Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Sovereignty of God from Psalm 99
I would like to invite you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 99. Most of its themes we have been singing about for half an hour, an immaculately well-chosen array of hymns to reflect what this psalm is about. But now, let us turn to the Word of God, and with the songs in your mind, hear what the Scripture itself says. Psalm 99:
“The Lord reigns, let the nations tremble; he sits enthroned between the cherubim, let the earth shake. Great is the Lord in Zion; he is exalted over all the nations. Let them praise your great and awesome name—he is holy. The king is mighty, he loves justice—you have established equity; in Jacob you have done what is just and right. Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool; he is holy.
Moses and Aaron were among his priests, Samuel was among those who called on his name; they called on the Lord and he answered them. He spoke to them from the pillar of cloud; they kept his statutes and the decrees he gave them. O Lord our God, you answered them; you were to Israel a forgiving God, though you punished their misdeeds. Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain, for the Lord our God is holy.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
There have been times, of course, when the authority of monarchs was almost unquestioned. Kings ruled; they reigned, in the fullest possible senses of those verbs. It was not uncommon to speak of the divine right of kings; that is, kings, it was thought, were appointed, finally, by God. Therefore, there was no law over them; they were over the law.
They could not be judged by the law; rather, they established the law, so that even if they became corrupt, there were no law by which to challenge them since they enjoyed the divine right of kings. That meant that the only way to bring them down was by a coup. You couldn’t vote them out of office; there was no vote. You couldn’t press charges; they were over the law. It took bloodshed, a coup, to get rid of the blighters. In other words, there was no constitutional way of getting rid of them. There was only a violent way of getting rid of them.
But there have also been times when the popular mood has been to question authority, not least the right of kings. During the time of the civil war in England in the seventeenth century, ultimately the popular mood so challenged the abuse of power under Charles I that civil war erupted, and ultimately he was executed.
John Cook was assigned, as a lawyer, what has sometimes been called the Tyrannicide Brief, which is the brief that would actually press charges against a tyrant, finally issuing in his death. He actually prepared documents to show that the king himself must be under law. He is not above law. Do you have any idea how revolutionary that is?
But that was what was at issue at the time. Is the king over the law, or is the king under the law? Of course, the problem was that once Parliament became established, it quickly developed that the various parties in Parliament became just about as corrupt as the aristocracy had been before Parliament got its powers back. So eventually in the so-called Rump Parliament, the various sectors were so busy protecting their own turf that ultimately Oliver Cromwell dissolved Parliament, and you were back to a dictatorship again.
One remembers Lord Acton’s famous saying, “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I saw a bumper sticker not too long ago that said, “All power corrupts, but absolute power sounds like fun!” But that’s a problem, isn’t it? As long as I can have it, it’s a good thing! And it’s not just England, of course.
In the eighteenth century during the French Revolution, the most articulate voices were looking forward to the time “when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” That was their expression. Of course eventually, after executing the last king and a whole lot of the aristocrats, the thing turned on itself, and eventually under Robespierre, you had nothing but the Reign of Terror, and about 3,000 people fell to Madame Guillotine.
We can have the corruption of authority in high places in kings, and we can also have the corruption of anarchists in low places trying to get rid of kings. In our day, at the risk of a huge generalization, older voices often long for the security of older authorities and structures. Younger voices are often suspicious of all external authority, thinking that their own pleasure ought to be paramount. That can generate any number of cultural tensions, even in a local church.
Of course, no thoughtful Christian would want to sign up for either extreme, thank you. After all, those who simply want tradition and authority, no matter what price, have forgotten the history of the twentieth century. For at the end of the day, the appeal of Nazism, as the appeal of Stalinism, was really an appeal to authority, unquestioned authority, which resulted in the death of millions and millions and millions.
On the other hand, the constant appeal to anarchy, to freedom from all authority, from a Christian point of view, forgets that the Bible itself says that God himself is appointed our ruler. A staggering thought, isn’t it? We’re told to honor our parents, which is the first commandment with promise.
Far from developing a life in which my highest good is doing whatever I want, Jesus insists our highest good is dying to ourselves, and it’s in dying that we live. It’s in giving that we receive. It’s in losing ourselves that we find ourselves for Jesus’ sake. I don’t see how any thoughtful Christian can either simply subscribe to all authority or simply overturn the traces. The Bible itself, of course, is prepared to expose the evils of those who take an authority not their own.
