Behold Our King Who Makes All Things New

A Reflection for Christ The King Sunday

There’s a small church in Spain with a story to tell. On its wall hung a simple portrait of Jesus wearing his crown of thorns—nothing famous, just a humble painting called Ecce Homo, which means Behold the Man. For years, it drew little attention until 2012, when an 81-year-old woman named Cecilia noticed the paint flaking off. With good intentions, she took up her brushes to restore it. The result? The locals started calling it Ecce Mono—Behold the Monkey.

Oh, Cecila.

I can’t stand in judgment, though. I have my own restoration story. When we moved back to Victoria, I found what seemed to be the perfect dining table on Facebook Marketplace. It just needed some work—or so I thought. After watching countless YouTube tutorials, I began stripping away layers of polyurethane, only to discover why there had been so much of it: the table was a mess underneath. I sanded, stained, tried again and again, until finally ... I just painted it white, covering everything up. After all that time, money, and effort, Julia and I decided it wasn’t our aesthetic. So, I sold it on Marketplace … for a loss.

This is often how it goes: our attempts at fixing things just make them worse. The damage runs deeper than we thought, and what we create looks nothing like what we hoped for.

But when God restores something—or someone—he does it differently. His restoration is perfect, complete. He takes what was originally good, heals what’s broken, and makes it even better. Not because he’s bored or needs a project, but because he’s deeply committed to the anthem of his creation, it is good, good, very good. God is so committed that he’ll hold nothing back to restore it.

The prophet Isaiah reveals that our King loves a good restoration project. In one of his prophecies, we discover that King Jesus knows God truly, he makes what’s crooked straight, and he will make all things new.

Our King Knows God Truly

Let's begin with Isaiah 11:1-3:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

Isaiah begins by speaking of a shoot growing from a stump. Jesse was King David's father, and God promised David an everlasting kingdom. Jesus is that shoot, the promised King. But what fascinates me about this King is what he loves. You can tell a lot about someone by what excites them. Take my friend Andy—he loves pickleball, which tells you everything you need to know: he's embraced being 50. Me? I'm a former creative director who loathes Comic Sans and Papyrus, which tells you everything you need to know: I'm an elitist snob.

But Jesus? What makes his heart sing?

He will delight in the fear of the Lord.

This might sound strange. How can any relationship be good if it's based on fear? My daughter Ansley helped me understand this when she was six. She had discovered her plastic recorder could do more than butcher Hot Cross Buns—it made the perfect weapon to hit her little sister.

I wasn't happy. Out came the middle name with force:

“Ansley May—do not hit your sister!”

She ran upstairs crying. When I followed, I found her on her bunkbed, tears and sniffles and a few snot bubbles. She told me something I'll never forget:

She didn't like my "stern" voice—an incredible play on words for a six-year-old, given our last name.

But then Ansley said something that hit me right in the heart: my stern voice made her feel “small.” I held her close and said, “I'm so sorry. I love you. I cherish you. I never want to make you small.” But I had to explain: “Sometimes a father needs to correct his children, especially when they hurt others.”

She had a solution: “Could you just say you want to use your stern voice. .. instead of using it?”

I signed that deal right away. And let me tell you: it works.

When the Bible talks about the “fear of the Lord,” it's not about God bursting out in anger or walking on eggshells. It's about a relationship where love and reverence flow together naturally. Yes, God corrects us when we're wrong, and if we persist against him, we might fear his discipline. But it's always driven by love, always for our good.

But when it comes to God’s presence, his very God-ness, well we might have good reason to fear. Consider Isaiah's experience in Chapter 6. He has an incredible vision of God—angels, the Lord's robe filling the temple, the heavenly anthem shaking earth’s foundations:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.

Isaiah's response? He falls apart, crying out:

Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.

He's terrified—shaking in his boots—because he's standing before God, the Holy One, the Exalted One, the All-Powerful.

But here's what's amazing: the same God who can leave us trembling ... intercedes for us. An angel touches Isaiah's lips with a coal, saying:

Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.

And what does God say to us more than anything else in Scripture?

“Fear not.”

This is the tension: fearing and fearing not. This kind of fear isn’t just good—it's essential. It’s how we start to know God as he truly is: God is beyond us, yes; different from us, absolutely. But also merciful, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love—caring for us, interceding for us, forming us.

This is what Jesus gets excited about! This is what he delights in: honoring God, walking in his ways, living in perfect delight with the Father. That’’s what it means to fear the Lord—to know God truly. Not just knowing about him, but living with him, learning to delight in his ways.

