Most Christians believe Jesus is waiting in heaven to become King. But what if Jesus is reigning now? Brian Del Turco unveils Psalm 110—the most quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament—and reveals why the early church treated it as the master key to understanding Christ’s present authority.
Discover why Jesus reigning now isn’t future hope but current reality, how the apostles saw Christ as King even under Roman persecution, and why “rule in the midst of your enemies” describes our world today. This is a tectonic shift in how you pray, view your calling, and participate in Christ’s reign through prayer-born activity. The King isn’t waiting. He’s already on the throne. Read the full article.
See the complete episode transcript below.
A few episode Highlights
✅ Psalm 110 is the master key to understanding Christ’s present authority. The most quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament reveals that Jesus isn’t waiting to become King. He’s been actively reigning since His ascension, governing nations and steering history while His enemies still resist.
✅ Jesus is both King and High Priest simultaneously, not sequentially. The one interceding for you right now is the same one ruling over nations—priest and king are concurrent realities, not future roles Christ will assume when He returns.
✅ We participate in Christ’s reign through prayer and prayer-born activity. Christ rules through His people, not apart from them. His authority extends from Zion (the assembly of believers) as we partner with Him in shaping history through Spirit-led prayer and obedience.
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Transcript: Jesus Isn’t Waiting to Be King–Understanding Psalm 110
Hey everybody, how are you doing? This is Brian Del Turco, Jesus Smart X the podcast. I’m glad you’re with us today. This is episode 366, and this one has been coming for some time.
It’s based off a piece of content I’ve recently created, which I think is the longest article I’ve written on jesussmart.com. But I’m hoping to make this a breezy episode, and I want to call your attention to this article. You can read it at jesussmart.com/psalm110. This is called “Jesus Isn’t Waiting to Be King,” and don’t prejudge it or pre-categorize this content. I encourage you to listen through to the end before you make up your mind or form an opinion about what I’m saying here about this Psalm.
I think my personal conviction is that Psalm 110 is being highlighted today. It’s being underscored by the Lord, and I think it has found its fulfillment. Although I’m making the case that throughout all of history since the ascension of Christ, it’s really found a high gear today.
The Traditional View: Jesus Waiting
Now you’re probably picturing Jesus in heaven right now doing one thing mainly—waiting. Waiting until He comes again. Waiting to take up His throne on the earth, waiting to deal with the nations and rulers of the earth.
We also know from Scripture that He’s also interceding for us as a high priest. We know that He’s preparing His bride without spot, without wrinkle. And there will be this moment where the Father says to the Son, “Go get Your bride.” We know that He’s transforming us into His image, but we also have this picture of Him sort of waiting until He comes and takes up His full authority on the earth.
But what if there’s a dimension of His present-day activity that we consistently underestimate? And that is: He is currently a king. And although it’s not overt and not revealed to the world in the open, He is already ruling over history itself.
We know that He’ll reign when He returns in completeness. We sing about that future kingdom. But what if He’s been ruling all along governmentally over nations and rulers, steering and shaping the course of human events, human history, from the moment that He sat down at the Father’s right hand?
Psalm 110: The Most Quoted Psalm
There is this one Psalm—Psalm 110—that is quoted by the Apostles in the New Testament more than any other Psalm. In fact, more than any other portion of Old Testament Scripture. It is Psalm 110 that is either directly quoted or clearly alluded to.
And what if recovering how what we could call Century 1 Christians, Century 1 Christ followers understood Psalm 110—what if we were to recover that in our time? How might it transform how we see Christ’s authority today, even how we pray?
Psalm 23 is certainly the most beloved Psalm in the Psalter of the 150 Psalms, but Psalm 110, as mentioned, is the most quoted. Now why is that?
Jesus Himself quotes from Psalm 110 in Matthew chapter 22 when He silences the Pharisees. And this is just before His blistering rebuke of the Pharisees in Matthew 23 and then His teaching on the end-time events in Matthew 24. I think, if I’m not mistaken, all of this discourse is during that last week just before His crucifixion and then resurrection, followed by His ascension.
