I don't know if you heard just now as John prayed, he prayed in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. That creed, Jesus is Lord, is one of the oldest professions that the Christian church has had. Right from the beginning, Jesus is Lord has been the signifying mark of the faith of a Christian. For two thousand years through times of both persecution and times of peace, Christians have proclaimed this, Jesus is Lord, as their identity. But I wanna ask you this morning, do you know what you mean when you say Jesus is Lord?
For all of us, the word Lord in itself may not mean very much at all. We don't live in a time where there's lords and ladies anymore. We don't live in a time of kings and queens. And so this title, this tagline of Lord has sort of lost its meaning. It's become, in my understanding, a bit vague, a bit distanced from where we find ourselves today.
So I wanna ask us, what does it mean to say Jesus is Lord? This morning, we're going to be looking at a psalm, and I don't think we have really worked through the psalms in the time that I've been here. So I'm really excited about this. We're gonna look at Psalm 110. And I wanna encourage you to keep your Bibles open to this as we really investigate this together and looking in particular at the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Turn with me to Psalm 110, and we're going to read these seven verses together. Psalm 110. Of David. A psalm. The Lord says to my Lord, sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet. The Lord will extend Your mighty sceptre from Zion. You will rule in the midst of Your enemies.
Your troops will be willing on Your day of battle, arrayed in holy majesty. From the womb of the dawn, You will receive the dew of Your youth. The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind. You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. The Lord is at Your right hand.
He will crush kings on the day of His wrath. He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead and crushing the rulers of the whole earth. He will drink from a brook beside the way. Therefore, He will lift up His head. So far, our reading.
There's three things that I want us to look at this morning when we talk about the lordship of Jesus. Firstly, we're going to talk about Jesus Christ as He is now. Then we're going to talk about Jesus' kingdom as it is now. And then we're going to talk about Jesus' victory as it will be. In the opening verse of Psalm 110, it begins with the words, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.
Now I don't know if you read this the first time, you might be a little bit confused because I was. Who is talking to who here? The Lord said to my Lord. Is it two lords? Is it one Lord?
What's going on? Well, in the Old Testament, God has a special name, and that name was Yahweh, marked by the consonants Y H W H, Yahweh. In the Hebrew tradition, however, this holy name of God became something that people felt really fearful of using, putting on their lips, especially sinful lips, broken lips. And so they refrained from using this holy name and rather used the word or the term the Lord for God, for this special name, which is in Hebrew, Adonai. Adonai.
So our English traditions, interestingly enough, have kept this. Instead of using this special name, Yahweh, we translate it as the Lord. This is indicated in the Old Testament by the lettering, the capitalisation of Lord, L O R D in capitals. So we find in verse one, the Lord in capitals, Yahweh, the God of Israel, says to my Lord in lowercase, sit at my right hand. And the question is, who is Yahweh, the God of Israel, referring to here?
Well, in Matthew 22:42, Jesus talks to the religious teachers, Pharisees at that time, and He asked them this question, who is, in your opinion, the Messiah? Who is the Messiah? Whose son is He? Whose descendant is He? Where is He gonna come from?
They reply, these teachers of the law, these experts in the Jewish faith, they reply, He'll be the son of David because they know their Old Testament, and they know that there's a prophecy that says that He will be a son, a descendant of David. Then Jesus quotes this psalm, Psalm 110, which is, by the way, the most often quoted psalm in the New Testament. He quotes this psalm and says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand. And Jesus asked them this question. If the Messiah is merely David's son, David's descendant, why would David, who wrote this psalm, call Him Lord?
If He's simply a descendant, why would he call Him his Lord? Matthew 22:46 says that no one was able to answer this question. He absolutely stumped them with this. Now Jesus' disciples would later realise that this Messiah that Jesus referred to was actually Jesus Himself, that Jesus was this Lord, and they would call Him Lord. Because while He was indeed a descendant of David as we all know, He was more than that.
He was more than simply a son of David. He was the Lord that David foretold in this prophecy. Yahweh said not only to Lord, to the Lord, but to my Lord, David says. My Lord, my king. This Lord is to sit at the right hand of Yahweh, the God of Israel, until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.
