Chapter 12
The Knot: "Sit at My Right Hand, Until [...]"
If He has already won, why is the world still such a wreck?
It is the most honest question a believer can ask. The King holds all the deeds. The price is paid. He is risen and seated on the throne. And yet the wars rage on, the children die, evil roars as though it were still in charge.
The answer hangs on one small word. A word that explains the whole interval in between: until.
The throne and the waiting
This is the most important sentence heaven ever spoke: "The LORD said to my Lord: Sit at My right hand, until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet" (Psalm 110:1).
Two things at once, and you must hold on to both.
Sit at My right hand — that is now. Already. The King is seated on the throne, crowned, with all authority in heaven and on earth. On paper the case is closed: "All authority has been given to Him" (Matthew 28:18), "He put all things under His feet" (Ephesians 1:22).
Until I make Your enemies a footstool — that is not yet. The open dominion, the visible bringing of every enemy under His feet, is still to come. Only then, says the next verse, "rule in the midst of Your enemies" (Psalm 110:2).
The Bible says it plainly: "We do not yet see all things put under Him" (Hebrews 2:8). And at the same time: "But we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor" (2:9). Already crowned. Not yet everything visible beneath Him. There, in that tension, is where we live.
The verdict is signed, the execution is under way
Think back to the throne room of Part 3. The scroll is opened. The verdict is written. But between the verdict and its execution lies time — and in that time the Bride lives.
It is like a king who has already won the battle decisively, but whose coronation procession has yet to pass through the streets. The outcome is settled; the parade is on its way. We live between the victory and the procession.
That is why the Son prays, and waits: He "sat down forever at the right hand of God, and from then on waits until His enemies are made a footstool for His feet" (Hebrews 10:12–13). Even the King waits for the "until".
The nations as inheritance
And what is He waiting for? For His inheritance.
In Psalm 2 the Father pronounces the decree: "You are My Son, today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will give You the nations for Your inheritance, the ends of the earth for Your possession" (Psalm 2:7–8). The crown that Adam forfeited — dominion over the whole earth — is here given back to the Son. No longer a garden, but the nations. No longer an enclosure, but the ends of the earth.
He shall shepherd them "with a rod of iron" (Psalm 2:9) — the same rod that returns in Revelation, in the hand of the returning King (Revelation 19:15). The inheritance has been claimed. The deed is His. But the full possession becomes visible when He comes.
Living in the "until"
This is no dry doctrine. It is the very air the Bride breathes.
The "until" explains your struggle: you live in occupied territory, under a King who is crowned but does not yet openly reign. It explains your hope: the result is already settled, the parade is on its way. And it explains your calling: you do not wait passively, you already reign with Him in prayer, anticipating the day when every knee will bow.
The King is seated. The enemies are still moving. But there is an "until" in heaven — and that word will come to an end.
What comes then — the day the crown becomes visible, the Bride is set beside the throne, and everything is at last under one Head — is the subject of the rest of this book.
In Depth — The already: all things are already subjected to Him
Before you can rightly feel the tension of the "until", the first half of the knot must stand at full weight. For on the point of Christ's present position the New Testament is utterly unembarrassed. It does not hesitate. It does not say "He shall be seated" but "He is seated"; not "all shall be subjected to Him" but "all is subjected to Him." The verb tenses are completed. Whoever weakens this weakens the throne of Christ.
Begin with the key text of this whole part. God worked His power in Christ, Paul writes, "when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion [...] And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him as Head over all things to the church" (Ephesians 1:20–22). Three things are fixed here, and all three in the completed tense. He sits at the right hand — a phrase every Jewish reader recognized at once, for it comes straight from Psalm 110:1. He stands above all powers — above every conceivable principality, in this age and in the age to come (1:21). And everything lies under His feet — an echo of Psalm 8:6, with a verb (in the Greek hypotassō, "to subordinate") that describes a military, administrative act, here in a form that says: it is done. Beneath those feet lies, according to the text, everything. And the capstone: Christ is given as "Head over all things" to the church, "which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all" (1:22–23). The Headship is universal — above everything — and in the same breath it is bound to the church.