Later, Peter on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2—they were waiting in Jerusalem for 10 days, the Holy Spirit is poured out upon them, the church is born. In Acts 2, he steps up, delivers this apostolic sermon. And he quotes there from Psalm 110:1: “David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies Your footstool.'” And he says, “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Peter wasn’t talking about someday in the future. He was saying now. The Davidic throne was already occupied by the ascended Christ.
Paul referred to it in 1 Corinthians 15. He develops and lays out his theology of Christ’s present authority and the culmination of the kingdom in 1 Corinthians 15:24-28. He says, “Then comes the end when He hands over the kingdom to our God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and authority and power. For He must reign”—quoting now Psalm 110—”He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet.”
You cannot read the book of Hebrews without understanding that Psalm 110 is laced throughout the book of Hebrews. There are direct quotes, I think—it’s alluded to or directly quoted at least 15 times across the book of Hebrews.
So the early church didn’t treat this Messianic Psalm as some kind of occasional reference or some kind of background poetry or something. They treated it as really the master key that unlocked their understanding about the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ—and Christ’s present role, His present authority.
How Does This Relate to Us Today?
Now, how does this relate to you and I today? Stay with me, okay? Stay with me. Learn with me. Let’s allow the Scriptures to speak to us again.
I think Psalm 110—I believe personally it’s being underscored by the Holy Spirit. I think it’s always been at play since the ascension of Christ. It’s not just reserved for the future millennium. It’s always been at play, but it’s being underscored today. The nations are shaking, nations are realigning. And could it be that it’s the Lord Jesus who is at work from His throne?
Well, in Psalm 110, verse 1, “The Lord said to my Lord”—the Father said to the Son—”Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
In the ancient world, whenever somebody sat at the right hand of a king, it meant shared rule and active governance. And Psalm 110 does something that no other Psalm does. It declares the Messiah to be both king and eternal priest at the same time. Verse 4 says, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”
This is the only place, I believe, in the entire Old Testament where the Messiah is explicitly called a priest—not from Aaron’s line of priesthood, but from an eternal order that predates the law itself, the priesthood of Melchizedek and the kingship of Melchizedek. And so without this single Psalm, we would really have no biblical framework for Jesus functioning as both king and high priest simultaneously.
Now, let’s be honest. Most of us have unconsciously created this timeline in our heads, and it goes something like this. And this is where the challenge is coming: Jesus is functioning as our high priest now, but He’ll take up the Davidic throne later as king when He returns.
Here’s the problem with that view. Psalm 110 does not allow that split. You see, the one who is interceding for you as a high priest right now is simultaneously the one governing history. He’s the one praying for the church, but yes, He’s also the same one ruling over the nations.
For Jesus, priest and king aren’t sequential roles—priest now, king later in some hyper-dispensational view. They are concurrent realities.
I know for some of you this may feel like a little bit of Bible nerdery. But listen, we need to become Bible nerds because we need the illumination, we need the template of Scripture. We need the understanding of the inspired Scriptures to understand our times and what we ought to do. And by the way, we all know that nerds rule the world—software nerds, AI nerds, high-tech, Silicon Valley nerds. But even more so, Bible nerds praying in alignment with the inspired Scriptures, having our understanding and the contours of our understanding shaped by the inspired Scriptures.
Comfort for the First Believers
So Psalm 110 was a great comfort to the first believers because it explained to them how a crucified, resurrected, and then ascended Messiah could be called Lord. It explained to them during that first century why persecution continued even after Jesus ascended. Remember, the Father says, “Rule in the midst of your enemies.” So it explained that tension they felt living under the authority of Caesar and yet confessing Jesus as the true king. Their highest allegiance was to Christ as Lord, Christ as King.