The very first temptation turned on this point, didn’t it? It wasn’t just a matter of eating the wrong fruit. The tempter said to Eve, “God knows that if you eat this fruit, you’ll become like God.” In other words, the very first temptation was to overthrow the authority of God so that we could establish our own, which is the first anarchy.
Then there are counts like those of Nadab and Abihu, who think, “Listen, if Moses and Aaron can become priests, why not us? Whether they say God appoints them or not, they’re no better than we are.” And they too were destroyed. Or King Saul, duly appointed king, but also wanting the rights and authorities of priests; and he was destroyed.
Or in New Testament times, the Roman Caesars produced coins on which were written the words, dominus et deus noster, our lord and god … referring, of course, to Caesar himself, which the Christians could only see as utter blasphemy. So even though at one level the apostle Paul could say that the powers that be are ordained by God, at another level, if those powers took on authority that was blasphemous, then these same apostles said things like, “We must obey God rather than men.”
Yet there is one authority in the Bible that is never, ever depreciated. Not once. It is the authority of God himself. So that insofar as we belong to an age that is deeply suspicious of authority because we have seen so much abuse of authority, sooner or later, if we want to come to grips of what the Bible says we still have to reckon with God’s authority.
This is true even in creation itself, isn’t it? Many, many, texts in Scripture insist that in the first instance, we owe God a certain allegiance; we owe God a certain obedience precisely because he made us, and he is God, and he rules us. Human responsibility to God, human accountability to God in the Scripture is grounded first and foremost on the fact that we are not self-made beings; we were made by him and for him, and to think otherwise from the Bible’s point of view is already the first step toward rebellion. It is, in fact, what the Bible would call idolatry.
We are not to think of the sin of Genesis 3 as a minor peccadillo: the wrong fruit, apples instead of pears. We’re to think of it as the most horrific evil, the overthrow of the Creator. The de-Godding of God. The creature saying, “I will be the Creator. I will be God. I will do it my way.” Since our life comes from God himself, from the Creator, then this can itself only spell death. All of human disaster comes from this.
One way, of course, at getting at God’s authority, is to picture him as a great king. We have to do a couple of mental gyrations even to begin to understand this because when we think of monarchy today, our first recourse for most of us is probably Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. But she is what we call today a constitutional monarch, not a written constitution, but a traditional one, which basically means that all of her power is shaped by constitutional constraints.
She cannot exercise any authority outside the constitutional constraints. That means, in real terms, she really has very, very little power. She can, should she choose to do so, dissolve Parliament. But if she does so, without the permission and sanction and request of her prime minister, then what will happen is the prime minister will get a super majority in the next election, and she’ll be forced to go his way in any case.
She really has no authority, and yet, we respectfully speak of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II reigning, the reign of the queen. It’s not reigning in any first-century sense or tenth-century BC sense or even sixteenth-century sense. It’s a figurehead job. So the mythology is created that what happens in Parliament is sanctioned by her when she puts her name on a bill or the governor general does or whatever the case may be, and so the authority then comes nominally from the crown.
In fact, in our course we sin against the crown, just as in republics, we sin against the state or we sin against the law. But when it comes to actual authority, there’s nothing there. Nothing. Which means when we read in Scripture that God reigns, we have to do a double think and remind ourselves, “God is not a constitutional monarch. What he says goes. He is God.”
And indeed, in the psalm we’re reading, we discover this is one of a sequence of psalms from 93 all the way to 100 that celebrates the sheer kingship of God. With the exception of Psalm 94, all of these psalms rejoice over God as King, sometimes celebrating his various kingly functions because God is all that thrills us and all that shames us. He is the one whom we adore, and he is the one who exposes our horrible rebellions. And still he is God, and still he is King. So we come to Psalm 99, and we divide it into three parts.
1. God the transcendent King.
Verses 1–3. “The Lord reigns.” That refrain comes up in Psalm 93, Psalm 96, Psalm 97, Psalm 99, all through these psalms. “The Lord reigns.” Not as a constitutional monarch; in fact, the expression has almost a form of an announcement, not simply an eternal, timeless truth. “Listen up! God reigns.”