What Ephesians says about the exalted Christ, Colossians 1 grounds in His very being. He was not made Lord over an order that existed outside Him; that order came into being in Him. "For in Him all things were created [...] whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:16–17). The list — thrones, dominions, principalities, powers — names precisely the categories that Ephesians 1:21 sets above Christ, and here they turn out to be created through Christ. The powers that man dreads owe their existence to Him who now sits above them. And the arc closes: He is "the head of the body, the church [...] the firstborn from the dead", for it pleased the Father that in Him all fullness should dwell and that He should "reconcile all things to Himself [...] having made peace through the blood of His cross" (1:18–20). One nuance calls for care: that "reconciling all things" means cosmic pacification and the bringing back of a rebellious order under one Head — not that every being is saved. The broader witness of the New Testament rules out such universal salvation. What matters here is simpler: by right, the reconciliation is accomplished, the peace is made, the ground is laid.
Colossians 2 sharpens the position still further and adds something decisive: Christ is not only the Head, He has also already defeated the hostile powers. "You are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Colossians 2:10). And of the cross: "He disarmed the principalities and powers, made a public spectacle of them, and triumphed over them in that very cross" (2:15). That is extraordinary language. The image is the Roman triumph — the procession in which a victor led his captured enemies behind his chariot through the streets, before everyone's eyes, as living proof that the battle was decided. At the cross, precisely where the powers thought they had won, they were led along as prisoners of war in Christ's victory march. The decisive blow has been struck.
Taken together, the first half of the knot stands immovable. Raised and seated at the right hand (Ephesians 1:20; Psalm 110:1); above all principality, power, might, and dominion (Ephesians 1:21; Colossians 2:10); all things put under His feet (Ephesians 1:22; Psalm 8:6); in Him all powers created and through Him reconciled (Colossians 1:16–20); the hostile powers disarmed, put on display, and led along in triumph (Colossians 2:15). This is no music of the future, but the present legal state of the cosmos: Christ is the crowned, enthroned, sovereign Lord, and all is subjected to Him. Whoever bargains here bargains against the cross and the resurrection. And yet the world does not look like it. That is no contradiction; it is the mystery of the two Psalms.
In Depth — The two Psalms and the one word "until"
The knot is not untied by Ephesians itself, but by the two texts the New Testament quotes again and again whenever it speaks of the exalted Christ: Psalm 110 and Psalm 2. In those two songs lies the closing word — one small word, in Hebrew ad, in Greek heōs, in English "until" — and it carries the whole weight of the already and the not yet.
Psalm 110 — the throne with a boundary in sight. No text from the Old Testament is quoted more often in the New than this one. Jesus cites it Himself (Matthew 22:44), Peter quotes it on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:34–35), Paul reaches back to it (1 Corinthians 15:25; Ephesians 1:20), and it runs as a scarlet thread through the whole letter to the Hebrews (1:13; 5:6; 7:17; 10:12–13). This is the text by which the early church named the position of the exalted Christ. And precisely for that reason it is so telling that it does not end at the sitting, but at a marker of time: "The LORD said to my Lord: Sit at My right hand, until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet" (110:1).
Two things carry that verse. The first is a riddle: the LORD speaks to "my Lord". David, the writer, calls another his Lord — and that other is invited to sit at God's right hand. It is exactly this riddle that Jesus puts to His opponents: if the Messiah is David's son, how can David call him his Lord? The question can only be solved when the Messiah is more than David's descendant — when He stands at the right hand of God Himself (Matthew 22:41–46). This is the enthronement of the Messiah, in a single line.
The second load-bearing element is that one word "until", ad. It is lexically significant that the dictionaries note something special about it: ad differs from the related preposition in that the boundary itself is included — "up to and including", where the end point is part of it. So the sitting has an end-point-in-sight. Not that the sitting ceases; the King remains King. But there is a state — sitting, while the enemies still stand — that passes over into another: the enemies made a footstool. And that "footstool" is no ornament, but a legal image from the ancient world: the victor set his foot on the neck of the defeated enemy. The enemy is made into the floor beneath the throne. Here is the knot in two phrases: in Ephesians 1:22 everything already lies "under His feet"; in Psalm 110:1 the making of the enemies into a footstool is still set as coming, introduced by "until". The position is won; its manifestation over the enemies is still on its way.
And what happens after the "until"? Not rest, but reign. "Rule in the midst of Your enemies" (110:2). The verb there is the same one that was given to man in Genesis 1: radah, "to rule". That is no coincidence — it is the scarlet thread of the whole story. The dominion that Adam lost returns in the Man at the right hand. And the place is telling: "in the midst of Your enemies", not when they are gone, but while they still stand round about. The most natural reading of verses 1 and 2 together is a sequence: the present sitting passes into a visible dominion that begins when "the scepter from Zion" is sent forth — no longer merely a throne in heaven, but a reign that breaks through on earth, in the midst of a world not yet fully bowed.