And this Psalm told them that Christ’s reign had already begun. And the subduing of His enemies is a process, not an instantaneous event or point in time. It is more process through history. And this gave them extraordinary confidence.
I mean, they needed that confidence. Both Paul and Peter were executed under Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68 AD. He blamed Christians for Rome’s great fire in 64 AD and turned them into human torches. Peter was crucified—tradition says upside down. Paul was beheaded. Three decades later under Domitian, who reigned from 81 to 96 AD, he demanded worship as Lord and God. The Apostle John was exiled to the island of Patmos because of the Word of God.
Both of these emperors looked unstoppable. But the kingdom of Christ outlasted them. So Rome didn’t have the final word. The Jewish powers, the Roman powers that crucified Jesus, were already under the authority of the One they rejected.
Jesus Reigning Now
So the early Church fathers inherited this understanding directly from the apostles. Authentic Christ followers remained faithful and obedient while Psalm 110 continued to unfold in history. Even Irenaeus, who lived approximately 130 to 202 AD, wrote, “The Lord is now king of all, having been made both Lord and Christ.”
Clement, who lived and his influence was at the end of the first century before Irenaeus, said that the right hand language was not a future hope for Clement—it was present reality. He said that Christ was king right now.
And so now we come to verses 5 through 7. There’s only seven verses in this Psalm. I encourage you to become extremely familiar with this Psalm. Read it in multiple translations. Read it in your English Standard Version, your New King James, your New American, your New Living Translation, your New International Version. Read it in the Amplified. Become very familiar with it. Allow it to reformat your internal understanding.
Now, it says in verses 5 and 6 of Psalm 110: “The Lord is at Your right hand. He will shatter kings on the day of His wrath. He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses. He will shatter chiefs over the wide earth.”
Now, I used to think that this was millennial language. I used to think that this was reserved for the millennium when Christ came again. And then those nations which would not serve Him on the earth, we would see this very difficult language: “He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses.”
Now, Jesus loves you. Jesus, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, created this earth. The earth belongs to them—Psalm 24. And the fullness in the earth, all that is in the earth belongs to them. And the people therein belong to Him.
Satan may own a corrupt, deceptive world system that runs culture and society and nations. And he told Jesus in the wilderness, he flat out told Him, “Fall down and worship me. I’ll give you the empires and the kingdoms of this world that’s been handed over to me by Adam.”
But Jesus knew that this was where it was going and that it would be His, but not on those terms. It would be on the terms of obedience to His Father, and these kingdoms would be taken back from Satan.
But understand that not only does the Lord own it all, but He came and died. I mean, the second person of the Godhead came and died to repurchase and redeem and reconcile all things in the cosmos to the Creator Father, as well as all those who would choose the truth and choose Jesus. So He not only owns it, but He has extreme ownership in the sense of He took responsibility. It wasn’t His sin or rebellion that created this problem, but He took responsibility to fix it.
And so I tell you, when He comes again, the picture of Jesus when He comes again for those who are outside of His redeeming grace is not an attractive picture. It is not the picture of Psalm 23 and even paintings or images you may have seen of this very pastoral figure carrying the sheep in His arms. He’s coming as a lion this time, and He will be executing.
And I’m going to suggest to you that He already is executing—the heads of nations, verses 5 through 7. I used to think this was reserved for the millennium when He came again. But I’m being challenged now, and I’m finding all kinds of scholarship support and church history support and even the Century 1 Christ followers, the way they viewed it—that He is currently reigning as king. It’s not starting when He comes again. He’s currently a king, and He is currently shaping and steering history covertly, as it were.
As far as the world is concerned, they don’t have illumination or understanding about what He’s doing. This is why we have to become saturated with Scripture and have our worldview and our understanding aligned with what is actually reality. However, He’s coming, but He’s already at work and already dealing with nations.
Rule in the Midst of Your Enemies
Now what does this say about us? Well, it says in verse 2: “The Lord will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, ‘Rule in the midst of Your enemies.'”
