You probably picture Jesus in heaven doing one thing. Waiting.
Waiting to finally take up His throne. Waiting to finally deal with nations and rulers. Waiting for the right moment to begin His reign.
Sure, He’s interceding as our High Priest, preparing us as His bride, transforming us into His image. All true and precious realities.
But what if there’s a dimension of His present activity we consistently underestimate: His kingly rule over history itself?
We know He’ll reign when He returns. We sing about His future Kingdom. What if He’s been actively ruling all along—governmentally, over nations and rulers, shaping the course of human events—from the moment He sat down at the Father’s right hand?
There is one psalm, quoted by the apostles more than any other. Understood one way by the early church, largely forgotten by the modern church.
What if recovering how Century One Christians understood Psalm 110 transforms how you see Christ’s authority today?
The Psalm the Apostles Couldn’t Stop Quoting
Psalm 23 is the most beloved psalm. But Psalm 110 is the most quoted psalm in the New Testament. Why is that?
Jesus quotes from Psalm 110 to silence the Pharisees (Matthew 22:41-46), just before his blistering rebuke of the Pharisees (see Matthew 23) and his teaching on the end times in Matthew 24 just before His crucifixion.
Peter underscores Psalm 110 in his sermon in Acts 2:14-39 after Jesus ascends and the Holy Spirit baptizes early Christ-followers.
“For 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.’ Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:35-36 ESV)
Peter wasn’t talking about someday. The Davidic throne was occupied. Jesus had ascended, sat down at God’s right hand, and begun His reign as King.
Paul structures his theology of Christ’s present authority and the culmination of the Kingdom around Psalm 110 in 1 Corinthians 15:24-28.
Then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to our God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet [from Psalm 110]” (1 Corinthians 15:24-25 NASB)
The structure of Hebrews seems to be built on Psalm 110. The writer of Hebrews quotes or alludes to the psalm at least 15 times across the book.
Direct quotes (hover over references): Hebrews 1:13, 5:6, 7:17, 7:21, and 10:12-13.
Clear allusions: Hebrews 1:3, 5:10, 6:20, 7:3, 7:11, 7:15, 7:24, 7:28, 8:1, and 12:2.
The early church didn’t treat this Messianic psalm as background poetry or occasional reference material. They treated it as the master key.
For early Christians, it was the passage that unlocked what happened after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.
How does this relate to you and I today? Keep reading. — Brian
Both King and Priest at the Right Hand
“The LORD said to my Lord: ‘Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies Your footstool.'” (Psalm 110:1 NASB)
This isn’t symbolic comfort language. This is throne language. Government language. Authority-in-motion language.
In the ancient world, sitting at the right hand of a king meant shared rule and active governance. Not He will reign later. He must reign now—and the subduing of enemies is already underway.
Psalm 110 does something no other psalm does. It declares the Messiah to be both King and eternal Priest: “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Psalm 110:4 NASB).
This is the only place in the entire Old Testament where the Messiah is explicitly called a priest—not from Aaron’s line, but from an eternal order that predates the Law itself. Without this single psalm, we’d have no biblical framework for Jesus functioning as both King and High Priest simultaneously.
Most of us have unconsciously created a timeline in our heads: Jesus is functioning as High Priest now, and He’ll take up the Davidic throne later when He returns. Psalm 110 won’t allow that split.
The One interceding for you is simultaneously the One governing history. The One praying for the church is the same One ruling over nations. Priest and King aren’t sequential roles. They’re concurrent realities.
Why the Early Church Loved This Psalm
Psalm 110 explained living under Rome to first-century Christians..
It explained how a crucified-resurrected-ascended Messiah could be called Lord. It explained why persecution continued even after Jesus ascended. It explained the tension they felt—living under the authority of Caesar while confessing Jesus as the true King.
This psalm told them Christ’s reign has already begun, but the subduing of His enemies is a process, not an instant event. That gave them extraordinary confidence.