The picture is eternally true, yet it feels like an announcement, a proclamation, even a promise, and you haven’t seen anything yet. God’s kingdom comes, and this reign ought then in God’s universe to shape the very foundations as it establishes them because there is no competing authority. Hence, “The Lord reigns, let the nations tremble; he sits enthroned between the cherubim, let the earth shake.” This language of the cherubim needs unpacking.
So many artists have pictured a cherub as sort of a cute little cuddly Cupid-like godlet. There is no terror to them. There is no vastness to them. And even when you look at the highly symbol-laden vision of the mobile throne in Ezekiel 1, such that those four living creatures are described later in chapter 10 as cherubim, we’re not to think of a kind of little chariot about the size of a moving chair with God sitting on it. This is a huge, vast, fiery thing.
A little later on in the vision, for example, Ezekiel dares.… He is commanded. He dares to approach inside, behind one of those great big wheels that are merely part of the construction of these cherubim, and reach in and take some coals. This is a vast thing, a fiery thing, suggesting fierceness and power and strength.
It’s symbol-laden. Eyes everywhere to remind us that the throne of God sees everything. A head of a man to remind us that God’s administration is intelligent. The head of a lion to remind of that God’s throne is royal. The head of a bull to remind us that God’s throne is strong. The head of a flying eagle to suggest swiftness to do all that God performs.
Indeed, even compassion. It reminds us of the words of Exodus 19, “You have seen how I have borne them up on eagles’ wings.” Then when you actually get the picture of God sitting on this mobile throne chariot, the closer you get, the less explicit the picture becomes. More and more symbol-laden until you get to Ezekiel 1:28 and you read, “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”
You can’t draw it. In the Most Holy Place, in the tabernacle, and in the temple, again, these huge pictures of cherubim with their wings touching one wall and then the other wall and then touching in the middle, and under it the ark of the covenant. And sometimes this is picked up in highly poetic language by the psalmists to describe God’s fearsome reign over everything.
Do you remember the words of Psalm 18? I know this is highly poetic language; it is all the more powerful for this. Psalm 18:6, “In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry came before him, into his ears. The earth trembled and quaked, and the foundations of the mountains shook; they trembled because he was angry. Smoke rose from his nostrils; consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it.
He parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the cherubim and flew; he soared on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him—the dark rain clouds of the sky. Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced, with hailstones and bolts of lightning. The Lord thundered from heaven; the voice of the Most High resounded.”
Listen, this is not a constitutional monarch. Allow all the nature poetry in the world, but this God is not domesticated. This is not the sort of God into whose presence you saunter and say, “Hiya, God. Nice to see you again.” Think French court about 1740 and you’re just beginning to scrape at the very fringes of what royalty looks like compared with this God.
Moreover, he is not a tribal deity. The whole earth shakes. The nations tremble, for all will give an account. And yet at the same time, Psalm 99:2, “Great is the Lord in Zion,” for this is a covenant believer who is writing. He knows that God is sovereign over all, but Zion is another word for Jerusalem. Zion is the city of the great King. Zion is the place where God established his temple. Zion is the capital city of his own covenant community.
Yes, he is sovereign over all, but he’s, in particular, the sovereign of his own covenant community. And that language is picked up in the New Testament and applied to God’s people across the ages, not least the church. For example, Hebrews 12:22: “You,” the writer to the Hebrews says. “You [Christians] have come to Mount Zion.” Not the Mount Zion, of course, of yesteryear, not the Mount Zion of Jerusalem. No, listen to what he says, “You have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God.
You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant,” and so forth. This is not only the God of all, whether he’s acknowledged or not, but in particular, he is the God of the covenant. He is the acknowledged God of his own covenant people. Yes, “Great is the Lord in Zion; he is exalted over all the nations. Let them praise your great and awesome name.”
Did you notice two or three of the songs that were sung had the word awful in it? That’s Old English for awesome, only in some ways it’s more powerful if you get rid of its contemporary usage. Awful today sounds awful, but it means full of awe. He’s awesome in that sense. Each of the three divisions of this psalm then ends with some variation of this line: “He is holy.” Again, verse 5, “He is holy.” Last line of the psalm, “For the Lord our God is holy.”
Now I have brought up this word holy in other occasions when I’ve been here, but I want to bring it up again. It’s a very important word. What does it mean to confess that the King is holy? Some people work through etymology; that is, the bits and pieces that go into a word, to try and understand its meaning, and they argue that it means that God is separate; he is different from us.
