The Monarchy of Christ
The Kingdom of God operates as a Divine monarchy with Jesus Christ as King. This spiritual Kingdom, foreshadowed in earthly constitutional monarchies, requires our willing submission as subjects. Matthew’s Gospel traces Jesus’ royal lineage through Abraham and King David, establishing His legitimate claim to the throne. Just as earthly monarchies provide stability through proper authority, true spiritual stability comes only through accepting Christ’s Lordship and receiving His forgiveness for our rebellion against His rightful rule.
Automatically Generated Transcript
[00:00:00] I heard on the news just yesterday, what perhaps is only a rumour, but it’s being broadcast around the world, that King Charles is considering stepping down in order to let his son William to become the king. There has been this show on TV called Crown that traces all through Queen Elizabeth the Second’s era and through the ups and downs to do with Lady Diana and her death. It’s brought to my attention just how ignorant I have been about the heritage we as Australians have received through being a part of the Commonwealth of Nations that are joined to Britain. The link that joins us there is that we all are, and this was the surprise for me, monarchies. Much of the discussion that there is today about what style of government works best
[00:01:09] hovers between, at least in the Western nations, a choice between being a republic or being a monarchy. But I was surprised to find that when people write up about the monarchies around the world still existent, it includes Australia, it includes New Zealand, it includes Papua New Guinea, it includes some of the other island places nearby. Canada is a monarchy, and I got a surprise. I always thought monarchies had some king person with a crown on his head walking around a lot. We are a monarchy. Well, actually, what we are is called a bit of a definition adjustment, a constitutional
[00:01:55] monarchy, where there still is a king figure who is looking after things going according to the Constitution. Where there is a change of government, the persons who voted in by the elections go along to, in our case, the Governor General and get their commission. We actually are a monarchy. The word monarchy means one person rules, whereas a republic is where all the people somehow together rule. Of course, even now the countries that are republicans do through some representative nature of the people choosing folks to make their decisions in parliament for them. So Australia here, we’re a bit of a mixture between being a representative republic to
[00:02:47] some degree and being a constitutional monarchy. If you knew that, put your hand up just so I can feel the shame that I hadn’t. A lot of you did, some of you I should say, but I’ve been surprised that’s the fact that we were a monarchy per favour of King Charles. Now, King Charles and me have got a connection, because King Charles and Lady Diana, when they got engaged, were both respectively one year older than me and Michelle. The age difference between the man and the woman was likely to be a problem except King Charles and Lady Diana wrote it out, and Michelle and I benefited from nobody who had any nerve to tell us off because of our age difference. Anyway, but learning about monarchies also is important when you come to the Scriptures
[00:03:55] to read about the Kingdom of God. What Christianity is all about is God’s institution of his Kingdom on earth. In the Lord’s Prayer we pray, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, so on earth. We prayed in the Lord’s Prayer because there is such a thing as the Kingdom of God here on earth. Are you in it? Have you been aware of it? How do you get in? Interestingly, that is why we have four Gospels at the beginning of our New Testament, because
[00:04:30] they tell how you get in. How you get in is by your approach to Jesus, the eternal Son of God, and also this human being in whom God came. So it has been explained to us in the leadership of the service that God is with us, is one of the things that was said when Jesus was born. If you put together all the things that were said when Jesus was born, you see a picture of one of the greatest miracles of all history. God coming from eternity and taking on humanity, to live amongst us not as a stranger or owner to come and ask for rent, or the boss of the business to tell us we’d better change our ways and work harder, he came to be one of us and took on humanity. So one of the titles
[00:05:32] given to him is God With Us. Well it’s more a description than a title, God With Us. That by his son, God’s son, the second person of the trilogy, you know about God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Well God the Son, he’s always been the son but he wasn’t always human. Previously, he amongst the God had shared the councils of eternity, a part of which was to create this world, a part of which was to create every person that comes into the world. He’s the one that lit your spiritual light when you came into the world. He’s there at our birth just as he’s going to be at the end of life as well. Jesus, God’s eternal son, the second person of the Trinity, he in the councils of the Godhead took on humanity and was born as a baby. That’s why the Bible can talk about God the Father looking down and seeing baby Jesus and