One verse of this psalm explains, moreover, how the King can wait without being idle. "The LORD has sworn, and will not relent: You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek" (110:4). In Israel kingship and priesthood were strictly separated — the king from Judah, the priest from Levi; King Uzziah was struck with leprosy when he laid hold of the priestly office. But in this one Person they coincide, and that after the order of Melchizedek, the king-priest of Salem who was there already before Levi existed. The whole letter to the Hebrews builds on this its argument about Christ's high priesthood. And this is the reassuring other side of the "until": while the King sits and waits, He is not passive. He is Priest, "always living to make intercession for them" (Hebrews 7:25). The interval is no void; it is the time of His intercession. The King who waits for the subjecting of His enemies is at the same time the Priest who in the meantime pleads for His own.
Psalm 2 — the decree, the Son, the inheritance, the rod. Psalm 2 is the twin text. Where Psalm 110 sketches the throne, Psalm 2 sketches the royal decree on which that throne rests, and the inheritance that is bound to it. This psalm too belongs to the most-quoted texts of the New Testament (Acts 4:25–26; 13:33; Hebrews 1:5; Revelation 12:5; 19:15). Four elements carry the knot.
The first is the decree. The psalm opens with revolt: the nations rage, the kings of the earth set themselves "against the LORD and against His Anointed" (2:2). And against that uproar, the calm of heaven: "He who sits in the heavens shall laugh" (2:4). The resistance is already settled — not by force, but by a decree: "I will declare the decree" (2:7). The word there, choq, means a fixed, engraved ordinance. The King of Zion does not stand there by chance; He stands there by virtue of a decree. That connects this psalm directly to the heart of this part — the plan that God "purposed in Himself" (Ephesians 1:9). The decree of Psalm 2 is the royal side of that same purpose.
The second, and the heart of the psalm: "You are My Son, today I have begotten You" (2:7). The New Testament applies this to Christ three times, and each time it ties the "today" not first to Bethlehem, but to His resurrection and exaltation. Paul in Antioch: God fulfilled His promise by raising Jesus, "as it is also written in the second psalm: You are My Son, today I have begotten You" (Acts 13:33). The letter to the Hebrews cites it twice — as proof that the Son is higher than the angels (1:5), and as the ground of His high priesthood (5:5). The "today" of the throne is thus the day on which the risen Man is openly installed in Sonship-with-power — what Paul says elsewhere with "declared to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead" (Romans 1:4). That is the same event as the sitting of Psalm 110:1. The two psalms describe, from two angles, one moment: the inauguration of the King-Son at the right hand.
The third strikes Ephesians straight in the heart: "Ask of Me, and I will give You the nations as Your inheritance, the ends of the earth as Your possession" (2:8). In Ephesians 1 the inheritance is twofold: we have "obtained an inheritance in Him" (1:11), and at the same time there is "the riches of the glory of His inheritance among the saints" (1:18) — there the saints are God's inheritance. Psalm 2:8 lays the foundation beneath that: the Son receives the nations and the ends of the earth as His inheritance. Christ is the Heir of all nations; and we inherit "in Him". But the verb is telling: "Ask of Me." The inheritance is won by right, but its possession is still to be asked, still to be paid out. That is exactly the pattern of the knot, now applied to the inheritance: the right of inheritance is fixed, the payout is still outstanding. With that, this verse stands in line with the "until" of Psalm 110:1 and with the pledge of Ephesians 1:14 — the Spirit as a down payment on an inheritance that must still be fully paid out. Already won, not yet paid out.
The fourth is the rod of iron: "You shall break them with a rod of iron, You shall dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel" (2:9). That image the New Testament takes up three times, each time in Revelation: to the overcomer it is promised that he will shepherd the nations "with a rod of iron" (2:27 — there the overcomers share in that reigning); it is said of the male child (12:5); and of the Rider on the white horse (19:15). Here lies an honest textual question. The Hebrew text reads "break", from a root that means "to shatter, to smash". The ancient Greek translation, and in its train Revelation, read the same consonants differently — as a root that means "to pasture, to shepherd, to rule as shepherd", hence "shepherd with a rod of iron". The consonants are identical; only the vowel tradition differs. And both readings say something true about the same dominion: "break" emphasizes the judgment over those who persist in resistance; "shepherd with a rod of iron" emphasizes a shepherd-reign that is unbending, an authority that does not negotiate. Together they sketch a dominion that breaks what hardens itself and reigns with a rod that does not bend — precisely the manifest dominion "in the midst of the enemies" of Psalm 110:2.