But when the angels in Isaiah 6 or in Revelation 4 say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,” are they merely saying, “Separate, separate, separate is the Lord God Almighty”? Loses a bit, doesn’t it? Nor will it do to render this as simply, “Moral, moral, moral,” although we’ll see this God as a God of justice.
As far as I can see, the whole notion of holiness, about which nowadays we sing a great deal in contemporary songs as well as in older hymns, as far as I can see in the Bible, the word holy has concentric circles of meaning, and you’ve got to watch the context closely. At its heart, when it applies to God, it is almost an adjective for God. It is almost a way of saying, “God alone is God. There is no other.”
How do you describe a God who is transcendent? Whose purity is whiter than driven snow? Whose love far outstrips the most wonderful mother love? Who is more nourishing than the best of foods? Who is more entrancing than a million twinkling stars? Who is more beautiful than a spectacular sunset in the Rockies? Who is just better? He is so unabashedly good that there is nothing better than he is? He is the best. How do you describe a God like that with terms that all seem too small?
This is why Christian theologians who have tried to study the use of the word holy with respect to God see his holiness as in some ways the integrating characteristic, the integrating attribute of God. Not love. God is perfectly loving, and he is perfectly righteous, and he is good. And he is wise, and he is powerful, and all the rest. But so much so that he is.… What can you say? We are out of words. He is God. He is holy. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”
Then in a broadening concentric circle, that which belongs to him, then, is also said to be holy. So the shovel that takes out the ash from the altar under the old covenant law is said to be holy. Not because it’s moral, not because it’s clean (ash is still ash), but because it’s God’s. It’s used only for that. It’s a holy shovel. Otherwise it would be a profane shovel, a common shovel. This is reserved for God. And if people are then reserved for God, we’re said to be holy.
But of course, we’re not shovels, so the way that we show that we’re reserved for God is by doing what God wants, and then you’re introducing notions of morality, and truth-telling, and conformity to God himself. And then the word keeps moving out in various concentric circles until on the farthest ring out it sometimes means something like simply low-dose sacred. Occasionally in the Old Testament a pagan priest is called a holy man, not because he truly does belong to God but because at least he’s moving around in the domain of the sacred. Do you see?
So the word gradually takes on more distant meanings as you move out from the center, but at the very center, when we’re told again and again God is holy, we’re to remember all that the Bible says about God and remember that God is God. In fact, the Hebrew has this inverted in all of these refrains. “Let them praise your great and awesome name—he is holy.” God the transcendent king.
2. God the just King.
Verses 4–5. “The king is mighty.” Well, yes, he reigns! Not as a constitutional monarch. He reigns! But in addition we are told, “He loves justice—you have established equity.” That is, fairness and integrity. “In Jacob you have done what is just and right.” That is, the laws that he has given are just and right to Jacob, to his old covenant community, and he holds the people to account, and all of his judgments are superb. They are excellent. They are fair. They are right. They are good.
He never makes a mistake. How could he? He knows what has been, he knows what is, he knows what will be. In fact, in several places in the Bible we’re actually told that he also knows what could have been under different circumstances. So how could he ever possibly make a mistake? “The King is mighty; he loves justice—you have established equity; in Jacob you have done what is just and right.”
Therefore, “Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool; he is holy.” In other words, no sooner has the psalmist called forth celebration over God’s transcendent being then he focuses on his justice and integrity. It is this that addresses the question of abuse of authority. When we find people today who are deeply suspicious of authority, it is because they have been burned by observing various forms of abuse of authority.
But supposing you deal with a God who never abuses his authority? Or is never perverse or corrupt? Who can’t be bought or never makes a mistake? Then, you see, if we really don’t want that kind of king over us, it’s not because we can point a finger at him and say, “You’re corrupt. You’re corrupt. All authority is bad. I’m an anarchist.” Rather, it’s because the very perfection of authority that he exercises is going to catch us out too.
Suddenly what seemed so noble to begin with, a kind of thumbing your nose at authority to prove your independence, sidles surreptitiously across the line into idolatry. Where does it end? Verse 4b is not just abstract. “In Jacob you have done what is just and right.” Rather, this is a summary of Israel’s experience of God’s justice; that is, it’s acknowledging that when God sent the people into exile, they deserved it.
