Reflection on Psalm 72
Children love to bicker, and quarantines provide the perfect environment to prove it. My two children have certainly been demonstrating their abilities to quarrel with each other over the past several weeks. It’s common for parents to plead with their children to be nice. We want the house to be calm and quiet. In my better moments I will enter into the skirmish to seek more than just a resentful ceasefire. In those moments I will pursue my children’s hearts and shepherd them through that painful process of reconciliation. This kind of intervention requires more energy from me than a simple request for kindness.
Sometimes we would prefer to have a Jesus who pleads with us to just be nice to one another. It can be offensive to suggest that Christ is anything more than a passive parental figure. We’ll jokingly refer to what Jesus wouldn’t like for us to say or do, immediately before we do it. We can be so childish, can’t we? This Jesus of our own making is not, however, the Jesus of reality. Psalm 72 reminds us that Christ is far more involved than most of us would prefer.
God promised David that one of his sons would rule for eternity over a cosmos-sized king- dom. Psalm 72 gives us an Old Testament glimpse at the fulfillment of this promise. The Mes- sianic-King of Psalm 72 rules with righteousness and justice (1), yielding prosperity and peace for his people (3, 7). His reign delivers the sick and needy from death and oppression (12-14). His dominion stretches from sea to sea and includes every people group on the planet (8-11). This is truly a vision of Heaven on Earth!
How do we get there? In one sense, Christ has already attained this new creation when he rose from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20). But we still are waiting for every enemy to be placed under Jesus’ feet (1 Corinthians 15:24-28). We are still waiting for the full number of God’s people to be transferred out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light.
Christ is actively accomplishing this work today. He is no passive parental figure. He is the glorious King of Psalm 72. May we respond to this Old Testament vision with the same expec- tant doxology as the psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory! Amen and Amen!”