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THE FATHER INSTALLS THE SON AS KINGPSALM 2:1-12INTRODUCTION It is hard for most Christians in the U.S. to really feel the hostility that the majority of the people in the world hold for Christ and his church. The fact that more Christians have died in the last 100 years for being Christians than died in all the centuries prior to the last one doesn’t really faze us because none of us personally know anyone who has died because he or she was a Christian. When we hear about the man in Afghanistan who converted from Islam to Christianity being put on trial and thus facing the death penalty we are not really emotionally impacted, as that seems so far away from us. Sure we may have had a coworker mock us for being a Christian or a family member or friend shun us for saying that Jesus is the only way to know God, but most of us have little real experience with the hatred that Jesus told us we would face: “If the world hates you keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you…” Or as the apostle John reminds us in his letter: “Do not be surprised my brothers, if the world hates you.” Whether we have personally experienced it or not the world that we live in is adamant in its animosity towards Jesus Christ and his church. To join oneself to Christ and to his church is to join with a hated and persecuted minority in the world. The world is opposed to us because, as John says in his letter, “the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” The great enemy of God, Satan, is himself directing the natural antagonism of non-believing humans against the church. Satan assaults the church not only through overt persecution and various kinds of trouble but even more through false teaching. He aims to deceive, “even the elect, if that were possible” through sending false prophets among us who are dressed like sheep but who are inwardly ravenous wolves. In addition, like Balaam, son of Beor, who could not successfully curse God’s people and so he tempted God’s people into sin, so Satan attacks the church by seducing us with the promises of sin and thus bringing shame upon Christ and division into his church through our failures and sins. Satan daily assaults us with temptations to pursue our pleasure here, in this world, rather than to pursue our pleasure in Christ and his kingdom. Thus he seeks to alienate us from our Savior by sin. Make no mistake about it, the church, since its inception, has been under attack from the world, both outside its walls and inside. What hope do we have that the church and those of us who belong to it are going to be kept safe from the onslaught of God’s enemies? What confidence can we have that we will not be dragged away by our sin or deceived by some smooth talking false teacher? How can we know that our faith will not be destroyed when Satan sends the persecutors or some other great trouble upon us? When confronted with the wholesale apostasy of the church in Europe, the conquest of the church in the Middle East and North Africa by Islam, the shallow and worldly church in the U.S. and the syncretistic churches of Africa and South America, how can we have any confidence that the true church will itself survive? Psalm 2 gives us a poetic description of the war of the world with God and his Anointed One, the Christ. It is in this psalm that we discover God’s attitude towards his enemies and God’s plan to subdue and overcome his enemies. It is in this psalm that we are given the answer as to where our security lies and where we are challenged to make sure we are living in the only place of security in the world. While belonging to Jesus Christ subjects a person to the animosity of the world, yet living in the church is truly the only safe place to live for only the church and those in it will survive the greatest trouble which is yet to come on the world. MAIN POINT The church and all who belong to it are safe because…I. God mocks human rebellion (vv. 1-6) The historical setting of this psalm is the coronation of David as king of Israel. It was then used during the coronation ceremony of each of the succeeding kings of Israel (and then Judah) who were descendants of David. Thus it has as its historical setting the opposition of Saul and of the surrounding pagan kingdoms, like the Philistines, to David’s becoming king. However, in this psalm we have a clear and convincing portrayal of how David and Israel are but a shadow of someone and something far greater than this tiny kingdom with its poetic king. Portions of this psalm are directly quoted over a dozen times in the NT and alluded to scores of other times in direct reference to Jesus Christ. The psalm begins with a question of astonishment. “Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples meditating on vanity?” What exactly is the cause of the uproar among the nations and what is it that they are meditating upon that is so pointless? The second verse tells us. “The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers of the earth take counsel together against Yahweh and his Anointed One, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’” According to Acts 4:22 it is David himself who asks this question. David is astonished that Saul and the surrounding nations would oppose God and the one whom God has anointed as king, namely himself. But he also recognizes, as a prophet, that the opposition of Saul and the Philistines to his becoming Israel’s king is the opposition of all kings and all nations and all peoples to God himself and his Anointed One, David’s greater son who will reign on his throne forever. That phrase, “anointed one”, means Messiah or Christ. David knows that the opposition he is experiencing to his kingship is but a small example of the overwhelming opposition of all human beings to the Son of God who becomes the Son of David being made king. What David is expressing here comes to its fullest expression in the opposition of the Jewish leaders to Jesus and then to his eventual arrest, torture and crucifixion at the hands of both the Jews and the Gentiles. As we had read for us earlier the NT uses these verses to summarize what happened to Jesus. In Acts 4 (Please turn there while keeping a finger in Psalm 2), the Jewish ruling council (who had killed Jesus a few months prior to this) had Peter and John arrested for preaching about Christ in the temple. They put them on trial but could find no ground for punishing them and so let them go with a warning to not preach about Christ anymore. When they returned to a gathering of Christians and reported what happened, the church gathered in prayer. Look at what they said (vv. 25-27), “You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant David, ‘Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Christ.’ Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed…” Do you see what they are saying? Just as the Jewish King Saul and the Gentile nations like the Philistines gathered against David, so the Gentile kings and rulers and the people of Israel and their rulers came together to overthrow God’s rule in and through Jesus Christ. David in describing his historical situation described what would happen to Jesus. The world's opposition to God and to his Messiah is first expressed in Saul's opposition to David becoming king as an example of that ultimate opposition of all peoples to Jesus. Opposing God’s anointed one is to oppose God himself. If you honor the Christ, then you honor God and if you dishonor the Christ, you dishonor God. But not only do these verses describe what happened to Jesus in his flesh but they also describe what is happening to his church even now. That is how the church continues in its prayer. These same rulers who opposed and killed Jesus are also opposing the church of Jesus. Thus the warfare against God and his Christ continues as the world, ruled over by Satan, fights against the church. Back to Psalm 2. When David says that the peoples are plotting in vain or, literally, meditating upon vanity, he is pointing to the foolhardiness of opposing God. Humans can no more escape the rule of God and of his Messiah than an ant crawling on the sidewalk can escape the descending foot of the young boy. Human claims of autonomy and self-determination and freedom to do as we will without any consequence are the height of stupidity and irrationality. You can no more escape God’s rule than you can escape the gravitational pull of the earth by jumping out the window. “Resistance,” as the Borgs love to say, “is futile.” The evidence of the futility of human insurrection against God is proven in vv. 4-6. God, who is enthroned in the heavens laughs at the boastful arrogance of human beings. He mocks their attempts to throw off his rule over their lives. In spite of all human attempts to the contrary, to keep God from accomplishing his will, “God rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, ‘I have installed my king on Zion, my holy hill.’” Let’s go back to Acts 4 to see how these verses, while not directly quoted are illustrated. Look at v. 28. The Gentiles and Jews who plotted against Jesus and thus killed him did exactly what God wanted them to do. In opposing God by murdering Jesus they were serving God’s good purposes. These evil men while doing evil accomplished the greatest good that has ever been done against their own will. By killing Jesus they installed Jesus as king. Can you hear God and his Christ mocking these evil men and their evil lord? As we are told dozens of times in the NT God exalted Christ to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name by means of his obedient death. The cross is the preeminent joke on rebellious humans and their evil lord. The Bible is full of the ways in which God has mocked the rebellion of humans by using their evil deeds to accomplish his mighty work. Was not God laughing as Pharaoh set out to destroy all the male children in Israel and thus do away with God’s people even while his daughter pulls the abandoned male, Hebrew baby from the Nile and raises Moses, the Savior of Israel, in his own house? Was God not laughing as Pharaoh’s mighty army riding in its iron chariots chasing the walking former slaves through the mud on the bottom of the Red Sea got stuck and were destroyed by the returning waters? The history of the church is littered with the graves of men who set out to destroy her but who are now dead while the church lives on. Is not God laughing at Satan who through the savage cannibals killed the four missionaries in Ecuador in 1954? The death of those four men was the direct cause of thousands of young men and women giving their lives in missionary service around the world. And through their deaths the fierce Auca’s were converted to Christ by the selfless and fearless love of their widows and children. The good that God brought from their seemingly tragic deaths continues to reverberate through the world to this day. God mocks the vain attempts of puny man serving his vanquished lord Satan by establishing his king and fulfilling all of his good purposes in spite of and even through their vain insurrections. If you belong to Christ you have nothing to fear because God is ruling over all things for his glory and your eternal joy. We cannot be harmed and even when the wrath of men and of demons falls upon us our great God uses our suffering for the furthering of his kingdom and the salvation of his people. The proof of our security is the betrayal, torture and bloody death of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross which is the highest expression of human and demonic wickedness and rebellion yet, at the very same time, was God's setting Christ as king on Mt. Zion, his holy hill. The church and all who belong to it are safe because…