[00:06:34] saying, this day a son has begotten me. Your words to that effect. For Jesus in his birth as a human. He had a Heavenly Father who said, I’ve got a son in a special sense. It was the son he’d always had but a son now a human person. Now this morning the lead-up I’ve been giving to you is because I want to talk about the genealogies in the Bible. They’re the list of names of people who are the backdrop to the coming of Jesus. It’s usually a boring subject when you go through all the names and generally speaking when sermons are designed they ask the question, how do you explain the difference between how Matthew does it and how Luke does it. They’re the two, they have lots of genealogy stuff. The answers to that question are rather interesting. I’m not going to go through
[00:07:33] all the differences because that would take us to the evening service and you wouldn’t have even gotten home for lunch. There are a lot of differences between Matthew and Luke in these genealogies. The biggest one we’ll notice if we turn in our scriptures, we’ll put it on the screen for you, to Matthew chapter 1 and the first two verses. We’re talking from Matthew because that’s the book of the New Testament. Our church has been going through for a couple of years now, I think almost, and Matthew’s gospel in chapter 1 verses 1 and 2. This is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and it goes on down. This is a genealogy but
[00:08:26] noticed how Matthew describes it with the word the book. The little Greek word that’s used there in our New Testament, the way it was written originally was in Greek, is the word biblos from which we get Bible. Leon Morris, one of the commentators about the scriptures I love to refer to because he really is an evangelical with a lot of study done and is one of the best commentaries you can get on anything if you find something by Leon Morris Byatt. But in his commentary he would prefer to read the story of the genealogy or the story of the background, though I forget the second word, but he wants to make the word book to be more story. Now the reason is that the meaning of the original word doesn’t have an exact equivalent to one English word. It’s the
[00:09:29] idea of a bit of a mixture of a storyline nonetheless, giving us explanations to understand, but also it’s got the idea of record, an official record. And so Matthew’s Gospel is written to be an official record but also to be a storyline and what story it is is the story of Jesus because the heart of Christianity is all about Jesus, all about the facts that he came with a mission and in that coming to as a mission it was to include his living out what humanity was always meant to be but that we failed because at the beginning of human history we the human race sinned, our representatives didn’t let us into sin and sin has been our biggest problem ever since. I think you’d be an idiot not to see what happens in the news all around the world and in
[00:10:30] Australia, beautiful Brisbane, not to understand that we’ve got a major sin problem everywhere. Now what most people don’t recognise is they see that as the teenagers who are running around the streets at night, or they see it as the people taken to jail because of doing monstrous things, or they see it as the selfishness of some of the people who have the money-bags and not wanting to share it, or they see it as the breakdown of relationships that can happen anywhere, They see sin therefore exemplify but the Bible teaches something deeper. It sees that sin is in every heart. It is something even with the best of training you might be a fine upstanding person but you are in the Bible’s definition of you. You are a sinner for all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of
[00:11:28] God and the glory of God was to be like God and we are so far away from Him. We the whole human race is fallen into sin. I’m going to demonstrate that to you this morning in one simple thing about Christmas. Do you know that there used to be a time when we talked about Christmas as the beginning of a new era. It was an era introduced by the year of our Lord and we talked about the year of our Lord as being the start of the new time period and we talked about before that as BC. BC is before Christ. AD is not after his death but AD is anos domilios It means the year of the Lord and our very way we’ve understood history maybe it was in some point of time back there you know a few centuries where this was adopted I think Charlemagne had a lot to do of it of decreeing how
[00:12:38] Europe was going to understand its timings of things and there was a tightening up of understanding dates and he was introduced there but for a lot of time many centuries we all understood about Christmas that we were celebrating something that happens that all our history said this is AD and after the year of our Lord we recognized the historicity of Jesus. Have you ever met a person that said as their excuse for not you know coming back to God and becoming a Christian they say oh I don’t really think Jesus existed. There still are people who try and proclaim that that’s the way to think. He didn’t really exist he was something manufactured by religious people who wanted to be able to have a beginner to their religion who’d have authority and who could make