It’s acknowledging that when there was sin down below the mountain while Moses was receiving the commandments on top, and in consequence there was punishment, they deserved it. And when God has defended his people against those who are trying to bully them into submission and take them over and steal their wealth, and God protected them, he did what was just, for this authority can’t ever get it wrong. He is just.
Now in the Old Testament, this had huge implications, at least on paper, for the Davidic king. I’ll come back to this one right at the end, but I’ll mention it briefly now. In the Old Testament, the Davidic king was seen, as it were, as God’s son. No, not his real son, but the one who was to act like God. The real king of Israel was God, but the Davidic king, the line of royalty from David, the dynasty from David, was supposed to execute justice in line with what God had said, and execute mercy in line with God had said.
In other words, the justice of the king over which the earthly king had due authority was supposed to reflect God himself. So many, many, many are the psalms, for example, that talk about the need for the king to be just. Read, for example, Psalm 45. “A scepter of righteousness is in your right hand,” the courtier says to the king. “A scepter of righteousness is in your right hand.” That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Ultimately the messianic King, the promised ultimate King, great David’s greater son, the King who would finally bring in perfect justice, the one whom we know as Jesus, he is described already in great prophecies of the Old Testament underlining this justice theme. Listen to Isaiah 11: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse.” That is, from the destroyed Davidic dynasty. Jesse was David’s great-grandfather. “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” This is promising the ultimate Messiah coming from the Davidic line.
“The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and power, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord—and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears, but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist.” Then it speaks ultimately of the transformation in the final consummation when there is no death or destruction anymore. “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together.… They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
Why? Because he establishes peace, not simply by force of arms. “You do it my way regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, good or bad. You do it my way because I hold the gun.” Rather, he perfectly brings together absolute authority with absolute justice. Classic Marxism, of course, argued that you must have revolutionary man before you can have new man. That’s their terminology.
Revolutionary man comes to destroy the entire capitalist system. After you’ve destroyed the capitalist system, so that there is no advantage now in being wealthy, and the structures are such that everyone rises to give as he can to take only as he has need, once you have destroyed the system and established Marxist structures, then new man emerges. That’s the theory in Marxism.
But of course what it presupposes is that all injustice, finally, is the result of merely social forces. It doesn’t examine the heart, which is why no Marxist society has ever got beyond revolutionary man. You destroy the system, and then you put another oligarchy in place. The new man doesn’t arise because the problem is not just in the system; it’s in the heart.
This doesn’t mean that there’re no distinctions to be made between a better system and a worse system. It does mean that no matter how good the system, ultimately, we can corrupt it. You name a system; we’ll corrupt it. But supposing you have a supreme King, all-powerful, who is perfectly just, who can never be deceived, who can’t be bought off, and who, out of his power, but nevertheless with perfect equity, can establish order? Now would that be a society to die for? Except of course that we ourselves would also be called out.
There is so much in the Scripture that celebrates God’s justice, because biblical writers were aware of how much injustice there was. So it becomes a longing for the day when God so manifests his kingly power in final consummating justice that no one will ever, ever, ever be able to say, “God was unjust.” And on the last day, when all the accounts are in, we are told by the Bible that every mouth will be stopped, and everyone will finally see the justice of God. “Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool; he is holy.”
3. God the personal, self-disclosing King.
Verses 6–9. In the first part, holiness is exalted. In the second part, holiness is enthroned. In this third part, holiness is encountered, and when we encounter holiness, we come face to face sooner or later with our own sin. Look at the figures that are mentioned. “Moses and Aaron were among his priests, Samuel was among those who called on his name; they called on the Lord and he answered them. He spoke to them from the pillar of cloud; they kept his statutes and the decrees he gave them.”
There’s a lot here to encourage us. This God did not remain aloof, some deist notion of a god who sort of winds up the universe like the supreme watchmaker and then doesn’t pay it much attention anymore. This is the God who gets involved with us, do you see? He actually disclosed himself through his priests, like Moses and Aaron. And he disclosed himself through his prophets, like Samuel, one of the great prophets, the one who finally under God as a prophet actually introduced the first Davidic king.
These men were obedient in very substantial ways. They led the people in righteousness in very substantial ways. And this God is involved with his people; he’s not merely distant. Even the little word among is cheering, isn’t it? Moses and Aaron were among his priests. Samuel was among those who called on his name. That is to say, they are not a separate class. We can belong, as it were, to their company. They were among them.
