Zion’s King Shall Reign Victorious! - 6

The very fact that Jesus is presented in the Gospel accounts as the promised messiah means that he is a king. After the Magi came to Jerusalem looking for “He who has been born King of the Jews”, Herod asked “all the chief priests and scribes of the people” where Messiah (the promised descendant of David - 2 Samuel 7) was to be born.

They knew the Old Testament Scriptures well and quoted Micah 5:2, “But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you shall come a Ruler who will shepherd My people Israel.”

They also well knew the Psalms, included the second, saying,

“Why do the nations rage, And the people plot a vain thing? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, And... take counsel together, Against... His Anointed (Messiah)...”

Their resistance will be futile - 6 “Yet I have set MY KING On My holy hill of Zion. 7 I will declare the decree: The Lord has said to Me, 'You are MY SON, Today I have begotten You. 8 Ask of Me, and I will give You The nations for Your inheritance, And the ends of the earth for Your possession.”

The future kingship of Christ is recognized in the preaching of the apostles after the ascension of Jesus, while admitting “But now we do not yet see all things put under him” - Hebrews 2:8. We hear about this in those who opposed their preaching in northern Greece, complaining, “These who have turned the world upside down have come here too. 7 ...and these are all acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another king - Jesus” - Acts 17:6.

Paul made similar reference in v.30, “God ...now commands all men everywhere to repent, 31 because He has appointed a day on which He will judge (i.e., rule, govern) the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”

It is an accepted fact on all sides that Paul, who is recorded as stating the above words, had been a persecutor of those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. None can deny that he became the most devoted of the preachers of the Christian gospel. Yet he began his adulthood in a single-minded endeavour to stamp out every vestige of what was viewed at that time as the Nazarene sect of the Jewish religion.

His was not a half-baked fanaticism, foisted on his young and impressionable mind by someone filled with excessive and mistaken enthusiasm. He had sat at the feet of Gamaliel, the teacher of the law whose renown is summed up in the words recorded in the Talmud: “When Rabban Gamaliel the Elder died, regard for the Torah ceased, and purity and piety died.”

His influence on Paul was profound, and Paul absorbed the tenets of the Law of Moses, making the law of God the central driving force of his life. With such a powerful influence on his young mind, it may come as no surprise that Paul came to regard the Nazarenes as an impurity from which his beloved Judaism needed to be cleansed.

Irrefutable evidence of Jesus’ resurrection changed all that. How else can one understand such a one making his about face, than the appearance to him of Jesus on the road to Damascus?