[00:13:40] decisions as to what it was about and who could detail how successes would come. Well Jesus was that authority for sure and he did choose people to define Christianity he called them apostles and the Christian faith that we now have is the same faith that those apostles are going. I happen to bring my old Bible this one’s got a lovely cover but that’s not why I brought it but it’s a Bible that I’ve had to be able to write notes in because of the pages give me the room but this lovely Bible is something that’s called Bible because it’s the story of what God has done to save you and save me and when Leon Morris wanted this to read the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ to read us the story of the genealogy you find the two words in the original language I found earlier in
[00:14:41] the book of Genesis when it talks about how the world was created when it talks about how the people were created God begins something and this is the story of how it began but the story that the New Testament carries is a story of the God of heaven who wanted to redeem his fallen race and said his son that’s that’s Christmas. And once upon a time in the Western world, we were people who recognised Christmas so universally that there were all sorts of customs of people going around in horses and carts, but having people singing Christmas carols I can remember, I’m old enough to remember the time when people from church who still did it, you get a truck and you put some hay bales on the back and the young people would all sit in there and we’d go go around to all different places and we hop off and sing carols outside people’s doors.
[00:15:32] Is that still happening? Has anybody heard people singing carols recently? Thank you someone has. I didn’t see a lot of hands. Do you know why? Because every time human culture has the witness of God in rebellion against it, it finds some way to water down that memory that we’d be made by God, that we’d be made for God and that God has sent his Son into the world to save us and calls on our response and will hold us accountable for it. Christmas is the beginning of the Gospel of how Jesus came into the world and brought the presence of God amongst us. By the way, one thing Jesus had to do was not only die on the cross for our sins but he had to live a perfect sinless life in order to qualify to be a person who could take the sins of others and when he went to that cross, he went as an innocent person who’d lived a perfect life according to the laws of God as known back then. Jesus,
[00:16:39] the perfect sacrifice just as the temple had to have perfect little creatures to be sacrificed so that was all a picture of how when God provided his son to be our Saviour, he would have to be a perfect sacrifice, he lived a perfect life and he went to the cross and he died for our sins. That’s the beginning of the Gospel and here in Matthew’s Gospel in chapter 1, the story you could say of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Then it says, son of David and the son of Abraham. I thought about today that I could give a nice long lecture like I was still at college teaching there and tell you all the ways that Matthew’s genealogy is different from Luke’s genealogy, not genealogy Jim, it’s genealogy. The way Matthew’s genealogy differs from Luke’s and one of them is very very interesting.
[00:17:46] One of them is that Matthew’s Gospel has going from Abraham and David down to Joseph, whereas Luke’s Gospel has the very steps of the tracing of the genealogy not coming down from David and Joseph to Jesus, David to Joseph, but rather it’s something that takes the generations back to God. What I’m trying to say is that the direction of the genealogies between Matthew and Luke are different and the genealogy of Matthew comes from David, goes back to David and Abraham and that’s what Matthew chapter 1 says, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham and what he’s actually doing, listen, is showing the royalty of the kingdom of God that Jesus is born to lead and just as we have monarchies in the world I began to research about what we had of
[00:19:06] people like monarchies. I actually have some Australian part of me that’s rather glad that Prince Charles or King Charles is over there and not botting us around here, but he actually is, we are a constitutional monarchy, an important role that he plays through the Governor-General and that Canada does the same thing, New Zealand does the same thing, I was staggered at how many of the nations there still are as monarchies, though they be constitutional monarchies with a sort of mixture in of a representative being a Republican, not a Republican but being a representative democracy and this is how we are and do you know that we are one of the most stable nations in the world, in fact all the countries found in the Commonwealth that have adopted this constitutional monarchy and still are
