# Who Messiah *David calls him ‘Lord.’ How then can he be his son?”* By [Reborn Jem](https://paragraph.com/@rebornjem) · 2026-06-03 faith, christianity, jesus, biblestudy, faithjourney, luke20, messiah, sonofgod, christianliving, kitohuu --- **Luke 20:41-44 (NIV)** ----------------------- _41 Then Jesus said to them, “Why is it said that the Messiah is the son of David? 42 David himself declares in the Book of Psalms:_ _“’The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand 43 until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”’_ _44 David calls him ‘Lord.’ How then can he be his son?”_ * * * ### The Question Nobody Asked Throughout Luke 20, the religious leaders have been coming at Jesus with questions designed to trap Him. The Pharisees sent spies to catch Him on the question of taxes. The Sadducees tried to embarrass Him with a puzzle about resurrection. The teachers of the law tested Him about the greatest commandment. Question after question, each one a carefully constructed attempt to find the crack in Him that would allow them to discredit or arrest Him. And then the questioners run out of questions. _They no longer dared ask him anything._ The interrogation is over. Jesus has answered everything they brought and none of it has produced what they were looking for. And into the silence that follows, Jesus asks a question of His own. Not to trap them — though it does expose something they have not thought through. But to push them toward the question that was always the most important one and that all their clever questions had managed to avoid. Who is the Messiah? Not what are the rules about taxes. Not what happens to marriage after the resurrection. Not which commandment is greatest. Who is this one you have been waiting for? And if you have been reading David all your lives, why have you not noticed what David himself seems to have understood about Him? * * * ### Son of David The title Son of David was the most common Messianic expectation in first-century Judaism. It was rooted in the covenant God made with David in 2 Samuel 7 — the promise of a king from David’s line whose kingdom would have no end. The Messiah would be a Davidic king. A warrior-liberator in the tradition of David. Someone who would restore the throne of Israel and break the power of the occupying Romans the way David had broken the power of Israel’s enemies a thousand years before. This was not a wrong expectation in every sense. Jesus is of the line of David — Matthew and Luke both establish this carefully in their genealogies. He is the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant. The throne He inherits is real and its kingdom will indeed have no end. But the title Son of David, by itself, was too small. It carried the assumption that the Messiah was primarily a human figure — a great king, a mighty deliverer, but ultimately a man of David’s kind rather than something categorically beyond it. And Jesus is pointing to a passage that David himself wrote which suggests David understood that the Messiah was something more than his own descendant. * * * ### David’s Psalm The passage Jesus quotes is Psalm 110 — the most quoted Old Testament text in the entire New Testament, referenced more than any other single passage by the apostles and the early church. It begins: _The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet._ In Hebrew the first Lord is Yahweh — the covenant name of God. The second Lord is Adonai — a title of supreme authority and honour. David is writing this psalm, and he is describing a conversation in which Yahweh speaks to someone David calls his Lord. Jesus is drawing attention to the pronoun. David writes _my Lord_ — not _my son_, not _my descendant_, not _the one who will come after me_. My Lord. The one David himself addresses with the title of sovereign authority. The one before whom David, the greatest king Israel had ever known, takes the position of a subject. If the Messiah were simply David’s descendant — a human figure in the royal line, however great — David would not call him Lord. A father does not address his son as his sovereign. A king does not bow to his own offspring. The title David uses points to someone who is not merely David’s son in the ordinary sense but David’s Lord in a sense that transcends the biological relationship entirely. * * * ### The Question That Contains the Answer _David calls him Lord. How then can he be his son?