“Why do the Nations Rage?”

Sunday, March 6, 2022

The kings of the earth desire to be deified. They demand to be regarded as gods, requiring obedience and, if not worship, then fear. With regard to this, a critical question in the Bible occurs in the second Psalm 2, where it says “Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain?”

I’m so glad for those last two words, “in vain.” They preen and they pout; they demand and they threaten. They bring together tremendous forces to exert their will. But all these things that they do, they do “in vain.”

Why? Because of the Father and the Son - the LORD and His Anointed. Here in this Old Testament text, we have both together, working together, to frustrate the plans of the wicked. There is no real problem here. These “great men of the earth” are as nothing to God. In their faces, God laughs: “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision” (v.4). 

These wicked leaders can hurt us. They can hurt a lot of people, ruining lives, ending lives - except for the fact that the Father and the Son give eternal life and abundant life with the promise that the former hurts will be so far removed that it will be as though they never happened. These wicked leaders are a real problem - to us. But ultimately, they are no problem for God.

Think of these rulers standing before God on judgment day. We are given pictures in Scripture of the end of these men - small pictures, like Joshua with his men with their feet on the necks of the kings who rose up against the plan of God as God’s people came to inherit their land (Joshua 10); of Agag’s beheading by the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 15:32-33); of Haman’s hanging on the gallows that he himself built, intended for the hanging of righteous Mordecai (Esther 7:9-10); and who can forget wicked Herod who, without human help, was destroyed by God for his arrogance (Acts 12:21-23) - small pictures of a much great scene to come.

All of this makes the phrase “Christ crucified” all the more shocking. Here is Jesus, the Anointed, sentenced by a Roman governor for the pleasure of a Roman emperor and with the agreement of the “fake” king of the Jews, Herod. On that day, it seemed as though the bad guys won, just as it seems so many times today. But each of those “bad guys,” every single one, will stand before that same Lord in judgment one day. God will have the last laugh.