We'll take a break for a few weeks
from our study of the Sermon on the
Mount and go wherever the Lord takes us.
And I wanted us to go to Psalm
2 today.
And the name of this sermon, if you
like, is Raging World, Laughing God.
Raging World, Laughing God.
If my journal entries are right, we've read
this Psalm four times in the last two
years in our prayer meetings.
And it tends to come up in my
heart when news events get difficult.
And I believe that's the right use for
Psalm number two.
When you see the world raging, when you
see things going on that hurt your heart
in the world, you should turn to Psalm
2 and seek to see everything that's happening
in our world through the lens of this
Psalm.
We have a great need for this Psalm.
This last week we had that horrific shooting
in Nashville.
Horrific.
A few weeks ago we had the Asbury
Revival.
Yesterday there was purportedly this trans day of
vengeance.
There are very weird things going on in
our world, and we see people raging against
God daily, daily in our world.
The three sections of this Psalm, if you
like, would be this.
A Raging World, a Laughing God, and a
Kissing Church.
But we're not going to get to all
of the Psalm today.
But think about those three sections with me
for a second, and how vital it is
that we refresh our mind with those ideas.
The world is raging.
God looks at it and laughs.
And thirdly, His church kisses.
We kiss the Christ.
And those are the three things we want
to see going on.
When you see something in the news that
hurts your heart, you want to go back
to this Psalm and say, okay, the world
is raging, but God is laughing at that,
and we are called to kiss the Son.
Those are the stakes of Psalm 2.
We might be in it for a week
or two or three, I'm not sure.
But let's read this incredible Psalm.
Why do the heathen rage, and the people
imagine a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and
the rulers take counsel together against the Lord
and against His anointed, saying, let us break
their bands asunder and cast away their cords
from us.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.
The Lord shall have them in derision.
Then shall He speak unto them in His
wrath and vex them in His sore displeasure.
Yet have I set my king upon my
holy hill of Zion.
I will declare the decree the Lord hath
said unto me, thou art my son, this
day have I begotten thee.
Ask of me, and I shall give thee
the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost
parts of the earth for thy possession.
Thou shalt break them with a rod of
iron.
Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a
potter's vessel.
Be wise now, therefore, O ye kings.
Be instructed, ye judges of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with
trembling.
Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and
ye perish from the way, when His wrath
is kindled but a little.
Blessed are all they that put their trust
in Him.
Amen.
Lord Jesus, please show us Yourself from this
song.
Please guide us, Lord, to consider every precious
golden word of this song.
Lord, please edify Your church through a study
of this incredible song.
And Lord, please get me out of the
way, and let us hear from Jesus Christ
Himself today, by Your Holy Spirit.
Father, thank You that there's access to Your
throne as we sit here today.
And this is not vain.
We're in an act of worship here, Lord,
as we open Your word.
We're in an act of worship, enlarging our
hearts, Lord, enlarging our hearts to see how
this world actually works, enlarging our hearts, Lord,
to have wisdom to go on and to
persevere as Christians.
So we thank You, Lord.
Please open up Your word to us.
Help us be like Bereans, who don't just
take what's said for granted, but who go
home and seek to see if what's been
preached is actually in Your word.
Lord, help us to honor Your word today.
Enlighten us and refresh us with Your word.
In Christ's mighty name, we pray.
Amen.
This psalm has three divisions.
You might want to mark them out in
your Bibles.
The first one is verses 1, 2, and
3, which present the problem, the problem of
a raging world.
And then we have verses 4 through 9,
which present God's response, God's response.
And then we have verses 10 through 12,
which present our response.
So that's pretty simple, is it not?
The psalmist sets forth the problem, and then
God himself reacts to that problem.
And then finally, the psalmist tells us how
we should respond to that problem.
I don't believe we're going to get all
the way through this psalm today, but hopefully
let's try to get through the first six
verses or so.
And again, my title for you today is
Raging World, Laughing God.
We see the raging world in verses 1
through 3, and we see our laughing God
in verses 4 through 6.
Let's study this.
And before I even give us those two
points, let me just give you the application
for this sermon right at the start.
Here's our application.
View all of life through the lens of
this psalm.
View every difficult news event that comes up
through the lens of this psalm.
That's our application, okay?
When things come up, when you start to
become confused about where the world is going,
when you start to wonder what in the
world is happening on the streets right outside
of our homes and apartments, go back to
psalm 2.
Let's train ourselves.
Go back to psalm 2.