Our King Makes What's Crooked Straight

Have you ever looked at our world and ached for someone to make things right? Those injustices that keep you up at night? The broken things you just can't fix on your own? Our King makes what’s crooked straight, and he does it in a way no human power can match. Isaiah continues in verses 3-5:

He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

Jesus—our King who delights in the fear of the Lord—sees God truly and sees things as they really are. He makes the right call, every time, and he will bring God’s perfect justice to earth.

That word, justice—it's a bit muddy now, meaning different things to different people. But in the Old Testament, justice means “to make straight.”

Consider these photos, labeled as an OCD nightmare …

… what do you want to do?

What rises up inside of you?

Don’t you want to straighten them out? Make every crooked detail right?

That’s what the justice Jesus brings is all about. He looks at everything crooked in our world—the corrupt who exploit the poor, the plight of refugees and widows and orphans, our greediness and selfishness, all the suffering and tragedy—and he promises to straighten it out. He will make every wrong right.

Some of this language in Isaiah might sound intense. It’s cool that Jesus can rock a sash, but striking the earth with a rod? That's a lot. But look closer—it’s “the rod of his mouth” and “the breath of his lips.” The very words that proceed from within the soul of God are spoken to make things good. This isn't about physical force or senseless violence; it's about authority. It's about God's desire to set things straight, and his actual power to speak and whatever he says happens. To say the word and make everything right—that's what our King can do, will do, and has started to do.

Our King Makes All Things New

Look at Isaiah's vision in verses 6-8:

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra's den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper's nest.

This isn’t just poetry—it’s prophecy. It shows us what happens at the end of history and time, when heaven comes to earth, the day when God's restoration is complete. Our King is preparing something far more radical—an altogether different world. Not just patched-up problems, but creation itself transformed, where the kingdom is on earth as it is in heaven.

This transformation goes deeper than we could imagine in three ways:

1. Reconciliation: The wolf and lamb aren't enemies anymore—they're neighbours, friends. Even little children are safe among them! Everything reconciled to everything else.

2. New Nature: The lion eating straw like an ox? That's not just behaviour modification—that's transformation from the inside out. These animals aren't just acting differently; they've become different. They have a new nature!

3. The Curse is Broken: Remember Genesis 3? The snake, the temptation, the fall and unraveling of life into death? That sin that poisoned everything? Our exclusion from eating from the tree of life? Cast east of Eden and aliented from the presence of God? Where is all the aftermath of the fall in this vision? Gone. Eradicated! It doesn't exist. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus crushed the serpent’s head (as foretold in Genesis)—that is, he defeated Satan—and overthrew the power of sin and death, breaking the curse as far as it can be found.

When Jesus returns, he will make all things new. That’s what he says near the end of the book of Revelation, “I am making everything new!”

Isaiah describes it this way:

They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

But in our Western secular world today, most people long for the kingdom (even if they don't realize it). People want to see the world reconciled; they want peace, equity, and justice—at least their version of it. This is why billionaires fund life extension research, why scientists work on genetic modifications, why activists strive for utopian societies, and politicians promise to fix all that's broken.

As Mark Sayers puts it, they want the kingdom ... but without the King.

But you can't straighten what's crooked without the one who drew the original lines. And no matter how we may repair this world, no matter how advanced we may get, no matter how many diseases we may eradicate through technology and progress—and I hope it's all of them—we will never be able to do the one thing that only Jesus can do: remove the curse as far as it is found.

Our world can get better and better but it will always live under a curse without the king. Only Jesus has the power. Only Jesus can bring heaven fully to earth when he declares, "Behold, I'm making all things new."

You can't have this kingdom without the king.

Where do we fit in?

Isaiah prophesies:

In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.

Jesus isn't just a shoot from Jesse's stump—he's the root itself. Not just David's descendant—he's David's source. He's eternal. He's always been God's plan. And he has been raised up, like a banner, to rally people to himself and his glorious kingdom.

But here's what amazes me: we don't have to wait for the end to taste this restoration.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17-20:

If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Right now, those same three things we saw in Isaiah's vision can begin in us: reconciliation, a new nature, and the curse broken. God's done more than touch our lips with coal like Isaiah—he's given us his Son! Our guilt—taken away. Our sins—no longer counted against us. Our old self—transformed by his Spirit. Our future—secured in him.

But here's the tension: the kingdom is here, but not fully. We live in the "already/not yet." If we don’t grasp this tension, we’ll be perpetually frustrated and disappointed. This tension explains why some people are healed and many are not, why we have a new nature yet still struggle with sin. We see glimmers of the new breaking into the shadows of the old.

