MPC, 30th December 2001.Psalm 72 - "The Perfect King: Fanciful or Real?"
Maurie Cropper MPC, 30th December 2001.
Stories involving fantasy have always attracted huge audiences. From Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream to Rowling's Harry Potter. Enid Blyton's Noddy; Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows; A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh; and C. S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. J.R.R. Tolkien was a contemporary of Lewis. His fantasy story, The Lord of the Rings is the latest adapted to film. It grossed over $45 million dollars in its first three days in American cinemas, and over $4.1 million on its first day in Australia. It's attracted huge audiences.
Tolkien was a classical scholar, a linguist, a professor at Oxford University who taught Anglo Saxon and English literature for about thirty five years. Tolkien got the idea for his first book on fantasy, about a funny little creature called Bilbo the Hobbit, from telling stories to his young children. In 1936 The Hobbit was published. A sequel in the form of a trilogy followed under the titles of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King.
Tolkien's stories have a sort of timeless feel to them. Like so many other stories they are about good and evil. And how the tyranny of evil threatens good. Remember Disney's The Lion King? These same themes are found in Tolkien's works.
I said that these stories have a sort of timeless feel about them. Let me explain what I mean.
During the mid 60's and into the 70's there was a very real cloud of fear and pessimism about the world. A few years earlier President Kennedy, and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The confrontation between the USA and Cuba, along with its ally the then Soviet Union almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The Cold War in Europe, and the war in Vietnam only increased that tension. I see a number of you nodding your head.
People of my age at the time were seeking answers to questions about life, not from world leaders in whom they had lost confidence, but from philosophers and gurus of all kinds, and from their writings.
Now Tolkien would never have considered himself a guru on life's question. But what he had written seemed to lend an answer to so much fear and misgivings about the world. So many travellers that I met as I travelled the world, were engrossed in Tolkien's stories.
What Tolkien offered in the stories involving the fantasy creatures... the Hobbits... was a sense of hope that good could rise to the threat and challenge of evil... and win. And note the parallels to those times that I mentioned, and the time we live in now, and that of the Hobbit.
The Hobbit lived in the relative isolation of their Shire, the Shire in Eriador - with its pleasant green fields and rivers, modest farms from which through honest labour they prospered... largely unaware of the world around them. Something like America before September the 11th. In fact, Hobbits were oblivious to the gradually darkening world at large. The same sort of dark world that threatened my sense of well-being around thirty years ago, and for many people, the dark work of evil that has given our false sense of security a good shaking over the past months.
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy ends with the evil might of the Dark Lord Sauron finally being defeated by the good king Aragorn, who becomes King of Middle-earth. No longer did the inhabitants of Middle-earth have anything to fear from evil. The return of the king, as the last part of the trilogy is titled, brings an anticipation of peace and hope.
This anticipation of peace and hope was what the people of Israel in the Old Testament also longed for, and they, like us, will never find real peace or hope, in fictitious characters. Characters whose claims of ultimate peace and hope can never be trusted when a sequel is on the horizon.
Real peace and real hope can only be delivered by someone who is real, someone who has the power to step into history and save us from the evil of this world, and of the evil within.
The coming of such a King was anticipated by the people of Israel. A king who would have a close relationship with both his God and his people. Psalm 72 offers a glimpse of the ideal relationship between ruler, God, and people.
The psalm consists of prayer and prophecy. And without wanting to bore you to sleep, these are distinguishable by the verb forms. Which, in the case of Psalm 72, are either 'imperfects' translated as English 'futures' or 'jussives'. 'Imperfects' are the language of prophecy. For example, in verse 2 "He will ...". Whereas 'jussives' are the language of prayer. For example, in verse 8 "May he ...". The NIV bible unfortunately has them all written as 'imperfects'. It therefore, misses out on conveying the message through both prophecy and prayer, as the author intended.
To all you linguists out there I'm sure all this is simpler than it sounds. But whether Psalm 72 is taken as prophecy or prayer, it doesn't take away from the content which is all about a coming king who will be a King above all kings, and one that we are told in verse 11, look at it with me: "All kings will bow down to him and all nations will serve him." In fact verse 11 is pivotal to the whole psalm. It's what Israel is pinning all their hopes on. A universal King. One who would protect and bring blessing upon blessing on his people. One who would take on the roles of warrior, judge, redeemer and shepherd. One who would be recognised by all nations... to the extent that they would serve him, and only him. And God would not let them down!
