Psalm 2 - Spiritual Beings and Begotten
Podcast Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)
Hello, and welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. We are in Season 2. And Season 2 means that we are in Book 1 of the Book of Psalms.
And yesterday we started off, we kind of gave an introduction to the Book of Psalms. We would invite you to look back at that if you are, haven't tuned in. That way you can kind of get an idea of where we're going.
And wanted to start today in Psalm 2. And as I mentioned yesterday, the Book of Psalms starts off with these two Psalms, Psalm 1 and 2.
And it kind of gives the overall thoughts for as we enter into the Book of Psalms, here's what we need to keep in mind.
So yesterday we learned that as we approach the Book of Psalms, we approach it realizing that it is God's Word and that as it lives in us and it bears fruit, it shows us what is good and what is bad.
And that if we're wise, if we want to be happy or blessed in our life, we listen to what God has to say. And we don't ignore him. We don't scoff at what he says.
We listen to him. We meditate. We think about what his Word says.
And as we come into Psalm 2, we're going to see some of those exact same thoughts fleshed out in a little bit bigger scale. So yesterday we looked at, okay, this person is like an individual tree that's planted by rivers of water.
His leaf doesn't wither. He brings forth fruit in his season. Whatever he does works.
And that the wicked aren't like that, but they're like chaff that floats away. It's a little bit more individual. What we're going to see today in Psalm 2 is a little bit more cosmic.
So let's dive right in. Psalm 2 in verse 1 says this, Why are the nations restless and the peoples plotting in vain? This word is the same one as for meditating in Psalm 1.
Why are they thinking about going over and over and over in their head, just like the righteous are thinking about the law of the Lord and how they can meditate on it?
The peoples, the heathen, the nations of the world, they are plotting, thinking, meditating about how they can not obey God, how they can avoid His judgment.
It says in verse 2, The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers conspire together against Yahweh and against His anointed, His Messiah, saying, Let's tear their shackles apart and throw their ropes away from us.
We don't want to do what God says. We don't want to follow His anointed one, His King, His Messiah. It says, He who sits in the heavens laughs.
That sitting was a sign of authority, it was a sign of calm. You wouldn't be sitting down if you kind of weren't in charge. The one that's sitting in a throne room is the one that is most important, that they're the one giving the orders.
And here is Yahweh that is sitting in the heavens, sitting in the heavens, in the highest courts of all. He's sitting. He's not worried.
It says, he who sits in the heavens laughs. This isn't a comforting laugh. This isn't, oh, that's really cute, guys, that you think you can do this.
It's almost more of a laugh. Well, here, it speaks to it in the second part of the verse. He who sits in the heavens, the one who's enthroned in the skies laughs.
It says the Lord scoffs at them. I grew up on the King James. It says something like he has them in derision.
He goes, you guys are so dumb. He says, what are you thinking? You can't fight against life itself.
To do so is to invite destruction. He who sits in the heavens, the one who's enthroned 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.
To God, he is not challenged by this world's rulers and those spiritual forces that are kind of animating them, behind them, pushing them towards destruction and rebellion against God. God's not taken aback by those people. He's not in danger.
He is the danger. To quote a popular TV show, he is the one who knocks. You don't have to be worried about God.
God is the one that the kingdoms of this earth should be worried about. He is the all-powerful one. He says he has installed his king on Zion, his holy mountain.
His kingship that here, to an extent talking about David, this is David writing this, the New Testament writers would take this Psalm often and say, hey, here's what God promised about Jesus. Here's the truths that we find about him.
And the king that God installs is never going to be taken down. Jesus will never encounter any sort of legitimate fight or battle. He reigns unrivaled.
He reigns and no one can stop him. What can he say? Hey, this is going to happen and it won't happen.
He is the sovereign one. So verse 7, God continuing to speak, I will announce the decree of Yahweh. So I was correct.
I said this was God speaking. Technically, this would be Jesus. I will announce the decree of Yahweh.
He said to me, You are my son. Today, I have fathered you. Ask it of me and I will certainly give the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron or a scepter, a staff. You will shatter them like earthenware. So, there's some textual differences on some places.
You will break them with a rod of iron. You will rule them with a rod of iron.
