Psalm 2 -- A Sermon by Josh Giesbrecht

Psalm 2

The Reign of the LORD’S Anointed.

 ¹ Why are the nations in an uproar
And the peoples devising a vain thing?
² The kings of the earth take their stand
And the rulers take counsel together
Against the LORD and against His Anointed, saying,
³ “Let us tear their fetters apart
And cast away their cords from us!”

 ⁴ He who sits in the heavens laughs,
The Lord scoffs at them.
⁵ Then He will speak to them in His anger
And terrify them in His fury, saying,
⁶ “But as for Me, I have installed My King
Upon Zion, My holy mountain.”

 ⁷ “I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD:
He said to Me, ‘You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.
⁸ ‘Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance,
And the very ends of the earth as Your possession.
⁹ ‘You shall break them with a rod of iron,
You shall shatter them like earthenware.’”

 ¹⁰ Now therefore, O kings, show discernment;
Take warning, O judges of the earth.
¹¹ Worship the LORD with ^[l]reverence
And rejoice with trembling.
¹² Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way,
For His wrath may soon be kindled.
How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

What is this psalm saying?

• The Messiah will rule over the earth
• God is not threatened by our kings and empires

Great! But then it also seems to say:

• When we rebel against God, he is furious with us
• If we don’t acknowledge the Messiah we will “perish in the way” of his anger

Those last two points don’t make sense to me at all. It’s pretty hard to argue that this psalm describes the same Jesus we see arrive in the Gospels.  It’s also pretty hard to argue that it reflects the Father heart of God that Jesus revealed.

So what I’m sharing about today isn’t the good stuff.  That part’s pretty easy, I think we’re okay with God being bigger than the President.

I’m going to share some things that God has shown me personally, I’ll try to connect it with scripture enough that we don’t feel like I’m making this stuff up, and I also want to connect where I’m at with what happened in Psalm 2 to get all that weird stuff about God’s boiling rage in there.

About 8 years ago I was at a prayer conference, hungry for God to speak to me.  I was feeling lost and lonely, so I asked him to show me his heart.  Mostly I just wanted to feel loved, that’s all I thought I was asking for. (Ha ha).

I got 'zapped' by a vision or picture from God.  And when I say “zapped” it isn’t because it was an especially detailed or elaborate visual picture. It is because I felt like a bolt of emotional lightning seared this onto my mind that day.

The picture was, basically, God seeing us as a Western culture on this bleak, black landscape, busily constructing huge machines full of giant gears and systems just to basically end up tossing ourselves in and dying.  Now, if I just stopped there, wow, yuck. It actually almost sounds like the start of Psalm 2, with the nations devising a vain plot to exalt themselves.

The thing is, I hardly managed to take in the visual because this wasn’t really the biggest part. The moment I saw this, my heart saw this and was horrified because I had this overwhelming sense of how much God, Father God who loves us dearly, is himself horrified and his heart is like this giant screaming “NO!” of a daddy who is running to stop his kids from hurting themselves.

(In fact, in the picture that “NO” turned into the ground splitting and life breaking through and busting up the machines.)

Now, at the time I was messed up by this; I didn’t expect a message from God to scare the pants off of me.  For months after I thought maybe that wasn’t God, that it was some kind of weird panic attack or depression invasion or something.  But when I tried to actually talk about it to people, the words I was using sounded strangely like exactly what I had asked for. I asked God to show me his heart, and he did. He showed me how HUGELY his heart aches for us. How he wants to rush towards us in strength and break us free of the chains and death traps we built for ourselves.

I have a really hard time trying to describe the emotion of it because I can’t think of how to put it into words without comparing it to something really, really horrible.  But the emotion of it is exactly what was seared into my mind – and since then it’s become really central to my understanding of God’s love and his “anger”.  This emotion that God feels when he sees us killing ourselves (ie. sinning) – it’s strong, it’s urgent, it’s loud.  But if we call it “anger”, we risk confusing the most important part – God’s urgent and loud response is one of salvation, not one to hurt us. 

So where does this take us with Psalm 2?  Psalms are art, they’re lyric, they are inspired by the Spirit. And I suspect this inspiration worked a lot like prophecy.  Now, prophecy is just hearing God say something you can share with someone.  But usually, what God gives us is visual or emotional as well as verbal.  When that gets put into writing, the person has to choose how to put that experience into words.

I think we need to be fair to the psalmist here and acknowledge that he wasn’t perfect, and that’s okay, it doesn’t negate that God was speaking to him. This is kind of painful because we build so much of our faith on what Scripture tells us that it’s scary to say “this is wrong”, but we see these conflicting voices in Scripture (especially the Old Testament).  Passages can speak of God’s grace and love on the one hand, and then a few verses over portray God as angry, sarcastic, punishing.

So if we can get comfortable with the idea that passages in Scripture can be inspired but not perfect, we can look at a passage like Psalm 2 and ask, what did the Holy Spirit speak to the psalmist’s heart that inspired this?  Did he hear correctly but then miss the point?  Did he just have some bitterness or other junk that got in the way between inspiration and written word?  What might this have looked like?

