a good king.

I would hope when Christians declare that "Jesus is on the throne." That this acknowledges the real gap between a good King who looks upon a broken, desperate, needy, barren land and people and the reality that he has commissioned healing, rescue, and repair through his people.

Because a good king would weep over his hurting people, a good king would move to provide for those in need. A good king would enact rescue on behalf of the helpless. A good king would eradicate oppression. A good king would instill repair and reconstruction over the land. A good king would bring restoration to our families, our homes, and our communities.

"Jesus is on the throne" ought to be a declaration of our responsibility in God's commission to us to bring his goodness to the earth and to eradicate evil. It ought to be a confession of our failures to bring goodness, a confession of ways we have agreed to keep evil in our families, homes, communities, and land. It ought to be a daily, moment by moment, appeal to the good king to bring goodness despite ourselves until his return.

To say that "Jesus is on the throne" and not acknowledge the gap between these realities is to dismiss the broken, desperate, needy, oppressed, and the barren. It is to chose to look the other way and to passively agree to the evil present in our families, homes, communities, and land. It is to recreate the story in the Garden (Genesis 3), to willfully ignore that a Serpent has made his home in our own land and to permit evil to ravish all goodness. Do not give in to this deception. It is the same deception from the beginning.