The thought is that they will fall in line with his orders, that there won't be anyone that when Christ comes to reign on this earth, there will be no one that will be able to fight against him. He is sovereign.
He is without challenge, without rival. Notice that he says, You are my son. Today, I have fathered you.
That this is a designation that is on the son. Jesus is just as eternal as God the Father. That they have always been co-existent with the Holy Spirit throughout all of time.
It wasn't God existed and then after some time, then he made Jesus the son and then after some time, he made the Holy Spirit. We believe in the Trinity, which is these three persons in one being.
There's only one God, Yahweh, but this one being God has three distinct persons. That the Father is not the son, the son is not the spirit, the spirit is not the father. They are three distinct persons, each with mind, will and emotions.
You can look at much of the New Testament that kind of fleshes out the mind, will and emotions of the Father, of Jesus and of the Spirit. So all of that takes place here. It is a designation.
So in older translations, when maybe you'd see the word begotten, I forget if this particular edition of the New American Standard has the word begotten.
You know, the King James, New King James, the New American Standard 95 and the Legacy Standard Bible all use that word begotten. It's from the Greek word monogenes. So it's one and then genus or genus, which would be kind.
So the most literal rendering would be one of a kind. So God so loved the world that he gave his one of a kind son. That sounds a little campy.
And so it's one and only. This is the one and only unique person or son. So Isaac is called Abraham's begotten son.
So he is the monogenes. He's the one of the kind. He's a unique son that he was unlike.
He wasn't Abraham's only son. He had several sons, including Ishmael and some others, but he was his one of a kind son. And that's what Jesus is.
So in John 1 where it says that Jesus is God's one of a kind son, that's a begotten son. Here today I have fathered you. I have given you this designation as my son.
It says, ask it of me. I'll certainly give the nations as your inheritance. So I'll give the briefest possible description of this.
If you want to dive more into this thought, I would invite you to read The Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser. He's a Christian Bible scholar that has since passed, but he has an excellent work on this. God creates the world.
He creates, if you will, kind of two families, two image bearing peoples. So he creates the physical, so Adam and Eve, and they are to bear his image kind of in the physical realm.
And then in the spiritual realm, he creates those that are also called to shine out his image, to show him and his will and accomplish his purposes in the spiritual side of things.
We would know those as angels, and the scripture talks about some different designations of those, such as archangels, seraphim, cherubim. Not all of the angels are the same. Some of them have different appearances.
Some of them do different things. Some of them are mainly in the throne room of God. Some of them are tasked with watching over humanity and protecting God's people.
It's a really, really cool study. But as he does that, both of those families of image bearers in the physical realm and in the spiritual realm, they both fell. We would know about that.
We have Satan, all of the demons, those that fell in the spiritual realm, and then there were those in the physical realm, obviously Adam and Eve, Cain, and on and on throughout human history.
With how God has set up the spiritual realm, there are angels that are over particular areas, nations, peoples, and you can read about that even in the Book of Daniel. It highlights much of that in the Book of Deuteronomy.
I think it's chapter 32 or 33. He talks about the fact that the nations were given over to specific spiritual beings, some of which rebelled.
So with Adam and Eve, because they have children who are all coming from their direct line, all that come after Adam and Eve have kind of that sin nature, that they naturally have a bent towards sin.
Obviously with Jesus being the exception, and the angels were individually created, that as Jesus highlights when the Sadducees are talking to him about, hey, in the resurrection, if a woman has married seven brothers, each of them died after
marrying her, whose wife is she going to be in the resurrection? And he explains to them, no, it doesn't work like that in the spiritual side of things. And so you guys are asking the completely wrong question.
Besides, you guys are Sadducees, you don't even believe in angels. What are you doing? So because each of them are not like one group, like humanity all came from Adam and Eve.
And so when they fell, kind of a cascading effect, all of mankind would fall and would have that same temptation and would fall to that same temptation. With the angels, they are individually created, so they didn't necessarily all fall at one time.
Scripture would talk about some different time periods in which some of the angelic beings fell. And one of those is after God divvied out the nations. You can look at Genesis 10 and 11 with the Tower of Babel.
A lot of different things taking place. It's way too long of an explanation for everything that we're doing today. But the angels divvied up over the nations.
