The King-Priest

Now, before we open Psalm 110, I want to jump to Jesus in Matthew 22. In Matthew 22, Jesus has entered into Jerusalem and He cleansed the temple, which would make quite a stir. On His way out of town, He curses the fig tree. He comes back the next day into the temple and He's confronted by the religious leaders — the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the temple priests. They ask Him this question: who gave You the authority to do all this stuff? In whose name, in whose authority are You doing these things? And so then Jesus just enters into some dialogue with them and He tells them a series of parables. So they respond with a series of “gotcha” questions. They try to trap Jesus into some sort of heresy. Yeah, it didn't go well for them. And then we get this from Jesus.

41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, 42 saying, "What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is He?" They said to Him, "The son of David."

Let me just reiterate — this is not Jesus's last name. This is a title. It's Χριστός (Christos). It's anointed one. It's a messianic term. It's a savior term. It's a redeemer term. It's a king term.

If you pay attention while I’m reading scripture, often I will just transliterate this as "king," because that’s what’s being communicated in this word. So what do you think about the Christ, the coming king? Whose son is He? And they answered Him immediately: the son of David.

43 So he said to them, "How is it then that David in the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 44 'The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet'? If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?"

So they have their gotcha questions, and Jesus just cruises through them, and He comes back with this riddle. And this is interesting — it says:

46 And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

I like that. The sharpest legal minds among the people, men who had spent their entire lives studying, memorizing the Torah, couldn't give an answer, not even a partial answer. They were silent.

Makes me think of John 5, where Jesus says,

"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, yet it is they that bear witness about me, and yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life."

That’s lived out, what Jesus is saying here. This is in Matthew 22. So let’s take a look at the psalm that Jesus quotes here — Psalm 110, verse 1. This is what He quotes:

"The LORD says to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.'"

So Jesus starts with the question, who do you think is the Christ? And they immediately respond, “the son of David.” Well known — nobody argued about that, because they knew the Scriptures. In just several weeks, we'll be in 2 Samuel chapter 7, and we'll see why everybody knew that the Christ, the Messiah, had to come from the line of David. This is the heart of Jesus's riddle, then.

So it says — and this is really hard to see in the English, because we look at that and we see the same word twice: "The LORD said to my Lord." But they’re two completely different words in the Hebrew. The first one is the tetragrammaton — יהוה (YHWH), the covenant name of God — the LORD God said. Now who’s speaking? David. It’s okay, come on now — David is speaking. It’s his psalm, right? God said to my Lord — now the word here is אֲדֹנִי (adoni). It’s a title for a political and social superior. This is what David would have been called every day by everyone around him. He was the king — my lord, adoni. Over and over again, this is what he would have been called. He was the king. He was the top of the hierarchy.

So now he starts this: God said to my adoni, my Lord — like, who is David talking about? What’s going on here? David is confessing something of extreme importance here. This is what makes this psalm so important prophetically. This is why it’s quoted in the New Testament so often. He’s acknowledging that the office he has been given, the office that he has been called to and installed in as king, is not fulfilled in him. Yeah, David’s a man after God’s own heart, but he has feet of clay. It’s not fulfilled in him — that there is one greater, and that David the king ultimately is awaiting, and will serve, the greater king.

This is why adoni is important, because it refers to a human king. It sounds so similar — אֲדֹנִי (adoni), human king; אֲדוֹנָי (Adonai), God as king — completely different. So, "the LORD says to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool." This is enthronement language, just like we looked at last week. And let me just, for clarity’s sake — this is not saying that at some point in time Jesus became God, or was changed in His nature. It’s just saying that He has been installed as the king, given the place and the position of the One who will rule, and He’s commanded to sit at the right hand until God makes the enemies His footstool.

That's an interesting word in the Hebrew, the word footstool. The root of it comes from a very vivid picture and image — it's the image of a conquering king with his foot on the neck of a conquered king. Right? Like, you come and sit at the place of honor, the right hand, the place of power, the place of authority, until I make all of your enemies your footstool.

You know, Paul just flat out applies this to Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15. He says,

"For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death."

