The Vain Mutiny (Psalm 2:1-3) | Worship Service

The Psalms as the Gateway to Blessedness

Well, good morning, everyone.

You'll come in and find a seat. We will get started with a scripture reading today from the book of Psalms, Psalm 119. Please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 119 to verse 97. We'll read these next three sections of Psalm 119 together, and then we'll open our service with prayer.

Psalm 119, beginning at verse 97, oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever mine. I have more insight than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.

I understand more than the aged, because I have observed your precepts. I have restrained my feet from every evil way that I may keep your word. I have not turned aside from your ordinances, for you yourself have taught me.

How sweet are your words to my taste, yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth. From your precepts, I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

I have sworn, and I will confirm it, that I will keep your righteous ordinances. I am exceedingly afflicted. Revive me, oh Lord, according to your word. Oh, accept the freewill offerings of my mouth, oh Lord, and teach me your ordinances.

My life is continually in my hand, yet I do not forget your law. The wicked have laid a snare for me, yet I have not gone astray from your precepts. I have inherited your testimonies forever, for they are the joy of my heart.

I have inclined my heart to perform your statutes forever, even to the end. I hate those who are double-minded, but I love your law. You are my hiding place and my shield. I wait for your word. Depart from me, evildoers, that I may observe the commandments of my God.

Sustain me according to your word, that I may live. And do not let me be ashamed of my hope. Uphold me, that I may be safe, that I may have regard for your statutes continually. You have rejected all those who wander from your statutes, for their deceitfulness is useless.

You have removed all the wicked of the earth like dross. Therefore, I love your testimonies. My flesh trembles for fear of you, and I am afraid of your judgments. Will you please stand with me as we pray?

Let's bow our heads. Our Father, we are gathered here together today because of your word. By your word, you have saved us through the preaching of your word and the proclamation of your word. You have brought conviction to our hearts and turned our eyes, our hearts, and our affections to Christ.

And we thank you for that. We thank you that we can gather around the truth of your word and exalt the Lord Jesus Christ in our worship and in our words. And we pray that you would be pleased with the offering of worship that we give to you today.

We pray that you would strengthen us to sing robustly from our hearts and express our affections to Christ and to you for the great grace that you have shown us. And may you be honored here amongst this assembly for the glory of Christ in whose name we pray.

Amen.

Let's begin our worship this morning in Christ alone.

Let's sing this song, Christ our hope in life and death.

Chapter 4, verses 8 to 11, it says,.

And the four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within. And day and night they do not cease to say, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the almighty, who was and who is and who is to come.

And when the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne, to him who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders will fall down before him who sits on the throne and will worship him who lives forever and ever and will cast their crowns before the throne saying, Worthy are you, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and because of your will they existed and were created.

Let's sing together, Behold our God.

Psalm 2 and the Inclusio of Blessedness

Now in your Bibles, will you please turn to the second Psalm, to Psalm 2.

Psalm 2, and before we begin, we'll ask the Lord's blessing on our times. Let's bow our heads. Our Father, it is our hope, our desire, and our hunger that you would feed us today from your word, that as we behold your goodness, your grace, your wrath, your mercy, your holiness and righteousness in your word, that our hearts would be transformed and conformed to the image of Christ.

We pray that you would work in us everything that is good and pleasing in your sight, and teach us, we pray, from your word today that we may give honor and glory to Christ our King, in whose name we pray.

Amen. Well, this is the second in our series in the Psalms. Not a series that will accompany every Psalm in the Psalter, but some select ones. And we did Psalm 1 a couple of weeks ago, finished that up.

Today we're starting into Psalm 2. These two Psalms are, it would be wrong to say mirror images of each other, but there is overlap in these two Psalms as they handle some of the same themes, and they certainly complement one another.

And they are complementary and overlapping Psalms, and together they form the gateway to the Psalter. And they are intended to be taken together, understood together, read together, and I have suggested that they are really the doorposts at the entry to the Psalter.

So, we have Psalm 1 on one side, Psalm 2 on the other, and seeing how they complement one another, and what they teach, what they lay out, helps us to understand the purpose of the Psalms. There is, in Psalm 1 and Psalm 2, together, when taken together, there's something of an inclusio, which is a literary device that uses the same theme or idea at the beginning and at the end to sort of incorporate, like brackets or parentheses, everything that comes between them.