Pray psalm 2.
Learn psalm 2.
Okay?
So that's the application.
Very simple today.
We look at all of the world through
this lens.
Let's look first at the raging world, verses
1 through 3.
And we're going to go word for word
and study this psalm together.
Verse 1.
Why do the heathen rage and the people
imagine a vain thing?
Is that not a good question, brethren?
Why do the heathen rage?
The psalmist is asking a question that's on
our minds almost, what, daily now?
Why do the people around us rage and
imagine a vain thing?
You could sum it up this way.
What in the world is going on?
What in the world happened in Nashville?
That was such a horrific tragedy.
What was going on?
Why is the world raging?
And that's the question of verse 1.
Why do the heathen rage?
That first question is external, okay?
And the word that's used there is the
same word that's used for when a horse
rears up and starts neighing, right?
Gets on its hind legs and goes, whinnies
and neighs like that.
That's the verb right here.
Why are the heathen just neighing and going
crazy like a wild horse?
Is it not a good question?
That's external.
So when you look at the first half
of this verse, you say, I can hear
them.
I can see them on the streets.
I can hear them on news reports.
I see the people around me literally going
crazy like a wild stallion, right?
We can hear it.
We can see it.
That's external.
The second half of verse 1 is internal.
So look at it.
And the people imagine a vain thing.
So now he takes us not just into
the news reports, but into people's minds.
And the psalmist tells us that deep in
their hearts, they're imagining emptiness.
The literal word in verse 1 is that
the people are meditating a vain thing.
Go back to psalm number 1 and look
at verse 2.
And it says, the godly man's delight is
in the law of the Lord.
And in his law doth he meditate day
and night.
Now you come to psalm 2 and these
people, the nations around us are also meditating.
But what are they meditating upon?
Upon emptiness.
Literally, they're meditating emptiness.
They're imagining a vain thing.
Isn't that amazing?
We see them on the outside.
So now we're studying biblical psychology here.
We see from the outside and we see
people going insane.
But here, the psalmist takes us into their
hearts and we realize, what are they doing
all the time?
What are they thinking about all the time?
Well, vanity, nothing, nothingness, emptiness.
Do you all remember when you were in
the world?
Do you all remember meditating upon vanity?
Just upon things that don't matter at all?
I remember and I still go with lost
family and extended family on vacations.
And the central thing is always just food.
Just what's the next thing?
What's the next thing we're going to eat?
Just food, food, food.
And then you relax for maybe an hour
and then it's, what's the next meal?
Food, food.
What's the next meal, right?
And it's like, well, why is that?
The psalmist tells us right here, the people
of the world without Jesus, they're just meditating
on emptiness, on nothingness.
And this verse also ought to convict us
for our own Christian lives.
We have times in our life where you
can, you say, I'm a Christian, but all
of a sudden, I realize I've gone for
hours just meditating on emptiness, on nothing.
I've just been flicking through Facebook.
I've just, I'm doing nothing.
I'm not redeeming the time.
I'm not doing anything whatsoever.
We want to make a marked difference between
these heathens in verse one and the godly
man back in Psalm 1 verse 2.
We ought to say, no, I want to
fill my life and my thoughts and my
days and my hours with God's law, with
beautiful things, with singing good songs, with having
purpose, with redeeming the time.
But here, well, just ask yourself that.
Do you ever meditate a vain thing?
Let's clean up those hours in our life.
Let's not be like these people.
Let's be a people who redeem the time.
That's the raging world, verse one.
There's so much to study, even right there.
He tells us what's going on by asking
this question.
And now we get an answer to the
question in verse two.
The question was, what's going on?
Why are people raging?
And here comes the answer.
Verse two.
This is why people are raging.
The kings of the earth set themselves and
the rulers take counsel together against the Lord
and against his anointed.
So why are people raging?
Why are people full of emptiness?
Because they're actively setting themselves against God and
his anointed.
And you all see that word there, his
anointed.
That's Hebrew, Meshiach, or Messiah.
So they've set themselves up against who?
The Lord Yahweh and his Christ, his Messiah,
Jesus Christ himself.
Another thing to notice about verse two, it
speaks of the kings and the rulers.
And most commentators will say that this verse
is using metonymy.
You all know the figure of speech called
metonymy?
It's where you take a part for a
whole.
And the frequent example is, you say, the
what?
The sails are coming into the harbor.
Many sails coming into the harbor.
And what do you mean?
Well, many ships are coming into the harbor,
right?