And the psalm closes pastorally, not vengefully: "Kiss the Son [...] blessed are all those who take refuge in Him" (2:12). The kings can still bow; the choice is sharp, but there is a choice. That explains why the "until" is not wrath but justice: an invitation goes before it.
The keys in the New Testament. The two psalms tie the knot; the New Testament does not untie it, but names it — with the same word. Four passages are decisive. The clearest is 1 Corinthians 15: "He must reign as King until He has put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that is dethroned is death [...] that God may be all in all" (15:25–28). Three things stand out. The verb "must reign" is continuous — Christ's kingship is under way and goes on "until". The enemies are subjected one by one, and the last is death — as long as death still reigns, the "until" is not complete. And the goal is "God all in all": that is precisely the consummation toward which all of Ephesians 1 points, the "gathering together of all things in Christ" (Ephesians 1:10) that issues in God all in all. The "until" is therefore no stray detail of the end times; it is the hinge on which the whole mystery turns, from already to consummated.
The second key is a direct quotation: "And to which of the angels has He ever said: Sit at My right hand, until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet?" (Hebrews 1:13). No angel received that invitation; only the Son. And the writer quotes Psalm 110:1 in full — including the "until". That is telling: the New Testament does not regard that word as a negligible remnant, but as part of the revelation itself.
The third is the hinge in a single verse. The writer quotes Psalm 8 — "You have put all things under His feet" — and draws the logical conclusion: if all is subjected, nothing is excepted; by right truly everything lies under His feet. And then, in one turn, the honest observation: "But now we do not yet see all things put under Him" (Hebrews 2:8). There the knot stands in one breath: by right all things subjected, in practice not yet visible. The little phrase "not yet" is the hinge of the whole already-and-not-yet. And how does the writer go on? Not with a retreat, but with a look at the Person: "but we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor" (2:9). What we do not yet see — all things subjected — is borne by what we do see: the crowned Jesus. The certainty of the not-yet lies in the already of His crowning.
The fourth key binds the sitting to the waiting: Christ "offered one sacrifice for sins and sat down forever at the right hand of God, and from then on waits until His enemies are made a footstool for His feet" (Hebrews 10:12–13). Here everything comes together. The priestly work is finished — therefore He can sit; a priest who stands is not yet done, but this Priest sits, for His sacrifice is complete. And the sitting is not idle but expectant: He looks forward. Sitting and waiting, "until" His enemies become a footstool. That sums up the two psalms in one sentence: the sitting, its priestly ground, and the expectation of the subjecting of the enemies.
Honestly, in plain words. Lay it side by side, and the knot unfolds as one movement, not as a contradiction. The already: Christ is raised, set on the throne, above all powers, all things under His feet, in Him created and through Him reconciled, the enemies disarmed at the cross — by right the sovereign Lord of the cosmos. The not-yet: "we do not yet see all things put under Him", the enemies still stand, death still reigns, the inheritance is not yet paid out. And between those two stands one word — "until" — that expresses not doubt but certain direction: there is an end point, and the boundary is included. The sitting passes into a visible reign, and the content of that transition is the subjecting of the enemies. When that is complete, He "reigns" — in the midst of His enemies, with the scepter from Zion, with the rod of iron.
And one honest word belongs here. That Christ is already seated on the throne and that all is by right subjected to Him — that the text compels. That there is a "not yet" — that the text compels. That there is an "until" that issues in a visible dominion over subjected enemies — that too the text compels. Thus far Scripture itself, without a calendar. But that this visible dominion "in the midst of the enemies" is a concrete, earthly, temporary reign — the thousand-year kingdom of Revelation 20 — that is the leading reading of this book, not compelling proof. It is well supported: Psalm 110:2 speaks of a scepter "from Zion" and a ruling "in the midst of enemies" (there are therefore still enemies, and He reigns); Psalm 2 speaks of an earthly inheritance and a reign with the rod of iron; Revelation 19 binds that same rod of iron to the returning Rider, immediately followed by the millennium. The pieces fit. But it remains a coherent construction, not a single text that writes out the whole chain itself. Other readings — the dominion as already now fully spiritualized, or as coinciding with the eternal state — exist, and it would be dishonest to pass over them in silence. The frame stands firm; the placement on the time clock is held with a loose hand. And whoever fills in the millennium question differently still keeps the knot — and the knot is the gain of this chapter: already subjected, not yet everything, until.
De jure crowned, de facto awaited, on the time clock decided. The cross was the legal ground, the throne is the position, the "until" is the time — and the "rule in the midst of Your enemies" is the consummation.