No King/New King

And the good news is that despite our best efforts, God didn't leave. God has never left us. See, every time Israel was oppressed, they fall away, they worship other things, then they cry out, where is God? He's never far off. God is near. He is patient. He is listening.

CTK Sermons is a ministry of Christ the King Presbyterian Church. CTK is a community rooted in the depth of the gospel, refined by hard conversations, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh.

Good morning, everyone. If you guys could come and find your seats. It is a pleasure to be here this morning. My name is Paul Deschamps. I am a church planting resident here, and I'm super excited this morning to jump into God's word, spending a few minutes dwelling on something that I think for many of us is really familiar. It's absolutely fundamental to the Christian faith, and yet unless we slow down just a little bit in our lives and the busyness of this season, we just might miss it.

So let's jump into God's word together. And as a gift for you guys this morning, I'm going to do all the reading and I would like to invite you guys to sit and listen to these words from God's word.

We're going to be turning our attention this morning to two passages. One is from the book of Judges as we've been walking through this fall, and then we're also going to be reading from the Gospel of Matthew chapter one verses one through 17.

In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. — Judges 21:25

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. And Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. And Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron father of Ram. And Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nashon, Nashon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab. And Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth. And Obed the father of Jesse. And Jesse the father of David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. And Solomon the father of Rehoboam. And Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon. And after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shaltiel and Shaltiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud and Abiud the father of Eliakim. And Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Mathen, and Mathen the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. So all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations. And from David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations. And from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ, 14 generations. — Matthew 1:1-17

Father, would you meet us in your word this morning? Would you meet us in this story? Would you send your spirit to guide our hearts, to open up your word, to enlighten us anew, a love for who you are and what you've done for us. I pray this in your name. Amen.

So I want to give a huge thank you to Danny for what he just did in teaching us this new song. He didn't know this, but Danny was my introduction to this time this morning because I'm so thankful for the way he leads our church in worship through music. There's a lot of ways in which we worship and a lot of aspects to our service, but there's just something about music, right? That draws our hearts into worship. The way music just transcends our very being and allows us to offer our gifts of song and communicate these deep theological truths in really just incredible ways.

And I think it's especially powerful during Christmas when we get to sing all these beautiful Christmas carols. I mean, who doesn't love singing Christmas carols? Those of us in this room, we know the truths that it contains, but even those who do not call themselves Christians, those who do not belong to Christ, love the music of Christmas. They're both nostalgic and yet theologically profound. And I love the song that Danny just taught us: He is worthy of it all. He is worthy of it all.

As I was standing there singing, I found myself feeling this sense of peace. We serve a king who's worthy of it all. And that's what we celebrate at Christmas—the coming of the new king, our king, Jesus Christ. Christ the King—the very title of our congregation, of our church. He was born to us. What an amazing truth. What an amazing hope that we have.

And that's the main thing I want us to dwell on today and this week as we move into the busyness of Christmas and all the excitement we have. The main thing is this: Jesus, our long-awaited king, has come.

Our Complicated Relationship with Kingship

Now, if I'm honest, it's hard for me to really think about kings. When I think about kings these days, I immediately picture King George III from Hamilton. Those of you who have seen the musical or at least heard the soundtrack probably remember his over-the-top and hilarious portrayal in his big number, "You'll Be Back." It's this dramatic and possessive love song where he basically says to the American colony, "You're mine, and I will do whatever it takes to keep you, including sending a fully armed battalion to kill your friends and family to remind you of my love." It's a hilarious song, but it is a little unsettling.

I think we have a complicated relationship with the idea of kingship. On one hand, we have our fairy tale kings. We have this very positive view of kings. We have wonderful stories that start out like "once upon a time in a great land, there lived a great king." For our literature people, we've got King Arthur and the knights at the round table. For our movie-watching people, we have Monty Python. From Narnia, we have High King Peter and King Edmund. We've even got Mufasa in the new movie. These stories tell us something true. There's something good about having a good king.

And yet, our lived experience—the experience of history—tells us something different. Kings through history have been remembered sometimes good, sometimes positive, but also as violent tyrants, as conquering warlords. They're cruel. They're power hungry. They're selfish. They raise taxes to pay for their wars. They live in opulence while the common people starve. I think this is what King George represents. He perfectly captures a certain kind of kingship—one that's all about control and power and self-interest.

And yet we know this is wrong. Our hearts long for the good kings of our stories, the good kind of kingship that the Bible presents to us. It's one that isn't based on power, but on peace, on hope, and on the restoration of all things.

