The King of Kings
California Farmer 261:8 (Nov. 17, 1984), p. 19.
Paul, in 1 Timothy 6:15, speaks of Jesus Christ as “the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords.” Ernest Gordon translated the latter part of this verse as “the King of those kinging it, the Lord of those lording it.” Behind all the powers of history, in other words, stands the Great King, Jesus Christ.
This Great King allows men and nations to pursue their evil dreams and to work out their sins. Thus, what men in their evil imaginations see as the solution to man’s problems becomes in time their curse. The storms of history then in due time sweep away all things that are not founded on the Rock. As Paul says in Hebrews 12:22–29, the things which are all around us, and we ourselves, are being shaken so that only those things which cannot be shaken may remain.
We must therefore expect crises which will shake us. They will come from the Great King to test us and to prove us. We have no right to expect God to treat us as fragile cut glass.
Isaac Watts, in his great hymn “Am I a Soldier of the Cross?” (1724), asked,
On flow’ry beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?
Watts then said, “Sure I must fight if I would reign,” and he prayed for courage to endure as a good soldier of Christ.
We are in a time of shaking. The Great King is allowing men and nations to pursue their course to its deadly end. We shall be shaken. The question we need to ask ourselves is this: are we earthquake-proof? Are we so grounded in Christ that we cannot be shaken?
Topics: Theology