Alfred Place Baptist Church

Does Jesus being called the King of the Jews, mean he’s parochial, limited and irrelevant for non-Jews?


Stop and we think…

The Jews! Of course! They are the ones who God chose as a race of people to whom the King of the Universe would be born! He came first for the Jews, and then to the Gentiles. Salvation is of the Jews. Again, and again and again in the Old Testament, the Jews are urged on to be a light to the Gentiles.

If you can get to the point where you can really believe that Jesus is the King of the Jews, then you will realise that that means he is the King. Because King of the Jews means King promised to the Jews, for the Jews, but also for the rest of the world.

And what’s added to that is that since we see in Mark 15, that the Jews reject their King, we—like the woman we meet in Matthew 15—if we accept the king, can say “sure, we might be Gentile dogs in many people’s eyes, but even the dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

The King is worth worshipping if he really is the true King. And—amazingly—we get far more than crumbs. We read in Romans 11 that non-Jews who believe in Jesus, the King of the Jews are a privileged wild Olive shoot grafted in among the others and we now share in the nourishing root of the Olive tree!