They needed that confidence. Nero (54-68 AD) blamed Christians for Rome’s great fire in 64 AD and turned them into human torches. Paul and Peter were executed under Nero’s time as emperor.
Three decades later, Domitian (81-96 AD) demanded worship as “Lord and God.” The Apostle John was exiled to the island of Patmos because of the Word of God. Both emperors looked unstoppable. But the Kingdom of Christ outlasted them.
Rome didn’t have the final word. The Roman-Jewish powers that crucified Jesus were already under the authority of the One they rejected.
The early church fathers inherited this understanding directly from the apostles. When Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians around 96 AD—one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament—he quoted Psalm 110:1 to establish Christ’s divine authority and present reign.
The “right hand” language wasn’t future hope for Clement. It was present reality. While the apostle John was likely still alive or had only recently died, the next generation of Christian leaders was already using Psalm 110 the same way Peter and Paul did. As proof that Jesus is enthroned and reigning right now.
Authentic Christ-followers remained faithful and obedient while Psalm 110 continued to unfold in history.
“The Lord … is now King of all, having been made both Lord and Christ.” — Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-202 AD)
The Verses We Skip (And Why They Matter)
We love verses 1 and 4 in Psalm 110. They’re quoted in sermons, written on devotional cards, memorized in Bible studies.
We rarely touch verses 5–7. You likely never heard a sermon or teaching on Psalm 110:5-7.
“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 (or, the heads) over the wide earth” (Psalm 110:5-6 ESV).
This is obvious militant language. It’s governmental. Violent, even.
It doesn’t fit our soft categories of Jesus gently interceding for us. Or the kind shepherd taking care of us. So we instinctively shove this picture of Jesus into the future. We assume this must be talking about the Millennium or the final battle at Christ’s return. Anything but now.
And yet, the apostles quoted this psalm to explain their present reality under Roman occupation and persecution. They weren’t postponing verses 5–7 to some distant future age. They were using them to make sense of their current moment in history.
Ruling in the Midst of Enemies
Look at verse 2 again: “The LORD will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, ‘Rule in the midst of Your enemies'” (Psalm 110:2 NASB).
That’s an odd phrase if this psalm only describes a future peaceful kingdom.
In the Millennium, enemies are subdued. Bound. Removed. The reign of Christ will be visible, uncontested, universal. But Psalm 110 describes something different … a King who rules while enemies still exist and actively resist.
That sounds exactly like the world we’re living in 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. Jesus is King right now, even though Rome doesn’t acknowledge it. Even though persecution continues and the world looks chaotic.
What It Actually Means to “Shatter Kings”
Our modern imagination pictures divine judgment as dramatic and instantaneous at a point in time. Lightning from heaven and unmistakable acts of God. And that maximum point is on the horizon.
But Scripture also reveals that God judges and removes rulers through a process. The means often look ordinary from an earthly perspective.
Pharaoh hardens his own heart, and so God hardened him. He ends up destroying himself. Saul crashes under jealousy of David and paranoia. Haman gets caught in his own trap and is hanged on the gallows he created. Nebuchadnezzar loses his sanity. Herod is judged and dies a gruesome death.
Empires decay from within through pride, corruption, moral rot, idolatry. Leaders fall through scandal, overreach, miscalculation.
From heaven’s vantage point, the Lord at the right hand of the throne is shattering kings. From earth’s vantage point, it looks like human failure, politics, and history.
Same events. Different lens.
When you start reading history through the lens of Psalm 110, patterns emerge. King Jesus is at work.
Gird Your sword upon Your thigh, O Mighty One, with Your glory and Your majesty. And in Your majesty ride prosperously because of truth, humility, and righteousness; And Your right hand shall teach You awesome things. Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the King’s enemies; The peoples fall under You. — Psalm 45:3-5 NKJV
The Jewish Sanhedrin system that condemned Christ? Gone. The Roman emperors who demanded worship as gods? Irrelevant and gone too. Regimes in history that violently tried to stamp out Christianity? 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.