That’s an odd phrase if this Psalm only described a future peaceful kingdom. What an odd phrase, because in the millennium, enemies are going to be subdued, bound, removed. The reign of Christ will be visible, uncontested, except at the end of the millennium. But Psalm 110 describes something different.
It describes a king right now who’s ruling while in our time, while the enemies of Christ really are running rampant on the earth and actively resisting. You need to read Psalm 2 in correlation with Psalm 110. This sounds exactly like the world we’re living in right now.
And so we have to think: Is Christ reigning now? And yet opposition remains. Is resistance continuing even as His throne is presently established? The apostles saw their reality described in this Psalm. They saw Jesus as king right now, even though Rome didn’t acknowledge it and was demanding to be worshiped, even though persecution was continuing and the world looked chaotic.
Our imagination is that divine judgment is dramatic and instantaneous at a point in time in the future—like lightning from heaven, unmistakable acts of God. That maximum point is on the horizon. But Scripture also reveals that God judges and removes rulers through a process in history too. This means that these events can look ordinary.
It can look like World War II, where eventually Hitler was extinguished through warfare, but actually the Lord being behind it. Or in 1989, when communism fell in Romania and this very corrupt, evil ruler, Ceaușescu, and his wife were executed on Christmas Day up against a brick wall, and it was televised on Romanian television. You could say, well, that was just that country freeing itself from the Iron Curtain. But we may not understand that the Lord was at work behind that.
How many prayers, how many Christians persecuted, crying out to God for deliverance, for freedom? And then all of a sudden, the Iron Curtain fell and opened up. But God sovereignly at work. And so what looks like a natural geopolitical or political event of freedom is actually on the long end of a lot of steadfast prayer and faith and crying out to the Lord, and finally the Lord moving.
And we don’t know why these things take this long. All we know is that God is sovereign and that He is controlling history. I mean, that Jewish Sanhedrin system that condemned Christ—it’s gone. God’s not done dealing with Israel yet, but that system is gone. The Roman emperors who demanded worship as gods—where are they? They’re irrelevant. They’re gone too.
What about regimes in history that violently tried to stamp out Christianity? They’re all canceled. Every single one. The church that Jesus is building remains. The gospel of the kingdom continues to advance. The kingdom is the through line leading into the new heavens and new earth.
I want to say that Psalm 110 has been unfolding in slow motion for 2,000 years. Yes, it’s going to reach its zenith during the millennium, but it’s already at play.
One of the most curious lines in Psalm 110 is that last line, verse 7: “He will drink from the brook by the wayside. Therefore He will lift up His head.”
Now, why would a conquering king pause for refreshment at a brook? Because this isn’t the picture describing one final enthronement or one final battle. This is the imagery of a prolonged military campaign. This is a king who’s steadily moving through hostile territory, engaging enemies over time. It’s a picture of stopping to refresh Himself and then He presses forward again. This is a king who’s on the march through history.
How We Participate in Christ’s Reign
And so when it says, “The Lord will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, ‘Rule in the midst of Your enemies,'” this is how we participate in Christ’s reign. Here’s where it gets very practical for us. This is our CTA, our call to action.
You see, Psalm 110 reveals something remarkable about how Christ’s rule operates. When it says in verse 3, “Your people will volunteer freely in the day of Your power”—when is the day of His power? The day of His power and authority began at His ascension and it continues through the entire time of history leading into our time.
Derek Prince says in his book Shaping History through Prayer and Fasting that Christ rules through His people, not apart from them. The scepter of His strength extends from Zion. Now, Zion was actually a geographical place within Jerusalem, but here Zion also means the assembly of God’s people. We are Zion. I have a friend who says we are “Zionic.” Hebrews 12 says when we come to Christ, we come to Zion.
We are actively participating in His present reign through prayer and prayer-born activity as He sovereignly leads us. So as king, He rules. As priest, He intercedes. And He actually invites us into both roles with Him.
