In the previous article, we looked at the theological throughline of the Lion of Judah in the scriptures.  Now we will examine why this matters to us.

The Problem of the Sacred-Secular Divide

None of this understanding about the Lion of Judah would matter much as theology if it did not also have consequences for how Christians live. And here the symbol of the Lion begins to cost us something.

Throughout Christian history, a persistent temptation has been to quarantine faith from public life—to allow Sunday piety to coexist comfortably with Monday accommodation. This dualism has taken many forms, but its most catastrophic expression came in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. When the Nazi regime systematically dismantled law, persecuted Jews, and prosecuted an ideological war against the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilization, the majority of German Christians found reasons not to resist. Their faith was spiritual. The state was secular. The two realms, they convinced themselves, could be kept separate.

Are we not  swimming in the same waters?  Are not Jews becoming the scapegoats for our cultural unraveling?  Where is the church?  Do we wear the cross around our necks and yet forget that our very Messiah is a Jew?

What if instead, we as the church begin to proclaim the Lordship of Christ over every area of life in the public square?  Could we, with our Messiah, take on the mantle of the Lion of the tribe of Judah and arise against the gates of hell?  What if instead we work to use our voice and our actions to resist the wickedness that vies for cultural territory at every turn?

We must!  Or we will perish.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood that this was not a sustainable distinction. The Lion of Judah is Lord not merely of the interior life but of all things. The claim of Christ’s lordship is, by its nature, a public claim—one that collides with every competing pretension to ultimate authority. Bonhoeffer paid for this understanding with his life. The majority of his fellow Christians paid for their accommodation with their souls.

Western Christians face analogous temptations today, though the specific forms differ. The resurgence of antisemitism—including within institutions that were once reliably hostile to it—is one marker of a broader cultural shift away from the Judeo-Christian moral inheritance. The devaluation of human life, the erosion of institutions that once embodied the principle that human beings bear the image of God, the spread of ideologies that deny the possibility of moral truth: these are not merely political phenomena. They are theological ones. They represent a recrudescence of the pagan sensibility that the Hebrew prophets spent centuries opposing.

To wear the Lion of Judah is to acknowledge that the king whose kingdom has no end demands something of His subjects in the present—not comfort, not withdrawal, but engagement. It is to accept that the gates of hell are not merely a metaphor for personal temptation but a description of the forces arrayed against human dignity and divine order in every age. And it is to trust that those gates will not prevail.

 The Story and Its Demands

The Star of David bearing the Lion of Judah around my neck is not a piece of religious décor. It is a compressed argument: that God chose a particular people to reveal Himself to the world; that their history is the seedbed of the world’s redemption; that the Messiah who came from that people is both the fulfillment of ancient prophecy and the Lord of all creation; and that His lordship makes demands on those who confess it.

The bookends of Scripture—Jacob’s blessing in Genesis and the elder’s announcement in Revelation—frame a story that is simultaneously particular and universal. It begins with a dying patriarch speaking over his sons in the land of Egypt and ends with a vision of the throne room of heaven, where the Lamb who is the Lion receives the worship of every tribe and nation and tongue. The particularity (a Jewish patriarch, a Jewish tribe, a Jewish Messiah) is the vehicle of the universality. God chose to bless all the families of the earth through Abraham’s seed (Genesis 12:3), and that seed was the Lion of Judah.

What this means practically is that Christians cannot be indifferent to the fate of the Jewish people without being unfaithful to their own story. Nor can they confine Christ’s reign to the private sphere without denying the logic of the Incarnation. The Lion has already won. He calls His people not to spectate but to participate—in advancing His kingdom, in opposing the forces that diminish human dignity, in standing with those whom history has most targeted for annihilation.

The story ends in victory. That ending is not a reason for passivity but for courage—the particular kind of courage that is possible only for those who already know how the story ends.

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