Series: Psalms of Summer 2023 Title: Psalm 110

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- Hey, my name is Matt Tolander.

I'm the spiritual

formation pastor on staff

here at Midtown, which is an

incredible privilege for me.

And I'm really excited this morning.

We're continuing our

Psalms of Summer series.

And this morning, we are gonna talk about

the most important Psalm in the Bible.

And I have my friend,

Stephen Flowood, to read it for us.

So if you would, please, if you're able,

stand for the reading of our

teaching text this morning.

- The Lord says to my Lord,

sit at my right hand

until I make your enemies

your footstool.

The Lord sends forth from

Zion your mighty scepter.

Rule in the midst of your enemies.

Your people will offer themselves freely

on the day of your

power in holy garments.

From the womb of the morning,

the dew of your youth will be yours.

The Lord has sworn and

will not change his mind.

You are a priest forever

after the order of Melchizedek.

The Lord is at your right hand.

He will shatter kings

on the day of his wrath.

He will execute

judgment among the nations,

filling them with corpses.

He will shatter

chiefs over the wide earth.

He will drink from the brook, by the way.

Therefore, he will lift up his head.

This is the word of the Lord.

- Thanks be to God.

Thank you.

You're like, wait a

minute, that wasn't Psalm 23.

Show of hands, how many of y'all

are familiar with Psalm 110?

All right, pretty good, pretty good.

Let me ask you this.

If someone came to you, like say like a

non-Christian person,

one of your non-Christian friends or

something like that,

if someone came to you and

they asked you to explain

like what is the message of the gospel?

What is the heart of Christianity?

But you can only use the

Old Testament to explain it.

Could you do it?

What passage would you go to?

You can't use the Romans

road, can't use John 3 16,

can't use Ephesians 2, 1 through 10.

Which Old Testament

passage would you go to

to communicate the heart and

the truth of the Christian faith

and the Christian message

that we call the gospel?

And this is the most

transparent opener of all time.

Because when the early

Christians did not have

the New Testament yet,

and they had to communicate

to a world that needed to

hear this gospel message,

when they turned to scripture,

they turned repeatedly and

overwhelmingly to Psalm 110.

Psalm 110 is the most

quoted Old Testament passage

in the New Testament.

There's at least 20

different explicit references to it.

At Pentecost, when Peter

preached the first sermon

in the history of the church,

he ended the sermon in Psalm 110.

Paul references this text

in some of his most important

passages, including

Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15

and Ephesians 1 and Colossians 3.

And the entire book of

Hebrews is based on this Psalm.

And all three gospel

writers include an encounter

in which Jesus makes a very strong,

very forceful use of Psalm 110.

And so I wanna use one of those passages

as a front door into the Psalm.

So let me set it up for us.

So at the time of this story

that we're about to jump into

this interaction, what's

going on is that the Judeans

had been under the

thumb of the Roman empire

for nearly a century.

And the Hebrew Bible that

we call the Old Testament

is full of these

prophecies about a descendant

of King David, who happens to be the

author of Psalm 110.

And they expected

this descendant of David

to be a warrior king, a political leader

who would deliver Israel

from their political enemies

and would establish

this era of God's peace.

And they were sure of it.

They were sure of this

based on their interpretation

of the prophecies in

places like Isaiah and Jeremiah

and Ezekiel.

This Davidic king in

Hebrew is called the Messiah.

Greek word Christos,

which is where we get Jesus

is not his last name.

It's his title, Jesus Christ.

It means the anointed

one, the anointed prince,

God's chosen agent to do this work.

And so in the midst of that expectation

for this Messiah, you

have Jesus of Nazareth

stepping into the scene

as this provocative rabbi,

and he's gaining popularity.

And it starts to alarm

the religious establishment.

And so they come to him and

they start to ask him questions.

And they ask him questions about issues.

I mean, you know us religious people

how we love to argue about issues.

And they come to him

and they ask him questions

about issues.

Should we pay taxes to Caesar?

Political issue.

What's marriage gonna be like in heaven

or in the afterlife?

A theological issue.

What's the greatest

commandment in the law?

That's a scriptural interpretation issue.

They wanna talk to him about issues.

And they're asking him

these very tricky questions

because they're, you

know how politics works.

