Series: What Is a King? — Section 1 of 6
Pre-reading
Before you go any further, watch this video by CinemaStix: https://youtu.be/CaIFN0eQGTc
His thesis is the spark this section extends. If the link is ever dead, here is the short version so this section still stands: kingliness in film is not generated by the king but by the room around him — the bowing, the lowered eyes, the held breath, the way bodies rearrange in space. The actor playing the king does less. The room does the work.
A Confession About Cinema
Cinema has been doing real work on me my whole life. Godzilla as a kid — pure escape. Later, the craft itself — what a director actually does, how framing changes a story without changing the story. Kubrick, Scorsese, Tarantino, Ritchie, Nolan. I learned to feel what a movie was doing before I could name it.
So when a video about cinema lands hard for me, it lands hard because cinema has been training me to feel things for forty years.
That training is why the CinemaStix video would not let me go.
What CinemaStix Caught
The thesis: kingliness is in the bowing, not the crown. The room reorganizes around a king. That is what tells the audience he is a king. Take that away, and the actor in a crown is just a man in a costume.
He is right. And the more you watch for it, the more you cannot unsee it.
But here is what hit me when I sat with it. A 2026 American has no real-life reference for this. None.
I can flip off the president. There is no consequence. No ontological bend. The room does not reorganize when he walks in. The same is true of every CEO, every celebrity, every public figure I am supposed to consider important. They are self-projected. They walk into rooms and perform importance. They do not bend the room. They just get a bigger chair.
So when a movie shows me what a king actually looks like — the room going still, the bodies rearranging, the breath held — I recognize it. Something in me knows. But I have never seen it in person. I have only ever seen its shadow on a screen.
That is a strange place for a culture to live. The category is alive in our imagination and dead in our experience. And when Scripture calls Christ the King of Kings, most of us have nothing real to fill the word with.
What the Bible Means by King — In Its Actual World
Modern English has almost entirely lost what the biblical word king assumed. The Hebrew is melek (מֶלֶךְ). The Greek is basileus (βασιλεύς). But the word is not the point. The world the word lived in is the point.
In the Ancient Near East, kingship was not an office at the top of an organizational chart. It was the place where heaven and earth met. Parent-child imagery between gods and kings was common across the ancient world, supporting royal authority and portraying the king as mediator between divine and earthly realms — the one who maintained order at the seam.[1] ANE kings regularly identified themselves as sons of deities through a whole range of formulations — conceived by gods, birthed by them, nurtured at divine breasts, sponsored by father gods — making divine sonship a staple of royal ideology.[2]
The Old Testament reflects this conceptual world, but adapts it sharply. Israelite kings held divine sonship status based on covenant, not by nature.[3] In the Davidic covenant, Yahweh promises to be a father to David’s successor as a son, and the Psalms feature this relationship between God and king.[2] Israel’s geopolitical domain functions as Yahweh‘s vassal territory with the human monarch serving as ruling regent, receiving delegated authority through “divine sonship” language extended to the Davidic dynasty.[4]
Read Psalm 2 again with that frame in place. “You are my son; today I have begotten you.” That is not metaphor lifted out of nowhere. That is the standard ANE coronation formula put on Yahweh‘s lips — the king is being installed as the divine representative on earth. The cosmos is being aligned. The cosmic axis is being claimed.
But Walton’s most distinctive contribution sharpens this further. The pattern does not start with David. It starts with Adam. Adam was placed in the garden — sacred space — and commissioned to serve there.[5] The Hebrew verbs ʿbd and šmr (“serve” and “keep”) convey priestly tasks rather than agricultural work; these verbs are most frequently encountered in discussions of human service to God.[5] Genesis 2 establishes a terrestrial center of sacred space in the garden, where Adam and Eve are commissioned as priests to serve in sacred space, mediating revelation of God and access to God.[5] Both Adam and Jesus are archetypal representatives with priestly roles, connected to issues of life/death and order/disorder.[5]
In other words: the priest-king role at the cosmic seam is what humanity was made for. David inherits it covenantally. Christ fulfills it ontologically. The ANE conceptual world is not a foreign overlay on Scripture. It is the world Scripture is speaking inside of — and Israel’s kingship sits inside that world with one decisive difference: the relationship is by covenant, not by nature, and Yahweh alone holds the throne above the throne.
