(Psalm 2)
This is a valediction of sorts, a farewell address; I plan to be here next Sunday, but this is the last time I’m scheduled to preach here before God calls me on. At the same time, this is also a beginning—and I’m not talking about myself here, I’m talking about this psalm. Believe it or not, the fact that this is the second psalm in the book is important. We tend to think of Psalms as a random collection of texts, but there is actually a structure to the book. Among other things, there is a five-part conclusion to the book—the Hallel psalms, 146-150—and there is an introduction. Some ancient manuscripts combine it into one psalm, but most leave it in two parts, and our English versions follow suit. Psalm 1 is a beatitude describing the life of the faithful individual among the wicked people of this world; Psalm 2 widens the scope to consider the life of the community of faith among the godless nations.
Does this matter for how we understand these psalms? I believe it does. Taken on its own, Psalm 1 describes the righteous person as one whose delight is in God’s torah—what we usually restrictively translate as “law,” but more properly means teaching or instruction. That means, obviously, the word of God, but given its place in the psalter as a whole, it means somewhat more. I’m not going to lay out my case for this now—if you’re interested, you can go back to a sermon I preached here on Psalm 1 five years ago—but I believe understanding Psalm 1 as an introductory psalm means understanding our worship as God’s torah, and letting that understanding shape both the way we worship and the way we plan and lead worship.
What then does it mean for Psalm 2 if we read it as the second part of that introduction? I’ve spent a while pondering that question, and I’ve come to this: we need to understand our politics and the behavior of our nation, both toward its people and toward the nations of the world, in the context of our worship, and particularly in the context of our worship as God’s torah, his instruction. We need, in fact, to subordinate and submit our political thinking and commitments to the word of God and our corporate life as a body of people formed and shaped by God to worship him together.
As such, we must not conform our worship to our politics, whether domestic, global, or both, nor may we allow prior political commitments to constrain or constrict our worship. Rather, we need to subordinate our political commitments to our worship of God and let our worship and the word of God critique those commitments. Part of the mission of this congregation through the years has been to do the deep heart work, to face the reality of the sin in our hearts openly and honestly, seeking to understand why we do the sinful things we do. I think we as Christians are called to search our political circumstances in much the same way. We need to ask the hard questions of ourselves and of others. We need to look through the surface issues and arguments that divide us to see the deeper realities that underlie and drive them.
With that in mind, let’s take a little time to unpack this psalm. The psalmist opens by asking, “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?” The context is a rebellion by unnamed nations against the Lord and his anointed one, his mashiach. In that context, the anointed one is the king. This is a royal psalm, generally understood as a coronation psalm, and the king is the one anointed by God as viceroy over God’s people. The thing is, this psalm is expressing an ideal, not describing any actual king; it can’t be fully realized in its original context because no human king can truly meet the standard.
There are two things to say about that reality. First, as Christians, we understand that this psalm was ultimately fulfilled in the coming of the final mashiach, the deliverer whom God had promised over and over going all the way back to Genesis 3. Israel failed in the mission God had set out for them; Jesus is the new Israel who fulfilled in himself what the nation did not. David, great as he was in some ways, fell disastrously short of God’s standard, and none of those who followed on his throne could even match him; Jesus is the perfect Davidic king who will be in every way the ruler David failed to be.
Second, the psalmist is looking beyond the circumstances of one particular political and military struggle; we see that clearly in the vast sweep of his language. The rebellion of the moment is only a part of something much larger, which is a rebellion not against any particular earthly king but against God. To the extent that the human being on the throne in Jerusalem is a bad king, the nations will rebel against him because he’s a bad king; to whatever extent he might be a good king, they will rebel because he’s representing God. Either way, they’re going to rebel, because their quarrel is finally not with a particular Jewish man wearing a heavy metal hat but with the God of the universe who raised up the throne in Jerusalem and stands behind it. Why? Well, interestingly, the psalmist asks that question, but he never actually answers it.
Rather, he gives us God’s response, which is to laugh the nations to scorn. The Lord declares he has established his chosen one as the instrument of his wrath, to shatter those who stand against God and to exercise God’s dominion over the whole earth. The psalmist uses the Lord’s decree to warn any who would conspire against God to think better of their plans. To rephrase his message slightly, he presents them with two options: either surrender and bow to God’s anointed or you’re worm food. I think we see in this that the psalmist intended his opening question rhetorically. He’s not actually asking why the nations are rising up in rebellion against God, he’s only wondering why they think they’ll manage to accomplish anything. After all, as he makes very clear, they don’t have a prayer in the world.
That’s fair enough, but all the same, if we take a step back and consider the psalmist’s question straightforwardly, it’s a good one. Why do the nations and their rulers conspire and plot against God and his anointed? In pondering that question, I remembered a quote attributed to the 14th-century German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart: “God is at home. We are in the far country.” In light of that, I want to propose an answer to the psalmist’s question: if we look through the surface motivations for the world’s rebellion to the deeper reality, the driving power we find is the desire for home.