And I want you to notice the inclusio in Psalm 1 and Psalm 2. Psalm 1, verse 1,. So there you have Psalm 1, verse 1, a declaration of blessedness. Then look at the end of Psalm 2, Psalm 2, verse 12. So there is a declaration of blessedness at the very first verse of Psalm 1.

Then there is a proclamation of blessedness at the very end of Psalm 2. And these sort of form an inclusio, brackets, and everything in here describes the way of blessedness. These are not just two random Psalms placed at the beginning of the Psalter, as if the organizer, which I think was King David, just took these two Psalms randomly out of a collection of songs, and said, we're going to put one here and one here.

No, I think that these are intended to be seen together, and they really tell us what the book is about. Psalm 1, we saw when we studied that, finished it a couple of weeks ago, we saw Psalm 1 describes the blessed man, the path of the blessed man, the prosperity of the blessed man, and then the prize for the blessed man.

Blessed is the one who has never walked in the counsel of the ungodly, and has never stood in the path of sinners, and has never sat in the seat of the scoffer, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night.

That's the proclamation of blessedness. Of course, we understand that none of us have ever done that, so the question remains, how can we be blessed if that's the requirement for blessedness? Well, the good news is that Psalm 2 answers that.

God has appointed a king and a savior who has fulfilled the law of God, and has never walked in the counsel of the wicked, or stood in the path of sinners, or sat in the seat of the scoffers, and because he has been obedient to the law of the Lord, and meditated in it day and night, we can be blessed because we take refuge in him.

That's Psalm 1 and Psalm 2. You'll notice at the beginning of Psalm 2 that there is no superscript. That's what we call the little words that are above the psalm, that sort of introduce the psalm and sometimes describe the occasion of the psalm, like you see on the next psalm, Psalm 3, where you see it says, a psalm of David when he fled from Absalom, his son.

There's no superscript in Psalm 2, so we don't know from Psalm 2 who wrote Psalm 2, but here's good news, we do know from the New Testament who wrote Psalm 2, because Psalm 2 is quoted in Acts chapter 4, where we read this in verses 24 through 26.

And when they heard this, they lifted their voices to God with one accord and said, O Lord, it is you who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, who by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of our father David your servant said, Why do the nations rage and the peoples devise futile things?

The kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his anointed. And they're quoting Psalm 2 verses 1 and 2, and in Acts chapter 4, they attribute this psalm to David.

Now, historically, Psalm 1 and 2 have been viewed by the Jews and throughout church history as really belonging together. In fact, there are some ancient manuscripts that refer to the words of Psalm 2, and they call it Psalm 1, because in the Jewish mind, these two psalms were inseparably linked to one another.

So it is assumed that if David is the author of Psalm 2, that he is also then the author of Psalm 1. And though we recognize that these are two different psalms, in the Jewish way of thinking, historically, they have been seen as being inseparably linked together at the beginning of the Psalter.

There is something of a double meaning to Psalm 2. It does describe David, but it also looks past David and describes David's greater son, the Lord Jesus Christ. You're going to see in a moment how there are messianic tendencies in the psalm, messianic statements in the psalm, because it does speak of Christ, though the psalm does describe in some of the words of the psalm, it does describe aspects of the covenant that God made with David, the promises that God made to David, in 2 Samuel chapter 7, promises in a covenant that are also described in Psalm 89 as well.

You can imagine Israel being surrounded by its enemies, the Philistines, the Edomites, the Moabites, the heathenites, the paganites, and all the other ites that surrounded Israel. And when David is installed as king, it had a unifying effect for the 12 tribes of Israel, as all the 12 tribes then became one nation under the leadership of David.

And it is assumed that this psalm was a coronation psalm, something that was sung when new kings were anointed over the kingdom in the line of David. And it was a reminder again of God's purpose in choosing David.

And oftentimes, transfers of power inside of kingdoms were tumultuous. It could be a time when the enemies outside of a nation saw an opportunity to exploit a weakness when power was being transferred from one king to his son or from one king to another.

And so this is a psalm that would be sung during those coronation services. Alan Ross in his commentary on the psalm says this, quote, Psalm 2 is a royal psalm focusing on the coronation of the Davidic king in the holy city on Mount Zion.

It was included in the collection to be sung by the choirs at any appropriate time, certainly at coronations of kings, but also in times of national crises, when people needed to be reminded that God had installed their king and that the threats from the nations would fail, close quote.

So what was the answer? What was God's answer to the raging of the nations around Israel that threatened always to undo them and to conquer them until they had a king, David? His answer to those raging nations was to seat his king, David, upon that throne.

