Q26. How doth Christ execute the office of a king?

A. Christ executeth the office of a king, in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies.

We have seen that the offices had a defining prophetic text in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 18:15-18 pointed to the prophet to come and Psalm 110:4 gave the oath of God for Christ to be priest. For the central promise of the royal office, we can look at 2 Samuel 7.

“I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (vv. 12-13).

There are other texts that tell us more about what the Messiah and his reign will be; but what is significant here is just that God makes his promise to that typological office-holder, David. 

Even in our post-monarchical age, one would think we wouldn’t need to be told what a king is; but Brakel does so anyway: “A king is a person in whom alone the supreme authority over a nation is vested.”1 But we moderns are actually more confused on this point than we think. We can start, in a sense, at the end. Jesus is actually conceived to be the ultimate in all of the offices of the civil sphere: “For the LORD is our judge; the LORD is our lawgiver; the LORD is our king; he will save us” (Isa. 33:22).

Just as prophets and priests were first fathers of homes, and then chiefs of fathers in a village, and then finally of a larger clan or tribe, so in the same way the kings evolved from those who were “chief” or “prince,” that is, simply “first” among the local extension of the image of God. This is of course no longer taught, and is terribly offensive to our modern state-worshiping ears. But anyone who bothers to study history will see the same development of the kings from the local among the Greeks and Romans. So when Christ is called “King of kings, and Lord of lords” in Revelation 19:16, this means that he is ultimate not only as an end to such an office, but is the archetype of that office for which all earthly examples are types.

“‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.’ I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you’” (Ps. 2:6-7).

The City of God (namely Zion) is first an eternal reality, as Augustine argued, and the decree of God all the orthodox would take to be eternal.  

King Jesus first subdues his own people

The first thing that sets up the kingdom of Christ in this world is his conquest of each rebellious, sinful heart. The answer to Q45 of the Larger Catechism describes this as Christ “calling out of the world a people to himself.” If we can understand the manner in which God saves an individual soul, and how God assembles the church, then we can also get a glimpse of the order of the kingdom—it is from the invisible to the visible; from the spiritual to the material. Some err in making it invisible never touching the visible. This is Gnostic. Others err in making it material now, yet not conceding priority to the spiritual. This is Naturalistic. The biblical order of Christ’s invasion of the old world is always from the invisible to the visible, as he himself is the Word made flesh, and assembles a visible body by a spiritual word. 

I had mentioned how the Davidic Covenant is actually the unfolding of the Abrahamic Covenant, specifically the promise that “kings shall come from you” (Gen. 17:6). But within that same theme, it also belongs to a king, whose kingdom is expanding, to take unto himself the refugees and dissidents of the countries he is conquering. This is an act of mercy and generosity within the same covenantal plan.

“Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name. And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written, ‘After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old’” (Acts 15:14-18).

So the rebuilding of “the tent of David” turns out to be populating the kingdom with Gentiles. 

But whether viewed from the perspective of redemptive history or in the case of each individual soul, the “root” of the kingdom’s advancement in this world is the new birth, as this alone adds to its citizenship roles. He calls Christians into existence through the gospel call, and that from a people who were under the bondage of another prince, whose way is to blind:

“In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God … For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4, 6). 

Each new believer is called a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:7) and thus is a point of invasion of the new world in the midst of the old. We can see how the resurrection of Christ perfects the invasion that is first marked by the incarnation. Without the resurrection, the incarnation is an invasion of a King who commands no ground troops. 

King Jesus rules the church

“And he is the head of the body, the church” (Col. 1:18). If Christ is the supreme Head of the church, then all other subordinate leaders who do not submit to his law set themselves up as an antichrist and a tyrant in the church. 

As with Christ speaking as Prophet through the secondary causal agency of the ministry of the Word, so it is with his being King over the church—in “giving them officers, laws, and censures, by which he visibly governs them” (WLC, Q45). There is no contradiction between Christ’s government and local church government. One is the Head and throne, and the other the court and servants carrying out his edicts.  

The Reformed make a pair of distinctions that will help us here. The first is between the essential reign of Christ and his mediatorial reign.2 The former is universal and by virtue of his eternal and divine Sonship. The latter is specific to the church by virtue of his federal representation and redemption of them. The unbelieving world has no part as citizens of that spiritual reign. These will come together in the consummation of the kingdom as one. But for now, how are they related? Paul leaves us with no doubt that they are in fact related:

“And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church” (Eph. 1:22). 

He always had this power and even exercised it from the beginning—“by him kings reign” (Prov. 8:15); and he is “the ruler of kings on earth” (Rev. 1:5). The only question is how is the church related to this aspect of his dominion. Brakel speaks of “every form of dominion”3 forbidden from the church. Here he was using the word “dominion” in its Mark 10 sense of “lording it over others,” and not in its Genesis 1 sense of that general creation ordinance. 

Here is where the second distinction will help—that between the inaugurated kingdom and the consummated kingdom. Christ’s kingdom was inaugurated at the ascension: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mat. 28:18), so that Peter could preach a coronation sermon in the courts below at Pentecost,

“This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:32-36; cf. 5:31).

With these two distinctions in mind, we can picture a chart with two overlapping phenomenon. From left to right, there is the history of Christ’s mediatorial reign, moving from inauguration (First Advent) to consummation (Second Advent); yet from heaven to earth the exalted Head of the church commands his norms as King as surely as he declares, intercedes, and blesses in his other offices. The edicts of the throne room make landfall. In this way, there is a left to right and a top to bottom movement. 

