Psalm 110

 A Psalm of David

⁰¹          The LORD Says to my Lord;

                        ‘Sit at My right hand,

            until I make Your enemies

a footstool for Your feet.’

⁰²          The LORD will extend Your mighty scepter from Zion;

                        You will rule in the midst of Your enemies!

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Christ – at the Right Hand of God

For the Lord’s Day:  the 9^th of February 2003

 

Hebrews: 1: 13

 

“And to which of the angels has he ever said,

‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet?’”

Introduction:  While I have been complaining for some years, along with World magazine and a host of others about the NIV copyright holders choosing to do what-so-ever they will with their self claimed “publishing product”, I must carefully state that this is not so definitely new as to have been unheard of ever before.  The Liberal Church had its modernized Revised Standard Version, from the fifties.  And their product was only more subtle in its understatement than the current translation scandal involving the manhood of Christ and the desire of the only Triune Creator God to be called by masculine terms – including “Father.” 

 

The Liberal Church had by the middle of the last century already decided how they would doctor the language to dampen down the implied theology and to substitute inferior concepts to the very words which symbolically attained to the greatness set out before them in the whole history of the spoken and written tongues.  Whole generations of school children have been dumbed down for no other purposes except: better management, greater ignorance and cultural conditioning.

 

And yet, our whole complaint seems to be set in the modern era which is now even embarrassed to proclaim the year of our Lord “Anno Domini” according to the calendar once centered upon the very first advent of our Lord Jesus Christ.  John Owen spends page after page demonstrating what the Jewish scholars have been doing since the time of Christ to downplay the essential observations and meanings of their own sacred texts – so that they could expurge any conceptual prophecy of the person and place of Christ.  So it is with the grandest of the Messianic passages in the Old Covenant that stands before us today in the first verse of the 110^th Psalm.  John Brown tells us: “All the ancient Jewish interpreters explain it of the Messiah.  Even on the principles of the typical system, it is impossible to refer it to any mere human prince; and in the New Testament it is no fewer than eight times quoted and reasoned from, in a way which makes it evident that our Lord and His Apostles considered it as having a direct and sole reference to Him.”

 

By contrast, Owen reports “of the Targum or Chaldee paraphrase” the meaning of Psalm 110: 1 was corrupted to read “The Lord said by his Word that he would give me the kingdom, because I studied the docrine of the law of his right hand.  Wait thou until I make thine enemies thy footstool.”  He continues his report:  “it is hence sufficiently evident that this Targum was made after the Jews began to be exercised in the controversy with Christians, and had learned to corrupt by their glosses all the testimonies given in the Old Testament unto the Lord Christ, especially such as they found to be made use of in the New.”

 

Owen of course goes on for page after page – giving substantive evidence that our own Liberal “christian” scholars should have had ample opportunity to learn the craft of scholarly theological lying from the archival methodology already demonstrated for more than a thousand years.

 

That the ancients knew better is well demonstrated by the LXX translation which was so well known and quoted by the apostolic authors in making their connections between the Old and New Covenants.  Only in after years did the finely honed craft of deceit begin to grow and expand within the ethnic cultic rump of the Old Covenant Church, whose very purpose and further legitimacy was suspended with the tearing of the veil on the day when Christ was murdered by decree of the Sanhedrin’s very own “Star Chamber Court.”

 

Development:  We of course know better because we take the New Covenant witness and the faithful translations of the Doctors of the Church in all seriousness.  I remember one discussion from my early days, when a liberal pastor encouraged a group of us to purchase a contemporary Jewish Bible and to use it to discern what the Hebrew text really meant.  He should also have shared the fact that he took great comfort in the lack of explicit prophetic counsel, because he held to very little of the New Covenant doctrines and supported his decision from the corrupted understanding and implications of the cultic interpretations.

 

But what do the scriptures say truly?  The eternal truths can easily be fathomed from honest and true scholarship.  We have in our theological library upstairs a multi-volume (Kittel’s: Theological Dictionary of the New Testament) study and treatment of the Greek language used by the New Covenant authors.  While – this work was done by and large on the continent of Europe – those who composed the articles and did the research were very careful to give an honest literate appraisal of the meanings implicit in the words of the texts.  The evangelical and reformed concepts and understandings are breathed in and through the very words recorded faithfully by the early church.  And the trust in the faithfulness of the LXX scholars, by the first generation churchmen is widespread throughout the whole body of New Covenant literary revelations and reports.  With all of that said, we can read the text before us with a greater confidence, knowing full well that unlike members of the liberal churches – we can take the reports of the New Covenant authors at face value with full faith and credit.

 

“And to which of the angels has he ever said, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet?’”

 

Commentator John Brown shares with us the hushed awe with which we must consider “the meaning of a prediction clothed in figurative language, like that before us.”  The image reported through the lips of the psalmist “is borrowed from the most sacred part of the Jewish sanctuary, the Holy of Holies.  There, amid the thick darkness, resided the emblem of the divine presence, - there was the throne of Jehovah, the God of Israel, between the cherubim; and the ark of the covenant was as it were His footstool.” 

