Psalm 2 "Trembling, Rejoicing" Scott Hoezee

If you turn to the "Letters" section in the current issue of Newsweek magazine, you will see a bloodwarming fusillade of letters responding to Newsweek's recent cover story on Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the bestselling Left Behind series. Apropos for our theme this evening, the main line of thought that gets expressed by especially those letter-writers who are critical of these books relates to the vengeful violence and retribution of unbelievers that LaHaye and Jenkins both write about and, seemingly, revel in.

In the Left Behind novels, a fair amount of space is devoted to seeing non-Christians getting whacked. In the recently released final volume, Glorious Appearing, the authors have concocted any number of nightmarish scenarios of what happens to unbelievers when Jesus returns. Images of exploding eyeballs, boiled brains, and spilled intestines are not uncommon. But once the souls of these severely punished people appear before Jesus' throne at the judgment, the authors have our Lord saying, "Death is too good for you," and so he instead banishes them forever to a lake of fire.

Not a few people claim that taking such obvious relish at the suffering of others seems rather at variance with the Jesus we meet in the gospels. As one Newsweek respondent noted, how can the same people who despise brutal dictators like Saddam Hussein and who recoil at the excessive abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison not bat an eye when no less than God's own Son is shown skinning people alive and delivering lines of dialogue more worthy of some Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator character than the Jesus who told Peter to put up his sword in Gethsemane? Something is not right here.

I agree with those criticisms and yet as someone also devoted to the Scriptures, neither can I ignore something like Psalm 2 which is, let's face it, loaded with some fairly brutal imagery. Although I myself did not design it this way when I made the current preaching schedule, as it turns out, we have today an interesting pair of texts to balance off against each other. This morning Isaiah 53 gave us the classic portrait of the Suffering Servant. Based on that passage, we said this morning that we are saved by also the weakness of God's Son. It was his willingness to make this world's pain his own that somehow and mysteriously unmade evil from the inside out.

But now tonight we have this text from Psalm 2. In fact, we even get to hear a little more of Handel's Messiah in the background this evening with the famous verses about "Thou shalt dash them, to pieces, like a potter's vessel." Again, I didn't intend this parallel between this morning and now tonight, but it may prove to be very instructive after all.

Because as you can tell by the way in which the NIV translators used capital letters for the words "Anointed One," "Son," and "Father," there is an effort here to translate this ancient Hebrew poem in ways calculated to makes us substitute "Jesus" every time we read "Son." There is nothing in the original Hebrew that validates this. If you picked up any number of other translations, including certainly Jewish ones, you would find this psalm devoid of such attempts to connect the "Son" of Psalm 2 to the "Jesus" of the gospels.

However, in the biblical-theological tradition of the Church, this psalm has been interpreted as a prophetic prefigurement of God's ultimate Christ. But insofar as that is the case, we need to let the Jesus of the New Testament be the lens through which we interpret Psalm 2, and not the other way around. That is to say, the nature of that actual Messiah is what must help us re-read Psalm 2 in a new way. We cannot begin with Psalm 2 and then insist that Christ fit into a given understanding this psalm. In fact, if you do that--if you say that based on Psalm 2 you think you know up front what God's Messiah will look like--then you might very well find yourself in the company of those in Jesus' day who crucified Jesus precisely because he did not fit the messianic mold they had in mind.

But before we get to that, we should examine Psalm 2 itself, reminding ourselves of its orginal setting. Psalm 2 is the twin of Psalm1. As we have noted on other occasions when we've looked at the Book of Psalms, this book is not a random or haphazard collection of 150 poems strung together willy-nilly. Instead, scholars have long believed that the Hebrew Psalter was very carefully arranged and edited. Certain kinds of psalms were grouped together, and the book as a whole has a design and structure. As such, Psalms 1 and 2 were placed at the head of this collection in order to establish the primary themes that would subsequently weave through the entire volume.

Psalm 1 establishes one of the the primary themes of the book by pointing to the need for individual integrity and piety. Psalm 1 tells us what we read all through the psalms; namely, there are two kinds of people in this world: the righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous are firmly planted and well-rooted in God's word; the unrighteous are rootless, drifting from one thing to another but generally speaking opposing God and so trying to trip up God's people. Psalm 2 complements that opening poem by pointing to the need for not just individual integrity but for national, corporate devotion to God and, proximately, to also God's chosen King over Israel at any given time.