Dabney puts it in this way: “The Church is His immediate domain: its members are His citizens; and for their benefit His powers are all wielded. But His power extends over all the human race, the angelic ranks, good and bad, and the powers of nature.”4 But Brakel had earlier made a threefold distinction. Christ is King, 

“in a threefold manner: (1) as God (being coessential with the Father and the Holy Spirit), He rules over the kingdom of power, to which all creatures belong; (2) as Mediator He rules over the kingdom of grace upon earth; and (3) as Ruler over the kingdom of glory in heaven, of which both angels and all the elect are subjects.”5

King Jesus defends the church

Whichever view of the millennium is true, it is difficult to get around the many prophecies that speak of Christ’s reign “spilling over” into positive effects on earth. Some of these have to do with the link between Christ’s royal office and lesser civic offices which conform to his rule (even if to an imperfect degree).

“Behold, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice. Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm” (Isa. 32:1-2).

This defense is often a restraint—it says RESTRAINING. This may conjure up for many the mysterious expression by Paul about those two events of the end times, one being the revealing of the man of lawlessness and the other being a great apostasy. But the other detail mentioned in that place is something more behind the scenes: 

“And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way” (2 Thess. 2:6-7).

I will not add to speculation in dictating how one should think about the whole of this. But one thing is certain. Even if there is a “secondary restrainer,” not including the triune God, even still such a restraint would be on the short leash of the divine decree and all under the Lordship of Christ’s rule and reign. 

When the Scriptures speak about God exercising his powers to inflict harm on his people’s enemies, we need to recognize that this is always in concert with his timeline for redemptive history. At the center of that history, there is Jesus, in a sense, not defending himself; and there are his words to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world” (Jn. 18:36). The whole emphasis is not about where his kingdom extends to, but rather about its origins and nature. It is not world-ly, and therefore does not operate as the kingdoms of this world do. 

However, the exercise of power in the form of protection and punishment is not the property of the fallen world. If there is a just use of force is the delegated authority (cf. Gen. 9:5-6, Rom. 13:1-7), then how much more perfect is that just force of Christ?  Watson said, “It is a vain thing for a king to have a crown on his head, unless he have a scepter in his hand to rule.”6

King Jesus conquers his enemies and ours

The primary enemy of Christ and his kingdom is Satan and his kingdom, or as Paul calls it, “the domain of darkness” (Col. 1:13). So much of the problem of the more recent Two Kingdom view is that it does not make clear distinctions between the aforementioned dual reigns of Christ on the one hand, versus the Augustinian “two cities” concept on the other. Both are real categories. They are important categories. But it was the Gnostics, Donatists, and Anabaptists who blended all of this into one radical division, where the present world was evil without remainder and that to become a Christian is to sever all relationship with that world. Today’s Two Kingdom view would absolutely deny that they are making such a sharp severing (and they do not—they speak of common grace, natural law, secular vocation, etc.). However, when it comes time to relate explicitly Christian doctrine to civic matters, immediately the same Gnostic walls go up. 

We just looked at a key passage for this.

“Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every 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” (1 Cor. 15:24-26).

Whatever the exact timetables, this was set up, as Hodge said, “a kingdom into which in the end all other kingdoms were to be merged.” In most cases, this will not be a willing merger; it will be a hostile takeover!  

Why the Westminster Divines emphasized that we have enemies in this way I am not sure. Nevertheless this coupling is actually a key to reading the Imprecatory Psalms and crucial in order to understand how the final vengeance of Christ conditions our ability to distinguish between (1) our sinful vengeance and (2) duly appointed acts of force against violence. One such passage that rests our rightly ordered yearning for justice according to Christ’s final vengeance is where Paul says,

“This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering—since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed” (2 Thess. 1:5-10).

We must also ask how Christ rules in such a way as to exercise dominion immediately and spiritually over the church, and yet expand into the world and protect the church from the world in the meantime? Watson gives the dual method of “By law, and by love.”7 We could think of the Great Commission’s mandate to disciple the nations as the form that this expansion takes. In this way, we need not pit the basically spiritual method of the rule in the hearts of men against the outward motion that lays a claim on all things. It is fashionable to pit one against the other—Postmillennialists pitting the external against the internal, and Amillennialists preferring the spiritual to the cultural. In this same false dilemma, the triumph of the kingdom in that expanse is pit against suffering and persecution. But there is nothing at all to say that the two cannot intensify simultaneously and come to a head at points in history, and especially in the last great battle. 

None would disagree that the kingdom of Christ is everlasting. Think of the promises of just that in Psalm 72:17, Isaiah 9:7, Daniel 2:44 and 7:14. Or in the New,

“But of the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom’” (Heb. 1:8).

Although some have interpreted 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 as that the Son will submit the whole kingly exercise to the Father, or thereby, to the divine essence and no longer to the human kingship of Christ.8 This is a position so much in the minority among true theologians, but we mention it in passing because of how obscured the full doctrine of the humanity of Christ has become in the modern West.  

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1. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 561.

2. Turretin uses these words, but also the words “natural” (for essential) and “economical” (for mediatorial)—Institutes, II.14.16.2.

3. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 566.

4. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 550.

5. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 561.

6. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 187.

7. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 188.

8. Dabney speaks on one Scottish theologian, John Dick, who held to this view: cf. Systematic Theology, 552.