What we see here is the moment where Jesus ascends to heaven after His earthly ministry. It's like a glimpse through a stage curtain where everything behind it is being set up for a final scene. It's as if you were able to see just through a crack in that stage curtain, things being moved and being rearranged and set up. We get a glimpse into what happened when Jesus returns to God the Father. And the Father, pleased with the Son's work, invites Him to sit here next to Me at My right hand, this place of privilege at the side of the throne.
And then we see in this amazing scene, God the Father acting on behalf of Jesus Christ. Acting on behalf of Jesus Christ, sit next to Me and I will make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet. God becomes a powerful ally to this Lord. The Father, who in the Godhead of the Trinity is a source of all life and all power, begins to move and wage war against the enemies of Christ. Verse two, the Lord, again, Yahweh, will extend Your mighty sceptre from Zion.
You will rule in the midst of Your enemies. Friends, this is Jesus Christ right now. This is Jesus Christ right now. As He has ascended to heaven, He is seated at the right hand of God. Seated there, He has the full might and power of God the Father at His disposal.
That is a huge thing to understand. His mighty sceptre, which is the symbolic, poetic form of saying His rule will stretch out from Zion, from His people to the ends of the earth. And the picture here is dynamic as we see this kingdom grow and unfold and cover everything. It says even in the midst of Your enemies, You will rule. You will rule in the midst of Your enemies.
They are unable to stop His advance. They are unable to thwart His reign. Friends, this is Jesus Christ right now. This is Jesus Christ right now ruling with the full might, the full arsenal of God the Father at His side. Every day, when I drive back from work or from training or from the movies, I turn left in my neighbourhood at this roundabout.
On this roundabout, there is a magnificent palm tree, an absolutely spectacular specimen with a bold, straight, dark, thick trunk, and proud, majestic green branches sprouting from the top, perfectly manicured in perfect symmetry. It is the most beautiful specimen of a palm tree. If you can get excited about palm trees, you'll get excited about this one. And it's right in the middle of this fairly regular looking roundabout. It's not particularly big.
It's not particularly nice, and it's just in a fairly regular place in the neighbourhood. Not particularly nice or upper class. It's just magnificent. And it's surrounded on the ground with some small purple and yellow shrubs. You know those shrubs.
Now these are also nicely manicured in a circle around this palm. But they are hardly noticeable when compared to the glorious palm that looms above them. By far and away, it is this colossal palm tree that owns that little roundabout. Standing at its centre, drawing their eyes upwards and away from the little shrubs around its ankles. How well you understand the statement, Jesus is Lord.
Jesus is king. How well you understand that statement influences your entire Christianity. It influences all of your theology. If you understand that Jesus Christ is king over everything, then when it comes to issues like who is saved through election and consequently who isn't, if you understand that Jesus Christ is the supreme king over everything and rules in this kingdom, then who is brought into this kingdom is completely His call. It's completely His call.
And how I view and rationalise who should be in and who shouldn't be, it's completely irrelevant because I'm not Lord. I'm not king. He is. When I understand that Jesus Christ is Lord and it comes to my view of eschatology, the theology of how the world ends, the end times, I will realise that how and when Jesus Christ returns and His kingdom is fully established, it will be completely dependent on Him and no one else. No amount of missionary zeal, no amount of efforts to restore an earthly Zion in Jerusalem or Mecca or wherever amounts to anything.
No work to discover who the antichrist is is going to change anything because He is Lord and He decides. Whensoever He chooses. Can you see how all these various aspects of our theology is influenced and motivated by the confession Jesus is Lord? When we say Jesus is Lord, we testify that everything else fades in significance. As He stands above the rest, just like that palm tree towering over those shrubs.
When we say He is king, we say that He rules and so His edicts as king are mandatory. They are not optional. His wishes are our commands. His tactical decisions are our marching orders. When He is king, we say He reigns.
And our opinions of how He should act and our suggestions on how He should do things for us, it fades into obscurity as we see Him, the king, towering over us. But then, it also means that His resoluteness to act on our behalf becomes our hope. His strength of character becomes our strength in peril, and His victory becomes our victory. Because it means that His enemies are our enemies, and our enemies will become His footstool. Like the magnificent palm tree in my neighbourhood, the enemies are the shrubs, and all they can do is bite His ankles.