Psalm 110 has been unfolding in slow motion for 2,000 years.
A King on a Long Campaign
One of the most curious lines in the psalm says: “He will drink from the brook by the wayside; therefore He will lift up His head” (Psalm 110:7 NASB).
Why would a conquering king pause for refreshment?
Because this isn’t describing one final battle. This is the imagery of a prolonged military campaign. This is a king steadily moving through hostile territory, engaging enemies over time. He stops to refresh himself and then presses forward again.
This is a King on the march through history. Not waiting to start the campaign.
The Millennium as Zenith, Not Beginning
We tend to think: “The Millennium is when Jesus will finally start ruling.” Psalm 110, and the way the New Testament uses it, suggests something different.
The Millennium is when the world finally sees what has been true since the ascension. George Ladd, one of the most influential evangelical scholars of the twentieth century, called this ‘inaugurated eschatology’—the Kingdom is already here but not yet fully realized.
He wrote: “The Kingdom of God involves two great moments: fulfillment within history, and consummation at the end of history.”
His reign won’t begin when He returns. It began when He sat down in kingly session after his ascension.
So the Second Coming isn’t the start of His Davidic rule. It’s the public, visible, undeniable manifestation of a rule that’s been at play all along.
“That you keep this commandment without spot, blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ’s appearing, which He will manifest in His own time, He who is the blessed and only Potentate (Sovereign), the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power” (1 Timothy 6:14-16 NKJV).
The unseen king. For now. Christ is the only Potentate, King of kings, and Lord of lords even as his appearing is on the horizon.
How We Participate in Christ’s Reign
Here’s where it gets practical for us. We have a Call-to-Action from Christ.
Psalm 110 reveals something remarkable about how Christ’s rule operates: “Your people will volunteer freely in the day of Your power” (Psalm 110:3 NASB).
When is the day of His power? It began as Christ’s ascension. And it continues through the entire Church Age leading to 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”—not merely the geographical location on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but here the assembly of God’s people.
We are Zion. When we come to Christ, we come to Zion (see Hebrews 12:22-24). You could say we’re “Zionic”.
We actively participate in His present reign through prayer and prayer-borne activity as He sovereignly leads us.
As King, He rules. As Priest, He intercedes. And He invites us into both roles. His authority extends through our prayers and our steps of faith as we partner with the King-Priest who governs.
“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—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.” (Revelation 1:5-6 NIV)
Prayer and prayer-borne activity are the means by which Christ’s ruling authority flows into specific scenarios.
A Straightforward Understanding
This understanding doesn’t fit neatly into the usual theological boxes. And that’s probably good.
This isn’t classic dispensationalism, which postpones Christ’s Davidic reign entirely until the Millennium begins. It isn’t amillennialism, which tends to spiritualize the Kingdom and downplay a future earthly reign. And it’s not postmillennialism, which expects gradual Christianization of the world before Christ returns.
It’s simply an understanding that Christ began His messianic reign at the ascension. He actively governs history now through providence. And He will bring that reign to visible, geopolitical fulfillment when He returns.
The Millennium isn’t when Jesus starts ruling. It’s the zenith of a reign already underway.
This isn’t a novel theological system. It’s simply reading Psalm 110 the way the apostles did.
Not Waiting. Reigning.
This is the quiet but seismic shift Psalm 110 invites us to make. Jesus is not waiting for a better world before He begins to rule. He is ruling in a hostile one.
He is not waiting for enemies to disappear before exercising authority. He reigns while they resist.
He is not waiting to deal with nations. He is already dealing with them from the right hand of God.
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.
The King is already on the throne. And Psalm 110 is still unfolding.
Every regime. Every ideology. Every power structure that resists His Kingdom is living on borrowed time. Judgment is already underway.