Israel's Crisis Without a King

The book of Judges is a really sobering account. It's a sobering account of a nation that is in complete disarray, of people living without direction, without accountability, and ultimately without a king. If you go back and look at the last couple chapters of Judges, you'll see this verse repeated four times:

There was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Friends, this is no kingdom. Israel remains divided. There's very little unity. People's actions are spiraling out of control. There's little sense of good, of morality, of truth, of honor, of beauty. It's chaos. The writer of Judges really highlights the problem in this closing verse of the book. What a way to close a book, right? There's still no king. It's been a couple hundred years of this and still no king.

God's Vision for Kingship

But God wanted there to be a king. He wanted Israel to have a king, but not just any king. Deuteronomy 17 gives us really specific instructions for the kind of king that they were supposed to appoint. There's a king that would reflect his character, that would lead with humility, that would trust in God's power instead of human strength. This king was meant to guide the people in faithfulness, protecting them and bringing order to their lives.

God's plan was for Israel to be an upside-down kingdom. One that turned the values of the world on its head. In his kingdom, the first would be last. The weak would be made strong. Slaves would be set free. Rest and restoration would be hallmarks that would set his people apart from the rest of the world. Peace would come through grace rather than through conquest.

Israel was to be known as a kingdom of peace, set apart from all the other kingdoms in the ancient Near East. Among these larger, stronger, more war-loving nations, God wanted them to bring his glory through their faithfulness and their trust and under the leadership of a king who embodied God's values.

But as we read, Israel didn't follow God's plan. Judges begins with a cry for leadership, and it ends with the failure to produce a king. So without a king, people turn to idolatry, and they turn to violence and chaos.

And when they finally did demand a king, we read about this in First Samuel eight, they want one like the other nations. They want a king who looked powerful on the outside but lacked the heart of God. So God gives him Saul, a man who appeared strong and capable, but ultimately he led with self-interest and disobedience.

So the story of Judges is not just ancient history, but it's our reality, it's our history too. It shows us what happens when we reject God's desires and replace them with our own. Israel just keeps falling into these cycles, these patterns of sin and idolatry and violence, and then it gets to be too much. The people cry out for deliverance. God, will you hear our cry? Will you deliver us? And so God raises someone up to save them.

But over time, there's a disturbing pattern that happens. Their sin grows worse and worse and worse. By the end of the book, the people had not only been oppressed, they had become the oppressors. Their sin didn't just harm them, but it changed them, and it turned them into the very thing they feared.

God wanted his people to be led by a king, not just for their physical and geopolitical protection, but for their spiritual protection. He cared about their hearts. And so without a king, the people in Judges were lost. And the same is true for us. When we try to live without a king, doing what is right in our own eyes, it leads us to chaos. When we take total control and do only what we think is right, bad things happen. Broken relationships, struggles in our work, spiritual apathy, unethical decisions. Without a guide, we get stuck in patterns that we can't break.

We're hardwired to need a king. God created us to live under his rule and yet we resist it. Why? Because I think if we're honest, we don't really want a king, at least not one who tells us how to live. The values of our culture tell us the only good kings come from fairy tales. Submitting yourself to the leadership of someone who calls themselves a king is only going to hurt you. That's a lie. And it's the same lie that the serpent used in the garden when he was talking to Eve.

Did God really say?

Have you ever asked that question? When we doubt God's goodness and his sovereignty and his power and his love, we're asking him to step aside as king while we put ourselves on the throne.

Something's going to be our king. Something is going to rule our hearts. Something will guide our actions. And when we reject God as king, we end up making our own kings. Money, power, relationships, ourselves, our own self-interest. We elevate powerful business leaders, politicians, celebrities, our own personal causes. You go look at your phone and you look at where you spend time on your apps, that'll tell you where your king is. We serve our work, our family, our status, our comfort, our security.

The problem is none of these kings can bring the order and the peace and the purpose that we long for. This is why the story of Judges matters so much. It's not just the retelling of a violent part of Israel's history, but it tells us that we're hardwired to need this king even if we don't want one.

And the good news is that despite our best efforts, God didn't leave. God has never left us. Every time Israel was oppressed, they fall away, they worship other things, and they cry out, where is God? He's never far off. God is near. He is patient. He is listening. When they go and play with fire, he's there to bandage their burns. God is a God of grace beyond what we can possibly imagine. He's a God who loves his people. He's a God who's always moving not away but towards us.