Y’all, there’s only one king who has defeated death, and there’s only one king who will one day destroy it. There’s no enemy Jesus cannot and will not defeat. Like Psalm 110 — just that opening verse is God calling out, David acknowledging and calling out the reality of a coming king whom no enemy can stand against, and whom God will deliver all enemies unto Him.

Just that alone — if you really believe that, doesn't that reframe the enemies in your life right now? Like, you've got some. Sometimes we don't know it, but we have some. But we're all dying slowly.

We all at least have that in common. Death is the great wrongness, the great enemy. But if Jesus has already defeated death, and Jesus is going to one day destroy death, and we are in Jesus and Jesus is in us, doesn't that change how we view it? Doesn't it free us from fear? Doesn't it free us for hope, to trust and to follow the King who can do what no one else can do?

This continues on in verse two.

2 The LORD sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies!

Now, a scepter is an instrument and a symbol of ruling authority. I want you to notice a couple of things about it. First, it's sent to him. It's given to him. Over the last few months, I've talked about how Jesus refused to grasp, how He didn't seize, but instead it was given to Him and He received it. And it comes from Zion. It comes from the holy mountain. It comes from the throne of God. The authority of the King, the Lord of David, isn't given or conferred by humans. It's given and conferred by God. The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter.

And then here’s the command that is given with it: rule in the midst of your enemies. Rule. That’s what the scepter is given for. That’s what the authority is conferred for — to rule. Rule is the Hebrew word רָדָה (radah). It’s an imperative here, and it’s such an important word. This is one of the core words of the Old Testament narrative in Scripture. I talk about it all the time. Some of you might get sick of it. Not going to apologize. I could, but I’m not going to.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

That word dominion — that’s radah. It’s the same word, right? So I want you to hold on to that and really think about it. The rule or dominion that is given to this king, this son of David, who’s actually his Lord, is the vocation that all of us were created for in the first place, before the fall. He’s going to do what we were created to do.

But notice how different His rule is from what we've come to expect from worldly rulers.

3 Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power, in holy garments; from the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours.

Freely is the word here for a free-will offering. It's a religious word. It's a sacrificial word. So He says, your people are not going to be conscripted. They're going to be consecrated. Your people aren't going to come to fight. They're going to come to worship. This is what's so amazing about it. The King doesn't need an army to fight for Him. He's going to fight for His army. His people will offer themselves freely, not out of duty—although certainly that's there—but out of desire and delight. Your people will offer themselves freely. Such a different use of power, isn't it? He's not compelling. He's not demanding. There's something about this King that will be so unique, so beautiful, so powerful that people will choose to bend and worship.

Now, the next phrase—I just got to be honest with you—from the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours, is maybe one of the most contested Hebrew phrases in all of the Psalms, if not in all the Old Testament. It's really, really difficult to translate, and as many commentaries as you're going to read, you're going to find a different take. But here's what they all agree on with this phrase, the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours: the point is that this King's people are many, that they're willing, and that they're vigorous, just like the dew. So there's this sense of glory and power and multitude about those that are going to come to the King. But they're going to come because He's going to operate out of a different kind of authority—not man-given, but God-given.

Now, there's a lot of authoritarians in the world. You ever notice that? There's a lot of wannabe authoritarians in the world. Unfortunately, sadly, there's many in the church—many churches, many pastors—who try to seize power by compelling obedience, demanding it, controlling it. This was not the way of Jesus. If this was not the way of Jesus, I think that a church that is convinced that Jesus rules differently from the power-hungry, power-grabbing systems of the world—then Jesus's people, and Jesus's community, and Jesus's church should operate differently.

Verse four is going to show us just why Jesus is such a different kind of king.

4 The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, "You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek."

So David's Lord, the promised King, is a different kind of king because He will not only be a King, but He will be a Priest as well. Notice first, God swears this. This is God's oath. It's irrevocable. It's self-binding. It's not contingent upon anyone else's behavior.

It's only contingent upon the will and character and promise of God. So God swears and He will not change His mind that this coming king will also be a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. God promises this priest, and a priest is one who mediates before God on behalf of his people. This claim is staggering from David's lips because Israel's law had strongly separated kingship from priesthood. The crown and the altar had different lines. Kingship belonged to Judah. Priesthood belonged to Levi. Kings were not supposed to be priests, and priests were not supposed to be kings. The Old Testament is full of instances where people try to cross those boundaries, and it doesn't go well.