So you have these positive pictures of God’s own priests, God’s own people, and God’s own prophets responding to him. They kept his statutes and the decrees he gave them. And then on the flip side, verse 8. “O Lord our God, you answered them; you were to Israel a forgiving God, though you punished their misdeeds.”
And you realize suddenly that what the psalmist is thinking of when he speaks about how these people cried to God and God answered them, what they were crying for was the forgiveness of God’s people. Because this just God we cannot finally live with. This God is so just that at the end of the day, he exposes our corruptions. He exposes our idolatries. He exposes our lusts. He exposes our hates. He exposes our arrogance. He exposes our desire to be God. He exposes our anarchy, our own idolatry.
And yet this God graciously listened to the voices of priests, among them Moses, and prophets, among them Samuel. It’s easy to remember the incidents. Do you remember how Moses intercedes for the people in Exodus 33, for example? Do you remember how Aaron and others intercede, too? And yet Aaron himself falls in the matter of the golden calf, and Moses himself falls in Numbers 20 in the matter of smashing the rock.
Samuel himself doesn’t get everything right and has to actually be told by God to shut up and forget King Saul now; God has moved on to another man. Even these great priests and prophets were among the sinners. Yet God graciously listened to them and forgave the sins of his people. Not because he is soft-hearted and doesn’t care. No, no. There is a measure of punishment that is meted out. “You did punish their misdeeds.”
Now you are left with a tension that runs right through the Old Testament. This tension in which God does mete out some punishment yet keeps insisting that this punishment is nothing like what they deserve. God is slow to anger, abounding in love and mercy. He forgives them. Where is the final solution to this?
Do we just go through endless cycles of repenting and coming back to God, and then getting squashed again as we rebel one more time? Is there no solution to this at all? So far the psalm doesn’t hint at the answer, but it comes to the end and says, “Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain, for the Lord our God is holy.” That is, if there is any solution to this constant problem of sin, it’s going to be with God.
“Exalt the Lord on his holy mountain.” The place of the King; the place of the temple. The place of the King; the place of sacrifice. “For the Lord our God …” Do you hear now this personal confession? Earlier was, “He is holy.” Now, “The Lord our God is holy.” Do you hear the heart cry here? If there is any hope at all for us, it belongs with this God. “Exalt his name, for the Lord our God is holy. He is God.” Now then, before I leave this psalm, I must make two steps, and they mean everything.
1. God is always the King.
He is never not King. He reigns providentially. Read, for example, Isaiah 40 and following. These wonderful chapters in which even the mighty empires of the day are nothing more than the fine dust in the balance compared with him. And the other gods, they don’t know the end from the beginning, but God does. He orders things and he brings them to pass; even a pagan ruler like Cyrus is nothing more than God’s own servant.
If God raises him up for a certain task, who is going to tell him, “No”? God is always providentially the King. Thus, in the great vision of Revelation 4 and 5, Revelation 4 is to Revelation 5 what a setting is to a drama. What you get in the great vision of Revelation 4 is the setting of God on his throne in heaven, and all of the varied imagery conspires together to picture this God as so utterly transcendent that even the highest order of angels … cherubim, seraphim … cover their faces with their wings, unable to gaze at him in his glory.
They cast their crowns before him, acknowledging that they are dependent creatures. They are not independent; they only have derivative rights. And they sing, “You are worthy, because you created all things.” God alone is God. He’s the reigning King over all that he has made in heaven and earth. The first responsibility of the creature is to recognize his or her creatureliness.
That’s why the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. That is recognizing that God alone is God. God alone is holy. It’s putting God at the center. Anything less than that is already idolatry. It is a failure to recognize our creatureliness. It is the beginning of idolatry.
It is the beginning of the de-Godding of God. Do you see? It is bound up with recognition that this is God’s universe, and God alone is King. If we fail to give him the honor that is due his name as King, it’s not as if we’re thumbing our noses at a constitutional monarch; we are thumbing our noses at his majesty, and we are in his kingdom whether we like it or not, because we are derivative beings. He will hold us to account. It’s a horrible betrayal. It’s a wretched, horrific anarchy. But even more importantly …
2. In ancient Israel, as I have said, the king of the nation was to reflect the ultimate King of Israel; that is, he was supposed to reflect God and his justice.
