Pub Night Dallas

It started with a Villain. Well, it didn’t actually begin, in the beginning, with a Villain. It began with a different vision altogether. But that vision has been co-opted, and now we’re left with a different story.

And that story starts with a Villain. A wicked tyrant, a slave-master, an Accuser. 

He is the one who stands before God and cries “corrupt! deceitful! selfish! They don’t worship you, God, they worship themselves!” 

The human race is, in fact, guilty. And the Accuser, the villain, knows this all too well. He knows it both because he is the instigator of the self-subjected idolatry and he’s the one who daily finds multiple ways to make us feel uncomfortable about it. 

We were made for something (God’s glory), and we are not that something (we are broken, sinful reflections of that glory), and we feel the weight of the distance between the two hanging around our necks like an impossibly heavy millstone. 

Now, understand that God had made two intertwining claims throughout history. The first was that he would do something to roll back the disease—the decay that was separating us from him and his Glory. The second was that, ultimately, this was something only God could do himself.

Enter the Chosen One.

Jesus shows up, using ancient Israelite language to claim that God is indeed becoming King, that he is reigning. That he has power that is deeper, wider, and better than anything else the creation has managed to conjure up. 

And, stunningly, Jesus declared that this reign was happening in and through his very life.

He starts by taking all of the steps to becoming the theoretical “king of the Jews”—he claimed royal (from the family of David) blood lines, went through suffering and trial to re-engage the history of the Israelites so that he was an accurate representation of them, and took on the enigmatic titles “son of man” and “son of God” that were both Old Testament references who indicated a chosen, Kingly figure. Why is it important that Jesus became King?

Because the life of the nation was summed up in the life of the King. The one stood for the many. And Jesus doesn’t just do this for Israel, but he does it for all of humanity. 

Jesus believed that he was doing, through his life, death, and resurrection, for Israel and the world, what he believed only God himself could do. 

He couldn’t launch God’s kingdom of justice, truth, and peace unless injustice, lies, and violence did their worst, exhausting their power on one spot, the Cross. The work of healing the world would prove fruitless unless he provides the antidote to the infection that would otherwise destroy the project from within.

Though we have declared the right to rule ourselves, to be our own kings, Jesus lovingly came to reveal a better King. A better Kingdom. He allowed the Kingdoms of the world to do their worst and it wasn’t enough.

We, self-governed, were tyrannized by death, fear, and destruction.

And in his Victory, the the Victory of God over evil and Jesus over Satan, he declares that God is here. That he is powerful. That he is the true King.

He has put the Kingdoms of the world on trial and they’ve been found wanting.

God has declared the Victory, in Jesus. We can trust that he is powerful and sufficient and that all of the powers of death, destruction, and decay have no more power of us. We are set free from the fear of death, set free to live to and for the Glory of God.