Here, he speaks of kings and rulers.
And what he's really speaking of is all
the heads of the earth and all the
people that come under those heads.
It's a way of saying everyone in this
world, the kings, the rulers, all their subjects,
all their nations, what are they doing?
They're setting themselves and taking counsel together against
the Lord and against his anointing.
Now, there's a wonderful diagnostic here that even
if we don't get very far in our
study of this psalm today, I want everybody
to get this.
When you see people raging, what does the
psalmist tell us about the answer to that
rage?
Well, that rage is all based upon the
way they are exercising their own will and
responsibility against Yahweh and his Messiah.
We need then to analyze each situation where
we see people raging, and this can make
us better defenders of the gospel.
What we need to ask is, how precisely
are they against the Lord and against Christ?
If you want to sum that up, we
could say, how are they against a creator
and a redeemer?
And then we start to get really an
advanced apologetic because you look at these raging
nations and people around us and you say,
OK, what do they hate about a creator?
And secondly, what do they hate about a
redeemer?
You see how useful that could be if
we start to think that way?
Let's take this woman, Audrey Hale, who murdered
six people in Nashville.
Let's first ask, OK, why was she raging?
Where did that rage come from?
Well, let's apply our psalm.
Verse two, she set herself and she took
counsel against Yahweh and his Messiah.
Amen.
OK, now let's ask a little bit deeper.
What did she have against a creator?
Well, we see in the very act of
murder that she decided that she wanted to
be the one who gives life and takes
away life.
No?
Someone who is set on murder is dead
set against a creator God, because the creator
God is sovereign over when life begins and
when life ends.
No?
I remember being a suicidal, lost person, and
the thought was, I can take my life
whenever I want.
I can end this thing.
Right?
Now, but again, we return to our psalm
and we say, what's at the heart of
that?
It's hatred for Yahweh.
It's hatred for a creator God.
Amen.
You all see that?
Now, go a little bit deeper again with
this woman, Audrey Hale.
What about Christ?
What were her feelings about Christ?
We don't know yet, but I can, I
think we could all predict that when her
manifesto is released, and I do hope it
is released, we're going to hear something about
workspace salvation in that manifesto.
And how do I know that?
Because she set herself against Yahweh and against
his one and only redeemer, the Messiah.
So just watch when it comes out, you'll
see things about workspace salvation, about our own
goodness.
It's just inevitable.
Okay.
And so this is what we're learning from
this psalm here.
Another sneaking thought that comes into the mind
of the unbeliever, they might not come out
and say, yeah, I'm against Yahweh and his
Messiah.
But they might say something like this.
I know what God really wants.
Do any of you remember being lost and
thinking that way?
I thought that way all the time.
You're not denying God necessarily, you're not making
any claims about the God of the Bible,
but deep down inside, what are you saying?
You're saying, I just know he doesn't want
what they all say he wants.
I know that his will is a little
bit more like my will, right?
So deep down inside, we're saying God, even
this creator God is more like me.
And God in his redemptive plan, he's more
like me and he will forgive me.
And I can decide on what terms I
get to heaven.
Those are the really deep thoughts of the
lost person.
Are you all learning with me how to
analyze the world around us just from verses
one and two?
It's very, very vital.
I want to share something with you from
Fox News.
It's very rare that I would quote Fox
News, but this is from Tucker Carlson.
And he looked at that event, which was
happening in Nashville, and he said something that
was so spot on that made me praise
the Lord that he was.
I don't think Tucker Carlson's a Christian, but
he was preaching pure gospel right on Fox
News.
I want you to listen to this and
listen to how what he's analyzing is exactly
what we're talking about here.
You know, this woman who shot up Christians
and precious Christian children at this Presbyterian school,
you know that deep in her heart, she
had set herself against a creator and a
redeemer.
No, the biblical creator and redeemer.
Listen to what Tucker Carlson said, what he
preached rather.
The trans movement is the mirror image of
Christianity and therefore its natural enemy.
For Christianity, the price of admission is admitting
that you're not God.
Amen.
Christians openly concede that they have no real
power over anything.
For that matter, they have very little personal
virtue.
They will tell you to your face that
they are sinful and helpless.
This is on Fox News.
Listen, how he preaches the gospel saved a
wretch like me goes the most famous Christian
hymn ever written in English.
The trans movement takes the opposite view.
Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself.
We can change the identity we were born
with.
They will tell you.
Christians can never agree with this statement because
these are powers they believe God alone possesses.
Amen.
