God’s Promise to His Anointed
1 Why do the nations conspire
and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and his anointed, saying,
3 “Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast their cords from us.”4 He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord has them in derision.
5 Then he will speak to them in his wrath
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
6 “I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.”7 I will 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 make the nations your heritage
and the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”10 Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
11 Serve the Lord with fear; with trembling
12 kiss his feet,
or he will be angry, and you will perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.Happy are all who take refuge in him.
So I’m already way behind on my attempt to do one chapter of the Bible per day. I have read on through Psalm 4 but just haven’t had a chance to publish anything. I find some of these Psalms challenging because the context is that of David, King of Israel, facing some trials or under duress from conflict with surrounding peoples. My opinion is that the church has a tendency to want to make every part of the Bible somehow relatable to what we’re going through today, but I think that’s asking too much of the text. The Bible is a collection of history, poetry, law, narrative, personal letters, and more.
Is a prayer of David, a King of a nation, directly relevant to me, a relatively powerless person in the United States in 2023? While I believe God wants to say something to us through every piece of scripture, I just hesitate to try to find too much in common between trials that I face vs what David faced.
Anyway, back to Psalm 2. The way it reads, David frames the hostility of enemy nations as being spiritual–that their leaders are intentionally inciting war with God himself and his people. I don’t know enough about the historical context to know if that’s actually true–is this just David’s point of view or was the conflict between nations motivated by differing allegiances to a higher power?
And bringing it forward to 2023–do any “kings of the earth” intentionally conspire “against the Lord”? The obvious situation whether people likely still use this framing is with the Israel/Palestine conflict.
I think it’s dangerous for any head of state or people group to believe that God is “on their side”. At the same time, my one take away from this passage is that even if you are a head of state or person in high authority, there is blessing from being obedient to God and recognition that he still has authority over you, regardless of how powerful you feel. “Happy are all who take refuge in him”–regardless of whether you’re president of the most powerful nation in the world or struggling with homelessness and poverty.