And that is the language that is used in Psalm 2. But that was not a one-time and temporary event with no lasting consequences. That installation of David on the throne in Zion would have eternal and lasting consequences because ultimately, again, Psalm 2 looks beyond David's kingdom to the rule of his greater son, the Lord Jesus Christ, in a future incoming kingdom.

The psalm clearly speaks of Christ. It is inarguably messianic. It looks beyond David to Christ. In fact, it is Jesus Christ, the son, who speaks in verses 7 through 9, Christ is the king, the ultimate king, who is installed in verse 6.

David is a prototype of that. And then Christ is the one whom we are to worship and do homage to in verses 10 through 12 where we are said to worship the Lord with reverence and do homage to the son lest he become angry.

So the last half of the psalm is explicitly the words of the son regarding the father and his decree to seat him on his throne. And they describe the rule and the reign of Christ and the refuge that can be found in him.

This psalm, Psalm 2, is cited no less than eight times in the New Testament. Every time it is cited, it is applied to Christ. It's cited in Matthew 3, verse 17. This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.

There is an allusion there to Psalm 2. It's cited in Acts 4 and in Acts 13. It's cited in Hebrews 1 and Hebrews 5, in Revelation 1, Revelation 2, and Revelation 12. And every time it is used, it is seen to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Now the psalm divides really naturally into four sections of three verses each. The psalm is 12 verses long, and it divides really naturally into four sections of three verses each. This psalm describes Yahweh's promise to establish his king and his kingdom in spite of the vain opposition of earthly powers.

And the psalm sort of unfolds in four scenes. There is a different speaker in each one of the scenes, and I'll show you that here in just a moment. Harry Ironside, in his commentary on the psalm, sort of divides the psalm up into these four sections in recognizing the different speaker in each one.

And he identifies, and this is his outline for the psalm. It's not our outline for the psalm, so I don't feel like you have to write this down just yet. But Harry Ironside divides the psalm into these four sections, identifying four different speakers.

And you'll notice in verse 3, the first three verses, that it is the wicked who speak. Then you'll notice in verse 6 that it is the Father who speaks from heaven. Then in verses 7 through 9, the third section, it is the Son who speaks, who tells of the Father's decree.

And then you will notice in verses 10 through 12 that there is an invitation, a warning there of comfort and a promise of blessing. And so those words are attributed to the Holy Spirit. So you have the wicked speaking in scene 1, the first three verses.

Then you have the Father speaking, then the Son speaking, and then the Holy Spirit speaking and giving application of the entire psalm there at the very end. Each section has a central truth that helps unfold that.

So while we could recognize that as the outline, we're not going to. I've developed something that I think is a little bit more helpful. We're going to notice the same division, four sections with three verses each.

But there is a statement that I think summarizes each section. And when we put all these together, it helps us to unfold the meaning of the psalm. Now here's where we're going to read the verses together.

In verses 1 through 3, we will say that the rebellion of the wicked is vain folly. The rebellion of the wicked is vain folly. Let's read those verses together. Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples devising a vain thing?

The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed, saying, and here's the wicked speaking, let us tear their fetters apart and cast away their cords from us.

In the second section, verses 4 through 6, we see that the response of Yahweh is mocking fury. The response of Yahweh is mocking fury. Verse 4, He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord scoffs at them.

Then He will speak to them in His anger and terrify them in His fury, saying, but as for me, I have installed my king upon Zion, my holy mountain. That's Yahweh, the Father, who is speaking. In the third section, verses 7 to 9, we see that the reign of the king is with sovereign force.

The reign of the king is with sovereign force. Verse 7, I will surely tell of the decree of the Lord. He said to me, you are my son, today I have begotten you. So this is the son speaking. Verse 8, ask of me and I will surely give the nations as your inheritance and the very ends of the earth as your possession.

You shall break them with a rod of iron. You shall shatter them like earthenware. And then in the final section, the refuge for the wise is His blessed favor. Verses 10 through 12, look at verse 10. And hear the narrator of the psalm.

We can even say the Holy Spirit is speaking. Now therefore, O kings, show discernment. Take warning, O judges of the earth. Worship the Lord with reverence and rejoice with trembling. Do homage to the Son that He not become angry and you perish in the way.

For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him. Now as you might expect, we are going to take four weeks to work through this psalm. And we're going to unpack each section and meditate on the truths of each section.

And as God's good and kind providence would have it, we're going to be finishing up this psalm with God's answer for the rebellious, wicked rulers of the world on the Sunday right before election day.

