The Royal Psalms
Notes
Transcript
In every culture there is a belief, a legend, a myth which grows over time and becomes part of the nations psych.
In Australia we are familier with this concept.
We have the idea of “a fair go for all”
The idea of mateship.
The legend of the ANZACs.
We love a sunburt country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.
Every culture has some sort of defining belief, cultural norm or legend that defines them in some way.
In the USA it is the land of the free.
But I am not sure that to many americans can actually define it, outside of their own cultural pursuits.
In Great Britian, maybe rule Britania, or apologising for everything.
In New Zealand, “Don’t know bro”, but probably some form of ANZAC legend as in Australia.
Even in Australia most people would be hard pressed to really define our national belief.
In fact you would get a variety of answers.
Some informed and considered, many ignorant.
For every culture there is a development, a growth over time of their belief about themselves.
It is usually shapped by times of struggle, times of victory, times of great loss and perseverance.
When we look at the story of the people of Israel and their beliefs about themselves we see this same development over time.
Especially as they moved from the time of the Kings to the post exilic period when they no longer had control of their own destiny and then beyond into the reestablishment of the nation, rule by outside powers and eventual destruction.
This development of belief is evident in the New Testament Church as they understood so much of Israel’s history and literature in light of Christ.
One example of this is what are known as the Royal Psalms
The Royal Psalms each has some reference to the king, the nature of his rule and his relationship to God (Psalms 2, 28, 20,21,45,61,72,89,101,110,132,144) are usually regarded as the Royal Psalms.
The NIV study Bible tells us that Belief in God’s Kingship is the foundation of the royal psalms (Ps 2).
Each King in King David’s dynasty served as a messianic agent.
He represented God’s kingship.
As God’s representative, the Davidic king was expected to uphold qualities of justice, righteousness, faithfulness and peace Psalm 72:1-3
1 Give your love of justice to the king, O God, and righteousness to the king’s son. 2 Help him judge your people in the right way; let the poor always be treated fairly. 3 May the mountains yield prosperity for all, and may the hills be fruitful.
There was this hope that through King David and his descendents a “golden age” would last forever in the Kingdom of Israel.
But we know that wasn’t the case and with corruption and failure, the dynasty came to an apparent end.
Psalm 89:38-45 says,
38 But now you have rejected him and cast him off. You are angry with your anointed king. 39 You have renounced your covenant with him; you have thrown his crown in the dust. 40 You have broken down the walls protecting him and ruined every fort defending him. 41 Everyone who comes along has robbed him, and he has become a joke to his neighbors. 42 You have strengthened his enemies and made them all rejoice. 43 You have made his sword useless and refused to help him in battle. 44 You have ended his splendor and overturned his throne. 45 You have made him old before his time and publicly disgraced him. Interlude
So what were the people of Israel to do with their national cultural identity.
What was to become of their national myth, their view of themsleves.
They had begun with a promise which they understood as an enduring promise.
What the Bible calls a covenant.
And its promises were in their understanding for all time.
But things weren’t looking so good and the promise no longer made sense.
Yet there was hope for the future, a king from David’s line would would set things right.
A King whose perfect obedience would guarantee the continuation of the Davidic dynasty and the benefits of his reign.
The Kingdom and their status as the chosen people of God would be restored.
The people of Israel had to experience a development in their understanding of these promises.
Obviously things had changed, so their understanding had to change if they were to comtinue to make any sense of the promises.
It was this developing understanding that Jesus grabbed hold of in Luke 24:44
44 Then he said, “When I was with you before, I told you that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must be fulfilled.”
The people of Jesus’ day had an expectation of a Messiah, one who would come and fulfill the promises of old.
Jesus and the New Testament writers took these promises and proclaimed that he was the one who fulfilled them.
So let’s take a brief look at three of the Royal Psalms, their original context, how the people came to see them as speaking of a future King, a Messiah from the line of David, and how Jesus fulfilled the promise in each of them.
Psalm 2 speaks of Israel’s King appointed by God to rule the nations.
Nations who are in rebellion against God.
But Israel’s kings never ruled all the nations of the known world in their time, let alone the whole earth.
So when the line of Davidic kings came to an end in 567 BC with the fall of Jerusalem, it seemed like the promise would never be fulfilled.
A new understanding was required to cope with the reality of their time.
The result was a radical reinterpretation.
A new understanding.
An understanding expressed in Jeremiah 31:31-34
31 “The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. 32 This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord. 33 “But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already,” says the Lord. “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.”
From this idea of a new covenant, the idea of a new kingship grew in the mind of Israel.
If David’s kingship was meant to be eternal then it followed that the king would be of the line of David.
This picked up on the idea in Psalm 2:2 of the Lord’s annointed one.
This concept also appears in Daniel 9:25 where the idea is that there is some future work of God perfomred by his annointed one.
An annointed one is a Messiah, so the whole concept of a coming king, a Messiah who would come to restore the Kingdom began to form in the understand of the people of Israel.
It was this very concept, which by the time of Jesus and the Roman Empire’s occupation, had grown to fevor pitch which features so strongly in the Gospels and the New Testament.
The people had an expectation and Jesus confirmed that he was the one they were expecting on a number of occassions.
At Jesus baptism Matthew and the other Gospel writers tell us that this Psalm was intended when God said in Matthew 3:17 “And a voice from heaven said, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.””
And again at the transfiguration in Matthew 17:5 “But even as he spoke, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy. Listen to him.””
Peter quotes this Psalm in Acts 4:25–26 when he addresses the Sanhedrian
you spoke long ago by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor David, your servant, saying, ‘Why were the nations so angry? Why did they waste their time with futile plans? 26 The kings of the earth prepared for battle; the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Messiah.’”
