For Sermon Central researchers: I have posted a series of 15 sermons on the Psalms. In recent personal studies I have found the psalms to be richer and more thought-provoking than I had fully appreciated. I had too often swept swiftly through psalms without slowing down to inquire as thoroughly as I might have into the depths of meaning and feeling that are expressed by the psalmists. Upon deeper examination and reflection, I find the psalms to be highly relevant to Christians in every age. My most recent foray into the psalms led me to present a series of studies of selected psalms in a class environment.
In my classes I did not examine every psalm, or every verse of the ones I did. Rather, I presented selected psalms that I believe to be representative of the collection in the book of Psalms. The studies were held in a class environment suitable for pauses for questions and discussion, and to pose “thought questions” where the meanings are not readily apparent, as is often the case in poetry. My notes include suggested points for such pauses, and I have not removed them in Sermon Central posts.
I developed the material with the view in mind that the series may be well used as sermons. There is an introductory sermon that describes what psalms are (whether they are in the 150-chapter book or elsewhere) and explains my approach to the series. The psalms I selected were presented in no particular order in the classes; however, I suggest that anyone using this material as a series begin with the introductory sermon and follow it with Psalms 1 and 2 in that order, as the first two psalms function as a pair. Beyond that, the selected psalms may be presented in any order.
To get as much enjoyment as we could from our study, I did some of the reading from the KJV, which I believe is the most beautiful of the English bible translations. For clarity we also used other versions, mainly ESV, which I have used for several years and the one I have come to prefer.
Psalm 2
Outline of Psalm 2
I. Historically, civil governments are often more hostile than friendly to Christianity
II. Christ’s kingdom will prevail anyway (vs4-9)
III. Rulers of the earth, be warned
IV. Blessing for those who take refuge in the Son.
Read Psalm 2
This is the first of the Messianic psalms.
As I said a couple of weeks ago, Psalm 2 is about the Messiah’s universal sovereignty, against which nothing can prevail.
Unlike Psalm 1, this psalm is not anonymous.
Although the author is not given in a title, it is quoted in Acts 4: 25-26 as coming from the “mouth of our father David … by the Holy Spirit.” More on that quote later…
The psalm is divided into four stanzas of three verses each:
In the first three, we are spectators of vividly painted scenes.
In the last the psalmist exhorts the rebels to come to allegiance.
This is a Psalm of Messiah the Prince or King.
It sets forth the opposition of the people against the Lord's anointed, the purpose of God to exalt his own Son, and the ultimate reign of that Son over every enemy.
Vs1-3 describe nations that rage and are hostile to God.
Is what is described in this psalm a universal rule that holds true for every nation?
No. I believe this pertains to nations openly against God, trying to destroy the kingdom of Christ.
Is this about the United States?
Potentially, but as things stand currently, I think not.
Despite some alarming trends, to my mind the U.S. is a wonderful country - an exception to the norm.
While we are increasingly experiencing erosion of the blessings we are used to, those liberties we are losing are outside historical norms.
But Christians must not be guided by the legality or criminality of a sinful act.
It has always been legal to sin in a multitude of ways, but to the Christian, legality is not license. Christians are guided by a higher calling than to do everything the law of man allows.
I believe this psalm is about those governments that intentionally and overtly set themselves in direct opposition to belief and practice of faith in the God of heaven and earth.
That is my opinion.
According to figures released by Open Doors, the persecution of Christians took a massive jump last year, stating that 30 million people were added bringing the number of Christians vulnerable to persecution to 248 million, a 13.9% increase over 2017.
It is part growing trend of Christian persecution seen around the world seen in recent years. Five years ago, Open Door only had one country on its severe persecution list and in 2018, there are now 11.
According to Open Door:
• In North Korea it is an act of treason to convert to Christianity.
• Afghanistan is governed by Islamic law. It is against the law for anyone to be a non-Muslim.
• Somalia is 99% Muslim, is ruled by Islamic warlords who dispense brutal retribution against Christians.
• Libya, similar to Somalia, has fallen into anarchy with Islamic militia groups persecuting Christians at will.
• Pakistan is ruled by Sharia law. Christians and other non-Muslims are on death row, facing charges of blasphemy.
• Sudan is an Islamic state where Christians have been arrested and many churches have been destroyed.
• Yemen has been in a civil war for several years and radical Islamic groups are able to take advantage of the situation and target Christians. These radical groups control relief aid coming into Yemen and often refuse to dispense it to Christians.
• Iran’s Islamic government considers Christianity an attempt by the West to undermine its authority. Christian leaders are often sentenced to long jail terms after being charged with “crimes against national security.” It is illegal for any Muslim in the country to convert to Christianity.
• In 2018 India joined the top ten list of most dangerous countries for Christians for the first time.
• China jumped from 43rd spot in 2017 to 27th in 2018 as the Chinese government led by Xi Jingping turned back to atheistic communism, with the Chinese government closing down several large churches. Christians in China say this is the worst persecution they have experienced since 1976 when Mao’s cultural revolution resulted in the deaths of nearly 70 million people.
