Jesus' Hymnbook

Psalm 2:11-12

Serve the LORD with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

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The psalms are notoriously difficult to interpret. As a young believer, I turned to the psalms of the Old Testament for daily encouragement in my faith. I found solace especially in the transparent quality of the psalmist's doubts and fears, born from struggles with everything from envy (see Ps. 73) to adultery (see Ps. 51) to persecution (see Ps. 63 among others).

The problem is, poetry is cryptic. It is meant to be. My poetry professor in college taught us a pithy little statement I will never forget: "Art is a lie that tells the truth." Sounds very postmodern, right? Well, you get the point. Artistic expression never gives you all the cards; the artist leaves much to the imagination, forcing the viewer or listener to contribute their own attention and mental energy to the artistic experience. In the case of the psalms, this shared experience came through corporate singing, both then (3,000 years ago) and now (in the singing of the Psalter or other Psalm-based songs). *Note: Just because poetry is cryptic doesn't mean it has NO rules for interpreting. Any cursory reading of the Psalms will give you an idea of the patterns, the parallelisms, and the poetic structures throughout that make interpretation very possible. The following is a brief example of how to interpret a psalm.

Rule number one in interpreting the Psalms is to look to the New Testament. Psalm 2, verses 1, 2, and 7, are all quoted in the New Testament (in Acts 4 and Hebrews 1). A good study Bible will give cross-reference notes for these kinds of quotations. While not every psalm is a direct allusion to Messiah, today's chapter is clearly one of them. While verse 12 is not quoted in the New Testament in this way, it is fair to the context of the psalm to include it as part of the allusion to Christ.

Allowing for a Christological reading, verses 11 and 12 are a strong exhortation to us that our affectionate reverence to the Son of God is not optional; it is absolutely necessary. "Rejoice with trembling" conjures ironic images, but the point is made: The LORD is both terrible and beautiful, like the fiercest thunderstorm or the erupting of a volcano. As the Beaver in Narnia described Aslan, “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” This combination of emotions is fitting for the Man we meet in the Gospel accounts of Jesus. One who spoke with authority, who controlled nature and demons with a word, and who wept for his friend and bled drops of blood in the agony of the garden. The Psalms are devotional material of the highest caliber, because they add these soaring melodies of emotion to the concrete truths of Christ's kingdom as described in the Gospels.