In the Gospels Jesus is portrayed as being the King spoken of in Psalm 2 which is a coronation Psalm.
Jesus is crowned King and defeats his enemies in his death and resurrection.
His rule is worldwide but like the Old Testament kings we do not yet fully see his rule, which is where the idea of a future fulfillment comes in as represented in passages such as Revelation 11:18
The nations were filled with wrath, but now the time of your wrath has come. It is time to judge the dead and reward your servants the prophets, as well as your holy people, and all who fear your name, from the least to the greatest. It is time to destroy all who have caused destruction on the earth.
So much of what we read in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels and the preaching of the Apostles in Acts is informed by the understanding of the poeple of the day.
Their expectations, their hopes for the future.
Jesus’ words and his actions all join together to give us this picture of the Messiah.
The second of the Royal Psalms we will take a brief look at today is Psalm 45.
Psalm 45 is a marriage Psalm for one of the Davidic kings, possibly Solomon, yet it speaks of a permanent rule in Psalm 45:6 “Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever. You rule with a scepter of justice.”
The great writer C. S. Lewis spoke of “second meanings in the Psalms” (Reflections on the Psalms, 101–15)
Peter C. Craigie in the Word Biblical Commentory on the Psalms says this.
(Craigie, P. C. (2004). Psalms 1–50 (2nd ed., Vol. 19, pp. 340–341). Nelson Reference & Electronic.)
“The primary meaning of the psalm is clear; it is a wedding song, celebrating the marriage of a king to a princess.
In its original sense and context, it is not in any sense a messianic psalm.
And yet within the context of early Christianity (and in Judaism before that), it becomes a messianic psalm par excellence. “
In the New Testament the writer to the Hebrews picks up this idea in Hebrews 1:8-9 which quotes Psalm 45:7-8.
8 But to the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever. You rule with a scepter of justice. 9 You love justice and hate evil. Therefore, O God, your God has anointed you, pouring out the oil of joy on you more than on anyone else.”
But C. S. Lewis second meaning idea extends to the whole Psalm in that The entire Bbiles idea of human love and marriage as a covenant becomes the basis of the idea of Christ as the groom and the church as his bride.
This draws on the positive picture of love in the Song of Songs and also the negative image of the wayward bride in Hosea 1 to 3 and Ezekiel 16.
It goes even further speaking of the royalty of Christ and the ultimate blessing of the union of Christ and the church as in marriage of children.
Ongoing generations of believers.
So we see in Psalm 2 the Lord’s annointed, the Messiah crowned as King over the nations, in Psalm 45 the eternal wedding of Christ and his church and then in Psalm 110 Christ enthroned as a Royal Priest sitting in the place of Honour
Psalm 110 is the go to Psalm when speaking of the Messiah.
It is like the peak of the mountain when it comes to the Old Testaments understanding of Jesus.
The New Testament writers, in light of their personal experience of Jesus, saw that Psalm 110 spoke of his powe and authority over all things as he is seated at God’s right hand.
As the New Testament writers set out their beliefs, the new revelation which they had encountered in Jesus. we see this expressed in passages such as;
Romans 8:34 “Who then will condemn us? No one—for Christ Jesus died for us and was raised to life for us, and he is sitting in the place of honor at God’s right hand, pleading for us.”
Colossians 3:1 “Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand.”
Ephesians 1:20 “that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms.”
18 Christ suffered for our sins once for all time. He never sinned, but he died for sinners to bring you safely home to God. He suffered physical death, but he was raised to life in the Spirit. 19 So he went and preached to the spirits in prison—20 those who disobeyed God long ago when God waited patiently while Noah was building his boat. Only eight people were saved from drowning in that terrible flood. 21 And that water is a picture of baptism, which now saves you, not by removing dirt from your body, but as a response to God from a clean conscience. It is effective because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 22 Now Christ has gone to heaven. He is seated in the place of honor next to God, and all the angels and authorities and powers accept his authority.
Jesus himself used this Psalm to confound the teachers of religious law in Mark 12:35-37 and Peter used this same quote in Acts 2:33 when speaking to the people of Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost as he declared that jesus is the Messiah they had been looking for and challenging them to repent and believe.
35 Later, as Jesus was teaching the people in the Temple, he asked, “Why do the teachers of religious law claim that the Messiah is the son of David? 36 For David himself, speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, said, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit in the place of honor at my right hand until I humble your enemies beneath your feet.’ 37 Since David himself called the Messiah ‘my Lord,’ how can the Messiah be his son?” The large crowd listened to him with great delight.
But that is not the end of the use of this Psalm in the New Testament.
A number of significant theological truths are drawn from it.
Again Peter C. Craigie in the Word Biblical Commentory on the Psalms quotes another writer, M. Gourges (À la droite de Dieu, 209–31), who makes these deep insights.
The spiritual message for Christians is manifold.
First, no adversity can now overwhelm believers (Rom 8:34–39).
Second, Christian moral lives are to take their cue from Christ’s heavenly session (Col 3:1–3).
Third, persecution that involves suffering and even death are not God’s last word, for Jesus or for his followers (Heb 12:2; 1 Pet 3:18–22).
Above all, the destiny of believers is assured. From one perspective, believers’ spiritual status is to be already seated with Christ (Eph 2:6); from another, he is “a forerunner on our behalf” in entering the heavenly sanctuary (Heb 6:20).
The New Testiment writers were very sure of their identity, in fact they were absolutly convinced, even to the point of death.
What about us?