What God Says About Jesus
What does God say about Jesus?
I'm going to guess that most of you have never heard a message or Bible lesson on Psalm 110. But for first century Christians, many of whom were from Jewish backgrounds, Psalm 110 rose to the top in importance in prefiguring their newfound Messiah-Savior Jesus.
In fact, a good pre-Easter sermon series would be preaching on those Psalms that point to Jesus.
Psalm 110 is quoted or alluded to more times in the NT than any other OT passage. It dawned on the early Christians how this Scripture fused Jesus as both our King and Priest.
Even today, people are looking for kings and priests: kings to lead us out of our misery and lead us to victory; priests to save us and soothe our egos. But people are not necessarily looking for Jesus. Both titles of king and priest fit a messiah. And we follow these flawed people sometimes to our doom. Just think of our political process and how we raise leaders upon a pedestal making them an idol. Think of “priests”, those who ease our conscience, providing band-aid solutions to our deep wounds of sin. They are priests for the ego, not the Holy Spirit.
In Jesus’s day, there were the religious zealots (ironically called Zealots) who used violence to force regime change from the hated Romans. There were also the Essenes, famous for their Dead Sea Scrolls, who preserved the purity of religion while looking forward to the day of God's violent judgment. Both looked to violence as a means to their goal.
Have things really changed? Can't we think of groups today that fit those descriptions?
But when Jesus appears as a Messiah, he's a king without an army as we know it, a priest who mingles with the unclean and offers himself as the sacrifice. He seemingly operates from a position of weakness and not strength. How can Jesus be our Messiah? We don't expect our kings to die. Our priests don't clean things up by being the sacrifice themselves. We want a messiah on our terms, not God's.
The resurrection changes all that. In it, the power of sin and death are broken. And the early Christians scramble to find out what God says about Jesus. The Bible they had was Genesis to Malachi.
And they turn to Psalm 110. Jesus uses it in Matthew, Mark, and Luke to shut down the argument about his identity. Read Matthew 22:41-46:
"Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying,
‘The Lord said to my Lord,
Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet'?If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions."
Do you follow Jesus' logic here? Someone greater than David is here. How can he be a son when David calls him Lord? Jesus does not seek to win an argument but to force his opposition to affirm who he really is.
Jesus as King
Two different Hebrew words (Yahweh and Adonai) for Lord, yet both are considered deity and in authority. Right hand is a place of strength, power, authority. For example, Jacob’s youngest, Benjamin, has a name which means "son of my right hand". The phrase ‘enemies are under his feet’ are a sign of conquest. Despite outward appearances, God's enemies are subject to him and will someday be vanquished.
Verses 2-3 clearly demonstrate the power of Messiah as king. He has a sceptre, by definition a staff or wand held by someone in authority that symbolized their power. People follow this king. No enemy can stand against him. Depending on how you take verse 3, he has a miraculous birth. The last part of verse 3 is particularly hard to interpret.
Maybe as some have said, it prefigures the birth of Jesus. His birth refreshes us spiritually so even if we are advanced in years, we feel young in Jesus.
Notice in verses 1, 2, and 4, Yahweh speaks of Messiah as both king and priest. God the Father is speaking to and about God the Son, Jesus. God is telling us about Jesus. And Jesus as King means he has the power and authority to shape our lives and our world. No human event is outside his sovereignty. No enemy will ultimately succeed against his people.
Jesus as Priest
Jesus is also Priest. A priest makes it possible for people to find a way to God. A priest acts as a go-between for both God and man. Ironically, Jesus is that Priest for us. He wasn't of the priestly tribe, the Levites, but he gave himself as the one final sacrifice that wiped away the barrier of sin. Jesus made the old way of sacrifice obsolete by his once-for-all sacrifice. Read Hebrews 10:10:
He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all."
Jesus, like Melchizedek (literally king of righteousness) the mysterious figure in Genesis 14, is both king and priest. But Jesus is king and priest on his terms, not ours. Consider Hebrews 7:11-25:
Now if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law), what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron? For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well. For the one of whom these things are spoken belonged to another tribe, from which no one has ever served at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests.
This becomes even more evident when another priest arises in the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become a priest, not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life. For it is witnessed of him,
“You are a priest forever,
after the order of Melchizedek.”For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.
And it was not without an oath. For those who formerly became priests were made such without an oath, but this one was made a priest with an oath by the one who said to him:
“The Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind,
‘You are a priest forever.’”
We live in a world where the human voices drown out the voice of God in Jesus. People follow these voices more than Jesus. Maybe it's always been that way.
What does God say about Jesus? Jesus is King. Jesus is Priest. Jesus rules. Jesus saves. God swears by that. It's the truth even if no one is listening.
The messiah foretold in Psalm 110 is the fusion of an all-powerful King and a self-sacrificing Priest born miraculously of a woman. It's Jesus. And Jesus is enough to fill all our imaginations about God.
Garrison Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion fame, tells a story about one family Thanksgiving meal. Keillor grew up Plymouth Brethren, a strict Christian sect that attempted to follow the Bible and Jesus fully. Before the tops of the Tupperware could be taken off for the Thanksgiving meal, someone had to pray. And that was his Uncle John:
"Everybody in the family knew that Uncle John couldn’t pray without talking about the cross and crying. Sure enough, Uncle John prayed, talked about the cross, and cried. Meanwhile, the rest of us shifted nervously from one foot to the other and longed for the prayer to end. All of us knew that Jesus died on the cross for us, but Uncle John had never gotten over it."
I hope we never get over the fact that Jesus rules and Jesus saves. We need both to know God fully.