This is the image we have of Jesus here in the Bible, the majestic king whose enemies are mere ankle biters. Not even worthy of a second look down. All eyes are focused up and up and up at the majestic king. This is Jesus, friends, as He is now, seated at the right hand of God. The second thing we see is His kingdom as it is now.
We see in Psalm 110:3. Your troops will be willing on the day of Your battle, arrayed in holy majesty. From the womb of the dawn, You will receive the dew of Your youth. The king, in other words, has an army. The king has an army.
And previously, the word Zion came up, which in the Old Testament was the dwelling place of God in Jerusalem. It was a place where God was centred. But as the New Testament shows us later, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, Zion is now in the hearts of every believer. Our bodies have become the dwelling place of God. And I think it's no stretch to say that the people mentioned here are the people of God.
The people mentioned here are the people of God, and that is the church. We are the troops referred to here. We are the people who willingly dedicate ourselves to the king's cause. And Christ, who is the king of Psalm 110, has a kingdom of subjects who are ready to devote themselves to Him. And the picture we see here of the church, very importantly, is descriptive, not prescriptive.
In other words, it says how the church is rather than what the church should be. This is what the church is. So how are we? What does it say about the church here in the psalm? Well, firstly, it says who we are.
We are a people. We are a people. It indicates that we are distinct from the rest of the world. We are not the king in the psalm, but we are also not the enemies in the psalm. We are a people.
What this means is that you are either or. You are either in the kingdom or you are not. You are a people. It means that you cannot be a Christian and a new age pantheist at the same time. You cannot crown Christ as king when you serve Allah.
It means that His people are not a confused rebel of individuals being blown in here by any kind of teaching or confession or lifestyle. We are a community united by a single truce that Jesus is king. But because of this, we are not only a people, we are His people. We are His people. Through the effectual calling by the Father, the calling from God where we become His, along with the gift of the Spirit and the precious purchase of Christ's blood, we have been adopted into this kingdom and we have become His people.
But even more amazingly, Jesus Christ the king was made to share in the humanity of His people in order that He might become, as Hebrews 2:17 says, a merciful and faithful high priest in His service to God and that He might make atonement for the sins of the people. Therefore, Jesus is not ashamed to call us His family. After becoming like one of us, dying for us, God exalts Him above His family, His brothers, and puts everything under His feet. Hebrews 2:8 uses those words, puts everything under His feet, and crowns Him with glory and honour. In other words, He is the king at the right hand of God, and we are His people.
Not we will be. Not we can work towards that and hope that hopefully one day we will be. We are His people. We are His brothers and His sisters. By His blood, He has ransomed us from His enemies who were at one time our kings and our lords and who we served.
Like a white knight, Jesus rode in and captured us from the lords of sin and death. And now we crown Him as the Lord of our lives. He is the Lord of our lives, and so we are His people. Secondly, the church is comprised of willing subjects, the psalm says. Willing subjects.
We see the beauty of this willingness, this eagerness to see Christ the king, illustrated by the phrase, in the womb of the dawn, You will receive the dew of Your youth. Verse three. In the womb of the dawn, You will receive the dew of Your youth. Now if you're scratching your head and going, what the? That's fine because I did too.
For all the Bible nerds out there, Bob, I'm looking your way, it is widely regarded as one of the most difficult Hebrew sentences to translate. It is a head scratcher. The dew of Your youth can be translated as Your young people will come to You like the dew. And no one is entirely sure which way this is meant to be translated, but more or less, we get this image. More or less, we get this image.
At the break of light, at the first rising of the sun, the army of Christ is at hand, at His hand, to participate in the conquest. They come to His side like the dew, and I get this image of Lord of the Rings or Braveheart or any of those medieval movies of the king shouting, on me. On me. And his troops rushed to his side. That's the idea.
They come to Him like dew. Can anyone stop dew from falling? You can cover some things, but it is all pervasive. It is everywhere.
You cannot stop it. And this is the church. This is His people coming to Him in His day of victory. Spurgeon in his commentary sees the powerful working of God even in the idea that we should be willing troops. Not only were we so dependent on Jesus to rescue us, but we are supernaturally moved by and are dependent on God in becoming willing as well.
We have been made willing. And this happened when we were weaned off our old kings and our old lords of sin and death, our sinful natures, our futile thinking. We were weaned off our own thoughts and purposes so that the thoughts and the purposes and the will of God will be fulfilled in us and through us. Only because of God's will have we been made truly willing. It also says that the king's troops are arrayed in holy majesty, which can also be translated as priestly garments.
