political statement, I’m giving a statement, a spiritual statement about the church. The church is not a republic. The church is a monarchy where one person only, Jesus, rules. And he gives his leadership to certain persons he chooses and he leads. And we are not people who are a part of a republic to say what should happen. Rather, we’re a part of a monarchy where we are subjects of the leadership of King Jesus. And as people in the church get themselves aligned to do as Jesus leads so the church is happy and prospers, but where we get to see the church as being for us to decide what

[00:22:19] we shall do and be, it becomes a mess. And the history of all churches has the same problem. It doesn’t matter where you go, if you go to mission fields and the church is established and the same thing happens, but you’ll find that there is a sense in human nature to want to make it like a republic, where we’ll say what our church is. No, we don’t. We should go and ask God. The one God who is over high over all and had to show Nebuchadnezzar that he shouldn’t think of himself so high and mighty and who humbled people who try and put themselves in that position is a bit of a principle that happens all the time even in the church, for

[00:23:03] when we have a God who is leading his church, Jesus is the head of the church and as he leads it, he leads it and we are his subjects to do as he leads us to. Well, that we’ve been going on about this I have in these last weeks of Sermon’s, but we find in the whole storyline of Daniel in the Old Testament even before the era where they understood anything about Christmas and understood nothing about the fact of the trinity and how Jesus comes to set up the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The Kingdom of Heaven not being the Kingdom just going to heaven. The kingdom of heaven is God’s rule on earth, as the Lord’s Prayer says. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so even before, though, the time of that being understood, the principle that you can’t

[00:23:57] rebel against the God of heaven, which is God the Father, who rules from heaven. And now he also rules his church through his Son from earth. The Son is in heaven with the Father now, but he has sent his Holy Spirit to constitute the leadership in the church. And as the church discovers how to listen for the Holy Spirit and to follow in step with him, so there is a glorious subjectiveness, I don’t know if I’ve got the word subject in my mind, but we are the subjects, there’s a glorious execution of the monarchy of the King. It is the spiritual kingdom of God here on earth, and the church is the chief place it operates from.

[00:24:46] Not that God has given away the leadership of all the kingdoms of the earth, as Nebuchadnezzar had to find out, I’ve jumped over a little bit as to the punishment that he got, it was on the screen at the moment, where Nebuchadnezzar thought that he was so much the head of all All the kingdoms that God had to humble him, and our God did it was making him lose his mind. So he got pushed out of operating the kingdom, and he was naked, and he had to eat grass and had just, you know, the jewel in his back and his mind gone. And there’s seven periods of time. I think that means seven years in which that happens, seven periods there as we read it there in verse 25, that he went like that.

[00:25:32] And then God restored his mind to him, and he got put back into being in his position in King. But then he speaks and in his testimony he gives the talk about the fact that he has humbled himself before the God of Heaven. God the Father has not left Heaven. He is still ruler overall, but he has begun a process of there being a rulership of the Kingdom of Heaven, or Kingdom of God, they’re the same thing, different names, but the same thing on earth through the Messiah which is King Jesus. And his humanity is a part of how he qualified to be the leader of the Church. And though he’s taken that leadership in his ascension back to Heaven and being crowned

[00:26:19] King of Kings and Lord of Lords, he through the sending of the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit down to earth, it’s a day of Pentecost, and the Church came into existence. This rulership of the Kingdom of God from earth, we’re a Messiah who is human as well as divine as the King, and it is a monarchy that we have found ourselves in, we do as he tells us to, we’re his subjects and he leads us for our good and for our use and for our expansion of his Gospel. And this is the storyline that the whole Bible, when put together, helps us see where the lead comes from in the Church. Well I’ve said enough this morning, but tonight when we come to the Sun service, it’s going

[00:27:09] to be a service where I have a title, What Christmas is All About, and to let you lot in on what the answer is, but what’s Christmas all about? Christmas is actually all about God not just staying in Heaven and giving decrees, not just commanding allegiance for we, his subjects on earth, which we are, but the Kingdom of Heaven and God himself bringing it all down to us, and the title I’ve got for tonight is Christmas About God Coming to You. That’s what we’ll be talking of. I hope that if you haven’t got anything to get yourself reminded, or if you have belatedly perhaps someone you could invite tonight at 5 o’clock, it’s got the time on here, Sunday 22nd December starting 5pm, is our Sun service and Christmas carols night wrapped into one.

[00:28:11] There’ll be a lot of carols sung, but it’ll also be like how we have experienced previous occasions of having what we call Sun service, it’s a bit of a play on the word Sun, because there’s S-O-N. It’ll be 5 o’clock, it still will be sunny, S-U-N, but nonetheless the service is about the Sun. And what is Christmas about? But it’s all about how God comes to you, he comes to us. He hasn’t stayed on high and to creed alone, but he has come to us. And so there’s probably a few of these left out in the foyer that you can pick one up if you need one, I’m not sure, you’ll have to look and see.

[00:28:51] 5 o’clock come along to the Sun service where we’re going to celebrate that Christmas is all about God coming to us. Let’s have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father we thank you for the recitation of the book of Daniel of how that ancient King Nebuchadnezzar had to get humbled. And in his humbling he recognised there was the one who was the God on high, the most high God he called him, that he had to be a subject to. And Lord we thank you that you don’t let people take over your role of being in charge. We thank you that you’ve understood not only to be the God who rules, but you wanted to show to us that you’re the God who loves and cares.

[00:29:41] And so tonight we ask for that Sun service, that as we talk about Christmas being about the God who comes to you, that you’ll bring along people who need to understand how to become a Christian as to let Jesus come to them. We pray that in his name, Amen.

Listen to a recent sermon