Now I didn't plan it that way. I wish I could take credit for having planned something that magnificently great. But it just fell out that way. About Wednesday, I thought, oh, this is appropriate. So for the next four weeks, we are going to meditate upon the promises of God regarding His kingdom and His King and His wrath against the rebellious, wicked.

And no matter who wins the elections on election day or election week or election festival or whenever they decide to declare an end to election season, they get the outcome that they want. Whoever wins that, we are going to remember that these four truths remain unchanging and unchangeable.

The rebellion of the wicked is vain folly. The response of Yahweh is mocking fury. The reign of the King is with sovereign force. And the refuge of the wise is His blessed favor. That's Psalm 2. I think those are four good truths to keep in mind over the course of the next month.

By the way, there's also in this psalm a little mini gospel outline. Verses 1 through 3 is the sinful depravity of man. Verses 4 through 6 is the sovereignty of God. Verses 7 through 9 is the preeminence of Christ.

And verses 10 through 12 is a gracious invitation to find refuge in the Son. You are a sinner. God is justly angry with you. He has appointed a Savior and a King who will execute His wrath. So find refuge in Him or you will perish.

That is Psalm 2. That's the outline of Psalm 2. So let's look today and just today at the rebellion of the wicked being vain folly in verses 1 through 3. And we're going to notice here that the author describes the rebellion of the wicked.

It is a cosmic mutiny that is described in these first three verses. And you're going to notice three things about the rebellion. Number 1, it is raging, verse 1. It is defiant, in verse 2. And then number 3, it is lawless, that's verse 3.

It is a raging, defiant, and lawless rebellion that is executed against God and against His Christ. Verse 1, Psalm 2, verse 1. Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples devising a vain thing? This is a raging rebellion in verse 1.

Now the question asked in verse 1 is not of somebody inquiring as to the reasons that a thing is so. In other words, he's not saying, I wonder why the nations rage. I wonder why they're plotting vain rebellion.

He's not wondering why it is so. It is a question of astonishment and indignation. Why do the nations rage? Do you hear the difference in tone? Why are these people plotting such vanity? This is insane.

Why would they do this?

He is simply amazed at the insolence of these fallen creatures who are mere dust, rebelling against God and His anointed Christ. He is marveling at their rebellion. He is marveling at their insurrection and the stupidity of it all.

He describes their corporate rebellion. It is the nations and the individual peoples that conspire together in those nations. Why do the nations rage? Why do the peoples plot this thing? Whether you're talking about individual sinners raging against God or whether you're talking about collections of sinners raging against God, it is utter futility.

The word translated nations in verse 1 is a word that was often used to describe the pagans or the heathens. It was just a general reference to God-haters, usually a generic reference to those who are outside of the covenant, just Gentiles, pagans, non-Jews, whom God had not looked down upon and revealed Himself to.

So it is describing their pagans or heathens and those who had not received the revelation of God, of Yahweh in His Word through the prophets, just God-haters. And the author notes that they, David notes here, that they are raging or in an uproar.

The nations are in an uproar. Some translations translate that word uproar as raging. It describes a tumult or a commotion like the raging of a stormy sea, like a commotion of frothing and tossing about in that commotion.

It describes the passionate hatred, the passionate and intense rage and hatred of unbelievers for the one true God. That is what is being described. A passionate hatred, a fury. This is how Paul describes fallen man in Romans 1, verse 30, as slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, etc.

So this is the condition of fallen man, apart from the grace of God, a raging, tormenting, tumultuous commotion of passionate rage and hatred and fury toward the one true God. That is the heart of every unbeliever.

It describes all of fallen humanity. We are born with a deep-seated animosity to God and to His truth. Now this deep-seated animosity expresses itself in all kinds of different ways. Sometimes it can even express itself in apathy and indifference.

So for instance, the individual who says, you know, it's not that I hate God, I just don't care for Him. I don't love Him. I don't want anything to do with Him. I'm not interested in His truth or being obedient to Him.

That's not just apathy and indifference. That is an expression of humanity's hatred for God. It is an expression of the darkness and the love for darkness that man has and the hatred that he has for truth and for righteousness.

Sometimes it is expressed in terms of intellectual superiority. I'm not foolish enough or stupid enough to believe that ancient Bronze Age book that you guys worship and love. We've progressed past that.