In other words, again, these people are consecrated. They are set apart to the service of God. They are holy. In other words, as the king is holy, so the church is also clothed in this holiness. This is the image.
We are like knights in shining armour reflecting the sun of His holiness. Glistening in the king's holiness. It means that as Christians, we will not dwell on the acts that defy the holiness of the king. The church can have nothing to do with the acts that are contrary to her very nature, and this, friends, is our very great comfort. That Psalm 110 talks of us, God's church, as already holy, as already pure, as already clean.
As a Christian, you will realise how God is cleaning you from the inside out. You will realise this. You will see the longer you follow Jesus, how much your life has been changing. This is the work of God already in you because so often, and this is a great comfort, so often we get down on ourselves. Oh, I've messed up again.
I've done this again. I've wrestled with this again. I've fallen in this again. We're grieved by our shortcomings and our sin, but the fact that Jesus became king after His death and resurrection. When He sat down at the right hand of God, His kingdom was given to Him, and we are His troops.
And we have been given the garments of holiness. The garments of righteousness. The New Testament talks of us as Christians being clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You are holy. You are righteous.
You are good. That is such a good thing to hear every now and then, isn't it? We're not just forgiven. We're not just spared from God's anger. You are good.
You are holy. And God has made it so, and He's in the process of making it even more so. So don't give up on yourself. Don't get too down on yourself. Keep working on those rough edges.
Keep smoothening it out. And if you sin and you fall, get up again and repent and change and grow. But know that you have the garments of holiness on and are reflecting the holiness of God. Like knights in shining armour reflecting the holiness of God. Now our third point, Christ's victory as it will be.
Christ's victory as it will be. As we reach the final verses of the psalm, we see a final victory of the Christ king. This time in verse five, it is the Lord who is at the right hand of God. See that change? The Lord, lowercase, is at Your right hand, God.
As Yahweh's right hand man, Christ crushes kings and the rulers of the earth. He judges the nations, heaping up the dead, and He's so fixed on bringing total and complete judgement that He doesn't rest. He simply takes a drink from the stream along the road, lifts up His head, and continues on with His mission. This is Jesus Christ and His victory as it will be. There's a coming time when all of Jesus' enemies will be utterly destroyed.
This hasn't happened yet. We know of this. He will not simply be ruling in the midst of His enemies anymore. He will crush them completely. Notice, here in these verses that these enemies are now kings and rulers.
They are specified. They're kings and rulers. They are the ruling class that rule over other men. And it leaves room to insinuate that there is still hope for their subjects, that in conquering over these powers and these forces and these human beings, Christ is interested in recapturing the lost. But it is clear that those that oppose Christ will be crushed under the glory that is His.
The victory will be complete. In 1 Corinthians 15, a magnificent passage on the resurrection of Christ and what that means for us, the hope that it gives for us as Christians, Paul refers to Psalm 110. Have a listen to this. 1 Corinthians 15:24. Paul writes, the end will come, the end of time, when He, that is Christ, hands over the kingdom to God the Father after He has destroyed all dominion, authority, and power.
For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Christ is in the process right now of ruling in the midst of His enemies, extending His sceptre from Zion, growing His kingdom, but there will come a time when enough will be enough and all His enemies will be dealt with, the last enemy being death itself. Death will no longer be a king opposing the reign of Christ. It will no longer rule over humanity as it does right now.
He will lose his sting. He will have no more victory. And friends, this is our hope. This is our very great comfort that Jesus Christ our Lord wins over everything. Over everything.
Justice is done. Love conquers all. Faithfulness reigns. Now you may have noticed that we skipped over verse four in the psalm. Now I want us to look at this because it is in fact the most important verse in this psalm.
It is right in the middle. If you notice that, it is right in the middle of the psalm. Everything leads up to it. Everything flows from it. The Lord has sworn in verse 4.
The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind. You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. Now again, what is going on? Who is this guy Melchizedek? If you know your Bibles, your Old Testament, you'll know that there is no other place before Psalm 110 that mentions Melchizedek other than Genesis 14.