II. God makes his Son King of the nations (vv. 7-9) As we move to vv. 7-9 our Lord Jesus Christ, David's greater Son, himself speaks to us. This is not the voice of David as God did not call David his son. Rather, in 2 Samuel 7 God promises to David that he is going to make one of his descendants king over Israel forever. One of David's sons will rule over God's people through all of eternity. It is about that son of his that God tells David, “I will be his father and he will be my son.” One of David's sons, who by right of inheritance is a king, is also called God's Son. It is this greater Son of David who is speaking in vv. 7-9, not David. Look at what David's son who is called the Son of God says. Having been made king he now declares the fullness of what God has done, is doing and will do. He proclaims the decree of God. In other words, these words are the revelation of God’s plan. The first thing David's son, Jesus tells us is that there was a point in time when God the Father called him his Son and declared his Fatherhood of him. This is not talking about the eternal Sonship of the second person of the Trinity. Rather, because of the time reference, “ Today, I have become your father,” this is describing that commissioning of Jesus to his ministry that was begun at the baptism of John and was completed at the resurrection. Do you remember? When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, the Holy Spirit descended upon him as a dove and the voice of God spoke saying, “This is my Son whom I love, with him I am well pleased.” Then the apostle Paul says in Romans 1 that Jesus “was declared with power to be the Son of God through the resurrection from the dead.” The king that God has installed in Zion, his holy hill, is his only begotten Son. Notice the relationship between this Son and his Father, who is Yahweh. The Father tells the Son that the inheritance that he plans to give to the Son is all the nations to the very ends of the earth. Don’t miss this. These are the nations that we were just told were plotting rebellion against this very Son. These are the nations who hate the Son. Yet the Father is going to give all these nations to the Son as his possession. They will belong to him and to him alone. How will he obtain these nations? He obtains them by asking his father to give them to him. In other words the nations become the possession of the Son who is the king of the church by his prayers to the father. Does not this portrait of the praying king fit our Lord Jesus Christ whom we are told often withdrew by himself to lonely places to pray? Here is the prayer of Jesus in John 17 hours before his death where he prays for all those whom the father has given to him out of the world. He prays not only for the original eleven but for all those who will believe in him through their testimony. As he describes that witnessing work in Acts 1:8 he uses one of the phrases right from this psalm, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” Listen to how the author to the Hebrews describes this praying king: “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission… he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him…” God gives the nations to his Son in response to his prayers. But now notice that possessing the nations is not only referring to his saving the nations but also to his judging of the nations. He will destroy all those nations who refuse to bend the knee to him in reverent obedience in his perfect justice. He is the Lamb of God who is slain for the sins of the world. However, this same Lamb will come again and when he does the nations will call out to the mountains, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come and who can stand (Rev. 6:16-17)?” Later in that same book of Revelation, John quotes verse 9 from Psalm 2, “Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike the down the nations. ‘He will rule them with an iron scepter.’ He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty ( 19:15).” All who belong to Mt. Zion are safe because their king is also the Son of God who has prayed for them to be saved and to continue to be saved. Like he did for Peter, our Lord Christ has prayed for all those who are his that our faith would not fail. We who belong to Christ are his treasured possession. He watches over us as the apple of his eye and preserves us to eternal life. He will never leave us or forsake us. He is always with us, to the very end of the ages to the ends of the earth. At the same time he is against all those nations and peoples who refuse to bend the knee to him and he will shatter them with his iron scepter as brittle clay pots. He is both Savior and Judge and he is the one before whom all the nations will one day stand and answer for their persistent, vain attempts to throw off his rule. The church and all who belong to it are safe because…
III. God commands his enemies to take refuge in the Son or be destroyed by the Son (vv. 10-12) In these final verses we are told the only wise way to respond to this King who is the Son of God and to whom the nations belong. By addressing the kings and rulers of the earth in v. 10 he is not ignoring everyone else. Rather, the point is that if kings who have enormous resources available to them are required to give wise attention to God’s Son who is the king, then how much more do average people need to pay attention who do not control armies or nuclear arsenals or have national treasuries at our disposal. If kings cannot successfully oppose God’s king, then what hope is there for the rest of us? He is an irresistible force and so we should not be so foolish as to think that we can in any way resist him. Just as being the mayor of New Orleans or being a multi-millionaire basketball player for the New Orleans’ Jazz didn’t stop Hurricane Katrina from destroying their homes, so there is nothing anyone can do to withstand the fury of the Son’s iron scepter with which he will shatter the unrepentant nations like pottery. So be wise and be warned. Why should you be wise and heed the warning? Because the anger of the Son can flare up in a moment and when it does you will perish in the way. What does this mean? It means that there is a limit to the patience of the Son. The way in which the kings, rulers, nations and people are walking is the way of rebellion. It is the way described in Psalm 1 with which this Psalm is strongly connected. They are walking in the way of the wicked, standing in the path of sinners and sitting in the seat of mockers. As the last verse of Psalm 1 says, “the way of the wicked will perish.” God is under no obligation to permit anyone