Hey, you specific group are in charge of watching over these nations. You do some spiritual ruling. I am in charge of Israel.
And God chose Israel to be His particular possession, that He was going to bring the Messiah through Israel. And then one day, He would take back the rule of all the nations.
And some of those angelic rulers, they fell after having been given the nations. And they caused people to worship them. And you'd have gods like Baal, and you'd have many other things that would happen.
As you read through the Psalms, as you read through especially the major prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel in particular, as you look at, we saw some of the things that were said in Acts about the nations of this earth being given over to the hosts of
heaven, the armies of heaven, those spiritual being rulers. If you want maybe a briefer summary on this, you can look at the Bible projects.
They have six very short videos on spiritual beings and how scripture talks about them and kind of their role would strongly encourage you. Watch those videos.
Very brief, won't take a lot of your time, but will be immensely helpful in getting kind of an idea of, okay, what does the Bible say about spiritual beings? What do they do? How do they interact?
What's their history? All of that. So here in Psalm 2, God is saying, hey, with my Messiah, the king that I'm installing in Jerusalem, he's going to take back all of the nations.
That it's no longer going to be, okay, the angels are ruling this, Jesus is going to rule this.
As a short aside, that's one of the tasks that Scripture says those that believe in Christ and those that accept him, that we will rule with Christ, that what used to be a role of some spiritual beings will then become the role of us as believers, as
Christians, those that have placed our faith in Christ. And I forget if it's 1st or 2nd Corinthians, where it specifically stated that we will judge those errant angels, like we will pronounce the judgment based on the criteria that God sets for us.
That it's a wonderful future, way too much to go into today.
But I want you to know, as we're reading through this passage, these are some of the things that God is talking about, that he has in mind and that we can think about the fact that, okay, it's not just that God did things in the past or that God is
doing something right now, and I guess in the future we'll all kind of be bored. But there's a wonderful both history and future that we have, exciting things that we can't fathom yet, that we will do in eternity. And Christ rules.
There you will rule them with a rod of iron. I think we read that verse at some point in the Book of Acts as well.
You can also read about it in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is definitively mentioned as this is the anointed, this is the ruler, this is the king who's in Zion, that he is strong. Iron was something that wasn't easily broken.
It is something that is firm, and that is who Christ is, that when the enemy comes at you, when temptation comes your way, know that you have a king, you have a savior, you have a priest who rules with a rod of iron, that he can defeat the wickedness
that wants to come against you. He can defeat the circumstances should he so choose. And so if he allows you to go through difficulty, know that these are marching orders from your king, that he says, you've got a purpose even in this hardship.
He says, now then, you kings, use insight, be smart, think about this, let yourselves be instructed, you judges of the earth. He says, serve the Lord with reverence, realize who he is, revere him, respect him. He says, rejoice with trembling.
You can be happy knowing that he doesn't want to destroy you. He wants you to be in relationship with him, but if you fight against life itself, all that's there for you is destruction.
So rejoice that he doesn't want to destroy you, but if you fight against life, you die. That's what happens. He says, kiss the sun.
This is a thing of homage that like you would maybe kiss a ring or kiss the feet of a king during this time. It's not really something we do anymore. He says, kiss the sun.
Pay him homage that he not be angry and you perish on the way. He says, for his wrath may be kindled quickly, how blessed are all who take refuge in him. Notice that his wrath may be kindled quickly.
So if someone really gets angry quickly, do you want to run towards him or away from him? I would want to run away from the person that can have his wrath kindled quickly. But it says how blessed, how happy are all who take refuge in him.
The result of fearing God is not running away from him, is not not doing his commandments, is not not reading scripture.
The way to interact with the fear of God is to run straight to him because in him is life and love and joy and peace and safety forever. So we can follow him and take refuge in him.
Already taking a good bit of time today, but hope that this would be an encouragement to you, would encourage you.
Go watch or listen to the Bible Project videos on spiritual beings and realize that the God who oversees all of both the physical realm and the spiritual realm, the one who has created all of it, stands without rival, that there is no enemy you could
ever face on heaven, in heaven or on earth or under the earth. There is nothing that can stand against your God. And if He is for you, if He is on your side, then who could be against you?