 

In an earlier year, when we were studying “The Great Covenant” given through Moses, it was in the ark of the covenant where the tables of law were to be kept.  I had read in one of the commentaries, that this was the habit of the ancient Oriental potentates – to keep the various suzerain agreements with lesser villages and counties in such close approximation with the rightful Sovereign.

 

Thus we should view the symbolic picture of the person of Christ upon the throne of heaven thereby ruling with the person of the Father over all of creation, which we know from earlier studies to be the rightful possession of Christ in and through God Himself.

 

But the visionary implication rises far above the earthly realities of the Temple yet to be built when this Psalm was written.  We have only to consider the fourth chapter of Revelations, and the seventh chapter of Daniel to sense that the throne room in question is the heavenly one.  It is as John Brown describes: “the glories of the presence-chamber of the celestial palace of the Great King, the Lord of hosts, burst on the prophet’s view; Messiah the Prince, in the form of a man, draws near to the ‘throne high and lifted up;’ while from the inaccessible light in which He dwells who sits thereon, there comes forth a voice of complacent invitation, ‘Sit Thou at My right hand, till I have made Thine enemies Thy footstool.’”

 

But there is more in this wondrous Psalm still.  Paul speaks of Christ on the eternal throne in his comments on not only the resurrection and the end of days:  “Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.  For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.”  (1 Corinthians 15: 24-25)

 

Application:  The application of this text is clear in its regard that none, not one of the angels has or ever will be so honored as is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Jesus is thus much higher than they, His place is on the throne and theirs is to stand before it in His service for ever and ever.

 

One further point that needs some elaboration is tied up in the title of our series on the book of Hebrews.  Specifically I must mention that underlying theme and describe it as The New Covenant Administration of Christ.  John Owen describes this purpose which flows from the presence of Christ on His rightful throne.  “The kingdom of Christ respects his administration of it visibly in this world, in the profession and obedience of his subjects unto him; and this also, with the opposition made unto it, is respected in this expression.  God the Father, in the exaltation of Jesus Christ, hath given unto him all nations for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession.”

 

Therefore, Owen would argue two final points for our consideration.  The first point is that Jesus Christ has the right to “call, gather, and erect his church, in any nation, in any part of the world, and to give unto it his laws and ordinances of worship, to be owned and observed by them in a visible and peaceable manner.”

 

Certainly, we have seen the long term progression in the growth of the Christian Church since the time of Christ.  And while some continents have grown cold towards the gospel and His church, others are only now warming to the word which is continually going forth.  And while this is little mentioned in the context of the upcoming war, one outcome of a free society imposed upon the Middle East could well be the opportunity for the gospel to be preached more widely behind the Devil’s curtain.  Yes, there are already churches within the Muslim world, but the blood of the martyrs continues to flow too freely for those interested to ask the proper questions and for the church to grow in power and in influence.

 

Of course, the rightful claims of Christ can never be limited or enhanced by the secular powers, however – it is well that the gross intentions of worldly powers be blunted and that every people be given their God given rights to participate or not in the spiritual kingdom of our Lord and Savior.

 

Owen’s second point is the Jesus Christ has the “right, power and authority to dispose of and order all nations and persons for the good, benefit, and advantage of his kingdom.  In pursuit of this grant and right, erecting his church, and therein his visible kingdom in the world.”

 

At first glance, this right of Christ seems to be saying nothing more than the first.  However, this second means that the worldly powers and princes do not have the right to condemn, oppose or persecute the citizens of His eternal kingdom.  Any secular state that opposes and limits the Church of the Living God will be held to account.   While the citizens of the world are allowed to reject the Lordship of our Christ, they do so at an eternal cost.  What they are not allowed to do is to deny Christ the obvious public fruits of His growing kingdom, because thereby all of those states are much diminished without the salt and light of the church bearing witness to the Almighty power and holiness of our God.

 

Certainly, we understand that by God’s providence the church in Europe is in hopeless decline unless the power of the Spirit beings forth a season of spiritual interest and new growth.  By contrast, the moral degradation of the Muslim princes in persecuting and destroying the persons and institutions of Christ flies in the very face of God’s principles of civilization.  Thus, whether they like it or not, they will be destroyed within God’s own pleasure and time.  Of course, we have to remember there are all manner of opposing parties to the rule of Christ, secular, humanist, statist and even religious.

 

So let us be very careful in understanding our beliefs and actions when it comes to participation in the eternal Kingdom of the Spirit.  And let us faithfully honor the rights of King Jesus, as an older generation of reformers would phrase it.  And just as carefully, let us be certain to study the administration of His kingdom as Christ would have us live within His Church and thereby be prepared for His eternal Kingdom when it comes.  Amen.

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PREACHING RESOURCES

 

Brown, John.  A Geneva Series Commentary: Hebrews.

Owen, John:  Commentary on Book of Hebrews.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version

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