This is the world the Bible’s word for king lives in. Strip the ANE context away and melek flattens into “guy with a crown.” Keep it, and the word carries cosmic weight from the first syllable. The king is the place where heaven touches earth.
So when the disciples are in a boat in Matthew 8:27, terrified, and Christ stands and speaks to the sea, and the sea obeys — they are not asking about weather. They are asking the ANE question: who is this who has authority over chaos itself? The sea in Hebrew Scripture is the primordial chaos, the place creation was lifted out of in Genesis 1:2, the chaos the priest-king is supposed to hold back. When Christ commands the sea, He is doing what only the King can do — and doing it at the cosmic level.
The disciples are not asking how. They are asking who. The room is reorganizing. The bowing has begun.
John makes it explicit in Revelation 4–5. He sees the throne room and does not describe Christ first. He describes the room. The twenty-four elders fall down and cast their crowns. The four living creatures cry holy, holy, holy. There is a sea of glass before the throne — primordial chaos now appearing tranquil like crystal, the calmness of the sea demonstrating God’s sovereign authority over the very powers that oppose his order.[6] The throne room itself is the original sanctuary of which the earthly tabernacle and temple were merely copies — the four living creatures recalling the cherubim on the ark, the seven lamps before the throne corresponding to the lampstand with its seven bowls, but the veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the outer sanctuary on earth conspicuously absent.[6] The earthly sanctuary was always provisional shadow pointing toward this. The cosmic axis. The kingliness is in the chaos pacified. The kingliness is in the room.
King of Kings Is a Cosmic Claim
Most modern readers hear King of Kings and import a list. Christ outranks Caesar, Napoleon, Henry VIII. True but radically incomplete.
Heiser, working from the Divine Council framework rooted in Deuteronomy 32:8 and Psalm 82, makes the cosmic claim explicit. The judgment at Babel resulted in assigning the nations to members of Yahweh‘s heavenly council, with Israel designated as Yahweh‘s own inheritance while other nations were allotted to lesser gods.[7] The number of nations disinherited at Babel was seventy — matching the seventy sons in Ugaritic divine councils — and when Yahweh disinherited the nations and allotted them to the sons of God, this theological assertion established that Yahweh alone commands the nations and their gods.[8] Israel was to be governed by a special group of seventy under Moses, and later under the Israelite king who served as Yahweh‘s enthroned son.[8]
This is the world Paul is writing into when he calls Christ King of Kings. Not “ranks above human monarchs in a list.” **Outranks the bene elohim themselves.** Outranks the divine administrators of the seventy nations. Outranks every authority, visible and invisible, in this world and the next.
And the divine council members were not faithful. At some point the sons of God transgressed Yahweh‘s desire for earthly order and just rule, sowing chaos in the nations — the distinct trajectory of Psalm 82, where the gods of the nations are excoriated by Yahweh for abusing their charges.[7] Psalm 82 has the nations cast aside at Babel in view; the reference to gods of Yahweh‘s council as “sons of the Most High” aligns completely with the apportionment of the nations by the Most High among his sons, using the same Hebrew term for “inherit” as appears in Deuteronomy 32:8.[7]
So King of Kings is not flowery devotional language. **It is a courtroom claim against the elohim themselves** — the divine council members assigned over the seventy nations after Babel, who rebelled against the order Yahweh set — and against every visible throne they ever propped up. The hostile divine princes in Daniel 10 are connected to that same allotment.[7] The pattern runs from Babel forward.
Second Temple-period Jews would have been reading about gods allotted to the nations in their Old Testament.[7] Ben Sira 17:17 puts it plainly: “He appointed a leader for each nation, and Israel is the portion of the Lord.” “Leader” here denotes high officials or someone of princely authority — paralleling exactly the original text of Deuteronomy 32:8-9.[7] This is not Heiser inventing a framework. This is the framework Second Temple Judaism was already operating inside.
When Paul declares Christ King of Kings, he is making the cosmic claim against that backdrop. Every authority, visible and invisible, in this world and in the next, has been subordinated to the rider on the white horse. Caesar is not even the point. The elohim are the point.
