To Caesar You Shall Go

To Caesar You Shall Go
Acts 25.1-12

There is a kind of wistfulness about the royal Psalms. We imagine them being sung in the first Temple in Jerusalem, some of the Western world’s oldest and still finest poetry. ‘Give the king your judgments, O God, and your justice to the king’s son! Then shall he judge the people according unto right, and defend the poor with equity! Then shall the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills their justice.’ That’s what we want, say the singers. A king who will sort everything out. Someone who will at last give the poor their rights. Someone through whose reign the land will be at peace, and the fields will give their proper harvests. And with each successive king, as the songs were sung again and the prayers ascended in hope, there must have been plenty in the Temple who were thinking: We said all this last time, and it didn’t work. We pinned our hopes on the last king for whom we sang these songs, and he let us down. Will it be any different this time?...

Taken from Acts for Everyone Part 2 by Tom Wright