That's Yahweh.
That's the creator God.
That failure to acknowledge a trans person's dominion
over nature incites and enrages some in the
trans community.
People who believe they are God can't stand
to be reminded that they are not.
So Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible
theologies.
Amen.
That's that's quite the statement.
That's quite the gospel presentation.
And I praise God that that's happening on
our news stations right now.
We need to learn to think with this
sort of prescience, this sort of clarity about
what's going on around us.
We need to learn as we seek to
go out on the streets more and more
that we see the rage, but we have
to identify where the rage is coming from.
And then we need to make clear statements
about how exactly do they hate the creator
and how exactly do they hate the one
and only plan of redemption.
Amen.
We might not get very far in this
sermon, but I want you all to let's
go a little bit deeper here.
Chiara and I were doing a little study
yesterday of the difference between non-Christian music
and Christian music.
And we compared Joni Mitchell's music with Rich
Mullins' music.
Now, look, this is interesting.
Think about this.
Both of these people, I don't know if
you know them, Joni Mitchell, both of them
use a ton of allusions to nature.
They have these beautiful pictures of nature coming
up in all of their songs.
Joni Mitchell, a lost person on the one
hand.
She's still alive, though, so pray that she
gets saved.
And then Rich Mullins, a follower of the
cross on the other hand, right?
And we just started thinking about the difference
between their songs.
Think about what happens.
Both of them are pointing, let's say, to
a beautiful river and skating on the river
and then the birds that come out and
then the animals and the sunsets.
The one who does not have the creator
God, what happens in Joni Mitchell's songs?
As Francis Schaeffer would say, the things are
not in their right place.
That's what happens when you take the creator
out of your songs.
If you go to Rich Mullins' songs, he's
talking about, let's say, a partridge over here,
a bird over here.
But all of those things are referred to
as creations, wonderful creations of the creator Yahweh.
And he's putting them in their right place
and he's seeing that humans are actually more
valued than that creation, right?
And he's sort of structuring the world in
his songs in this beautiful way.
Joni Mitchell, you take away any thought of
our creator God and all of a sudden,
I love this phrase, things are not in
their right place.
She talks in one song about this winding
river and she says, I wish I had
a river that I could skate away on
it.
And you find that God's beautiful creation, this
river, is all about her self-aggrandizement.
It's all about how she can use it
to heal her own psyche, her own head,
how she can use it for her own
romantic tale.
You see the difference?
You take the creator God out and all
of a sudden, things are just out of
whack.
They're in weird places.
Both songwriters refer to lips and heads and
eyes and parts of the body.
But for one, it's used for personal romance.
And for the other, it's used for praise.
So that's what you do when you take
Yahweh out of it.
Now, what about when you take his Meshiach
out of it, when you take his Messiah,
his Christ out of it?
What I notice is that you get a
false sense of self.
All of a sudden, Joni Mitchell's songs become
self-obsessed.
They become almost, it's like she's her own
trumpeter and she's the one who's figuring out
what matters in the world.
And then what happens when you take out
a redeemer is that all of a sudden,
there's no sense of thanksgiving and there's no
sense of wonder.
Right?
So the minute we come to learn that
we need Jesus, that we need a redeemer,
that we need a Messiah, we also say,
whoa, I'm thankful for everything around me.
I'm thankful for that Lord.
And then everything starts to be filled with
wonder, no?
Because it's not only are you thankful for
it, but you're amazed that you even got
the chance to glimpse it and that you're
not in hell.
Amen?
Um, when you take that element of the
Messiah out, you get self-obsession and you
get a savior complex.
And it's really fascinating to watch as you
compare secular music with good Christian music.
So we've looked at verses one and two,
and I want to, again, give you that
as a diagnostic.
You look at someone and you ask, why
do you hate the creator?
Why do you hate the one and only
redeemer?
And then you start to get somewhere with
someone.
Then look at verse three.
There's something more that happens here.
They say, let us break their bands asunder
and cast away their cords from us.
How are people reacting to Yahweh and his
Christ?
First, they're saying, I will not serve that
God.
It's the chant of Luke chapter 19 and
verse 14.
Y'all remember that little parable where they
say, we will not bow down to that
man.
That's what they're saying right here.
They're saying, if that God has a law,
I will break it.
If that God has a gospel, I will
break it.
I must break it.
I will not submit to it.
And then look at the progression of sin
in verse three.
It's not only, let us break it, but
let us cast it away as far from
us as possible.