What does that look like?

Look around a gathering of believers! Right here, right now—you're seeing a glimpse of the new creation. When Paul talks about reconciliation, yes, he means people being reconciled to God. But it's bigger than that. In Christ, the walls that divide ethnicities come crashing down. In Christ, a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language comes together as one new humanity.

But—and here's where it gets real—we're living in the shadows of the old world too. We exist in a world that's still divided, still fighting, still struggling against itself. It's like we have one foot in God's new creation and one foot in the old. And that's exactly where God has placed us—as His ambassadors. Learning to live as people of reconciliation right here, right now, in the middle of all that hasn't yet been reconciled.

It's like a spring garden—new life pushes through while winter's remnants remain. This is true of the world and of our souls.

Paul captures this perfectly in 2 Corinthians 4:16:

Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.

Yes, we still keep our kids away from snakes. Our bodies still age and start to creak. Death still awaits. But inside? We're being made new every day through God's Spirit. We're not just waiting for the new heavens and earth creation—we are a new creation, a sign of what is coming around the bend. We are a living preview of what's coming when Jesus returns to make all things new.

Let me tell you about my friend Bernice.

Twenty years ago, Bernice and her husband separated. Never officially divorced, just ... separated. Different cities. Different lives. No contact. Then one day, she gets a call. It's her ex. He has cancer. It's terminal. And he needs help. No one else to turn to.

Now, what would you do? What would any of us do? Bernice asked herself one question: "Who would Jesus love?" Next thing you know, she's packing her bags, putting her life on hold, moving to another city to care for the man she had more than good reason to leave behind.

Don't get me wrong: she didn't put herself in a dangerous or abusive situation. And this wasn't some Hallmark movie reconciliation. When she would check in with me, Bernice said every day she was reminded why this man was her ex. But she stayed. For six months, she stayed. Caring for him. Serving him. Or really ... serving Jesus.

She shared her faith too. Not with grand sermons. Just gentle words. Simple prayers. Living proof of Jesus's love. Then, just before he died—Bernice told me this part through tears of joy—her ex-husband looked at her and confessed his faith in Jesus. Right there, in his final days, he acknowledged Jesus as King.

All I could say to her was, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

That's what it looks like when the new creation breaks through—when Jesus transforms our inner life so completely that we start to love in a way that was never possible apart from him, we start to love others like he loves us—old enmities die, mercy triumphs over judgment, and death itself becomes the doorway to life.

This is what happens as our King restores us. 

Because he doesn’t just lather thick coats of paint to cover our blemishes—like I did to the table. Jesus gets to our crooked blemished core, he heal what’s beneath the surface—all the damage of sin. And he makes us a preview of his new creation!

How do we receive this kingdom? 

Isaiah gives us a hint. In his vision, little children run around unsupervised in a zoo. Where is the adult supervision?! The focus is on children for a reason. Jesus says in Mark 10:15:

Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.

In that time, children had nothing—no status, no rights, no claims, no PAW patrol.

That’s how he wants us to come to him. 

Our King essentially says, “You do not need to bring anything to the table—in fact, you can’t. It’s not about your status, or rights, you can make no claim to goodness to warrant a seat. In fact, you can’t earn the kingdom—because I have done everything necessary to bring the kingdom to you, and there is nothing you can add to it. There is nothing you can do to earn your salvation. Why? Because I've already done everything you need.”

All we can do is let go of whatever we’re clutching in our hands, the ways we’re holding onto the old creation, and open our hands open before the King to recieve his kingdom through faith. That’s the gift of grace.

We can’t have the kingdom without the king. So, let me summarize Isaiah’s answer to the question: Who is this King?

Our King knows God truly.

He delights in the fear of the Lord.

He will make every crooked thing straight.

He will reconcile predators and prey, people to God, and people to each other.

He fashions a new nature and shatters the ancient curse beneath his feet.

He turns death into life, and makes us into a new creation.

While our world scrambles to build a kingdom without a king, while our world continues to erect small empires that will be dust in the ash heap of eternity, we have a King, who is already reigning, already restoring, already making things new. And one day, when he returns, when the knowledge and glory of God fills the earth like water fills the sea, his restoration will be complete, his rule will be realized, and his delight will become our eternal joy.

This is our King!

And he invites us—not just to admire his kingdom—but to enter it like children and, in the words of Paul, to become “ambassadors,” living previews of the new creation breaking into the old.

Do you want in on that? I do.

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This reflection was originally delivered as a sermon at Coastline Church on Christ the King Sunday, 2024.