Men, you are kings. In Christ, you are the kings of the earth. You have been made to bear the image of the Most High God, the one who rules over all creation. His plan for you was for you to rule in his name. The reason that you exist is to bring God’s wisdom and order to the wild and waste parts of the earth. In his book The Unseen Realm, Michael Heiser writes, God’s “desire was to live among them [the humans], and for them to rule and reign with him.” God has made you to exercise his authority over his creation by his side.

That’s a high calling, to say the least. And if you’re anything like me, you don’t feel like a king. Not even close. Most days I feel more like the court jester than a wise and noble sovereign. A sniveling cynic. An excuse-making coward. An ignorant buffoon. But that is not who I am. It is not who you are. In Christ, you are a man who has been called, equipped, and destined to rule the earth – and not just the earth, the entire cosmos! – with confidence, courage, and wisdom. This, THIS, is Who. You. Are.

God doesn’t want to rule you; he wants to rule with you. God doesn’t want to exercise authority over you; he wants to exercise authority through you. Now, it takes humility and submission from us in order for God to rule with and through us, but humility and submission aren’t the point. They are the means to God’s end: to selflessly share power and authority with his creatures for the good of his creation. A good creation would be filled with creatures who cannot sin, but the best possible creation would be governed by creatures who possess, by nature, the freedom and power to rule alongside the ruling Creator. Only these creatures will have learned, through their own catastrophic failure and God’s remarkable redemption, that God’s wisdom is truly wise, that God’s ways are completely good, and that the fullness of life can only be found along his path.