Word of Salvation – December 2025
CHRIST THE KING
Sermon by Rev. John Haverland.
Text: Zechariah 9:9-10
Readings: Zech 6:9-15; John 12:12-19; Zech 9:1-10; HC LD 12
Theme: Zechariah urged the returned exiles to rejoice in the king who was coming who would establish peace and rule the world.
Purpose: To urge you to rejoice in Christ the King who will establish a universal kingdom of peace.
Intro to reading: In the 2nd half of 2022 I preached through Zechariah 1-6. Zech prophesised about 500 years before Jesus was born. To most of us he is probably an unfamiliar prophet, but he is often quoted by the writers of the NT. 33 passages from Zech are quoted 50x in the NT. When the gospel writers describe the suffering and death of Jesus they quote Zech 9-14 more than any other part of the OT.
Chapter 9 begins the 2nd half of his prophecies, which are quite different from the first half. Vs 1-8 picture the Lord God coming from the north conquering all of Israel’s enemies. In the 4th century BC God used Alexander the Great to carry out his judgments on Israel’s enemies: Aram was conquered, which was modern Syria; then Tyre and Sidon, which were the major cities of the Phoenicians; then Ashkelon and Ekron which were cities of the Philistines, which is modern day Gaza, which is a war zone at present. As Alexander was advancing on Jerusalem he had a dream and did not attack it.
Read: Zech 9:1-10…
Sermon intro: Queen Elizabeth died on the 8th of Sept 2022 after a long reign of 70 years. Her son Charles succeeded her and was crowned King in Westminster Abbey on 6th May 2023; it was an elaborate coronation ceremony with all the British pomp and ceremony.
Through the history of the world there have been many kings and queens, prime ministers and world leaders. But the greatest king of all is Christ Jesus. In the previous two sermons we noted that Christ is a title. The OT Hebrew word was Messiah. Both words mean “anointed”. He was anointed to be our chief prophet and teacher, our only High Priest, and our eternal King.
This afternoon we are focused on Christ our King. We’ll consider his welcome, his character and his kingdom.
1) HIS WELCOME, v 9a
The prophet Zechariah preached to the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem in 537 BC after the Babylonian exile. They immediately began rebuilding the temple, but after opposition from the pagan peoples around them they stopped.
God sent the prophets Haggai and Zechariah to urge the people to continue with the rebuild. Zechariah prophesied to the people in 520 BC, 17 years after the first exiles had returned. The temple was still not finished, the city walls were broken down and the city of Jerusalem was full of rubble. He encouraged them with the rebuild by prophesying about the great king who was coming, who is Christ the Lord. He would be welcomed with great rejoicing and shouting!
All four of the gospel writers tell us about the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter. For the Jews this was the week before the Passover festival when they remembered how God delivered them out of Egypt and passed over their homes because of the blood of a lamb on the doorframe of their homes.
On the Sunday before the Passover Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a young donkey. Many of the Jews who were in Jerusalem heard that he was coming, and they took palm branches and went out to meet him, lining the road and shouting part of Psalm 118;
“Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the King of Israel!” Both Matthew and John see this as fulfilling the words of Zechariah, “Do not be afraid, O daughter of Zion, see, your king is coming seated on a donkey’s colt.”
This prophecy was familiar and well known by these Jews and they saw it as fulfilled in Jesus the king. They were very excited about Christ Jesus because Israel had not had a king for 600 years, since the exile to Babylon. They saw him as the fulfilling all of the prophecies of the OT from Genesis to Malachi. They were filled with joy that the King had come! Zechariah looked far ahead and prophesied about this great welcome that Jesus would receive as the king.
2) The CHARACTER of the King, v 9b. What sort of a king was Jesus? Who was he and what would he do? What was he like? How would he rule? a
a) Zechariah described him as “righteous”.
Remember that the prophet is describing Jesus as a king. The kings of Israel had to be righteous; i.e. they had to be fair and right in their decisions, honest and true in their dealings with people, blameless and upright in their behaviour, moral and good in their character.
Some of the kings of Israel were like this – David, Josiah, Hezekiah – but even they sinned against God at times and made wrong decisions and were unrighteous at times. The human and imperfect kings of Israel anticipated the coming of the perfect King who would be both divine and human, God and man.
This is, of course, is Christ Jesus, the perfect King, the righteous Lord, the King of kings and the Lord or lords. He is the Lord our righteousness (Jer 23:5), the Righteous Servant (Is 53:9,11), and the righteous Branch (Matt 3:17).
He came as the perfect fulfilment of all the imperfect kings of Israel over 1500 years. Jesus is right and true in all his decisions, words and judgments. He is righteous in his character and in all his dealings with us as his people. He is our righteous King. We know that he will deal with us in righteousness.
b) Zechariah also described him as “having salvation”. Jesus is often described as our Saviour. He is able to save us because he is our eternal God; he is all powerful and almighty; he can do all things. But he is also our Saviour because he came into this world as a human being, as a baby, as we remembered last month in Advent and at Christmas. He came as our great prophet to teach us about God.