[00:20:12] reliant into some degree upon its connection with England, which we still do, they have the most stable governments and the least amount of insurrections and shooting people and all the rest in all the world. Where did it come from? I want to tell you that the idea comes from the Bible particularly when the monarchy that the Bible is talking about, the one person being in charge which is Jesus, because he’s the one who is the Messiah and our children’s talk had the word rescuer used to give them an idea of it, that the Messiah the God promised was someone who’s going to come, but is a human person the humanity was important that the Messiah would be a human person and And he would rule from God’s lead by the Holy Spirit being on him, the anointing of
[00:21:08] a spirit on that leader, that Messiah would make it the kingdom of God on earth. And Jesus came not only to die for our sins and rise again, but Jesus also came to set up a kingdom of God on earth, that he being the king. We are spiritually speaking a monarchy with King Jesus, the one who leads. You have no place in it unless you bow your knee to Jesus. The difference between a monarchy and a democracy is that you can be more of a rebel than a democracy. You go for lots of marches and you raise your flags and say bad things about whoever’s in charge as Prime Minister. But in a monarchy, his existence is because there is a king that God has provided, King
[00:21:57] Jesus. Now somewhere in British history there were people who recognised the formula, if you like, that if only you could have a king who’d be a good king, he would give us a peaceful time and to some degree he would set things up for there to be the worship of the one true God. In Britain, that’s the Church of England. And one of the roles of King Charles, which he’s not doing too well in, is to be the head of the Church of England. And he rebelled against it and said, no, I’m not going to be in charge of just one faith. I’ll be for all faith, which is a very woolly thing because faith is just trust, but you’re
[00:22:44] going to have trust in the wrong thing. Faith in Jesus is what saves you, not faith. If you’re sitting here today and you think because you’ve got some measure of faith but it’s just some trusting ability you have, you have been deceived, or at least been worded. You have yet to find out the truth that the only thing that will save you is when you transfer that trust to Jesus Christ and you put your rest in him to save you from your sins, from yourself and for eternity. And it’s a moment of coming to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins and accepting his salvation by accepting his Saviourhood, spiritually speaking, becoming a monarchy under Jesus. One of the differences between a monarchy and a republican is that the monarchy has subjects.
[00:23:40] And in that film series, Crown, there’s people objecting to being subjects when they much rather just be owners of the show. I can understand that as far as human things are concerned, but when it comes to spiritual things there’s only one place of safety. He’s under the shelter of the Messiah Jesus and that you give in to his monarchy and you come to him and say, Lord, I am sorry for all the representations of rebellion that my life has been. I am sorry that I have sinned. Please, Lord Jesus, forgive me for that rebellion. Not necessarily the wrong things you did that made a mess, but because you are out of step
[00:24:31] with the one who was the king, forgive me for my rebellion. Please now, let me be one of your subjects. You come to him and receive him as Saviour and Lord, which makes you in a lot of spiritual monarchy. Do you get my illustration? And that’s the Gospel of Matthew. And the difference between it and Luke is that the direction goes in the opposite way. It starts from Abraham, who was the founder of the Israeli race in terms of genetics. And also David. Now I had three verses to look at and I’ve done one and there’s two more to go.
[00:25:20] Can you hold on for a bit longer? I’ll be quicker. Let’s go now to the second one. And where I want you to turn to is in, well, we’ve looked at Matthew’s Gospel. Let’s turn now to Luke and have a passage in Luke. And this is the storyline of Jesus as understood by King David. And our Matthew genealogy begins with the storyline going back to Abraham, going back to David, or coming down from Abraham, coming back from David. And in this spot, in Luke chapter 20 verse 39, then some of the describes answered, “‘Teachers, you have spoken well, for they no longer dare to ask you any question.'”
[00:26:09] I love reading about Jesus when he was talking because he had such wisdom. He is the very outspokenness of God, no wonder that they couldn’t answer him. “‘But he said to them, how can they say that Christ is David’s son? For David himself says in the book of Psalms, the Lord said to my Lord, they’ll be the father to the son, Jesus, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. And David thus calls him Lord, so how is he his son?'” The question is because there’s a thousand years or so between when David lived and when Jesus lived. And yet Jesus says that David is his son and he is David’s son.