The cosmic axis has been claimed. The chaos has been pacified. The seventy administrators have been outranked. The room is being reorganized — at scale.
The Gold Crown Is Doing Real Work
Christ in Revelation wears a gold crown (Revelation 14:14). The gold is not decoration. It is argument.
Gold carries associations with God’s holiness, majesty, and unchangeable nature throughout Scripture.[9] Silver is different. It tarnishes. And it carried such strong associations with commerce and currency in the ancient world that it never became a metal of the divine.[9] Jonathan Pageau, working in the Eastern Orthodox iconographic tradition, sharpens this further: gold in iconography does not point to heaven. It participates in heavenly meaning because of its incorruptibility and reflective brilliance.[10] The gold leaf at the top of a Nativity icon is not symbolic decoration. It is heaven, made visible.
So when Christ wears a gold crown, three things happen at once:
He outranks the elohim and earthly powers — the gold crown is the visible badge of the cosmic courtroom claim.
He belongs to the heavenly order — gold is the metal that participates in glory itself.
And the part 2026 misses entirely: the crown represents Christ’s right relationship to hierarchy. He is not a king who answers to no one. He bows to the Father. The gold crown declares submission upward and authority downward simultaneously. That is what real kingship looks like.
The serpent’s offer in Genesis 3 — be like God, answer to no one — is the exact opposite of what the gold crown represents. The modern earthly ruler who wants only an earthly crown, who answers to nothing above himself, is wearing silver. He tarnishes. He belongs to the marketplace, not the throne room.
Where This Leaves Us
The Bible’s category for kingship is alive on the page and dead in our experience. The ANE world that Scripture spoke inside of — the world where a king was the priest-mediator at the seam between heaven and earth, where Yahweh outranked the divine council members He assigned over the nations, where the throne room of God was the true cosmic temple of which every earthly temple was a copy — that world is the world we have to recover before King of Kings can carry the weight Paul put on it.
Recovering it is what the rest of this series is going to do. Five more sections, each taking a different thread.
Section 2 walks through what Paul means when he calls himself a slave of Christ — and why “slave” is the most violently misunderstood word in the New Testament for an American reader.
Section 3 uses Tolkien’s Aragorn to give the modern reader something almost no one else gets to feel anymore — what it actually feels like in your chest when a king is recognized.
Section 4 names the strategy by which the original lie keeps infecting the church under new vocabulary in every generation.
Section 5 draws the line between your job and God’s job in helping someone come to faith — because most American Christians have absorbed an infected version of evangelism that puts them in the wrong chair.
Section 6 lands the question this whole series is actually asking: will you bow now, before you have to?
But before any of that, sit with this:
Christ wears gold because He bows to the Father. The crown is not decoration. It is a declaration of submission upward — and authority downward — at the same time. He is the King of Kings because He is the Son who bows to the Father. The hierarchy is the kingship.
If you take nothing else from this section, take that.
Footnotes
- Craig S. Keener and John H. Walton, eds., *NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture* (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 880–881.
- John H. Walton, *Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief* (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 232.
- Victor Harold Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, and John H. Walton, *The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament* (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000).
- John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, *The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites* (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 221.
- John H. Walton, *The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2–3 and the Human Origins Debate* (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 104–105, 168, 199.
- Martyn Cowan, “New World, New Temple, New Worship: The Book of Revelation in the Theology and Practice of Christian Worship — Part 2,” *The Churchman* (2006), 163–164. See also Michael Kuykendall, “Sea of Glass,” in *The Lexham Bible Dictionary*, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016); and Allen P. Ross, *Recalling the Hope of Glory: Biblical Worship from the Garden to the New Creation* (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic & Professional, 2006), 188–189.
- Michael S. Heiser, *Demons: What the Bible Really Says about the Powers of Darkness* (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020), 23, 148, 151–152, 160–162.
- Michael S. Heiser, *The Unseen Realm: Discovering the Supernatural World of the Bible* (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2025), 194–195.
- Leland Ryken, Jim Wilhoit, et al., *Dictionary of Biblical Imagery* (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 557.
- Jonathan Pageau, *Symbolism and Christianity*, Lecture 3: “Heaven and Earth” (Peterson Academy, 2026).
Continues in Section 2: Slave to Christ