Although Psalm 2 may indeed point forward to God's final Anointed One, his ultimate Messiah (whom we now believe is named Jesus), the original context of all this talk about God's Anointed One, God's Son, God's King, had to do with King David and his descendants on the throne of Israel. That also explains the highly political tone of this psalm. At the time this was written, the kingdom of God could be neatly identified with the kingdom of Israel as a nation, as one political entity among many in the Ancient Near East.

Scholars believe that this is one of the "royal psalms" in the Hebrew Psalter and may well have been originally written for use at the formal inauguration or coronation of new kings. Most ancient societies believed that kings were divinely appointed and so had direct access to whatever god the people worshiped. The king served by divine decree and was just so respected, honored, and even reverenced. As is true of so much of the Old Testament, the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures were keenly aware of the competing claims of the surrounding nations and so very often composed their texts as a way to claim that whereas the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Phoenicians may have thought they worshiped true gods, Israel alone had a living relationship with the only true Sovereign in the cosmos whose name was Yahweh.

Psalm 2 was a polemical attempt to get in the face of other nations so as to say, "We alone know the real God and so we alone have the only king on earth who truly is God's chosen one.." Given Who the Israelites believed was behind their king, you can understand the incredulous query of Psalm 2's opening verse: "Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?" They don't stand a chance against Yahweh or his anointed leader of Israel. After all, if Israel was correct about who their God was, then even the mightiest nation on earth looked as pathetic as the proverbial 50-pound weakling balling up his fists to duke it out with the 200-pound strongman who towers over the weakling in every sense.

But the last line of Psalm 2 was also meant as a kind of warning even for the Israelites themselves: "Blessed are all who take refuge in him." That closing beatitude and its specific use of the word "Blessed" was a deliberate reminder of Deuteronomy where Moses also repeatedly used the word "Blessed" to describe what would be true of Israel if and only if it continued faithfully to live in the ways of Yahweh.

But those many chapters of beatitude in Deuteronomy were matched by an equal number of chapters that used the word "Cursed" to describe the sorry state of affairs that would obtain in Israel in case they turned away from Yahweh. The people could sing and shout Psalm 2 as loudly as they wanted in future generations, but if that singing happened in a context where the people had abandoned God's covenant and God's law, these would become empty words. Sadly, we know that eventually exactly that did happen to Israel.

Making the connection between the setting of Psalm 2 in ancient Israel to the church today requires a set of theological sensibilities that the Reformed tradition has always had readily available. Time this evening permits only the briefest of reminders of how we as New Testament followers of God's Christ exegete something like Psalm 2. Basically, we trace the line of God's covenant. Beginning with Abraham, God's covenant stretches through also Moses and David.

The political nation of Israel was never meant to be the end of the covenant, which is why prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah could continue to talk about the ongoing validity of God's promises even after Israel had ceased to exist as an independent nation. But the language began to shift by the time you got to someone like Jeremiah, who began to speak about God's writing his covenant promises not on tablets of stone but on the flesh of the human heart. More and more the prophets pointed forward to the Great and Coming Messiah and, as we saw this morning from Isaiah 53, more and more that Messiah was described in terms of suffering, of being rejected and despised, of being a man of sorrows who would personally engage the griefs we all bear in this world.

So by the time you get to the New Testament, you find the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John taking theological delight in unveiling God's holy surprise. All four gospel writers trace Jesus' origins all the way back to Abraham--and John famously traces Jesus all the way back to creation, making Jesus the Word of God who was in the beginning and through whom all things were made. But the surprise comes when that Word is made flesh, when that descendant of David is born in a barn, laid in a feed trough made of rough-hewn wood, and ultimately crucified on yet another hunk of rough timber. The holy surprise of the gospel is that although he ultimately defanged the power of the devil and his hosts, Jesus himself did not lead a life that in any way, shape, or form bore resemblance to someone's dashing the enemy to pieces like a potter's vessel.