We are more enlightened now that we've gone through the Enlightenment. We understand things that the ancients did not understand. Ignoring Christ, pleasing yourself, rejecting His demands, living in disobedience, setting up our own standards of righteousness and truth, living for ourself, following after our own hearts and self-worship, caring nothing for the truth, nothing for God's Word, but only for ourselves, lying, idolatry, murderous of the heart, even pious religion that seeks to mask its hatred for God under the religiosity of love for truth is an expression of hatred for the one true God.

The Pharisees and the religious leaders of Jesus' day who crucified Jesus were doing so under the guise of a religiosity and a love for and a desire for the law, and yet they were haters of the one true God.

John 7, verse 7, Jesus said to unbelievers and about unbelievers, the world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify of it that its deeds are evil. John 15, verse 23, he who hates me hates my Father also.

If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin, but now they have both seen me and hated me and my Father as well. There is a hatred for Christ that unbelievers have that expresses itself sometimes in religiosity and pious behavior and sometimes in indifference and sometimes in outright hostility toward God and to God's people.

If left to ourselves, and this we have to remember, if left to ourselves apart from the grace of God, you and I would still be in that condition. I say this if you're in Christ. You'd still be in that condition.

Our natural state is at enmity with God. We are born in that state, born in rebellion, and we express it at every turn and every opportunity. Born into darkness with a love for sin and a hatred for the truth, we prefer darkness and ignorance to light and truth.

And there is within the heart of fallen man this seething, rageous, tumultuous hatred for God, for Christ, and for His truth. And you just need to look around us to see that this is true in our culture and amongst those who make no profession of faith in Christ at all.

But what can it accomplish? What can man possibly do against God? It is futility. It is emptiness. He meditates. That emptiness is described in the second phrase of verse 1. He meditates on vain things.

And the people's devising a vain thing is how the NASB translates it. The word devising there means plotting. It's translated as devising or plotting in the NIV in the New King James. It's actually the same word translated meditate back in Psalm 1, verse 2.

His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law, He meditates day and night. Here the same word is used for the mental working of the unbeliever and those who rage against God. In fact, the LSB, the Legacy Standard, translates it that way.

Why do the nations rage and the peoples meditate on a vain thing? Here you see yet another connection between Psalm 1 and Psalm 2. In Psalm 1, verses 1 and 2, the wicked sinner, the scoffer, they meditate upon their own counsel, whereas the blessed man meditates on the law of the Lord, and in His law, he dwells and muses day and night.

Here in Psalm 2, we see an expression of what the wicked meditate on. They meditate on vain things, empty things. The word meditate, you might remember from Psalm 1, means to muse over or to sort of chew over.

It describes the muttering kind of underneath your breath. Do you remember that? Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, who stands in the path of sin and sits in the seat of the scoffer.

It's kind of that just churning over in your mind, in your heart, under your breath, in your mouth, in your mind, in your consciousness. It's a musing. It's a turning it over. It's a chewing on it and a meditating on it, sort of squeezing out the juice of it.

Well, the blessed man does that with the word of God. The heathen nations and the unbeliever does that with their rebellion. They speak of it. They work over it. They whisper it. They talk of it. They plan it.

They plot it. They meditate upon it. They think upon their iniquity. This is what they give their hearts and their minds to. Just as the heart of the blessed man is set on truth, so for the wicked, their heart, their mind, and their musing is set on rebellion.

Their evil mutiny, their treason against God is the subject of their thought life, and their wicked ways and their rebellion are always on their lips because those things occupy their minds day and night.

And it ought not to be with the blessed man. The unbeliever gives his mind to vanity and futility. In fact, this is how Paul describes fallen man in Romans 1, verse 21. Even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile, vain, empty in their speculations or their imaginations.

This is the condition of unbelieving man. They become futile in their thinking so that they meditate and muse on vain things. And since all of their rebellion will come to nothing and all their tumultuous rage against God will amount to nothing, it is in the end vain.

It's empty and useless. It is like the waves that crash against a rock, so the wicked in their rage accomplish nothing. You can see a massive wave come into the shoreline and crash against an enormous rock on the seashore and it will just turn to mist and be gone in an instant.

So is all of the vain, wicked raging of sinful men. All their plotting and planning against God to overthrow His kingdom and overthrow His truth and reject His righteousness and thwart His plans amounts to nothing.

It just crashes against that rock, turns to mist, ends up being nothing, and the rock remains unchanged, undaunted, unaltered, and immovable. So it is with the wicked, a raging rebellion. Second, it is a defiant rebellion.

Verse 2, a defiant rebellion. Verse 2 says,. The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed. This is utter defiance. Nations, peoples, kings, rulers.