When the psalms were written, and for many years following, it was other nations that raged against the Lord’s anointed over the earthly kingdom of Israel - Philistia, Amalek…look at the oracles against these nations and cities beginning in Isaiah 13, running for many chapters...Babylon, Moab, Damascus, Cush, Egypt, Assyria, Tyre, Sidon…
…and Jerusalem (we see how that oracle was fulfilled).
Notice the application the New Testament makes of this psalm. Luke wrote:
Acts 4:27-28 for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.
Herod and Pilate were non-Jews, although Herod pretended to be of the Hebrews’ faith.
The Jewish rulers had become as though from the same bolt of fabric as the heathen in opposing the true Messiah.
Christians here and everywhere are right to stand against any government that restricts the right to obey God’s commands.
So far, we in the United States live in the nation that is as harmonious with the practice of our faith as any on earth or that has ever existed.
We live in a more sheltered condition than saints who suffer greatly for their faith today.
But their condition is the norm, not ours.
Someone may say: “What about abortion? Legalization of drugs? Decriminalization of theft up to some dollar threshold?” All wrong-headed to my thinking.
Let there be no mistake. I am fiercely and irreversibly against abortion.
I wish it was not legal.
But in every nation, Christians are free to sin.
We cannot depend on governments of the world - including the US - to prevent us from sinning by turning sins into crimes.
Christianity was born in a world where abortion was legal and practiced widely – likely at least as much as it is in the United States today.
In that world, Christianity grew and flourished.
The choice to avoid sin must be made in the presence of the freedom and ability to sin; otherwise, the only choice a Christian would have to make would be to live within the boundaries of the law of man.
Unlike people living in the nations Psalm 2 describes, we in the US have the blessed privilege of affecting what our government does.
I see some encouraging signs.
But even as I say that, I hasten to say that v3 shows that the throwing off of strictures, bonds, fetters of God’s laws is the pivotal answer to the psalmist’s question in v1.
Why did they band themselves against the Lord’s Anointed?
What was their objection to him?
v3 shows the true reason of the opposition of sinners to Christ's truth, viz.: their hatred of the restraints (bonds, or cords of godliness).
Psa 2:3 "Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us."
The worldly who rule want to rule absolutely. They do not want limits on what they may do.
They love to run by no law but their own.
They slander the laws of Christ's kingdom as bonds and thick cords or ropes, which they perceive as signs of slavery.
But what does a true understanding of the kingdom reveal?
My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
To a regenerated person, the law of liberty is not a burden but the lifting of burdens!
The law of Christ is to a Christian as wings are to a bird.
Compare these nations’ aversion to what they think are bonds and ropes to the blessed man of Psalm 1:
…his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
(Remember that in Jewish parlance the “law” was several things - perhaps most notably, the Torah, which are the first 5 books in our bibles…that is, most of what then existed of scripture.)
…and compare this (Psalm 2) to the effect of the blessed man’s perspective on the law in Psalm 1:
He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.
In Psalm 2 the psalmist says - and history proves - that “the peoples plot in vain.”
A medal was struck by Diocletian, one of Rome’s emperors, bearing the inscription,
The name of Christians being extinguished.
In Spain, two pillars were raised, on which were written:
“Diocletian Jovian Maximian Herculeus Cæsares Augusti, for having extended the Roman Empire in the east and the west, and for having extinguished the name of Christians, who brought the Republic to ruin.”
Lest we get lost in the tall weeds of what nations do and do not rage and “plot a vain thing” -
Here is the point of all this: the nations may rage against God, but God will reign, and that is final.
God’s dominion does not depend on man’s acceptance of it, and he can no more throw it off by opposition than he can fling himself to the moon.
All the self-will in the world does not alter the fact that the authority of Christ is sovereign over human wills.
We can either lovingly embrace it, or we can set ourselves against it, like an obstinate child defying his parent’s authority.
v4 - “He who sits in the heavens laughs.”
Laughs? This seems a hard word at the first: is the suffering of God’s people, the cruelties of their enemies, the derision, the persecution of all that are round about us, a laughing matter?
God laughs not in humor, but in derision; he scorns the efforts to destroy the everlasting kingdom.
• Pharaoh imagined that by drowning the Israelite males, he had found a way to root their name from the earth.
At the very same time, his own daughter rescued and gave a Hebrew child the honor of a prince of Egypt.
See the irony?
Did God laugh in derision? For Pharaoh had “plotted a vain thing.”
• And Haman’s scheme to destroy the entire population of Jews because a certain Jew Mordecai refused to bow down in his presence.
Haman tricked the king into decreeing the genocide of all Jews in the Persian empire.
Destroy God’s chosen people? Think again.
Instead, the nefarious trickster found himself leading a horse on which was mounted the man he hated - that same Mordecai - through the streets shouting, “Thus is it done for the man the king delights to honor.” Horrors! The worst thing that could happen to Haman!
