Lecture 22: Psalms 1 and 2, the Imprecations, and the Messiah in the Psalter

The lecture, section by section

1. Walton's cantata of the Davidic covenant

   Building on Gerald Wilson, the first scholar to write extensively on the Psalter's structure, John Walton reads the five books as a cantata with movements tracing the Davidic covenant. Psalm 1 is the ultimate vindication of the righteous, sealed in its last verse: Yahweh knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish; Psalm 2 is God's choice and defense of the Israelite king, David first, foreshadowing the ultimate King. Then book one reflects David's conflict with Saul, the anointed righteous man among enemies; book two the establishment and praise of David's kingship, still embattled by Absalom and the nations, cresting at Psalm 72 with Solomon and the kingdom's Old Testament height; book three Israel's intense suffering, which Walton ties to the eighth-century Assyrian crisis, ending in Psalm 89's cry over the seemingly forgotten covenant; book four introspection over the temple's destruction and the exile; book five praise after the exile, anticipating the kingdom, rising to the closing crescendo. Essex's verdict: broadly right, which means narrowly not, and on the themes he still leans to Toews.

2. The doorway: how blessed

   Psalms 1 and 2, distinct psalms from different hands, Psalm 2 Davidic and early on the testimony of Acts 4, Psalm 1 traditionally later, perhaps post-exilic with the wisdom flavor of Ezra's generation, now stand together as the introduction to the whole book, framed by blessing: Psalm 1 opens, how blessed is the man, and Psalm 2 closes, how blessed are all who take refuge in him. The blessed man is the favored one, the prospered one, and the word reaches back through the Abrahamic covenant to the creation blessing itself: fruitfulness and fullness for the one who renders faithful obedience to Yahweh, living, as he must, among the cursed.

3. Psalm 1: the man of Torah among the wicked

   The blessed man is described first negatively: he does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, taking his life-direction from those who replace God's standard with their own, the advice columns of every age, Essex quips; nor stand in the path of sinners; nor sit in the seat of scoffers, and the progression is real: wicked counsel leads to sinful behavior, and settled sin ends in scoffing at God. Positively, his delight is in the Torah of Yahweh: enthralled, unable to get enough, meditating on it day and night the way a new convert devours Scripture in every spare moment. The result is the firmly planted tree, deep-rooted and fruitful. Of the wicked the psalm needs only four words: not so the wicked; they are chaff the wind drives away, and therefore they will not stand in the judgment. The reminder matters for the whole Psalter, where the wicked remain loudly present: anchor yourself in Torah, for in the end it is the man of Torah who is delivered.

4. Psalm 2: earth, heaven, decree, summons

   Psalm 2 moves through four stanzas. On earth: why do the nations rage and the peoples devise a vain thing? The kings take their stand and the rulers take counsel together, the very verbs of Psalm 1:1, the leaders of the wicked, against Yahweh and against his Anointed: let us tear their fetters apart. Their vain plan, running from the psalmist's day through this age to the tribulation, is to defeat God's purpose to rule the earth through his Messiah. In heaven: he who sits in the heavens laughs; the scoffers are scoffed at; but the laughter will end, for he will speak to them in his anger: but as for me, I have installed my King upon Zion, my holy mountain. Then the King himself tells of the decree, the covenant stipulation embodied in the Davidic promise: you are my Son, today I have begotten you, the language of sonly privilege, not physical origin; ask of me, and I will give the nations as your inheritance, to be broken with a rod of iron, and the kingdom awaits only the Son's asking.

5. Kiss the Son

   The fourth stanza turns to the earth with the psalmist's summons: now therefore, O kings, show discernment; take warning, O judges of the earth; serve Yahweh with reverence and rejoice with trembling; kiss the Son, do him homage as your King, lest he become angry and you perish in the way, for his wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in him. The two psalms thus set the tone of the entire book: the blessed man anticipates the coming Messiah in faith, takes refuge in him before the wrath, and meanwhile lives by the Torah in which that King was first promised; the wicked follow leaders whose plan against God's plan cannot stand.

