Psalm 2 (Post 5)

Psalm 2

Structure and Classification

-royal psalm: perhaps used at enthronement celebrations of new kings

-the “happy” or “blessed” of v.12 ties back to the “happy” or “blessed” of 1:1 tying the two psalms together as introductory to the whole psalter. The themes of Torah and Throne/Temple cover the chief emphases of the psalms.

“One Jewish tradition treated Pss.1 and 2 as one psalm, and this reflects a number of points of connection between the two. Psalm 2 opens with an ironic link.  Whereas people of insight talk about Yhwh’s teaching (1:2), nations and peoples also talk something -emptiness (2:1). It closes with another link. Whereas Ps.1 ends with the prospect of the path of the wicked perishing, 2:12 envisages nations perishing as regards the path. Whereas the opening of Ps.1 comments on the good fortune of people who walk in the right way, Ps.2 closes with a comment on the good fortune of everyone who relies on Yhwh. That declaration thus forms a bracket round the two psalms. (John Goldingay, Psalms vol.1 (1-41), 128).

 -The psalm has four stanzas with three verses each:  

The Nations Oppose God and His Anointed (2:1–3) 

The Lord Addresses the Nations (2:4–6) 

The King Addresses Israel (2:7–9) 

The Narrator Addresses the Nations (2:10–12) 

Exposition

Ps.1 introduces God and Israel (both faithful and unfaithful) while Ps.2 introduces God and the nations (both obedient and rebellious). Here it is rebellious nations that are the focus.

2:1-3: The Nations Oppose God and His Anointed

V.3 answers v.1’s question about why the nations are in an uproar. It tells us that nations, as individuals writ large, suffer from and live by the same pretentions that infected our first parents in the Garden and brought them down:

-they can live by themselves,

-for themselves, and

-by their own power.

With apologies to Reinhold Niebuhr, no moral people, immoral societies here! Both repeat the same “original sin.” Our political perceptions of nations as Christians starts here: the relentless, restless efforts of political entities (on whatever level) to not to live as described above but to do so over against every other political entity seeking to do the same. The failure of the Babel project to consolidate all this rebelliousness into one entity both drives nations to keep trying and promises that frustration of these efforts will keep the world continually in conflict with each other as expressions of their rejection of God’s rule and the consequent judgment of their efforts.

2:4-6: The Lord Addresses the Nations

The Lord seems not to take all this hubbub very seriously. And not because he’s not concerned, but because he has acted to deal with all this rebelliousness. The Lord has put his king in place in Zion. From there and through this king he will exercise his rightful (and at present contested, see v.4) rule.

This king (v.6) is the politicized fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah (Gen.12:1-3), as befits the growing people of Abraham in the context of the Ancient Near East at the turn of the 2^nd to the 1^st millennium b.c.

Rebellious nations will, of course, not accept an upstart nation and their king claiming to be God’s people and to have rightful authority to rule over them. This observation prepares us for that king himself to address the readers in the next section.

The King Addresses Israel (2:7–9) 

The king says God calls him his “son” (kings were widely known as “sons of God” at this time) and denotes his enthronement as his “birth” (v.7).

V.8 unveils his inheritance: to rule over all other nations across the full expanse of the globe (or at least the known world of that time). “While David and Solomon ruled an empire, we know of no time when Israel ruled the size of empire presupposed by the psalm, or one whose parts rebelled against their emperor at the beginning of his reign, as happened to the great empires. The psalm invites its hearers to imagine a situation like that” (Goldingay, Psalms 1-41, 130). So this announcement of king and rule is more of a promise than a reality. This would suit a setting of the king’s enthronement when such a promise (perhaps delivered by a prophet) would limn an agenda for that new ruler.

In v.9 that agenda is given some detail: “You shall break them with a rod of iron,
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” This sounds pretty brutal, and it may be. However, the verb “break” is an Aramaism and can be and has been (LXX, Syriac, and Jerome) aligned with another familiar verb “to shepherd. Thus two agendas may be in mind here: a shepherding or a crushing subjugation (Goldingay, Psalms 1-41, 138). The response of the rulers of the other nations determines which form of this agenda Israel enacts.