to continue walking in that way. While he is slow to anger, yet his anger may flare up at any moment. You do not know when he will say, “Enough!” You do not know when the Son will decide to end your way and take you to hell. You do not know when the Son will return in his glory and the glory of the angels and separate the righteous from the wicked, sending the wicked into eternal fire, while taking the righteous into eternal life. You are not in control of the world and you are not in control of your life. You need a heart of wisdom so that you will not live in the delusion that your life is going to continue as it is for a long time. Your life is a vapor. You are a clay pot that can be shattered in a moment. Just because you are alive now does not mean you will be alive tomorrow. The anger of the Son can flare up at any moment. Notice that it is this Son who as we know from the gospel who is the friend of sinners who is also the one whose anger will flare up in a moment. He will not permit himself to be spurned forever. He will one day return to punish those who refused his love. What will wise people who have heeded the warning of this psalm do? There are four things wise people who heed the warning do. They will serve the Lord with fear. They will rejoice with trembling. They will kiss the Son. They will take refuge in him. In light of what vv. 1-9 have said these are astonishing commands. Rather than simply wiping all the nations out for their rebellion, he commands that these rebellious sinners enter into a covenant of peace with the warrior king of Zion. While he promises destruction upon the rebellious yet he holds forth the promise of pardon and reconciliation. What else can this be but the grace of God offered to sinners? There is no reason why this offer should be made that can be discerned prior to this. The offer is freely made without any hint of the nations earning it. In fact the offer of pardon is made to those who deserve to be shattered like pottery for their haughty insurgence. God is not obligated to offer his pardon. The only explanation for this pardon can be found in him. The offer must be made because God himself and his Son, while justly angry are also merciful and willing to accept repentant rebels on the holy mountain. The measure of God's love and grace cannot be apprehended without first seeing how much humans do not deserve his love and grace. This offer is made to the very people who attempted to throw off the yoke of Christ by killing him. Think with me for a moment about what these phrases mean about how we are to respond to the Christ, the Son of God, the King of Zion. First, we are to serve Yahweh with fear and rejoice with trembling. The idea of service here is not the idea of providing the Son with something he lacks. Rather it is the idea of submission and obedience. Rather than continuing to plot how to “break their chains and throw of their fetters” we are to take the yoke of the Son upon ourselves. We are to submit to his will and obey his commands. We are to do this with fear. We are not joining the Boy Scouts but we are joining ourselves to the Son of Yahweh who is the king of Zion who reigns over the nations. We are part of the most significant organization on earth, the church of Jesus and so we are to live in this church with dread that we might defile it or its Lord in any way. But we are not only to fear but we are to rejoice because we are part of this church. We are joined to this great and glorious king who owns the nations of the world and who has reconciled himself to us. We rejoice with trembling, not in a presumptuous, cavalier manner, but with a reverent joy that the king has accepted us. The joy that is ours is not the joy of having life on earth go our way but the joy of belonging to this King of Zion and to his church. Notice also that we are to kiss the Son. The way you treat the Son is the way you treat Yahweh. The way you treat Yahweh is the way you treat the Son. There is no way to be reconciled to God without being reconciled to his Son. Here, in the OT is another evidence of the divinity of the Son. This kissing of the Son is the embrace of faith. We are to be as Mary at the tomb when she realized it was not the gardener to whom she was speaking but to her Lord. She fell at his feet, clasping them with her arms and kissing them. We cannot bear to be parted from this Son of God who offers us a pardon we could never earn or deserve. We love the Son for his atoning death. We love him for his faithful prayers on our behalf. We love him for his promise of eternal life. We love him because he has loved us. And finally, we take refuge in him. Someone has said, we must take refuge in him for there is no refuge from him. The only way to hide from the wrath of the Lamb is to take refuge in the Lamb’s shed bled. Here is the great paradox of the gospel, the one whom terrifies us with his threats of eternal judgment is the very one who holds the keys to Paradise. Only those who have been terrified by his threats will ever come to him for refuge. All others continue in their vain obsession to escape his chains from which there is no escape. All who run towards the Son standing with his iron scepter ready to shatter the brittle nations find him to be a gentle shepherd with his shepherd’s staff and not the fierce king whom they fought so desperately to overthrow in their foolishness. So come now and kiss the Son and take refuge in him and enter into that blessed state of pardon and salvation that the King of Zion offers to you. As I said before, it is only those who have taken refuge in him who are truly safe. All outside of this refuge will be consumed by his anger when it flares up. Leave behind the plotting nations who vainly seek to throw off his control and accept his easy and light yoke and find rest for your souls. Join this one whom all the world hates and bear the reproach he endured, knowing that God is turning all their venomous hatred into eternal joy for all who follow him. The church and all who belong to it are safe because…
© Copyright 2006 John Swanson.
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