_ Jesus does not answer the question He raises. He leaves it hanging in the air of the temple courts, in front of the scribes and the Pharisees and the crowd that has been listening to the whole day’s interrogation. He asks the question and He stops. The question is not rhetorical in the sense of having no answer. It is rhetorical in the sense of having an answer that the listeners are being invited to find for themselves. The answer is not that the Messiah is not the son of David — He is. The genealogies confirm it. The angel confirms it to Mary. The crowds confirm it when they shout Hosanna to the Son of David as Jesus enters Jerusalem. The answer is that the Messiah is both. Son of David according to the flesh — rooted in the royal line, the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant, the king that Israel was promised. And at the same time, David’s Lord — one whose identity, authority, and nature exceed what any merely human Messiah could be. The one whom Yahweh addresses directly. The one seated at the right hand of God while His enemies are being made a footstool. The one before whom David himself, the man after God’s own heart, takes the posture of a servant before his sovereign. Paul will later articulate this with the precision that the temple courts cannot yet contain — descended from David according to the flesh, declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead. Both things. Son of David and Son of God. Human and divine. The one the covenant was pointing toward and the one the covenant came from. * * * ### What They Had Been Missing The religious leaders had spent their entire lives in the Scriptures. They knew Psalm 110. They could have recited it. They taught it. And yet they had not pressed the question that the psalm itself raises — if the Messiah is coming from David’s line, why does David call Him Lord? The failure was not one of information. It was one of attention. They had the text and had not read it all the way to the question it raises. They had built their Messianic expectation on one part of what Scripture said — the Son of David who would restore the throne — without accounting for the other part that the same Scripture contained. The part where David himself indicates that the one coming is greater than he is. Greater than a king. Greater than the greatest figure in Israel’s history. This is the danger Jesus is exposing — not false belief but incomplete belief. The belief that has been built on the parts of Scripture that are comfortable and familiar and that fit the existing framework, while the parts that would disrupt that framework have been left unexamined. The Messiah who was a great king of David’s kind was a Messiah they could accommodate. The Messiah who is David’s Lord — the one seated at the right hand of Yahweh — required a complete reconception of what they were looking for. He was standing in the temple. And they could not see Him because the category they had prepared for Him was too small to contain what He actually was. * * * ### The Right Hand of God The image from Psalm 110 that Jesus quotes is itself worth sitting with. _Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet._ The right hand in the ancient world was the position of honour, authority, and power — the place where the trusted co-regent sat, sharing in the rule of the king. To be seated at the right hand of God is not simply to be near God. It is to share in the authority of God. To reign with Him. To have been given the position from which the enemies are subdued — not by the one seated but by the one who does the seating. The posture is also significant. Seated. Not striving, not struggling, not waiting anxiously for the outcome. Seated — the posture of the work accomplished, of the one who has done what needed to be done and now occupies the position that the doing has won. The writer of Hebrews will later take this image and press it to its full meaning — after making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. He sat down because the work was finished. And He is seated because the reign is current. * * * ### Walk On The question Jesus asks in the temple courts is the question that every generation has to answer for itself. Not — do you know who the Messiah was supposed to be? That question is answerable from the textbooks. But — who do you actually believe Jesus is? Have you pressed the question far enough to arrive at the answer that Psalm 110 was already pointing toward? Have you allowed the full weight of what Scripture says about Him to reshape your categories — or have you built your faith on the parts that fit comfortably and left the harder parts unexamined? David calls Him Lord. The one from David’s line is David’s sovereign. The son of Mary is the Son of God. The carpenter from Nazareth is the one seated at the right hand of Yahweh while His enemies are being made a footstool. Both things. Fully human. Fully God. The one the covenant was pointing toward from the beginning. The one before whom the greatest king Israel ever produced takes the position of a servant before his Lord. The question is not how He can be both. The question is whether we have pressed the inquiry far enough to arrive at the answer — and whether the answer, once arrived at, has actually changed how we live and what we worship and who we are becoming. David knew. He wrote it in a psalm a thousand years before the temple courts. The Lord said to my Lord. Sit at my right hand. All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍 * * * _If this reflection spoke to you, consider subscribing to follow along my journey of faith, meditation, and rebuilding — one day at a time. Your support truly means more than you know._ ❤ --- *Originally published on [Reborn Jem](https://paragraph.com/@rebornjem/who-messiah)*