Bible Commentaries

Acts 4:25 the psalm is referred to as Messianic; in Acts 13:33, Psalm 2:7 is referred to as accomplished in the resurrection; and in Hebrews 1:5 it is regarded as intimating Christ's proper divinity. No doubt is entertained by the closest investigators, that in early days before the Christian era the psalm was regarded as Messianic. It has been attempted to explain it in reference to David, Psalm 2:1-3).

Why do the heathen rage? Because they are the heathen. The explanation of an action is to be found in character. The heathen, understanding by that term all lawless and unorganised communities, or communities uninspired by the spirit of reverence and justice, are without religious intelligence, sobriety, self-control; therefore they "rage"—literally, they bluster, and they foolishly suppose that noise is power. Thus the explanation of all thing's of a human kind is to be found in the quality of human character. No solidity of character means excitement, restlessness, fury, aimless striking, and irrational procedure altogether.

Why do the people imagine a vain thing? Because they are the people; that is to say, they are a crowd, a multitude, a mob; they do not move from a social centre; they are the victims and sport of any passion that may be uppermost at the moment The idea of social or united responsibility does not enter into their thinking, and, therefore, does not regulate their action. Mere numbers do not constitute society: men may be in association and yet not in fellowship. What is wanted is organisation, legal, moral, and sympathetic; such organisation alone constitutes "the people" in the Christian and even truly philosophic sense of the term.

But why do the kings and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord? Because they are kings and rulers; that is to say, they do not know that all governments are inferior and subordinate to spiritual and divine dominion; they resent every suggestion of the sort; they have all the pettiness but none of the genius of rulership; they do not know that rulership ought to come up out of the spirit of obedience, and, therefore, that he who cannot obey, cannot rule. Their notion of rulership is that of "directing" and "casting away"; it is destructive, negative, ruthless. The very terms they use indicate their conception of sovereignty. They do not say, Let us examine; they say, Let us break; not, Let us argue, but, Let us cast away! And this spirit comes out of a false notion of divine government; they designate that government by two expressive terms—namely, "bands" and "cords"; they think that the Lord's government is tyranny and slavery; to them it is not a spiritual dominion of thought, rectitude, sympathy, culture, discipline; but a dominion of bands and cords,—that Psalm 2:4-5).

The heathen and the people, the kings and the rulers, are answered with contempt, they are laughed at and derided; and if this be not enough to change their spirit and their purpose they will be spoken to in wrath and vexed in sore displeasure. It is interesting and instructive to remark how creation first laughs at and derides men who oppose it, and how in the next place it avenges the insults which are offered to its laws. When Canute rebuked the waves the sea laughed at him and the waves had him in derision; had he remained upon the position which he had chosen, laughter and derision would have been exchanged for vengeance and overthrow. Let a man attempt to put down the wind, and the only possible answer is derision; let him attempt to defy the lightning, and he may perish under its stroke. There is but a short distance between the derisiveness of nature and its penal judgments. So every attempt to revile the power of God is contemned, and every insult offered to his holiness is avenged. A very curious process is indicated by these two verses. The laughter is expressive of an eternal law; things are not so constituted that they can be turned about at the pleasure of the wicked, nor is the purpose of the universe so fickle that the wrath of man can affect its fulfilment; great strength can afford to deride; infinite power can best express its own consciousness of almightiness by smiling upon all the hosts which array themselves against it But this answer of contemptuous laughter must not be the only reply, for contempt can seldom have any moral issue of a really substantial and blessed kind; there must come a time when law must avenge itself upon those who would insult its majesty or mock its power. First, laughter as a proof of the utter impossibility of injuriously affecting the standards and purposes of God; after laughter must come the judgment, which shows how dangerous it is to trifle with fire, and how awful a thing it is to defy the wrath of righteousness. It is for every man to consider under what particular phase of the divine regard he is now living. For a period he may be amused, as it were, at certain phases of the opposition of nature or the awkwardness of life; but let him not suppose that he sees the whole of the case: such opposition and awkwardness may suddenly be displaced by judgment and vengeance and destiny irrevocable.

