Psalms for Turbulent Times - Psalm 2: God's promise to His anointed

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 asunder,
    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.

I can never read this psalm without thinking of Handel's setting of the opening verse in his great choral work, The Messiah. His orchestration has the strings - in particular the cellos and the basses - furiously working away creating a mounting sense of anger and musical stress while the bass soloist thunders out: 'Why do the nations so furiously rage together and why do the people imagine a vain thing?'

Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 are meant to be read together. They are the great opening to the great Book of Psalms. They paint the big picture. And they hold up the big message: depend upon God, trust God, take refuge in God. 

These are days of overwhelming sadness. It feels like we are suddenly being cast into a very fast moving stream of human history. The words of our time are 'self-isolation' and 'social-distancing'. These paint pictures of autonomy and alone-ness and solo-action to protect in order to survive. Both these psalms, 1 & 2, point to what it is to live a blessed life. We are reminded by this psalm that God is sovereign and that we live under the arc of God's love. Both psalms, my commentary says: 'Commend a dependence upon God that is the antithesis of autonomy.'

Scenes of autonomy this week have included shameful fights in supermarkets for food and loo rolls, selfish profiteering of hand-sanitisers (a small bottle going for £20 on ebay) and a general atmosphere of 'me-first'. This echos the language of the opening verses of this psalm - fury, rage, plotting. The Hebrew word for plotting is haga. But in a play on words, the same word is the root for meditate in vs2 of Psalm 1. The one who is blessed/happy does not plot, but meditates and delights in the law of God both day and night.

God laughs and scoffs at the foolishness of human autonomy - yet seeks those who do not plot but rather meditate. God must get so frustrated and angry with our plotting - whether in the supermarket aisle or in the myriad other ways we try to get one over others. Yet he patiently waits for those who meditate and in their meditation 'take refuge' in him. Not to run away from the world, but to be strong for the world.


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