He came as our great High Priest to give us free and open access to God our Father. He did this by offering himself as the final, complete and ultimate sacrifice for all the sins of all his people. Because of his death of the cross he has gained a salvation which he can offer to others; he possesses a salvation that he can give to you, if you are willing to receive it by faith.
Because of his resurrection from the dead and he is able to give you eternal life and peace with God. Do you have peace with God? Have you accepted this salvation that God offers to you? Is Jesus your Saviour? If not, you need to go to him now, today, before it is too late.
Jesus is righteous, and he has salvation, and he is “humble”. Zechariah prophesied that coming the king would be “humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
On that Palm Sunday Jesus could have entered Jerusalem riding on a stallion, a war horse! He could have been like Alexander the Great, or Napoleon Bonaparte, who were brilliant army generals and rode on powerful horses. But he chose to ride on “a colt, the foal of a donkey.” This was a deliberate choice on his part.
The Jews were looking for a triumphant and powerful military ruler who would be able to fight against the Romans and restore their land of Israel to them. They wanted a powerful king who would lead them in battle and defeat all their enemies.
But Jesus came as a humble leader. He identified with the poor and the weak, with those who were lepers and blind, those who were unclean and despised by others. He came for the Jews and the Gentiles, He came for men and for women. He is our humble Saviour.
He was so humble that he “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness… he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6-8).
“He had no beauty of majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man or sorrows and familiar with suffering” (Is 53:2-3).
Jesus is righteous; and he has salvation, which he can give to you; and he is gentle and humble of heart, so he will receive you when you come to him. But Jesus is also the greatest Lord and King of this world; he is the ruler of the universe, and he is in the process of setting up his glorious and eternal kingdom.
3) HIS KINGDOM, v 10
a) The kingdom of Christ our King will be one of peace.
i) We are looking forward to this because our society and our world are full of division, conflict and war. We see that in our society with the breakdown of many marriages and relationships, with violence in families and wife beating and the physical and emotional abuse of children.
Every week we hear about people in NZ being beaten or murdered and of aggravated robberies. The police are struggling to keep up with investigating these homicides and crime cases. In the world there is a terrible war going on between Russia and the Ukraine through the winter in both countries, and the horrific war between Israel and Hama in Gaza. Thousands of people have died.
ii) But God promises peace; “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem.” Ephraim was the largest of the 10 tribes of the northern kingdom, and Ephraim was often used to describe that entire kingdom, all the 10 tribes. God would cut off the chariot because they would not be needed any longer. God would disarm that kingdom because there would not be any more war.
The same would be true for the southern kingdom of Judah and Benjamin. These two tribes had always maintained a large and well equipped army but in the future these would not be necessary because everyone will be at peace. It’s hard for us to imagine this but this is what God promises. “…and he shall speak peace to the nations.”
The Messiah King will do this – he will speak peace – he will bring an end to wars, conflict and violence and he will set up an eternal kingdom of peace. Isaiah had prophesied that he will be called “Prince of Peace” (9:6). The prophet Micah wrote, “He will stand and shepherd his flock… and they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. And he will be their peace” (5:4-5).
We don’t see this yet. During this present age there are wars and rumours of wars. Nation rises against nation and kingdom against kingdom. Many Christians are persecuted for their faith, and this could come to us one day. Jesus encouraged us by saying, “he who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed in the whole world as a testimony to the nations and then the end will come” (Matt 24:7ff).
The end will come when Jesus Christ returns as the Lord and King and the judge of all the people of the world. Then he will establish his eternal kingdom of peace.
b) This kingdom will be universal. Children, this means it will be over all the earth. Zechariah wrote, “His rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.” When he spoke and wrote this the people of Israel thought that God’s focus and favour was just on them, and that was mainly true during the OT. But here God points forward to the first coming of Christ, which would be 500 years after Zechariah.
After the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus the gospel would go out to all the earth, to Jews and Gentiles, to everyone in the world. We see this happening today as the good news about Jesus is preach in every country, and the Bible is translated into many other languages, and as sermons, podcasts, Bibles and Christian books are available on the internet. MERF is doing great work in the Middle East, and 1st seek God is reaching out to Christians and non-Christians in countries where there is severe persecution.
We are preaching and speaking about Christ the King, the Lord Jesus, the King of kings and the Lord of Lords. The people of Jerusalem welcomed him on that Palm Sunday as he rode into Jerusalem. He is a righteous and humble King who has gained salvation for all his people.
And he has set up a kingdom on this earth that is growing and spreading. One day he will return and his kingdom will extend from every sea to every sea and from every river to the ends of the earth!
Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus! Come quickly! Amen!