Christ Revealed

‘The last enemy to be
destroyed is death’
1 CorinthIAns 15:26
10. The eschaton
Read: Psalm 110
With Psalm 110 we are back in the
throne room, observing another
coronation ceremony. We do not get to
see all the details, just the climax of the
ritual. Our gaze is fixed on God himself
who sits on his throne. As the king
approaches, the Lord speaks. The words
are striking: ‘sit at my right hand’. It is
an invitation to enter the presence of
God and assume a position of honour
and power. And then God speaks again:
‘you are a priest forever according to
the order of Melchizedek’. The kingpriest
is to represent his people before
God and to mediate God’s presence
to the nation. He is to be the living
conduit which connects the divine and
the human sphere.
The rest of the psalm, however, is
filled with disturbing scenes of military
violence. The reign of the king is not a
peaceful one, at least to begin with. The
king leads his forces into battle. On his
behalf the Lord will shatter kings and
fill the nations with corpses. And all
this violence continues until everyone
is subjugated and the enemies are made
into a footstool of the king.
In that humiliating position the
defeated foes will serve forever as a
visual symbol of his enduring power
and authority.
The New Testament makes it quite
clear that the king at the right hand
of God and the eternal priest in the
order of Melchizedek is no other than
Jesus himself. That is why it is difficult
to reconcile the psalm’s picture of
nations filled with corpses and the
reign of the Son of God who teaches us
to love our enemies. Here Paul helps
us to understand the military imagery.
The enemies are not people of flesh
and blood, but the cosmic forces of
wickedness. The last, most resilient and
powerful enemy is death itself.
Christ conquers the world, defeats evil
and destroys death not by violence, but
by self-sacrifice. When his victory is
complete death itself will die and God
will be all in all. And so we can look to
the future with hope. The reign of the
priest-king opens before us a world of
peace cleansed by the king’s own blood,
not the blood of his enemies.