6. The righteous man is not a sinless man

   From Psalm 3 onward the Psalter gives the prayers and praises of that blessed man, and immediately a clarification is needed: the righteous man of the Psalms never claims sinless perfection. David prays, do not remember the sins of my youth; for your name's sake pardon my iniquity, for it is great; forgive all my sins (Psalm 25); my iniquities have overtaken me (Psalm 40); heal my soul, for I have sinned against you, alongside, uphold me in my integrity (Psalm 41). The righteous man is the man of Torah who therefore recognizes his sin and deals with it in the God-directed way of the sacrifices, a man of integrity and faithful obedience, not a man without fault.

7. The story the five books tell

   Book one: David, the king among enemies, trusts the Lord for deliverance from death, the model for all who wait. Book two: after Korah and Asaph, the centerpiece is Psalm 51, the covenant king judged for his sin, Nathan's visit after Bathsheba in the superscription, and yet the book ends at Psalm 72 with the kingdom anticipated: the unrighteousness of the righteous will not stop the coming of God's kingdom. Book three: Asaph opens with God's goodness colliding with Israel's suffering, resolved only in the sanctuary, and the book descends through judgment and exile to Psalm 89's question over the promise. Book four: the exiles look up to the eternal King of heaven, and the refrain is present tense, the Lord reigns, with David's own psalms of trust in affliction (101 to 103) as the pattern, and the close (104 to 106) grounding hope in creation, Israel's history, and the Abrahamic covenant. Book five: restoration, the songs of ascent at its heart anticipating the ultimate temple, and the final five psalms sweeping outward until all creation praises Yahweh. Wilson and Grogan work with this reading, though not all its practitioners are premillennial, and their eschatology governs where they land; Essex offers his own reading with the caveat that the text is inerrant and his understanding is not.

8. The imprecatory psalms: the pastoral question

   The second interpretive issue is, Essex says, the most important pastoral question the Psalms will bring into your study: what do we do with the psalmists' calls for destruction on their enemies? Imprecation is a call for a curse, and while such petitions run throughout the book, three psalms make them precise and brutal. Psalm 58: O God, shatter their teeth in their mouth; let them be as a snail that melts away, as the miscarriage that never sees the sun; the righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance and wash his feet in the blood of the wicked, so that men will say, surely there is a God who judges on earth. Psalm 109: let his days be few, his children fatherless, his wife a widow, the creditor seize all he has, and none extend lovingkindness to him. Psalm 137: remember Edom, who cheered Jerusalem's razing; O daughter of Babylon, how blessed is the one who repays you as you repaid us, who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock.

9. Four positions on the curses

   Position A, popular among liberals: these are evil emotions, sub-religious attitudes to be avoided or vented and quickly relinquished, which is to say that what God ordained to be written is wrong. Position B, predominant among liberals and common among the orthodox through the ages: consistent with old-covenant morality, inconsistent with the new, the wrathful God of the Old Testament against the loving God of the New; but this is a narrow reading of the New Testament, where the same Sermon on the Mount that says turn the other cheek commands radical surgery against sin, where Paul comforts the Thessalonians with God's repayment of their persecutors (2 Thessalonians 1), and where the martyrs under the altar cry out for vengeance and are answered (Revelation 6, 16, 19). Position C, an evangelical cousin of A: righteous indignation that David, Jesus, and apostles could express but we, lacking their righteousness, cannot without hypocrisy. Position D, Essex's: the imprecations are expressions of the divine curse.