One of my favorites is 2 Chronicles 26. We'll probably get there in a couple years. But it says this: King Uzziah was a reigning king, and it was going well for him, and he got a little too big for his britches. It says he grew proud, and he decided that kingship wasn't enough for himself. So he goes into the temple to offer sacrifices and incense at the altar. He just takes it upon himself, like, "I'm a pretty good king. Maybe I can pull off this priest thing too." Now Azariah, one of the priests, goes to confront him, and he brings with him eighty priests. Now, I don't know about you, but when I tend to think of a priest, I don't necessarily think of a warrior. But these eighty priests that he brings with him are described as men of valor, which is a very interesting Hebrew term. We've seen it — Boaz was a man of valor. So these are like warrior monks. So here comes the king strutting his stuff, and then Azariah and about eighty buff men of valor priests say no. But he's not deterred. He's feeling himself as king, and so he doesn't back down. He keeps pressing forward.

Azariah and the monks don't have to do anything. God reaches down and gives him leprosy right on his forehead. And so now you have a profane thing in the holy space of the sanctuary. God's clearly said, "Dude, you're not supposed to be a priest." And because of your pride, now you've got leprosy. He had it for the rest of his life until he died, which meant he spent the rest of his life in seclusion. He had to live in a house by himself while his son Jotham ruled as king, because of his pride.

Israel had this separation of power built into their system of government. And if that sounds familiar, and it should if you've done any civics classes, it's because we have a separation of power in our governmental system. And that system, as it was constructed by the framers and founders, was deeply informed and influenced by the separation of powers in the Old Testament. It has an important and profound role. Why does God separate the kingdom and the kingship from the priesthood? Why do we separate powers in our cultural system? We do it because power corrupts. And finish it for me — and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That's why we do it. This is a really important reality. It's one thing to acknowledge that; it's another thing to live it.

I spent some time thinking this week about power and what it does to us, and it brought up a memory I hadn't thought of in I don't know how long. When I was like twelve, thirteen years old, I would go every summer to work at a camp, and I worked there for two or three years as a junior counselor. The junior counselors got all the grunt work, because the senior counselors would make us do stuff they didn't want to do. And I remember thinking, "Man, when I'm a senior counselor, I'm going to be so much better. I'm going to treat the junior counselors great. I'm going to do this so well." And then I got to be a senior counselor, and man, did that go to my head immediately. This is the funny thing about power. In whatever context we find ourselves — these little kingdoms — once we've got some power, it does something to us. There's a reason too much power can't be trusted in one person.

So if power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and if the law and structure of Israel intentionally separated the roles of priest and king, then what is God doing here? Well, let me say it this way: Jesus alone, Christ alone, is permitted to hold what no one else may. It's not just the two offices — priest and king. He's also the true prophet. The full mediatorial role between God and man is entrusted to Jesus because He alone cannot be corrupted by it. This is what makes Him so unique. This is why He can carry the mantle of King of kings and Lord of lords.

And this is why He can carry the mantle of priest of priests. The great and true ultimate high priest that all the others pointed toward is fulfilled in Him — the one who can't be corrupted by that power, the one who proved His incorruptibility by not sinning in His life and by coming back from the dead. So Jesus is this king and this priest. And then this is where it gets weird in Psalm 110. And you remember my rule: if it's weird, it's important.

Psalm 110:4 says,

You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

So Christ is a priest after the order of Melchizedek. And Melchizedek is one of the strangest figures in the Old Testament. We meet him one time only, in Genesis 14. We're not told much about him. Abram has just gone to war to rescue Lot, and he was successful. And as he's coming back from the battlefield, he's met by this Melchizedek. He's described as the king of Salem — Salem means peace, so he's the king of peace. He rules over Jerusalem, and he's described as the king of righteousness. So we've got Abram, who has been called to become the covenant nation — through him all the nations are going to be blessed — and then he comes and here's this strange figure who is a king of Salem, a king of righteousness. And the text tells us he serves as a priest of the Most High God. So Abram meets him and acknowledges him and honors him, and Melchizedek serves him bread and wine, and then Abram gives him ten percent — he tithes to him. It's this strange figure. People have argued about who Melchizedek was, where he came from. Take this for what it's worth: my view — I'm ninety percent convinced that this is a theophany, a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus.