Ephesians 2, by the way, says that we are seated with Christ at the right hand of the Father. That is our position. His authority extends through our prayers and our steps of prayer-born faith as we partner with this great King-Priest who governs.
In Revelation 1:5-6, right from the jump in the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ at the end of the New Testament, it says, “To Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His blood and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve His God and Father.”
So prayer and prayer-born activity led by the Spirit are the means. It’s part of the mix of how Christ’s ruling authority flows into nations, into the geopolitical, and even into the micro issues of your life and of my life.
The Tectonic Shift
This is a straightforward understanding of Psalm 110 and looking at how the earliest Christians understood it, looking at commentary throughout history from great Bible scholars and commentators, Martin Luther, people like that. It’s simply an understanding that Christ began His reign at the ascension, and He is actively governing history now through providence. And He will bring that reign to a visible geopolitical fulfillment when He returns.
The millennium, that 1,000-year period that we see in the book of Revelation chapters 19-20—the millennium isn’t when Jesus starts ruling. It’s the zenith of a reign already underway. Can you believe that? So we’re not waiting. He’s not waiting. He’s reigning.
Now this—Psalm 110, the Word of God is so powerful. Just these seven verses are like a tectonic shift, shifting your horizons, elevating your prayer life, elevating your belief set points, maybe revolutionizing your sense of calling and your place in His kingdom and your place in this world. It’s a seismic shift.
Jesus is not waiting for a better world before He begins to rule. He’s ruling in a hostile one right now. He is not waiting for enemies to disappear before exercising authority. He reigns while they are still resisting. He is not waiting to deal with nations. He is already dealing with them.
He has dealt with America. He is dealing with America. He will deal with America. He has dealt with Israel. He is dealing with Israel. He will deal with Israel. He’s dealing and working with every nation on the earth. He has dealt with Iran. He is dealing with Iran. He will deal with Iran. Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, England, the United Kingdom, Russia.
The church age is not a parenthesis in God’s plan. History is not on pause, waiting for the kingdom to arrive. The kingdom has arrived. Jesus said it’s already in your midst. It’s already here. It’s not here at its zenith and completeness when He comes again, but it’s already here at work. And it’s already moving and setting the table and moving history in that direction.
The King is already on the throne, and Psalm 110 is still unfolding.
Closing Prayer
I encourage you to go read the article at jesussmart.com/psalm110. Pray over it. Pray over those seven verses in Psalm 110. Allow them to seep deep within you and to renew the spirit of your mind and possibly shift your worldview and possibly alter and give you a new lens through which you can view your place in the kingdom, your place in this world. You were born for such a time as this.
Father, we just pray briefly before You. We ask Holy Spirit that You would give us a craving and a hunger for Your Word, that You would give us illumination and understanding of Scriptures. Holy Spirit, that You would remind us of everything that Jesus said, as Jesus said You would do. That You would teach us all things, that You would show us what is to come, that You would make us people that are current with our times, that have an understanding of what we ought to do—even a prophetic consciousness of Your unfolding kingdom, the through line of Your kingdom through our times, leading ultimately into a reunification of heaven and earth, the new heavens and the new earth.
And we are doing our best, Father, to understand. Your thoughts towards us are without number. Who can search out Your works, O God? Your plans are beyond us. Such knowledge is too high. It’s too wonderful for us, the Psalmist said in Psalm 139. But Lord, we are doing the best we know how to do, and we can do better, and we can receive more understanding, more a spirit of wisdom and revelation as it says in Isaiah 11—a spirit of counsel and might—and a spirit, Lord, that is just the anointing of Jesus on us growing and increasing.
Thank you for it, Father. I thank You for my brother and sister in Christ. I thank You for seekers. I thank You for people that are curious and may not yet be followers of Christ, but they’re searching, they’re questing. I thank You for pre-conversion processes in people’s lives that are leading to a born-again experience and the renewing of their mind. We thank You, Father, in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.