Now, to be clear, I’m not claiming this is clearly stated in either of the Scripture passages we’ve read this morning. I do think there are hints in this direction, though. For one thing, the first judgment God pronounces on the rebels in Psalm 2 is that they will be dispossessed, they will lose their homelands, in favor of his chosen king. For another, I think we can say in this psalm the Lord gives his anointed a home, in two aspects. God gives him a place, installing him in Zion; and God gives him a particular relationship, claiming the king as his son. Both those things matter, because life can be pretty transitory. I told Iain the other day that for me, ultimately, my home is Sara. It has been her and the kids, but obviously that’s a passing reality, as one by one they spin off on their own. Life passes from promise into memory, but to have God declare he has established you in his place and defined you by your relationship to him is to have a home that will not pass away. This fits with 2 Peter 1, where the apostle acknowledges the reality that we do not have a permanent home in this life, only a tent, and shows his concern to teach them as well as he can while he still has the opportunity.
This is our primal reality, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. We are exiles and the descendants of exiles. We had a home which was made for us, but we lost it, and no matter where in this world we wander, we will never find it again until all things are made new. I’ve always loved the way Rich Mullins put it in what’s probably my favorite of his songs (if for some reason I had to attempt the impossible task of picking just one), “Land of My Sojourn”: “Nobody tells you, when you get born here, how much you’ll come to love it and how you’ll never belong here, so I’ll call you my country, but I’ll be lonely for my home; I wish that I could take you there with me.”
If you engage meaningfully with that reality, if you truly let yourself feel it, that hurts. It’s a deep ache this world cannot heal and a deep grief it cannot console; if we face it honestly, we open our hearts to a pain we cannot make go away. So what’s the instinctive human response? Denial, perhaps the most primal of all defense mechanisms. Maybe we insist we can fill that hole in our hearts and go looking for a new home. For individuals and families, buy a new house, move to a new town, get a new job—maybe then that longing deep in our souls will be satisfied. For the rich and the powerful, a new conquest might serve. Claim more territory—fight a war, acquire another company, maybe buy a sports team . . . surely something is out there that will give me what I need. Or, if the expansionist approach doesn’t appeal or isn’t an option, try isolationism: lock down what we have, refuse to admit our lack, and blame everything on “those people” who want to take what’s ours . . . when they’re just looking for a new home because they feel the same ache we do. Stripped of all economic arguments, at the gut level, the deep heart level, is this not the essence of our conflicts over immigration?
Whether our denial is expansionist or isolationist, it sets us on a collision course with God. We cannot open our hearts to God, we cannot take refuge in him, and still convince ourselves we feel at home in this world, or even that we can feel at home in this world. God is at home; we are in the far country, and the nearer we draw to him, the farther we know this country to be. The nearer we draw to him, the more we feel our deep, desperate longing for home, and the more we know that desire will never be satisfied in this life. That knowledge feels like death, and so we fight it, we fight God, we run away to look for something, anything that feels like life; but in truth, moving into the ache and the grief, opening ourselves to the reality that as much as we’ve come to love it, we will never truly be home in this world, is the way that leads to life. We can let that ache and that grief turn us away from God, or we can let it drive us to him, to take refuge in him. Only there, under the shelter of his wings, will we find blessing. Only there will we experience life.
So, what then do we do with this? As the apologist Francis Schaeffer put it, how then shall we live? I won’t claim to have an exhaustive answer, but I do see three things this morning, which I’ll touch on briefly. First, as we understand how much we’re driven by the deep pain of our unfilfilled desire for home, we need to recognize the same reality in those who oppose us in this world, whether in the political arena or in our personal lives. Our culture has grown ugly with hatred, disdain, spite, and contempt, and the biggest reason is the relentless assumption that whoever disagrees with me must be doing so out of the worst possible motives. While that assumption is buttressed by the frequency with which the worst possible motives are openly displayed, we still need to set it aside. Even when such motives are real, they aren’t the deepest or most significant reality. Even those whose bodies have a home—many of them far nicer than ours—feel the anguish of homelessness in their souls, and are driven by the crawling need to fill that void somehow, anyhow. We need to see this, and let God move our souls to mercy.
This connects to the second point: in our world of cancel culture and politics as blood sport, shattering our enemies—even if they are in fact God’s enemies—is not the work we have been given. That task belongs to God’s anointed, his mashiach—Messiah Jesus. Now, when I say that, you might look around and protest that Jesus isn’t shattering anyone. I don’t think that’s actually completely true, but in general, yes, we do not see the rod of iron in use. Here’s the thing: that doesn’t mean we should try to grab it and swing it around ourselves. Let me point you to one of the most significant omissions in Scripture. In Isaiah 61:2, the Servant of the Lord declares that God has anointed him “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God.” In Luke 4, when Jesus reads this passage in the synagogue, he reads “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor”—and stops. The point is clear: now is the year of the Lord’s favor. The day of vengeance of our God has not yet come. We must honor that.
Third, we need to be open to our own souls to recognize when we are being driven by our desire to feel truly at home in this world—and as hard as it is, we need to set that aside. We love America and call it our country, and so we should . . . but this is not the home our hearts long for, and it never can be. 1 Peter calls us resident aliens and foreigners in this world; Philippians tells us we are citizens of another country, placed here as ambassadors for God and a colony of the kingdom of heaven. We have a home. It just isn’t here, and it isn’t now, and we cannot change that reality any more than we can turn ourselves inside-out. If we try to change it, however good our motives may otherwise be, we will do far more harm than good.
If we can’t satisfy our desire for home in this life, what can we do? Look to the Table.
Issachar Ber Ryback, City-Shtetl, 1917. Public domain. Image has been cropped to fit.
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