One thing kings have a lot of is power.
With just the flick of their wrist, they can make a bridge, or they could end your life. King Henry the 8th wanted to have more wives, so he decided to just break away from the Roman Catholic Church. After all, he’s king!
They can change laws, they can have their face on money, they can even change the names of cities if they like. If you are not a fan of them, well, they could get their own army on you, and that would be that.
Now not all kings are equally powerful. Some kings can dominate other kings. One thing that makes a king powerful has to do with how big their Kingdom is.
I could be king of my bedroom, but it’s not much. Tonga has a king on a tiny island, but it’s not much. But if your kingdom spanned a large enough area over a large enough population, your power can dramatically increase.
You could make pyramids or statues or even be worshiped as a deity.
Now here’s the juicy question :
If Jesus is claiming to be a king, then how powerful is he?
Usually it has to do with how big your kingdom is. But where is Jesus’ kingdom?
As we have seen, Jesus is a little bit different. His power will be a bit upside down.
Now we have seen many upside down things from Jesus. Born from a virgin, he fights with the sword of the Bible, he picks losers for his army, and his speech is counter intuitive.
But it is his power that is completely different to any other king. The things that Jesus could do shows that the other kings or queens didn’t really have power at all.
And this power was a total shock to the Jewish people.
They thought that when the Messiah, the King of Kings, was to come, that his mission was to build a strong army, take down the Romans by force, and establish the throne of David again for the kingdom of Israel. In other words, Jesus’ kingdom was to take but this little bitty patch of land called Israel.
But Jesus drops a bomb. He says this little phrase in John’s Gospel to another ruler, Pilate.
This shows that Jesus is not really going after a particular territory of the globe. Not just yet. But his kingdom is going to advance on something greater than just the square feet of land. The problem happens because people thought that Jesus has come to take on the kingdoms of the world. But there is a greater enemy that he is going to take on.
You heard it right. Jesus, in order to show his power, took on diseases, a far greater enemy than humans.
From the get-go he went out and waged war against diseases. Have a look at this passage.
All he did was gently rebuke the fever, and it left Peter’s mother-in-law.
Impressed by that power?
This is just the beginning of his power.
