Jesus the King: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God

by Timothy J. Keller

Suffering happens, we might say, when there’s a gap between the desires of your heart and the circumstances of your life, and the bigger the gap, the greater the suffering.

To say, “When there’s a gap between your desires and your circumstances, change the circumstances” violates the teachings of these and other currents of religious thought. Instead, they say, what you do need to do is suppress your desires. Get on top of them and become cool, detached, and dispassionate. Then you can keep your promises and stay on the path. The circumstances are fated, while the desires are just an illusion. That’s the reason Socrates wasn’t panicking at the end of his life. He didn’t care to keep on living. He had succeeded in detaching himself.

It would still be possible, at this eleventh hour, for Jesus to abort his mission and leave us to perish. But he doesn’t consider that as an option. He’s begging the Father to carry out the mission some other way, but he doesn’t ask him to abandon it altogether. Why? Because as horrible as the cup is, he knows that his immediate desire (to be spared) must bow before his ultimate one (to spare us).

Often what seem to be our deepest desires are really just our loudest desires.

Jesus is subordinating his loudest desires to his deepest desires by putting them in the Father’s hands.

And when you see that, instead of perpetually denying your desires or changing your circumstances, you’ll be able to trust the Father in your suffering.

You will be able to trust that because Jesus took the cup, your deepest desires and your actual circumstances are going to keep converging until they unite forever on the day of the eternal

There are two things that render Christ’s love wonderful: 1. That he should be willing to endure sufferings that were so great; and 2. That he should be willing to endure them to make atonement for wickedness that was so great.

What’s at the top of the list of the kingdom of this world? Power and money (“you who are rich”); success and recognition (“when all men speak well of you”). But what’s at the top of God’s list? Weakness and poverty (“you who are poor”); suffering and rejection (“when men hate you”). The list is inverted in the kingdom of God.

To Peter and to all of us, Jesus is saying, “My kingdom is not of this world.

It’s completely different. This is how I’m going to change things: I’m going to put others ahead of myself. I’m going to love my enemies. I’m going to serve and sacrifice for others.

On the cross, Jesus is getting what we deserve so we can get what he deserves.

wealth and came into our poverty so that you could be spiritually rich, it changes you.

The kingdom of this world teaches you to base your identity on status, money, and power.

But if you’re starting to get rooted in the kingdom of God, you know losing your job is not going to be easy or pleasant, but you have learned that when weakness and suffering, poverty and rejection are near, the kingdom of God is near. It’s the time when you come to grips with your real treasure, your real identity.

He is the judge over the entire world, being judged by the world.

Many people have proposed a natural cause for this event—an eclipse, for instance. But a solar eclipse does not create absolute darkness for more than a few minutes. Further, a

solar eclipse can’t happen during the time of a full moon, and Passover is always celebrated at a full moon.

But if today my wife comes up to me and says, “I never want to see you or talk to you

again,” that’s a lot worse. The longer the love, the deeper the love, the greater the torment of its loss.

But this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity. This love was infinitely long, absolutely perfect, and Jesus was...

Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade. Why? Jesus was experiencing our judgment day. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. And the answer is: For you, for me, for us. Jesus was forsaken by God so that we would never have ...

If anything but God is more important to you, you have a problem with direction.

At the moment Jesus Christ died, this massive curtain was ripped open. The tear was from top to bottom, just to make clear who did it. This was God’s way of saying, “This is the sacrifice that ends all sacrifices, the way is now open to approach me.”

Because they would eventually see that they had been looking right at the greatest act of God’s love, power, and justice in history. God came into the world and suffered and died on the cross in order to save us. It is the ultimate proof of his love for us.

Jesus Christ’s darkness can dispel and destroy our own, so that in the place of hardness and darkness and death we have tenderness and light and life.

In the course of about three hundred years it had spread through the entire Roman empire.

Jesus had risen, just as he told them he would. After a criminal does his time in jail and fully satisfies the sentence, the law has no more claim on him and he walks out free. Jesus Christ came to pay the penalty for our sins. That was an infinite sentence, but he must have satisfied it fully, because on Easter Sunday he walked out free. The resurrection

was God’s way of stamping PAID IN FULL right across history so that nobody could miss it.

No, it gives us much more, and Tolkien himself, in the epilogue to his essay, explains why. In an argument similar to the one that helped persuade his friend C. S. Lewis on Addison’s Walk by the River Cherwell in Oxford years before, he argues that the gospel story of Jesus is not simply one more great story, pointing to the underlying Reality.75 Rather, the gospel story of Jesus is the underlying Reality to which all the stories point. It gives us more than a passing inspiration because it is the true story; it happened.

The story of Jesus changes our lives because it is true.