When King Saul had fallen from grace, the prophet Samuel went to Bethlehem looking for a king. What he found was a shepherd. David would go on to do many great things, including becoming a king and establishing a royal dynasty, but he started out as a lowly shepherd. It is no accident that in Royal David's City, the very first people who were told about the birth of Jesus Christ were shepherds - the very same kind of people that David himself started out as. And not only David. The baby that these shepherds would visit one day became and still is the Shepherd of Shepherds. Jesus Christ inherited a royal legacy of kingship from His mother Mary's ancestor David. The Three Kings of the East, who brought kingly gifts, paid tribute to that royal legacy. But Jesus also inherited from David the noble legacy of shepherdry, and it is His role as a shepherd that was given precedence over His role as a King. After all, at the very end of His mortal ministry, Jesus Christ explains to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.” (John 18:36). Many of the Jews wanted a warrior King like David of old - he who killed his ten thousands. They wanted a political force that would vanquish Rome and all of their other enemies and oppressors. But what they got was a Shepherd more concerned with the welfare of His flock than with gaining great victories in epic battles. The irony is that although Jesus Christ never conquered any territory or established any kingdoms or Empires, the Spiritual Kingdom of Christianity has gone on to fill the Earth in a way that no empire in history has ever managed. To this day, Christianity as a demographic group represents a larger percentage of the population than any other - larger than China or India, larger than Islam or Hinduism. Leaving aside the eternal significance of the salvation of our immortal souls, speaking strictly of mortal, mundane, worldly matters, there is no king or emperor or politician or world leader who has had a greater influence on the day to day lives of the inhabitants of Earth than that simple shepherd, born from the noble lineage of another simple shepherd.