Our New King

Our king comes to us and this is what we celebrate at Christmas—that Jesus Christ the king has come. Jesus is the king that we long for. The one who breaks the cycle of sin and leads us into peace. Unlike our earthly kings, he doesn't rule with an iron fist or demand that we prove ourselves loyal. Instead, he comes with grace and with love and an invitation to follow him.

Jesus is the king who fights for us. Jesus is the king who defends us. Jesus is the king who leads us into peace out of chaos. He invites us into his kingdom where true greatness is found in the serving of others. And real peace comes from trusting him. The kingdom of power and of greed only releases its grip when it's faced by the one that has real power—Jesus Christ, our new king, our Prince of Peace.

Now when you think of Christmas, the first thing that comes to mind probably isn't this genealogy. What a list of great names. If anyone's looking for a baby name, we have many to choose from. We want to hear about shepherds and angels, some animals, a star, Mary and Joseph, a manger. We probably weren't thinking we were going to hear about a bunch of birth certificates. But I think this is such a Christmassy passage.

It's a perfect passage for Advent because it's oozing with gospel hope. See, Matthew was a personal friend of Jesus. He walked with him as a disciple for three years, and he was a firsthand witness to Jesus' miracles, his teaching, his death, his resurrection. And he wrote down this story to tell what he saw of Jesus. And one of the key things that Matthew tells us through his gospel is this idea that Jesus really is the long awaited king.

A genealogy is more than just a list of names. It's more than just a list of people. Rather, this is a history of grace. The late pastor Tim Keller once said that the gospel isn't good advice. It's good news. It isn't advice about what we should do. It's news about what God has done.

This genealogy is good news because it tells us that Jesus' coming isn't a myth. It's not a metaphor. It's not a hopeful idea. It really happened. Matthew begins by grabbing the reader's attention by saying, look, Jesus is not just a guy I know. He's not this carpenter from around the way. No. This is Jesus, the son of the good king David. He's the son of Abraham, the great patriarch of our faith. We can trace Jesus all the way back through all of God's promises.

This passage might seem dry at first glance, but it's one that's full of rich meaning. It shows the faithfulness of God through generation after generation after generation, his power to work through broken people. And the reality that Jesus Christ, our savior and our king, really came into this world.

In those days, a genealogy served as a sort of resume. It was a way that a king or somebody important would prove his line of nobility. Matthew covers in just a few short verses nearly the entire historical scope of the Old Testament. We could go back through our Bible and read of nearly all of these stories. We could read and see that God has been about the redemption of his people all along. And the high point of this story is the birth of Jesus.

It's good news because it has already happened. We read newspapers or apps about things that have happened. And we can look back and see that God has been faithful. We can look to this point that his faithfulness has brought God himself to our midst, laying in a manger. Jesus is the credible king from the line of David that we need. He's also our covenant king, the promised king to Abraham. He's come to us.

The gospel is good news because it's true, but the gospel is also good news because it's saturated with grace. If the genealogy serves as a resume, then Jesus' job application for the role of king is a pretty strange application to receive.

Normally, a king would trace his lineage back through all of his great predecessors that had gone before him, allowing him to stand on the shoulders of the giants that had gone before him to prove that he is tall. It was really common to edit your list of names, to cut out all the people that made you look less than great. We do this when we write our own resumes. When I put a resume together, I like to put the name of the college where I graduated, where I earned my degree. That sounds good. What I don't include is the fact that I could not get into that college out of high school and had to spend a couple of years in community college finding myself, figuring out who I was. I want you to read the good stuff about me. You don't want to read that part of my story.

But Jesus' line of nobility is different. It's different for a lot of reasons, but most notably, Jesus' line includes women in his genealogy. In those days, a king just didn't do that. In that culture, women were considered less than, not important. This was a huge no-no. You don't put women in your genealogy. They're gender outsiders. And yet Jesus includes them.

More so, if this is to be a genealogy of a Jewish king, most of these women are gentiles. They're cultural outsiders. But there's more. Most of the stories of these women are horrendous. They're scandalous. If any one of these stories had been in our own family trees, we might be a little embarrassed about who we share that truth with. But not Jesus. Jesus includes Tamar, a Canaanite woman who disguised herself as a prostitute and through an act of incest secures her future.

Rahab is a prostitute from Jericho who would save the Israelite spies at great risk to herself, and she would become the great great grandmother of King David, ultimately of Jesus. We have Ruth, a Moabite widow who would choose faith over her despair and would marry Rahab's son Boaz. Their son would be King David's grandfather.