Except the next thing. He was hanged from the gallows he had built from his enemy.
For Haman had “plotted a vain thing.”
• Is Dagon standing in his place? Not for a very long time.
• God permitted his temple to be sacked and rifled, the holy vessels to be profaned; didn’t God have the last laugh (so to speak) when Belshazzar trembled at the handwriting on the wall?
How many times must we see it?
For the wicked, the illusion of victory is short.
Read Psalm 2:5-6
He is “my King,” says God the Father, and I have set him up from everlasting.
This is the authority by which the Anointed one reigns.
The kingdom over which the King rules is “my holy hill of Zion.”
Zion is called the holy hill several times, one of them in the next Psalm (3), and another in Psalm 15.
Zion is an eminent type of the gospel church.
The temple is believed to have been built on the very hill at perhaps the very spot (then called Mount Moriah) where Abraham took his son Isaac to offer him according to the divine command.
Christ’s sovereignty is universal:
Christ is the King above all kings.
Mighty men, the great, the honorable men are like stick figures on paper.
Christ Jesus is not only higher than kings, but he is higher than the angels who have demonstrated fearful power.
Hebrews 1:6 ESV And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, "Let all God's angels worship him."
Christ is King over all kingdoms, over all nations, over all governments, over all powers, over all people.
Isaiah wrote:
…the government shall be upon his shoulders. (Isa 9:6)
Christ’s reign is eternal:
Dan 7:13-14 “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
Such is the very kingdom of the King the psalmist wrote about - the kingdom of which we are citizens and the King to whom fealty is due from us.
V8 - Now God speaks to his Son:
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.
Triumph over his enemies are promised to the Son, yet for this the Son is to ask?!
The Son was no stranger to prayer, even when he knew beyond a doubt that the thing he prayed for was already decided – that the heathen were already “the inheritance,” and the ends of the earth “the possession,” which God had purposed to give to his Anointed.
Now he says to him, “Ask of me,” and he promises to fulfil his purpose.
Is this poetic license, or an essential condition the Son had to meet?
What is the meaning of the asking for what the Father long before intended to give?
An empty gesture to honor the source of the thing requested?
Discuss
Jesus taught the disciples to pray,
Your kingdom come.
To prevent the coming of the kingdom, the raging nations might as well have tried to rearrange the constellations.
Psalm 2:9 - The ruin of the wicked is certain, irresistible, terrible, complete, irreversible, “like a potter's vessel.”
The destruction of systems of error and oppression is to be expected, like Jeremiah showed would happen to Judah if they persisted in idol-worship.
It is easy for God to destroy his foes:
• Remember Pharaoh, his wise men, his hosts, and his horses sinking like lead in the Red Sea. Here is the end of one of the greatest plots ever formed against God's chosen.
• Thirty Roman emperors, governors of provinces, and others high in office, who distinguished themselves by their zeal and bitterness in persecuting the early Christians -
one became speedily deranged after some atrocious cruelty,
one was slain by his own son,
one became blind,
the eyes of one started out of his head,
one was drowned,
one was strangled,
one died in a miserable captivity,
one fell dead in a manner that we had best not talk about
one died of so loathsome a disease that several of his physicians were put to death because they could not abide the stench that filled his room,
two committed suicide,
a third attempted it, but had to call for help to finish the work,
five were assassinated by their own people or servants,
five others died the most miserable and excruciating deaths, several of them having an untold complication of diseases,
eight were killed in battle, or after being taken prisoners - among them was Julian the apostate. In the days of his prosperity he is said to have pointed his dagger to heaven defying the Son of God, whom he commonly called the Galilean. But when he was wounded in battle, he saw that all was over with him, and he gathered up his clotted blood, and threw it into the air, exclaiming, “Thou hast conquered, O thou Galilean.”
Such was the end of many of the emperors and high officials of the Roman government.
v11 - Psalm 2:11
Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Fear and joy are seemingly contradictory things.
We may think that neither can exist in the presence of the other.
But here we find them together and in harmony.
This fear of God tempers and channels our joy.
If you separate fear from joy, joy may become overly cavalier and reckless.
If you withdraw joy from fear, then fear will become paralyzing.
vs10-12 – The kings of earth are advised to be wise and
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.
“Kiss the Son?” That is God’s advice to earthly rulers.
What is God advising the kings of earth to do?
A kiss is a token of affection or deepest devotion humans are capable of – or for royalty, a token of fealty.
Often in olden times, kissing the hand - or the ring on the hand - indicated submission to the authority signified by the ring.
It was a formal demonstration of submission and loyalty to one who has authority.
The Father says to the rulers of nations:
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Is God - or if you please - is Christ quick to anger?
Or is God patient?
Psalm 86:15 But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
Psalm 103:8 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
Psalm 145:8 The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
Are we to think of God - or the Son - as quick to anger or patient and slow to anger?
Discuss