Genesis 14, where a mysterious figure called Melchizedek comes up and is described as the king of ancient Jerusalem. He's the king of Salem, it says. The old word, the old name for Jerusalem. He is the king before David was king in Jerusalem, and he's described as a priest to the Most High God, Yahweh. He blesses Abraham, and that's all.
He blesses Abraham, receives a tithe from Abraham, and then that's it. Two verses, three verses, and then nothing. No other mention of Melchizedek. Then it comes up in Psalm 110, where David prophesies that the Messiah will be a priest king like Melchizedek. I'm sure no one really understood what this was really in the Old Testament.
But turning to the New Testament, the book of Hebrews goes to great lengths to show that while Jesus Christ was indeed the messianic king, the Son of God, He needed to be a priest as well in order for His kingdom to be established. Four chapters in the book of Hebrews are spent talking about how Jesus had to be priest. Over and over again, Jesus is given the title of high priest. Hebrews 4:14, 5:10, 6:20, 7:26, 8:1, 10:21. But He's not simply a high priest in the order of Aaron, the Levitical order, the human order that was in existence at that time.
He's a different priest of a different order, the order of Melchizedek. This priesthood is better. This priesthood could offer something that the other one never could. By being the high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek, Jesus becomes the very source of salvation for all who believe in Him so that not only is His kingdom established by His kingship and His reign, but it is populated by a cleansed people. Since Jesus was both human and divine, the book of Hebrews says that He was able to be a true mediating priest.
The old order, the Levitical order was weak and useless in that it could make nothing perfect. Chapter 7:18 says, its sacrificial system was not effective because it had flawed, imperfect sacrifices brought by flawed, imperfect, and dying priests. It needed to be repeated over and over again. But Jesus' priesthood was always going to be better. Why?
Because Jesus led a perfect life, and this life was indestructible, chapter 7 says, indestructible. He has a permanent priesthood, in other words, that lasts for all eternity, but not only that. Not only that, He was also the holy, blameless, pure, set apart, exalted above the heavens priest, and therefore He could make everyone completely perfect through one completely effective sacrifice once and for all. He was both the perfect priest and the perfect sacrifice. The writer of Hebrews brings both the conquering kingship of Jesus and the mediating priesthood of Jesus together.
And then he wraps it up in chapter 10, and I want us to turn to this as our final thing today. Chapter 10:12-14. Let's have a look at that. It is amazing. It'll give you goosebumps.
Chapter 10:12-14. But when this high priest, or this priest who is Jesus, had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time, He waits for His enemies to be made His footstool because by one sacrifice, He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. Psalm 110 and Hebrews 10:12-14. The kingship of Jesus, the priesthood of Jesus, and a kingdom of wholly made troops.
How amazing. When we say Jesus is Lord, we say that He is king. Not only because He's been given all authority and power and dominion, but because He has won back His kingdom as a perfect priest. Only a king will do anything to protect his kingdom. And by one sacrifice, He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.
Christ is king today, ruling in the midst of ankle biting enemies. We are His willing people living holy lives in honour of His name, and we look forward with hope to the day when He will conquer all His final enemies, including sin and death. Hallelujah. Let's pray. Jesus, You are Lord.
Jesus, You are Lord. You are our king. You are our master. Thank You that You are a good master. Thank You that You ransomed us from our bad masters.
Lord, sow into our minds the understanding of the majesty and the glory and the power that is due to Your name, is inherent in Your name. Father, as we understand You as Lord in our lives, may we submit more and more to that authority. May we submit more and more and live under that rule. Where there is things in our life that try to wage war against Your will and Your commands, Lord, crush them in us as You crush Your enemies. They are not something we want in our lives.
We do not desire them at all. Lord, as You make us holy through the garments and the clothing of righteousness on us, Father, make us into troops that are willing to come to Your side, willing to be with You, willing to be Your subjects. Thank You, Lord, that this has already been done. The very fact that we sit here, Lord, is proof of that. There would be no other reason for us to be here, and there is no other reason.
Lord, we look forward to that day where we will have that kingdom feast with You, celebrating Your victory over all, including sin and death. We long for that final victory, Lord. We pray for it. Lord Jesus, come. God, give us the strength and the endurance and the perseverance to fight this fight, to remain in Your kingdom, and to grow it, to be involved in the stretching out of Your sceptre from Zion until we wait for Your coming, we long for it, Lord Jesus. Amen.