The Coming, Conquering, Coronation of the King

Psalm 2 Why do the nations rage
    and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves,
    and the rulers take counsel together,
    against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,
3 “Let us burst their bonds apart
    and cast away their cords from us.”
4 He who sits in the heavens laughs;
    the Lord holds them in derision.
5 Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
    and terrify them in his fury, saying,
6 “As for me, I have set my King
    on Zion, my holy hill.”
7 I will tell of the decree:
    The LORD 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,
    and rejoice with trembling.
12 Kiss the Son,
    lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
    for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him. Proper, God-exalting feelings (affections, emotions) find their roots in powerful, God-revealed truths. When I’ve preached from the Psalms in the past, and as I preach my eleventh sermon from the Psalms, I pray that is the one reality, the one truth you take away from these sermons. To be human is to have emotions. That is a central mark of being made in the image of God. We feel a wide array of emotions. Some of you experience emotions more strongly than others, but you all experience them in a response to what you think, say and do. The glorious beauty of the Psalms, is that God gave us 150 songs that help us root the surge of our emotions in the bedrock of God’s truth. Psalm 2 has emotional language in it. Did you catch those words when the passage was being read? What is the emotional language we see? Rage. Laughter. Derision. Fury. Fear. Rejoicing. Trembling. Different kinds of emotions fill the Psalms. These are songs after all, and they are meant to help us feel rightly. And right emotions are anchored in right thinking. Right thinking is rooted in the bedrock of God’s Word. So that’s my aim with each of these Psalms. It shapes the way I write these sermons. I pray and hope and long for you to have proper, God-exalting feelings that are rooted in powerful God-revealed truths. When your thinking is rooted in truth and your feelings overflow in response to that truth, God is seen more clearly and more gloriously. That is why the Psalms are here. We’re looking at Psalm 2 now. Back in 2018 I preached on Psalm 1 and gave an an overview of the entire psalter. Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 can been seen as the gateway into the rest of the Psalms. What you see in these two Psalms lays the groundwork for the other 148 songs. Psalm 1 talks about God’s people delighting in his law, whereas Psalm 2 talks about God’s enemies despising the law. We see examples in these two chapters of the righteous and the wicked and what emotions they have as the righteous and the wicked. God’s people delight in his law. God’s enemies rebel against it. In this first section of five sections that make up the Psalms, chapters 1-41 are nearly all written by David, and they are an example of what Psalm 1 declares. They are prayers from David in times of distress, in which he pours out his heart to God, and writes statements of the confidence he has in God. His distress many times comes at the hands of those doing evil, which you can see in Psalm 3, the very next chapter. Psalm 2 is split up into four sections, each containing three verses. We are going to work our way through each section, and see what is happening through the perspective