The Narrator Addresses the Nations (2:10–12) 

The narrator next makes appeal to these rebellious kings seeking autonomy from God “be wise . . . be warned . . . Serve the Lord with fear, with trembling kiss his feet (vv .10-11). Wisdom, warning, serve, and reverent fear coalesce in these admonitions to rebellious royals. The kiss of the king’s feet may allude to 1 Sam10:1. All of this points to the proper posture of human kings, submission to the Great King, the Lord God. They have a choice: being shepherded by the Lord’s son, his king, or dominated and destroyed by him. The same two options Psalm 1 presented to its readers.

The blessing “Happy (or Flourishing) are all who take refuge in him” (v.12) takes us back to  1:1 forms a bookend with it for the two poems that form the introduction for this entire collection.

Reflection

Nationhood

We read this psalm in time between its inauguration with David’s enthronement and it final fulfillment when God’s greater Davidic Son, Jesus Christ, rules the whole world. We pray in anticipation for this fulfillment.

In the world, then, nations and rulers still try to assert themselves against God and other rulers for their own aggrandizement. This psalm offers a most realistic profile of what’s at the bottom of the world’s unrest. Two inscriptions from  the Emperor Diocletian are representative:

Diocletian Jovian Maximian Herculeus Caesares Augusti for having extended the Roman Empire in the east and the west and for having extinguished the name of Christians who brought the Republic to ruin

Diocletian Jovian Maximian Herculeus Caesares Augusti for having everywhere abolished the superstition of Christ for having extended the worship of the gods

 God’s people, living in every nation on earth, must maintain a clear-headed sense that its interests and God’s interests are never the same. And the ways the nation-state will go about pursuing its interests will most often not be a way God’s people can approve of. The church needs to accept it role as a body of critique and non-conformism to most of what the state wants to do. It will support what it can and seek to move things toward a closer approximation of God’s design for human life insofar as that is possible. It will always adopt as its baseline the care and well-being of the poor and powerless in their midst.

The idea of a “Christian” nation receives its proper comeuppance in this psalm. America, no more or less than any other nation, seeks with all its energy and ingenuity to “be the best it can be.” Our history makes Christianity the perfect foil for developing its “best”-ness - our white supremacy, sense of special vocation, being a blessing to the rest of the world (and all the other marks Richard Hughes develops in his Myths Americans Live By (see second post in this series). Time and history have largely worn away the Christian veneer but secular versions of these marks continue to rationalize and empower much of America’s work in the world. But Psalm 2 pierces this foil (or at least should have) and lays open the rotten core of America’s nationhood and “best”-ness.

God’s Son

Rolf Jacobson’s comment on this is apt:

“Psalm 2 is a royal psalm, one of those psalms that originally had to do with Jerusalem’s kings. In its original setting, the psalm probably was a part of a public ceremony such as a coronation or the announcement of a prince designated as the future king. In that era, the king was God’s anointed (v. 2) and God’s son (v. 7). But in its current setting in the Psalter, the psalm has a different function. The psalm was incorporated into the Psalter long after the institution of Israel’s human kings had disappeared. According to the theological vision of the Old Testament, one of the reasons for the failure of the monarchy was that her kings never lived up to the ideals against which they were to be measured. Yet, Israel’s prophets had consistently promised the advent a Davidic king who would fulfill those ideals and reign as the ideal Davidic king (cf. Isaiah 11). The New Testament associates that ideal Davidic king and the son and anointed of Psalm 2 with Jesus. At Jesus’ baptism, transfiguration, and death, different voices declare him to be God’s Son. Peter con- fessed that Jesus was the Christ (the Greek word for “anointed” or “messiah”). The book of Acts even associates Pilate and Herod, who stood in judgment over Jesus, with the kings and rulers that oppose God’s will in Psalm 2. The rulers of Psalm 2 sought to cast off the chains of the Lord, in order to achieve freedom for themselves. But like Psalm 1, Psalm 2 envisions independence from God not as freedom but as bondage. True liberty consists rather of living in relationship with God and taking refuge in God and God’s anointed. As the New Testament says, “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36)” (Nancy Declaissé-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, Beth Laneel Tanner, The Book of Psalms {Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 134).  

And as “the” king who fulfills this promise, Jesus Christ has been placed far above all earthly authorities and powers by his resurrection from the dead (Eph.1:19ff.) and at his return will rule this earth  as its ultimate sovereign.

Prayer

As prayers the Psalms are the people of God’s first line of response to a world run-a-muck (though sadly this is most often not the case). Such prayer remains largely unexplored territory for most American Christians. Karl Barth gives a succinct statement of this reality: ““To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”