What Every King Needs

…he who is the blessed and only Sovereign,
The King of kings and Lord of Lords…
1Timothy 6.15

The Bible clearly identifies God as a ruler, king, lord, and sovereign. It is a cornerstone of the Christian faith that God has ultimate and absolute authority over all things. But no one, I don’t believe even God, can be merely “King”; a king needs to be “King of…” a kingdom. What would be the use of being the ruler over nothing? This is not to say that in eternity past God did not reign over anything, he has ruled over the spiritual kingdom of his heaven forever. But God would also rule over a material kingdom, a created kingdom, or kingdoms.

The first chapter of the Book of Genesis depicts the beginning of God’s reign as King of the material universe, and the account starts with God the King creating the kingdoms over which he would rule. In fact, God established three kingdoms successively on the first, second, and thirds days of Creation.

On the first day God created light, and established a celestial kingdom that would demark the separation of light and dark, night and day. It is the kingdom we survey when we turn our gaze skyward and behold the vast expanse of the cosmos.

The second day God created a kingdom of waters below separated from waters above. It was a smaller kingdom within the kingdom created on the first day. It was a kingdom of rivers, lakes, oceans, and seas, and a kingdom of clouds. It is a kingdom very familiar to us, for within it God created the third and final kingdom over which he would rule.

Day three witnessed God’s creation of a terrestrial kingdom, a kingdom of dry land, the kingdom we know as our home—earth. It was, again, a smaller kingdom within the boundaries of the kingdom of the seas and sky.

Three days of labor, three kingdoms established. God was now “King of Creation.” But God the King was not done with his work of Creation. Three more days of work would compliment and complete the work of the first three days. Three days had been spent setting out the kingdoms and establishing their boundaries. God surveyed each of the kingdoms he created each of the first three days, and judged each of them “good.” Good, but not complete.

Some would suggest that mindless and purposeless forces of chemistry and physics rule the Cosmos, drive the hydrological system of earth’s atmosphere, and create and destroy the land masses of our planet. Christians, while not denying the obvious presence of these chemical and physical forces, understand them to operate by the authority and under the rule of Creation’s Sovereign—God the King. Though contemplating the whole of God’s vast Universe strains our comprehension, we should take comfort in the fact that it is all ordered and ruled by “the blessed and only Sovereign.”