Let's see how the psalm takes shape. Let's hear what we can learn from it about the coming King sent from God.
From the outset the general question of prophecy or prayer is raised. Look at verse 1. "Endow the king with your justice, O God, the royal son with your righteousness."
Who is this king that the psalmist is referring to? Is the psalmist's chief aim to pray for a contemporary king, like Solomon, or to prophesy the coming Messiah?
In one sense he is concerned with his own time. His introduction in verse one is like a liturgy, a ceremonial saying for God's people to repeat. "Endow the king with your justice, O God, the royal son with your righteousness."
The introduction could have been King David praying for his young son Solomon, who would one day be king.
In another sense, and because we have the whole of Scripture before us, it is the kingship of Christ that is being foretold. After all, his kingship is the primary concern of all Scripture! And although the New Testament nowhere connects this psalm with Christ, the connections it does make... show that everything RIGHT and GOOD about the Old Testament Israelite monarchy foreshadowed the Messiah's kingdom to come.
With the use of the imperfect/future forms from verse 2 to 7, the psalmist leaves us with no doubt that he is prophesying that God's royal son and future king will judge with righteousness, and will defend and bring justice to the afflicted and the oppressed... and crush the oppressor.
The rich blessing of God's people under his king's rule, is beautifully spelt out by the psalmist is these verses.
...and the word in verse 7 that the NIV translates as "prosperity" is technically the word salom (shalom), which means so much more than "prosperity". It means total well-being: potentially the people under Solomon - and certainly ours under Christ! The prophet Isaiah tells us that eal peace is the 'fruit of righteousness'. (Is. 32:17) So if the king's rule is based on righteousness... the promise of peace... a sense of well-being is totally secure.
What was given to Solomon, the first 'royal son', he eventually lost. Christ, King David's greater heir is the Real Royal Son. He is both our righteousness and our peace. Paul reminds us of this when he wrote to the church in Corinth saying: "It is because of [God] that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God - that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption." (1Cor. 1:30) And once credited with righteousness Paul says in Romans 5:1-2 "...we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into his grace in which we now stand."
How foolish are we if we seek real peace anywhere else other than in Christ. How unwise are we if we don't cling to Christ, especially as his right to rule over our lives is based on his righteousness.
And let us follow the lead of the psalmist, who in verses 8 to 10, and 15 to 17a, commits God's royal son's rule of righteousness over all the earth!
Let us be people who commit to prayer His rule over the seas, and to the ends of the earth... his rule over all people, all nations, and over all the kings and leaders of those nations. Let us pray that just as the kings of Tarshish, and of Sheba, and of Seba, paid tribute to Solomon... that with even better reason, the universal authority and recognition of Christ might have supremacy over all who live in the world today.
For most of us, we don't have to go further than our family, or our circle of friends, or our neighbourhood... to be compelled to pray that Christ's righteousness will triumphant over their lives. For when Christ returns, all people will recognise him as King - but it may be too late for some to call Him Lord.
The post-script to Psalm 72 begins at verse 17b, which corresponds with verse 1 and verse 11. In a sense these three verses are what ties the psalm together. They are both the focus and the source of what the psalmist has to say.
The last part of verse 17b "All nations will be blessed through him, and they will call him blessed." ...has a parallel in the promises made to Abraham. When God told him: "All peoples on earth will be blessed through you; ..through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed ..." ...was a promise to Abraham when at the time he offered his son Isaac as a sacrifice. Later on God uttered the same words to Isaac. Abraham might have assumed that the "offspring" was a reference to Isaac, and Isaac might have thought it meant Jacob. In Psalm 72, David might have assumed it would be Solomon. But always God has something better in store.
The Apostle Paul confirmed it for us when he said: "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say 'and to the seeds', meaning many people, but 'and to your seed', meaning one person, who is Christ." (Gal.3:16)
I began by talking about Tolkien's fanciful character King Aragorn in his story The Return of the King.
I want to end by exhorting you to be ready for the return of, not a fictional king, but THE ONE AND ONLY RIGHTEOUS KING. THE ONLY KING WHO CAN SAVE HIS PEOPLE. THE ONLY KING WHO CAN GRANT PEACE AND HOPE, AS WE AWAIT THE FULFILLMENT OF HIS COMING KINGDOM.
I WANT YOU TO BE READY FOR KING JESUS!
...in the words of the psalmist:
"Long may he live!
May people ever pray for him [to return] and bless him all day long.
May his name endure for ever; may it continue as long as the sun." (15-17)