Let’s look at the scariest verse here:

¹² Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way,
For His wrath may soon be kindled.

I can’t understand this verse at all outside of what God’s shown me over the last eight years.  Without what he’s taught me, the best I could do here is try for legal maneuvers and loopholes, hunting for some way to pretend this doesn’t make Jesus sound like an abusive dad. Or maybe I’d just toss this away and mumble something about the “Old Covenant”. 

But when I look at this psalm through the lens of what God’s shown me about his heart, I see an ancient writer who saw a glimpse of something like what I felt.  It’s still getting God’s heart wrong, but it’s an inspired wrong, a movement of the Spirit that got misfiled and misinterpreted, confused in the psalmist’s own paradigms and traumas.

Here’s my hypothetical question: What would someone do with the same vision I received if they didn’t know about Jesus’ life or have a full revelation of God’s Father-heart?  Sensing God’s heart being absolutely horrified at what we’re doing when we sin, wanting to thunder in with a “NO!” that sounds an awful lot like a battle cry (because it really is a battle cry)?  Wanting to charge in to save us with all of his strength?

I think it would sound an awful lot like Psalm 2.  Especially if you forget that the “sinner” isn’t just the nation next door, or the kings of the opposing countries that you’re at war with, or whoever else you happen to hate or distrust.  Because the key in understanding my own vision was the fact that God wants to save the very people who are constructing the “vain things” that they kill themselves on. 

The other thing that gets in the way is that we hear God yelling “NO!” and instead of seeing it from his eyes, we react like little kids who hear a parent get loud.

It reminds me of something that happened here at FreshWind last year.  Nathanael (my son) was playing with another boy close to his age, and the boy was doing something he shouldn’t – tossing something at Nathanael, or bopping him, I forget, but something Nathanael didn’t like.  I went over and told him that he shouldn’t do that, please play nicely okay? Thanks.  What does he do?  The kid quietly breaks down and cries, devastated.  Seriously?!?!?!  I had to go over to him and give him a hug and let him know, it’s okay, I’m not mad at you.

Let’s face it, we’re like this. We’re little kids and when our heavenly Daddy gets loud our shame-scarred hearts think it’s our fault and we break down.  And all along Daddy wasn’t mad at us, he just really wanted us to put that knife down because that is NOT a toy!

I wish I could give you all this lens that this thing has turned into for me. It’s been a really messy journey of figuring out how to talk about, because it felt so STRONG that I just didn’t trust myself to be able to talk about it without sounding nuts or know-it-all or something.  But I want to give you a sense for how important it’s become to me in seeing who God is.

The biggest example on my heart now is our picture of Jesus at the garden of Gethsemane.   Growing up, I read about Jesus sweating drops of blood, agonizing, and all I ever heard was how he was agonizing over being tortured, or facing his choice to die.  Did we ever stop to think that this makes Jesus sound awfully scared?  Does that … make sense?  The Messiah, the God of Love being tormented by fear?  And fear might paralyze you or make you go pale, but I’ve never heard of it causing blood vessels to rupture.  (Intense crying will, though.)

Then one day I put that scene in the lens of this desperate love of God watching his children dying.  And now I am utterly convinced that Jesus’ agony had nothing to do with fear of pain.  He took up the full cup of God’s love for us, the full emotional truth of what God the Father sees when he looks at the world – his children, everywhere, hurting. And he WEPT, strongly, loudly. And he carried that to the cross, sharing his Daddy’s “NO!” and saving us the only way he could, diving into our machines of hatred to stop us from killing ourselves.  This isn’t fear – this is love in the full, crying and taking desperate measures to save the loved ones.

So I want to give the Psalmist credit.  He heard God speak truth.  And he shared it as best he could understand it without the benefit of hindsight that we have on Jesus’ life.  Maybe some other stuff got in the way, some of his own burdens and blinders.  But if we can recognize those, maybe we can find God’s inspiration even though we acknowledge that his pre-Christ understanding of God didn’t fully understand God’s response.

So if I look through this lens of love, admit the psalmist was human, and try to find what God’s heart  might have been saying, here’s what I see in Psalm 2: 

Why do people everywhere stand in defiance to the God of love?

They take their stand, saying, “We want freedom from your ways of self-sacrifice and grace!”

Their Father speaks loudly, desperately to them to let go of their pride.

“Nothing you do can shake the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Christ declares, “I will tell you what my Father says in heaven.

He announces his love for me –

He offers me his children to teach,

And his creation to tend to.

The proud and the evil will hit me, and be broken;

Their stone hearts will grow brittle and give way.”

Listen, children, and understand;

See the danger before you.

Let the Father’s love reach you,

See the Son, whose battle cry of peace is resounding

and is ready to strike and destroy your self-destructive weapons.

How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

 

Comments

[Chris]

For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.

[Brad]

Josh,

It seems to me your are modelling something similar to what Greg Boyd is promoting as cruciform hermeneutics ... something I believe worth investigating, because he acknowledges the revelation of the crucified Christ as our lens through which to read the OT.

Cf. http://gregboydreknew.blogspot.ca/2012/05/answering-objection-to-cross-centered.html