I mean, they're trying

to make him look dumb

or they're trying to

get him to say something

that's in error

scripturally that they can pin on him.

Or they at least are

hoping that he'll say something

that would maybe

alienate some of his followers.

And, you know, sort of push

away some of his constituents

and maybe lessen his influence.

But that doesn't happen.

Each time he answers, he gives

them these slam dunk answers.

And finally, Jesus goes on offense.

And he goes on attack

with a question of his own.

And we see it in Matthew chapter 22.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

It's also recorded in Mark 12

and also in the Gospel of Luke.

But here's what we got.

Matthew 22 starting in verse 41.

So while the Pharisees

were gathered together,

Jesus asked them, what do

you think about the Messiah?

Whose son is he?

And they would reply,

son of David, right?

Based on Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel.

They answer, he's the son of David.

And they're right.

They're right.

But Jesus takes them in

a different direction.

He said to them, how is it then

that David speaking by

the Spirit calls him Lord?

And then he quotes Psalm 110.

For he says, 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 can he be his son?

And what he's done is he's

used their own interpretive

method to challenge them.

He's proved to them from the scriptures,

using their own method

that their understanding

of the Messiah was incomplete.

It was inadequate.

David doesn't say my son.

He says, my Lord.

And this whole interaction,

they've been peppering Jesus

with these questions,

trying to box him in

according to their preconceptions.

And he uses Psalm 110 to very

definitively break out

of these containers

that they're sort of trying

to put him in.

And it's a crisis moment.

It's a fork in the road.

Because when you start to consider it,

you realize none of these other questions

none of them matter if

they have the wrong answer

to Jesus' question.

The questions about

the issues do not matter

if you have the wrong

answer about who Jesus is.

And so it's easy for us

to read a passage like this

and kind of look down

our nose at the Pharisees

as though we were not the Pharisees.

And it's us and Jesus

against the Pharisees

when we read the passage.

But we are the Pharisees.

We do this to God.

We do this to Jesus all the time.

So let me ask, what kind

of box do you have God in?

What are the ways in

your life in which you try

to contain him or

control him or define him?

I think there's two

ways that we often do this.

Two subtle ways, kind of tricky ways.

And I do this and you do this.

And these are usually really

easy to spot in other people

and extremely hard to spot in ourselves,

which is probably just the

way it is with most things.

But the first way I think

people often do this to God,

try and contain him or box

him in, is through projection.

It's through projection.

Now, this was the critique

of a guy named Ludwig Forbach

in the 19th century.

He was a 19th century German philosopher.

And he surveyed the theological landscape

of continental Europe

in the 19th century.

And he looked around and his critique

of the Christianity at

that time was that God seemed

to be just a bigger version of them.

God was a projection.

God is just a bigger

version of your idealized self.

God is just this abstract

object upon which you project

your own values, your own

desires, your own wishes,

your own dreams.

And his criticism was extremely apt for

19th century Europe.

If you sort of look into

the theological development

of what was happening in the church,

this is an incredibly optimistic time

where they basically

believe that God had given them the

revelation of religion.

And he had given them a

religious system in a society

that would work together to just

Christianize the world.

And so all of the

theological thoughts started

to orient around our

feelings and our experiences.

It was all very positive and

optimistic about human beings.

And so Forbach starts to

look at this and he goes,

when they talk about God,

it's like they're talking

about themselves with a loud voice.

And that was his critique.

And it held out very

well until World War I

and World War II, but sort

of shattered this mindset

in continental Europe.

And so his criticism was

very apt for that time.

It was very apt for our

day to, especially I think

in our political climate.

You can turn on any cable news network,

not that I recommend

you do, but if you do,

you will see politicians projecting.

You will see politicians using the

vocabulary of religion.

And here's what

projection looks like in practice.

God never disagrees with you.

God never challenges you.

God disapproves of all the

same people you disapprove of

and just as harshly.

And God can sort of, he

begins to function for us

when we're doing this.

He begins to function for

us like a card that we play,

just to justify ourselves and to

legitimate our beliefs

and our behavior.

He blesses our biases, doesn't he?

And so when we talk

about God, it starts to sound

like we're really just

talking about ourselves

with a loud voice.

It's projection, if Feuerbach is right.

But here's the problem.

Jesus is not a projection.

He is not a projection.

He is a person.