10. Vengeance is Yahweh's

    The key observation: the imprecations are prayers. The psalmist never asks to raise an army and do the deed himself; he asks God to do the judging, exactly as both Testaments direct, vengeance is mine, I will repay (Deuteronomy 32:35). Those who disdain Yahweh, his Abrahamic and Davidic promises, and his Torah stand under the curse God himself has announced, and the psalmist is reminding God to do what God has said he will do: Psalm 137 prays back over Babylon precisely the woes Habakkuk 2 had already pronounced. Nor is the New Testament saint different in kind: to pray your kingdom come, your will be done is to pray for the judgment of those who will not do that will, and anyone who confesses eternal punishment has no consistent ground for squeamishness here; indeed, Essex observes, those in a congregation most troubled by the imprecations are usually the same people who ask how a loving God can send anyone to the lake of fire. The application is not fire from heaven on the noisy neighbors at two in the morning, but honest prayer that submits the wicked to God's stated righteous judgment, in his time.

11. The messianic question: three positions

    The third issue has migrated from liberal into evangelical circles: is the messianic nature of the Psalms real? Liberals say non-existent: Psalm 2's anointed is merely David, perhaps in an annual new-year enthronement ceremony borrowed from the ancient Near East, and the New Testament writers were simply wrong. A second position, indirect, now found broadly in evangelicalism, holds that the psalms spoke exclusively of David and the historical kings, and the New Testament writers, guided providentially, reinterpreted them of Jesus; LaSor, Hubbard, and Bush's Old Testament Survey largely takes this line, asserting that no direct messianic prediction would have been unambiguously understood by the Old Testament reader. Neither has been the position of the orthodox church, and neither, Essex argues, survives the New Testament's own testimony.

12. Direct prediction: Peter's argument

    In Acts 2 Peter argues from Psalm 16 that David was not speaking of himself when he wrote that God's Holy One would not see corruption, and everyone in Jerusalem could verify it: David's tomb was with them, his corruption a present reality; David, says Peter, spoke as a prophet, of the Messiah, and knew it. Acts 4 assigns Psalm 2 to David, and who else could the Anointed be against whom the rulers gather, if not the king promised in 2 Samuel 7, when David marveled that God had spoken of his house for the distant future? The man of Torah, from Hannah's song onward, knew a coming anointed King; and the post-exilic worshiper, singing these psalms with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah in hand, could not have missed whom the songs finally hoped in. God began with David's experience and led him to write beyond it, and David, reflecting on words that outran his own life, recognized the greater David.

13. Preaching the psalms of the King

    Asked how to preach a psalm that seems to speak of David in one verse and beyond him in the next, Essex answers with Psalm 22: it begins in David's real suffering, but God led him to express it in terms that become predictive of the ultimate David's cross, and of the reward that follows the suffering. Psalm 110 is the clearest of all: Yahweh says to my Adon, sit at my right hand, a Davidic psalm in which David calls the coming one his own Master, and adds, you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, the king-priest of Zechariah 6 already present in the Psalter. Jesus himself pressed the question, how can David call his son Lord?, and Essex will take Jesus over any liberal any day; the writer of Hebrews then builds the Melchizedekian priesthood on the same verse. Closing counsel: do not merely dip into the Psalms; take a congregation through the book, an overview with representative psalms from each of its movements, and get Dr. Lawson's work on preaching them.

1. Psalm 1 pictures delight in Torah as being unable to get enough. What actually enthralls your spare thoughts, and what would have to change for Scripture to hold that place?

2. Psalm 2 says the nations' plan against God's King cannot stand, and heaven laughs. How does that settled outcome change the way you read the news, and the way you fear or do not fear the powerful?

3. The righteous man of the Psalms confesses great iniquity and pleads God's name, not his own record. How does that shape what honest confession sounds like for a believer?

4. Essex says the imprecations are prayers that hand vengeance to God rather than taking it. What do you currently do with your desire for justice against those who have wronged you, and what would praying it to God change?

5. David wrote beyond himself and knew the greater David was coming. When you sing or pray the psalms, where do you consciously meet Christ in them, and where have you been reading them as merely ancient poetry?