The Reigning King: How the Second Psalm Gives Hope to God’s People

Glance at the headlines, and you will quickly see that people fight God. It happens all the time. Governments threaten religious freedom. Dictators do evil things. The masses pursue new forms of evil. Sometimes believers observe all this from the safety of their living rooms, wearing slippers and bath robes as they observe the troubling trends in the morning paper or their Facebook feeds. At other times, the trouble hits closer to home. Christian employees lose their jobs because of faithful living. Lawsuits threaten to put Christians out of business. The city government forbids Christian materials.

In troubling times like these, we need the truth found in the Book of Psalms. We have already seen that Psalm 1 describes the world in binary terms: the righteous and the wicked. It is the first essential contrast that we must understand.

In Psalm 2, we are introduced to powerful themes that will run throughout the Psalms. These themes, also, help us understand the world. They provide continuity among the Psalms, even though these sacred songs were written by many different authors, in many different situations.

There are three themes, and we can introduce each one with a question.

Who really rules the earth?

You can see in verses 1-3 that the world population is staging a coup. It’s time to dethrone God, they say. Earth is in tumult – lots of ideas need to be implemented, and the rule of God is just too restrictive to turn those ideas into reality. The solution? Stop living under God’s reign.

It’s a dangerous idea, if God really exists. But if he is just a neurotic concept, well, it should all work out fine. Maybe all the God-fearers are afraid of nothing, after all. Maybe it’s time for us to rule ourselves.

This is the situation of the earth, not just in our own days, but even in the days of David, the author of this Psalm (see Acts 4:25-26). Times have changed, but the chaos remains. It isn’t new.

The solution is found in Psalm 2, and it provides an undergirding for the rest of the Psalms. You can be sure of this, the Psalm says: God still reigns.

We wonder why God hasn’t intervened, but the reason is simple: he doesn’t need to. He has the situation under so much control that it could get a lot, lot worse, and he would still be in charge. It’s like a mutiny of ants – all their combined power just isn’t enough to change anything. And that is why God can sit in heaven and laugh.

What does God’s reign look like?

God’s reign isn’t haphazard. He has chosen a Zion-king to whom he has given power over the world. As New Testament believers, we know that this is Jesus. But for the original readers of this Psalm, that wouldn’t be so clear.

For Old Testament believers, this passage functions as a future promise: someone is coming. He is one of those who is on the ‘holy hill of Zion’ – that is, one of David’s descendants. Whoever he is, he has a unique relationship with God, and he has control over the world.

This double news – that God has the situation under control, and that the Zion-king will restore order in the world – is what gives believers hope. Nothing can shake our confidence. Even in the worst moments we can confidently say, ‘God has got this.’

How do we respond to God’s reign?

If God really does rule the world, completely unperturbed by the popular coup – and if he has given control to the Zion-king – then the only appropriate response is submission to the divine rule.

All people – and especially those who hold sway over others – need to act as under-governors of the Zion-king. We should ‘serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.’

Then, in the chaos of the world, we can trust that ‘God has this.’ Even when the rule of the Zion-king looks wobbly (and it often does throughout the Psalms), there is no reason to be dismayed.

God rules the earth. The Zion-king has authority. And our only response is submission. Because of these hopeful truths, the Psalms will constantly remind us trust in God, to wait patiently on him, and to never despair – no matter how dark the path.