God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.
—Acts 2:36
The King of the kingdom of heaven is none other than the crucified Jesus. All that we have to say of Him, of His divine power, His abiding presence, and His wonderful love, does not teach us to know Him fully unless we maintain the deep awareness that our King is the crucified Jesus. God has placed Him “in the midst of [His] throne” as a Lamb, “as it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6), and it is thus that the hosts of heaven adore Him. It is thus that we worship Him as a King.
Christ’s cross is His highest glory. It is through this that He has conquered every enemy and gained His place on the throne of God. And it is this that He will impart to us, too, if we are to know fully the meaning of victory over sin. When Paul wrote, “I am crucified with Christ…Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20), he taught us that Christ ruled on the throne of his heart as the Crucified One, and that the spirit of the cross would triumph over us as it did in Him.
This was true of the disciples. This was their deepest preparation for receiving the Holy Spirit. With their Lord, they had been crucified to the world. The “old man” (Romans 6:6) had been crucified; in Him they were “dead indeed to sin” (verse 11), and their lives were “hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Each one of us needs to experience this fellowship with Christ in His cross if the Spirit of Pentecost is really to take possession of us. It was through the eternal Spirit that Christ gave Himself as a sacrifice and became the King on the throne of God. As we become “conformable unto His death” (Philippians 3:10) in the entire surrender of our wills, in the entire self‑denial of our old natures, and in the entire separation from the spirit of this world, we can become the worthy servants of a crucified King, and our hearts the worthy temples of His glory.