This comes across in a lot of different ways in the Old Testament. Let me mention three.
A. Sonship language.
In Psalm 2, the king is pictured as the son of God. In the ancient world, the son ended up doing what the father did. If your father was a farmer, the son ended up being a farmer. Now if the father is the king, then the son ends up being a king eventually. So the Davidic king is understood to be a kind of son of God, so that when he takes the throne, God says to him in effect, “Today I have begotten you. Today I have become your father.” And the king says, “Yes, yes, he said to me, ‘Today I have become your father.’ ” Thus, he is supposed to act like his own father.
B. Kingship language.
There is not only son imagery but also, expressly, “king” language. Do you remember the great vision of Isaiah 6? Isaiah has apparently been blinded a wee bit by the power of King Uzziah. But then, “In the year King Uzziah died,” Isaiah says, “I saw the Lord.” And the vision of God was so transcendent that he becomes aware of his own sin.
“I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King.” Not King Uzziah; he is dead. But now that King Uzziah is dead, Isaiah sees, as it were, the ultimate King, the real King, God the King, and he becomes aware, as the psalmist is aware, of God’s justice; and therefore, of his own injustice. So, sonship language, kingship language, then …
C. Shepherd language.
The shepherd, you see, ruled over his flock. The shepherd looked after the flock. The shepherd took responsibility for the flock. The shepherd disciplined the flock. The shepherd provided food for the flock, as the king was supposed to rule his people, and discipline his people, and provide security and food for his people. There was a theory in effect that everything came directly or indirectly from the king.
Therefore, when the shepherds of Israel, the leaders of Israel, the kings of Israel, the priests, the prophets of Israel became corrupt, then God himself says, as in Ezekiel 34, “These wretched shepherds, these wretched kings, these wretched rulers. They are fleecing the flock. They are eating the mutton, but they don’t look after the sheep. They don’t care for the sheep.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he says about 25 times in Ezekiel 34, “I myself will shepherd the flock. I myself will lead them to pasture. I myself will nurture them. I myself will discipline them. I myself will be their Shepherd.” He says this about 25 times, and then he says, “In fact, I will send my servant David to be their shepherd.” He is going to do it himself by sending his servant David, and 600 years later there was a voice heard in the land of Israel who said, “I am the Good Shepherd.”
So the Gospels rejoice that Jesus is the King. They rejoice that he is the Son of God. They rejoice that he is the Good Shepherd. He is the promised King. He is the Ruler. He is God manifest. And then the supreme irony of all, this thundering King, this one who approaches the Ancient of Days on the clouds of heaven (according to Daniel 7), he dies the abominable death of a damned malefactor. He is crucified in open agony and shame.
And after the resurrection, Christians beginning to understand speak with a knowing smile and deep irony, “Jesus reigns from a cross.” Do you have any idea how shocking that was in the first century? Kings rule. They are not constitutional monarchs. Kings rule, and Jesus reigns from a cross. For while he is perfectly just, and while he makes his demands, and while he holds everyone to account, he is also the one who in his own body bears our sins on the tree to reconcile sinners to himself.
The psalmist was right. There is only one solution to this: “Exalt the Lord. He alone is holy.” The psalmist was right. It took the Son. It took the King. It took the Shepherd to die for the sheep to redeem a whole family of sons and daughters to establish this kingly rule. We are told now by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 that all of God’s authority is mediated through Christ.
Do you realize that? All of God’s providence in your life; all of God’s providence in Kabul, Afghanistan; all of God’s providence in Lagos, Nigeria; all of God’s providence in the farthest reaches of the universe is mediated through Christ, for Paul says he must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet, and the last enemy that will be destroyed is death itself.
Small wonder Jesus says before the words of the Great Commission, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” Oh, he is the King. His reign is still contested, but he is the King. And one day, there will no longer be any contest at all. None. And then we will see the fulfillment of all our prayers when we have prayed times without number across the centuries, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
That, of course, is why Christians today can put up with sickness and suffering and bereavement and loss and discouragement. Because they still trust their King. This King, who is not only trustworthy because of his stature as God, his sovereignty, his goodness, his justice, but also trustworthy because he has loved us even to the cross.
He promises to bring in the consummated kingdom, prompting Christians in every century to lift their voices and cry, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” May it be so. World without end. Amen.