Hebrews chapter 7 unpacks this. And if y'all would let me preach for three hours, like I want to, I would walk you through this whole chapter, because it's dense and it's beautiful. But let me just try to summarize the argument. In Hebrews chapter 7, the author argues that Jesus, as a priest of the order of Melchizedek, is a superior priest in at least three different ways.

First, He's superior in order. The first argument the author of Hebrews makes is that Melchizedek outranks Levi before Levi even exists — he came first. One of my favorite lines in the chapter is Hebrews 7:9-10.

One might even say that Levi himself, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, for he was still in the loins of his ancestor when Melchizedek met him.

So it's just a funny little argument — Levi hadn't even been born yet, but genetically he's still in the loins of Abram, and Abram is submitting to and acknowledging the authority of Melchizedek. So the author says, listen, Melchizedek came first and he's greater. He's superior in order.

But he's also superior in permanence. Every Levitical priest died and had to be replaced. So the office was perpetual, but no single priest was. Melchizedek's priesthood requires no successor, because as Hebrews 7:24 says, he continues forever, holding it by the power of an indestructible life. So the priesthood of Melchizedek is superior because it comes first, and it's superior because it's permanent — it exists forever. That's what we read in Psalm 110.

Third, it's superior in its role of sacrifice. The Levitical priests had to sacrifice over and over and over again. But Jesus, in His Melchizedekian priesthood — that's a fun word — did it once and for all. Hebrews 7:27-28 says,

He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself. For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.

Remember, Melchizedek comes way before the law. So the law appoints the Levitical priesthood because of weakness. But "the word of the oath which came later than the law" — this is a clear reference to Psalm 110 without naming it. God swore an oath and will not change His mind: "You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek." That came later than the law, and it appoints a Son who has been made perfect — how long? Forever.

Jesus is, yes, the King of kings, the king to end all kings, but He's also the priest of priests. He's superior in order, permanence, and sacrifice. He brings together the two offices within Himself perfectly.

Psalm 110:5 continues to show us what that's going to look like. It starts out this way:

The Lord is at your right hand.

Again, this "the Lord" is God. I want you to notice — back in verse one, the king was told to sit at the right hand of God. Now it says that God Himself is at the right hand of the king. There's something beautiful about this interplay between them. It conveys — it doesn't say it outright, but there's this intuition, this insinuation, that this king who is a man is also God. And there's this equality happening here. And then what comes next is absolutely ambiguous.

He says,

He will shatter kings on the day of his wrath. He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses. He will shatter chiefs over the wide earth.

The text isn’t clear about, okay, is that the king that’s doing that with God at his right hand now, or is it God doing it for the king? Because the king is trusting in God. And my answer to that is yes, right? Because that’s what’s being communicated here. And I know this is tough language, right? He will shatter the kings on the day of His wrath. He will execute judgment over the nations, filling them with corpses. He will shatter chiefs over the wide earth. Just like Psalm 2 last week, we must sit with the reality of coming judgment. We don’t have to like it. We have to acknowledge it.

I was thinking about it this week. The reality of coming judgment no longer fills me with fear, but it actually fills me with peace and even joy. Let me tell you why. Not joy over the violence, not joy over the enemies being put down, but it's this: justice is not an experienced reality very often in this world. Equal justice even less. So evil is a reality that humanity cannot eradicate. We try, don't we? We try, but we cannot eradicate it because we are as much perpetuators of it as we are victims of it. So we live in this really sick tension. We know justice is something that we want and that we long for, and yet we tend to live in ways that are the exact opposite of it.

So when we come across these texts, that God is one day going to come and shatter the proud kingdoms that have risen up in rebellion against Him, that one day the God of all justice is going to come as judge, is the best news ever, because it means that one day justice will really come. It means that one day right will be here. The fact that one day God will set things right — it's not something to fear but something to long for. Yeah, there's a hard edge to it. There are consequences to our choices, which means we should take it seriously. But I say to you this morning, if you seriously long for justice, if your heart hungers for peace, it's the king priest who will bring it. And so we should pray, as I already did this morning, the closing words of the scripture: even so, come Jesus, come make justice flow. Come destroy your enemies. Let your kingdom come in its fullness.