A very beautiful expression is found in the sixth verse:—"Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion." There is but one king, and he is throned upon a hill that is beyond all other characteristics holy. Mark how the moral is associated with the royal in this picture of divine sovereignty. A throne that is set upon any other hill than a hill that is holy must fall because of want of solid and enduring foundation. Assured that the hill is holy, we may comfort ourselves with the further assurance that every sovereignty founded upon it is also holy. The kings of the earth had forgotten the King of Zion, and the rulers made by rude strength of their own had forgotten that all true rulership is but a phase of heaven's eternal sway. What is the reason why masters should rule their households well? because they have to remember that they themselves have a master. So kings are to reign under the King, and power is to be established upon holiness. Any king who supposes himself to be final must of necessity become a tyrant, because final authority is inconsistent with limited wisdom and restricted power. Finality can only belong to completeness. Kings should never cease to pray. This applies not only to kingships of a political or imperial kind, but to sovereignties of a spiritual, moral, and social degree. There is a temptation to believe that kingship is equivalent to deity; in other words, that the man who is upon the throne has no need to live upon any higher life than his own. This is a fatal error into whatever lines of thinking it may enter. The more gifted the mind, the more incessant should be its religious desires, that it may be kept in the right course, upheld amid all the temptations incident to ascendency, and chastened daily by still deeper insight into the frailty of human nature and the uncertainty of all earthly or finite tenures. In this sense the father has, so to say, more need to pray than has the child. In a sense he is both father and child, having to think for both, and plan the life of both, and concern himself with the most solemn aspects of the destiny of both. The pastor's prayer should be coloured by the necessity and the desire of the thousand hearts that look to him for the utterance of common necessities.

"I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel" ( Psalm 2:7-9).

There is nothing in the economy of life and civilisation that is haphazard. Before all things and round about them as a glory and defence is the Lord's "decree." Under all disorder is law. That law is first beneficent and then retributive; it is beneficent because it contemplates the recovery and sanctification of the heathen and the uttermost parts of the earth; it is retributive because if this offer of enclosure and honour is rejected, those who despise it shall be broken with a rod of iron and dashed to pieces like a potter's vessel. In a study of the world's constitution and movement, look first of all at the Lord's decree, in other words, at the Lord's idea and purpose. Settle it that the decree is good, merciful, redemptive, and then judge everything in the light of that fact. If we were judging of a national constitution, we should not pronounce it bad because of its prisons; we should, on the contrary, pronounce it good for that very reason. We should know that there was a strong authority in the land, and that the authority was good because it imprisoned and rebuked the workers of evil. So the rod of iron attests the holiness of God; and hell itself shows that virtue is honoured of heaven. Whatever may be the intermediate interpretation of these words, it is the joy of the Christian to find their full fruition in the advent and priesthood of Jesus Christ. Sometimes long periods are required for the full interpretation of ancient terms. We read these terms with wonder; sometimes we invent momentarily satisfactory interpretations of them; we may even go so far as to build orthodoxies upon certain meanings which we attribute to them; but; as the ages come and go and new phases of human nature and divine purpose are disclosed we begin to see fuller, if not final meanings, and according to our enlarging light should be the expansiveness of our judgment and charity. No birth in human history known to us so completely covers these terms with glory and beneficence as does the birth of Jesus Christ the Son of God. Not even in the New Testament have these words been excelled for dignity and spiritual richness. Here is law as if eternity itself had spoken: here is divine consultation resembling the conference between the persons of the Godhead reported in the earliest books of Scripture: here is the creation of a new term—" Psalm 2:10-12).

The threatening of Jehovah is neither an empty taunt nor a lawless passion. When he speaks of breaking the wicked with a rod of iron and dashing them in pieces like a potter's vessel, he is not to be compared with the kings and rulers who said "Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us." God's threatening has a moral purpose in view, which is to turn the kings to wisdom and the judges to instruction: his threatening is indeed an aspect of his gospel. When the parent threatens the child it is not for the child's injury but for the child's welfare. We do wrong in stopping at the threatening and overlooking the purpose. Our business is rather to look steadfastly at the purpose of God and to believe that all the methods which he adopts for its accomplishment are wise and good and best. Having shown the wicked how terrible he can be—how easy it would be for him to break them and dash them in pieces—he calls upon them to serve to him, kiss the Acts 13:33): "It is also written in the second Psalm 2:12; 1 Samuel 10:1). Xenophon says that it was a national custom with the Persians to kiss whomsoever they honoured. Kissing the feet of princes was a token of subjection and obedience; which was sometimes carried so far that the print of the foot received the kiss, so as to give the impression that the very dust had become sacred by the royal tread, or that the subject was not worthy to salute even the prince's foot, but was content to kiss the earth itself near or on which he trod ( Isaiah 49:23; Micah 7:17; Psalm 72:9). The Rabbins did not permit more than three kinds of kisses, the kiss of reverence, of reception, and of dismissal.

The peculiar tendency of the Christian religion to encourage honour towards all men, as men; to foster and develop the softer affections; and, in the trying condition of the early church, to make its members intimately known one to another, and unite them in the closest bonds—led to the observance of kissing as an accompaniment of that social worship which took its origin in the very cradle of our religion. Hence the exhortation—"Salute each other with a holy kiss" ( Romans 16:16; see also 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26; in 1 Peter 5:14, it is termed "a kiss of charity"). The observance was continued in later days, and has not yet wholly disappeared, though the peculiar circumstances have vanished which gave propriety and emphasis to such an expression of brotherly love and Christian friendship.—Kitto's Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature.