If history did not tell the story, who would believe that, nearly 2,000 years after an obscure Galilean peasant gained some local notoriety as a wandering preacher and healer, and was executed by the Romans, there would not be a single nation in the world where this obscure peasant was not worshipped and acclaimed as a king, a king whose kingdom shall never end, and who by his power holds the universe together? Fantastic, isn't it! Where in this world can one go and not discover somewhere a group of people who confess Jesus as Lord and King? In countries rich and poor, large and small, with repressive or democratic governments, the church which Christ has gathered into one body, and of which he is the head, is present and growing.

In the highlands of the interior of the East Malaysian state of Sarawak on the heavily-forested island of Borneo, there is a small village called Barrio. It is only accessible by small planes capable of landing on the tiny mountain-ringed runway, or by a long journey by canoes up jungle rivers and trekking on foot. And yet, every person in that village confesses the Lordship of Jesus Christ. In southern Zaire (officially emocratic Republic of the Congo), where political turmoil and corrupt government has many people on the brink of starvation, there are small groups of Christians who gather in rural mud-brick churches, sometimes without even a roof, and there each Sunday, they sing the praises of a king whose name is Jesus. Through the long years of repression in the Soviet Union and its satellites, and in China where for so many years public worship was forbidden, we now discover in this era when the walls of repression are falling that the church was not only alive but growing, and is now stronger than it ever was in those lands.

Many people in those lands refused to confess Mao Tse-Tung or Stalin or Brezhnev as king, preferring to confess Jesus as king instead, sometimes at great personal cost.

Somehow, that historical development -- the universal reign of One who died as a subversive criminal at the town dump of Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago -- must be explained.