Which actually gets us to Psalm's conclusion here, verse 7. What a strange verse.

He will drink from the brook by the way, and therefore he will lift up his head.

Kind of a strange ending to the psalm, right? It was from king, cosmic king, priest, cosmic priest, and then it just ends with this little pastoral setting. Here comes the king, and He stops by a little brook, and He has a little drink, and He lifts up His head. I think it’s a perfect ending. There’s a pattern here: He drinks, and He lifts up His head. Lifting up your head is an idiom. It’s a phrase of restoration. When somebody has been dishonored, when somebody has been lowered, to be restored is to lift up their head.

So listen to what’s being described here in verse 7. This king of all kings, this one who David calls Lord and yet is the son of David, the One who is sworn by God to be the priest of Melchizedek — He is going to drink from the brook and then be lifted up. I don’t know if that sounds familiar to you, but Christ on the cross, in John 19:28, cries out what? "I thirst." So there’s no dishonor like the dishonor of the cross, right? This is Paul’s argument in Philippians 2:8-9, and we looked at this a lot over this last season — like Jesus emptied Himself as divine prerogative, and He humbled Himself to come as a human, and not just as a human, but as a servant. Not just as a servant — He humbled Himself to death on a cross. And therefore God, what? Exalts Him above every power and authority and gives Him the name above all names.

This King in verse 7 — this beautiful, thirsty, humiliated one — His thirst is satisfied, and His head is lifted as He’s vindicated as He returns from the dead. That’s what’s offered to us in Christ. As I said last week, what God does for Christ, He does for those who are in Christ. It’s why He came. He came to restore us, to be truly and fully who we were made to be.

There’s a very real sense that Adam — and as we’re in Adam and descended from Adam — like we were made to be king-priests, like Christ was. That’s all over Genesis 1 and 2. So in Genesis 1, we already looked at, Adam is given dominion. He’s told to rule over God’s creation with Him. In chapter 2, Adam is placed in the garden of Eden, and there he is told to work it and keep it. If you remember, like six years ago when I preached through Genesis, "work it" and "keep it" are not gardening terms. Adam wasn’t created to just be a gardener. Work it and keep it are priestly terms.

They're the exact same words and terms that are used when the law is given for what the priests are to do in the tabernacle, in the temple. They are to work it and keep it. Adam was made to rule and Adam was made to work and keep. He was made to inherit the kingly mantle and he was made to inherit the priestly mantle, but he never inherited it because of his fall and his failure because of his sin.

This is why Jesus is not only the new and better David, He's the new and better Adam. Because Jesus actually received the mantle. Jesus didn't fall. Because Jesus didn't sin. And so sin had no grip on Him. Death had no claim on Him. This is how and why He defeats death. And this is why you and I who are in Christ can have an unshakable hope and have no fear of death. Because if we are in Christ then it has no claim on us either.

So if you long for justice then you need to follow Jesus the King and Priest. If you long for redemption, then you need the One who sacrificed once and for all. If you desperately need the power to break free from sin, it is the King-Priest who is putting all enemies under His feet and has come for your liberation.

I say this often. It’s so simple. We need Jesus not just to get out of hell and go to heaven. We need Jesus to be who we are made to be, to be the men and the women that God has fashioned and formed us to become. We don’t need Jesus once. We don’t walk down front at an altar call — somebody’s playing "Just As I Am" eight thousand times — and make this decision once, "Okay, I claim Jesus," and then move on to something else. I need Jesus just as much today as I did the first time I called upon His name. Jesus is our King. He’s our Lord. He’s our superior. He’s the One that helps us and aids us and guides us and leads us.

Church, I'm afraid there's so many of us in the church today. We start with Jesus and then we try to go our own way. It's not the first time I've said it. Probably not the last. When it comes to Jesus, you got to dance with the One who brought you. You don't start with Him and move on to something else. He is everything. He is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

There's not a moment of your life, there's not a struggle you'll ever encounter, there's not a question you'll ever have confusion about, that Jesus isn't the One that you are to turn to and look to, because He is the King of kings and He is the Priest of priests, and He is the One who God has sworn He will put all enemies under His foot. Amen.