We noted at the outset this evening that the NIV translators want you to connect the Messiah-figure of Psalm 2 directly to Jesus as God's Son. Theologically that seems appropriate, but I also said that if we are going to make that connection, we need to do it retrospectively and not prospectively--that is, we need to let the nature of the actual Messiah named Jesus help us to read Psalm 2 the right way rather than take Psalm 2's violent imagery and the force that onto Jesus whether or not the gospels validate that.

Because if you take Psalm 2 as your starting point, then you may end up with the Jesus of LaHaye and Jenkins--a vengeful Christ who takes glee in exploding the skulls of the wayward and who delivers marrow-chilling lines about "death is too good for you" and the like. This is not to say that there is no place for judgment in our conceptions of Jesus. We cannot each week intone that part of the Apostles' Creed that says we believe Jesus will return "to judge the living and the dead" unless we believe there is such a thing as judgment against those who hold out against God. As C.S. Lewis once famously said, those who refuse to say to God the line from the Lord's Prayer, "Your will be done" may find God saying to them, "Very well then, your will be done. Since you want nothing to do with me, you may enter that place where exactly such non-involvement will always be the situation."

But our view of that must be sorrowful. Our outlook on that must be the hopeful one that those who really do find it possible to resist the grace and compassion of Jesus will be few in number. Because after all, the Bible itself makes clear that Jesus is both Lion and Lamb. Both. He is the King and the Judge but he is the Crucified King and Judge. Because if you read the gospels, who finally was it that was dashed to pieces like a potter's vessel? Was it not Jesus himself?

Even when he rose from the dead, was it not true that the nail holes in his hands were still visible? And when people like Mary Magdalene and even good old Doubting Thomas saw this man, who was broken for our sakes and yet was alive again, didn't those people fall back in astonishment only to then burst into worship of this Jesus who died for us?

What if, even upon his glorious appearing, what if that dashed vessel now restored for our sakes is what all people see? What if the figure that people see on the judgment seat is not the muscular Jesus that has become all-too-common in American spirituality but instead the very Jesus we meet in the gospels and in the Book of Acts: the crucified One who is alive again; the Suffering Servant who undermined the violence of our world by submitting to it? What if many people, even those who have resisted Jesus, discover in the end that the Damascus Road experience of Saul from Tarsus turns out not to have been an isolated incident but the way it will go for many people?

Yes, Jesus appeared to Saul in a blinding light and he spoke with a thunderous voice. And yes, when he spoke, he said to Saul, "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." There was a ring of judgment in that statement. But what followed were words of grace. Saul was not exploded into pieces right there on the spot but was transformed by the grace of the very One whom he had resisted. As Frederick Buechner wrote, Saul set out for Damascus as a hatchet man for the Pharisees but he returned a fool for Christ.

Should not that be our hope for all people? Isn't holding out that hope what we as a Church need to do for our Lord right here and right now and until he comes? The jolting shock of the gospels is that all the wrath that the Old Testament depicts as befalling the ungodly nations of this earth ends up falling instead on Jesus. God has judged the nations. He has judged me, he has judged you, but he has done so through Christ Jesus the Lord. When all is said and done, what we need to hope as much as anything is that all people will be overcome by the supreme beauty of the gospel.

For Christians to betray even a hint of a lip-smacking eagerness to see unbelievers get their comeuppance reveals a woeful ignorance as to how any of us became citizens of God's wonderful kingdom. We are children of the heavenly Father only because the true Son of the Father went to hell for us.

Psalm 2 tells us that there is a cosmic God and King and that he brooks no rivals. Psalm 2 tells us that God has judged and will judge sin and evil, and he will do so with the intensity of an iron scepter. Psalm 2 tells us that unless something is done about wickedness, we all will be on the receiving end of wrath. But Psalm 2 must be seen in the light of the Chosen Christ of God who became the object of that wrath, who bore the full weight of that wickedness, who let himself be dashed to pieces with an iron scepter.

In Psalm 2:11 the psalmist advises the rulers of the nations that their best posture in front of Yahweh was not just rejoicing, but a rejoicing accompanied by also trembling. That's a good posture for all of us. We rejoice greatly and eternally. But considering the great and fearsome events that brought God's covenant to us, even our rejoicing is tinged with a trembling borne of humility. The trembling that accompanies even our rejoicing impels us to pray for the whole world that all may come to know the King Jesus to whom one day every knee will bow. Every knee. Amen.