A Diamond studded turd, May 25th, 26.

The occasion for writing about all this.

Last week, as we were enjoying another round of Christ's king posturing, a thought occurred

to me, and so I went ahead and tweeted it.

And when I tweet my observations or links to a post or anything like

that, I almost always get enough responses to encourage me to keep doing it. You know, that's why we're

here. That's why we do what we do. But this tweet was different in two ways. First, it took off like a

rocket, indicating to me that this was indeed a hot topic. A lot of people have noticed the

discrepancy between rhetoric and life. And second, if you will take a moment to note a certain kind of comment that started to appear under my exhortation, you will quickly realize the truth of D.L. Moody's adage, that if you throw a rock into a pack of stray dogs, the one that Yelps is the one that got hit. What I want to do here is follow-up, and by follow-up,

I mean the kind of thing that Gideon did with the Midianites, Judges 8-4. I then want to set out some biblical definitions and to make a few other general observations, along with some of what might be considered debris clearing. But if all goes well, I'm not going to deliver the payload until the very last section. And by payload, I'm talking

about what needs to be said to those who are doing their level best to pollute the name of Christ,

the same name they are pretending to honor. And I know that when I drop that payload, there will be

some who see in it some kind of inconsistency on my part. They will say, oh, we thought Christ was

was supposed to be king of the keyboard. Oh, he is. The one who spoke many hard sayings recorded for us in Scripture is certainly capable of sanctifying hard sayings. More about all that here. Quote,

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength, and my Redeemer. Psalm 1914. Of course Christ is king. Christ is king,

king over all. Let us confess it. However, phrases like individual words have both a denotation

and a connotation. The denotation of a phrase consists of what the words mean when put together

and all according to their dictionary definitions. The denotation of Christ is king is not only unobjectionable, but it is the truth that lies right at the heart of the Christian faith.

As John Calvin ably taught us, Christ holds three offices in his glory, prophet, priest, and king.

Unless he is king, he cannot be Lord, and Jesus is Lord is the foundational Christian confession, Romans 109.

But the connotation has to do with how the phrase is being used in any particular moment.

This is determined by the immediate context and intention. In 1685, during the killing times in

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