Now we get to King David. This is a good name, but he isn't mentioned here because of his greatness. He's mentioned here rather as the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. Uriah was a Hittite general in David's army, and King David stole his wife, got her pregnant, and had Uriah killed to cover it up.

Jesus is not embarrassed by his family. He doesn't hide messy stories or try to sanitize his lineage. This is not a polished family tree. This is a family that is full of broken people, of scandal, and of failure. And yet God was working through it all the time to bring about his perfect plan of redemption.

This genealogy tells us the story of Israel's kings. The second section tells us that this line of kings failed. The kings of Israel were meant to lead the people in faithfulness to God, but they were weak and they were corrupt and they led the nation into idolatry and division and exile. Yet even through their failure, God was faithful to his promise to send a king who would reign forever.

A king not marked by worldly power, but by humility and grace. A king who would humble himself, not just to lord over the lowly, but to become one. Jesus would leave all of his heavenly glory to take the form of a lowly peasant baby, to lay in that manger—not a soft crib—to be surrounded by those shepherds, not palace attendants, to live a life of poverty, not opulence, to be shamed, to be mocked, to be beaten, to be murdered, and to be rejected.

Jesus is no fairy tale king. He is a king who fits with the other historical kings, except his power and glory wasn't stripped through a coup or a revolution. Jesus laid it down for us by choice in love for us.

The Invitation

We are invited to see ourselves in this story, friends. You feel like your life is too messy, too broken for God to use? Just look at this list. Look at these people. It's full of people who failed. It's full of people who sinned. It's full of people who've struggled, and yet it was God's grace that worked through them to accomplish his plan.

Jesus didn't come from a perfect line. He came from a line of broken people to redeem broken people. He is the fulfillment of God's promises. A king who didn't come in power and wealth, but in humility, born into the messiness of our own world to bring peace.

That's the good news about a genealogy—it's already happened. The story isn't something we need to make happen again. We don't need to find a new king to worship. We haven't been given advice about the changes we need to make in our lives to be better Christians. So don't you hear the grace in this?

God didn't demand that we clean ourselves up, dust ourselves off, put on our Sunday best to come to church, to come to him—because we couldn't. We can't. He would come to us.

The Choice

So Jesus' coming leaves us with a choice of how we're going to respond. The choice is not if we will try harder to be better Christians. It's not a resolve of Ebenezer Scrooge to keep Christmas all the year long. Our choice is: will you bend the knee? And will you bow to Jesus as your king? Or will you not? Will you submit to him? Will you depend on him? Will you go to him in prayer? Will you find your refuge in him?

Jesus is the king who fixes broken stories. He's the real king who loves and uses misfit toys. He is the great physician who can mend broken hearts. He is the light who brings hope in times of darkness. If you will bend the knee, if you will call him your king and trust him with your life, that's exactly what you'll find—true life.

The story of Jesus is real. Will you believe it? Or would you rather continue being your own king, doing what is right in your own eyes?

So when you believe in this story, all the other stories begin to make sense. Judges make sense. Israel's failures make sense. Our failures, my failures make sense. Apart from God, we have the capacity to make a real mess of our lives. But Emmanuel has come. God with us. His story soaked with grace and truth.

He takes the train wrecks that we make in our own lives, and he turns our mourning into dancing.

See, Christianity is not a how-to manual for how we need to love better or to try harder or to be more merry or to be more cheerful or to be more charitable or how we should go to church or love God more or treat our neighbors better. No. Christianity is good news that the king has come and he has triumphed over sin and death, and we are invited to be a people who celebrate with him in his victory.

And so this Christmas, we celebrate the coming of the new King Jesus, who brings light to darkness, he brings peace to chaos, he brings redemption to a broken world. His genealogy reminds us that he really came, reminds us that God is faithful and that his grace is enough for every single one of us.

He's not a king like King George. He did not come to take. He is a king who came to give his own life for you and for me.

He gives us a new name, a new citizenship, a new hope in the eternal future that we have with him. This is truth for which I can say, Merry Christmas, CTK. Our king has come.

Prayer

Father, your good news is too much. You did it all. You came to the broken. You gave life to those who had nothing left. You fixed the broken spaces. Jesus, would these words ring true in our heart? Would you become our king? Would you be our king? And would we see your love and your grace poured down for us day after day after day? In your name, I pray, Jesus. Amen.

Closing

Thank you for listening to our CTK Raleigh sermons podcast. CTK is a community rooted in the depth of the gospel, refined by hard conversations, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh. If you have questions about our sermon content or about our church in general, please visit our website at ctkraleigh.org.