[00:27:01] The answer is this spiritual monarchy I’m talking about, that what Matthew’s gospel introduces to us is that the becoming of the Messiah is coming and you can trace his background to Abraham and David. The descent comes down from Abraham, the descent comes down from David. Abraham started the Jewish race, so Jesus is a Jew, he’ll always be a Jew. And David was a king. And what God said to David in the Psalms, I won’t take us there, but what he said to him is that your kingdom will last forever. David was wanting to build a temple for God and God wouldn’t let him and said, your son, that Solomon will do it.
[00:27:49] But not only was the promise for Solomon doing those things, but there will be a descent, lucky if you like, of a human connection to the original David coming all the way down to Jesus and that’s what the genealogy in Matthew 1 is proving. And it’s fantastic to know, it’s different over in Luke, Luke takes the genealogy in the opposite direction, goes back to Adam, goes back to a whole lot of interesting things and I’ll talk about probably tonight, but in terms of Jesus coming down from David, it’s how he gets to be the king in the monarchy of heaven. You know, you probably believe more in the monarchy of heaven when you pray the Lord’s prayer. Our Father, who isn’t heaven, the Father didn’t himself have to leave heaven for his son to
[00:28:49] come down and take on humanity, but he came in through his son, so doing, to be with us. It’s the son who was born of Mary, still being the eternal second person of the Trinity, but coming down to Bethlehem’s manger and coming to be with us. We’ve been hearing about the monarchy that began and came into practice on earth in Jesus’ Christmas event. So Christmas is the beginning of the Gospel, Christmas is important and do you know what I notice about our society, that just as society likes to push out the laws of God and invent other things they say is how you should live. So when it comes to anything that gives glory to God, our culture is trying to push Christmas out right now.
[00:29:56] You look around at all the department stores. Once upon a time not only were there people who went in the back of trucks and sang Christmas carols and everybody recognised Christmas, but now even in the department stores there are fewer who are making it Christmas altogether and looking for other things to make it celebratory. Check out for yourself and what you’ll be seeing is that corporate rebellion and sin of our human hearts that doesn’t want God and his monarchy and wants to push out Christmas. So the celebration there are of is something that fewer and fewer of those department stores are wanting to do. And if you have one that you know still has a little scene of nativity, you’ll bet you’ll find that there’s someone who’s a Christian who’s going against the tide, to see that
[00:30:54] their group still has a nativity scene. Because we are in a human race that is dreadfully rebellious. The heart is deceitful above all things, the Bible says, and desperately wicked, who can really know it? You have that heart until you come to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. Let him give you a new heart for what happens when you come to Jesus and accept his monarchy. As he puts his spirit inside you, who begins a process of sanctification and change that gradually helps you to be in line with God’s program. You don’t get changed, you get changed in principle instantly, but you get changed gradually across time as you let him do his work in you.
[00:31:49] It takes your cooperation, you’re saying, Lord, please work in me. It takes your sometimes confessing when you’ve been a sinner more than you really wanted to be. You ask him to cleanse you, that’s why one of the most beautiful verses in the Bible is in 1 John 1.9 that says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That’s what God does for the Christian who’s a subject of the spiritual monarchy that Jesus rules in called the Kingdom of God. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for this Christmas time.
[00:32:33] I thank you for Matthew’s Gospel who traces Jesus’ descent to be coming down from Abraham and from David, different from Luke who traces it going back to the Garden of Eden and back to what happened there with Adam and Eve. Heavenly Father, thank you for the Scriptures and thank you for your kingdom and thank you for Christmas. The beginning of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is Christmas. And Lord, I pray that this Christmas there will be people in Brisbane who suddenly become alert to these truths and come with knees bowed to King Jesus and accept him as their Saviour and Lord. May that happen if there’s someone here today that doesn’t so know him yet. Would you bow your spirit, be working on them until they can see it and come and follow you in Jesus’ name. Amen.