Psalm 2:4-6 - Making God Laugh

Please read Psalm 2.

Yesterday, we focused on the first stanza of this Psalm which is dedicated to pondering why the nations rage against the Lord. The Hebrew grammar breaks this Psalm up into four stanzas (1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12), and we are going to spend a full day on each one. Today, we will look deeper at the second stanza, verses 4-6 (so you may want to re-read them now).

As the nations are raging against God, fighting with all of their might to try to break His hold over them and cast away God’s holy cords of Providence from their shoulders, how does God react? Does He panic? Does He send His angels to reinforce His control, put down the uprising, and quench the riots? No… He laughs.

What greater example of God’s power is there than the fact that He laughs at any attempt to overthrow Him?

When my children try to wrestle with their father, it gives me great joy. My four-year-old son likes to test his strength by trying to pin me down on the bed, but I’m not concerned. I don’t worry that he will actually pin me down or hurt me in any way. His strength is nothing compared to my own. So, when he rages against me, I laugh and enjoy the play.

This is a similar picture to God’s reaction to the nations. Its hard for us to picture because we see the dangerous armies of the nations around us today. The weapons of mass destruction, the tanks, missiles, and soldiers trained for deadly combat are put on display to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies.

But is God afraid of the rebellion of some human nations? Absolutely not! The thought of them striving against Him is enough to make Him laugh.

Now, don’t misunderstand me to think that I am inferring that God is somehow heartless—that He somehow doesn’t care about all of the lost people who are rebelling against Him and will forever suffer for their sin.

God is infinitely loving and infinitely merciful. He has created each one of these precious children—carefully knitting them together while they were in their mothers’ wombs. He knows every hair on their head and He values them so much that He will send His Son to die for them.

But the thought that they could actually rebel against Him is laughable. He doesn’t have to fight back. He simply speaks to them in His wrath and declares “I have already set my King on Zion, my holy hill” (that is the meaning implied by the verb tense). God is saying, “You fools! You have already lost. I have already done what you are trying to prevent!”

The same is true of any of us who try to rebel against God today. Your struggle will never satisfy you. God is already in control, and He will forever be in control. Rather than rage against Him, simply surrender and experience the blessings that will come from being on God’s side, and not His enemy. That is the focus of the end of this Psalm, but we’ll get to that later…