And we also want to look for that
as we're diagnosing the world around us.
You see people breaking what God says, that's
stage one.
But stage two is, you throw it as
far away from you as heavenly possible.
We see the very same thing in that
last verse of Romans one.
Do you all remember that?
Where people are not only doing sinful things,
but they're what?
Giving hearty approval to those who practice them.
We want to look for that sort of
progression deeper and deeper into sin in those
around us.
That's the raging world, the raging world.
Let's look for a moment at God's response.
Verse four.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.
The Lord shall have them in derision.
Then shall he speak unto them in his
wrath and vex them in his sore displeasure.
And this is what he says, verse six.
Yet have I set my king upon my
holy hill of Zion.
I think what we're going to do is
come back to this psalm in a future
week.
But let me just give you a few
little inklings of what happens right here.
Look at God's response, verse four.
The one who sits in the heavens shall
laugh.
We need a deep concept in our minds
of a God who, on the one hand,
so loves the world that he gave his
only begotten son to redeem it, right?
And on the other hand, when the world
rages against him, what is he doing?
He laughs.
He mocks him.
He holds it in derision.
He is nonplussed.
He's not impressed.
Isn't that quite amazing?
We need to be able to see that
our God is reacting in that way.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.
And I'm just going to end with this.
And we'll come back to this psalm.
In verses one, two, and three, we have
diagnosed what this world's rage looks like, right?
What we start to get a picture of
in verses four, five, and six is that
God, the father, points to his son.
And he says, this is my plan, that
everything happens through him.
And in effect, what God here is saying
is there's no other plan.
This is plan A, and there is no
plan B.
And he points to his son.
And he tells everyone, you look at my
son.
Look at verse six.
Yet have I set my king upon my
holy hill of Zion.
We'll have to study that more exactly what
that means.
But consider just this.
He says, that's it.
That's it.
That's the answer.
And how is he saying that?
Just think about this.
He's saying that in wrath.
We often want to say that our God
is offering up Jesus in mercy.
He's offering up Jesus in grace.
But right here, he's proclaiming his son as
an act of wrath.
That's very, very startling.
And the picture we get is of a
world raging around us and God pointing to
his son.
And when everybody says, I don't care at
all.
I want to continue raging.
God the Father says, that's all I'm going
to offer you.
And if you don't accept it, you receive
my wrath.
That's all I'm going to offer you.
And if you don't accept it, you receive
my sore displeasure.
It's remarkable here to see the gospel of
Jesus Christ presented from the stance of the
Father's wrath.
I'll leave it there.
And I just want to give us those
tools to deal with what's happening in the
world around us.
We've covered the raging world.
And we've started to see our God's response
is what?
The laughing dog.
He says, this is nothing to me.
And regardless of what you do, that's still
my answer.
My king, my son is still my answer.
That gives us a backbone when we start
to evangelize.
And when we for years and years, if
you think about it, just in this church,
for let's say six years, we've given the
gospel to people and given the gospel to
people and given the gospel to people.
And what have they said?
They continue just to rage around it, just
to rage around it and say, I don't
want it.
I don't want to come in there.
I don't want to hear more of that.
I don't want to follow that God.
But then consider this.
Our father says, yet have I set my
king upon my holy hill of Zion.
I'm still pointing to him.
And there's no other answer.
And I'm not going to help you in
any other way, raging world.
And he just keeps pointing.
That can give us a strength in evangelism,
can it not?
Let's just keep pointing with our father and
our king on the holy hill of Zion.
And let's keep pointing.
But no one comes in, but no one
receives him.
But we keep pointing and we keep pointing.
It's really a frightening message, but it's also
a beautiful and a glorious message that points
to God in his sovereignty sitting in the
heavens.
I'll give you this application one more time.
This is what we're going to work on
as we study this psalm.
View all of life through this lens.
View all of the news events around us
through this lens.
And take comfort in this, that God has
this whole world mapped out.
God knows exactly what's happening.
And he sees these three elements happening always.
World raging.
God laughs in response.
And God calls us to kiss his son.
Amen.
Lord, we thank you just for opening the
eyes of our hearts here and teaching us
something about how we ought to react to
this world around us.
Lord, please do help us to use this
diagnostic.
Lord, help us not to be flabby in
how we approach this world.
Help us, Lord, to see the world raging
and to ask, why do you hate Yahweh?
Why do you hate the Messiah?
Help us, Lord, to ask these simple questions.
Equip us, please, Lord.
In Jesus' name, amen.