There are three things that are stately in their stride,
four that move with stately bearing: a lion, mighty among beasts,
who retreats before nothing; a strutting rooster, a he-goat,
and a king with his army around him.
—Proverbs 30:29–31
Here is the king with his powerful army, clad in his armor, surrounded by his generals and lieutenants, and ready for war. The king is powerful, and he impresses with his stately bearing. Any other image of the king would seem to be inappropriate, unless, of course, the king reversed our preconception of what it means to be a genuine king.
In fact, another king does appear who does not have “a stately bearing.” He may be “KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:16), but “he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:2–3).
He is the King who says, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9:35). He is the King who “made himself nothing,” and who “humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7–8).
It is Jesus who gives us something that no earthly king can give—eternal life. Here is a king who has descended into an “unbelieving and perverse generation” (Matthew 17:17), not to condemn the world but to save it.
—Eric Kampmann, Signposts