Listen to what W.H. Auden says, the poet,

when he's explaining why

and how he came to believe

in Jesus Christ, he says this, I believe

because he, Jesus,

fulfills none of my dreams

because he is in

every respect the opposite

of what he would be if I

had made him in my own image.

Why Jesus and not

Socrates or Buddha or Confucius

or Muhammad, listen to his answer.

None of the others arouse

all sides of my being to cry,

crucify him.

Jesus is not a projection.

Jesus is a projectile that

God fires into this world

to shatter all of our projections.

And so if we never find ourselves

confronted by Jesus,

if we never find

ourselves challenged by him,

if we never find

ourselves corrected by him,

then we would do well

to stop and ask ourselves

like if it's really

Jesus that we're dealing with

and that we're engaged with.

So that's projection.

The second way that we do this,

the second way that

we sort of contain God,

boxing man is through abstraction.

Abstraction, so we depersonalize God.

We depersonalize God.

We don't relate to God as a

person or Jesus as a person.

We relate to them as

something impersonal,

as an idea, as an

abstraction, as a topic for discussion,

as energy, as a force.

And the reason we do this is because we don't have

and the reason we do this

is because an impersonal God

doesn't have a will.

And an impersonal God is

never gonna make demands on me.

An impersonal God does

not have preferences.

An impersonal God is not gonna place

any kind of restrictions on me,

but the claims of Jesus

problematize this for us

because he comes in and

he says, I'm the Messiah.

I am the king, the

Davidic king of Psalm 110.

I am God's anointed king

and more than that, I am God.

And so he personalizes God in a way

that's rather

threatening to us when we're used

to sort of regarding

God as an abstraction.

Listen to the way C.S.

Lewis talks about this

in his book, Miracles.

I just pulled my

bookmark out and lost the page.

Here we are, okay.

So C.S. Lewis on this

idea of an impersonal God.

Here's what he says.

He says an impersonal God, well and good.

A subjective God of

beauty, truth, and goodness

inside our own heads, better still.

A formless life force surging through us,

a vast power which we

can tap best of all.

But God himself, alive, pulling at the

other end of the cord,

perhaps approaching at an infinite speed,

the hunter, the king, the husband,

that is quite another matter.

He goes on, there comes a

moment when the children

who'd been playing at

burglars hushed suddenly.

Was that a real footstep in the hall?

There comes a moment when

people have been dabbling

in religion, suddenly draw back.

Supposing we really found him.

We never meant it to come to that.

We're still supposing he had found us.

In other words,

if you've been relating to

God in a depersonalized way,

it's like you're playing a

child's game in your heart.

There's no stakes.

There's no consequences.

Like you go through the

motions of a religious life,

but you keep God at arm's

length by dabbling with him.

And at any moment, God could break in

and disrupt that dynamic

and disrupt that pattern.

And if he does that, then

it could be very sudden,

it could be very startling,

and he will become

very shockingly personal.

And this happened for

me when I was in college,

as it does for a lot of folks.

I mean, I had this experience in college

where the combination of

my own poor decision-making,

which was the start, it started with me,

and then other

people's graceless reaction

to my poor decision-making,

combined to produce this

guilt and shame in my life

that was new, it was

not something I dealt with

at that kind of level

and that intensity before.

And I did not know how to

deal with it spiritually.

It was like such a

shocking and disorienting time

and a dark time, and I

felt abandoned by a God

that I wasn't even

really sure I ever knew.

And so I had this

moment where I was like,

oh, I have to face reality.

And the reality was that I

had a depersonalized God,

and I had been a Christian all my life,

all of my conscious

life, and grew up in church.

But in many ways, I was a

21-year-old baby Christian,

and I didn't look like

it, I didn't talk like it,

because I knew my Bible,

and I was at university studying

theology, learning Greek,

leading in three different ministries,

but God was impersonal to me.

My God was an abstraction, and the

problem that I discovered

is that an abstraction could not help me.

An abstraction could not

help me resolve the guilt

that I felt for these

things that I'd done

that I could never justify.

And so my impersonal

God was useless to me.

Absolutely useless.

Couldn't love me, couldn't comfort me,

couldn't help me, couldn't forgive me,

couldn't heal me, couldn't change me,

couldn't do anything for me,

because he was an abstraction,

because I had depersonalized him.

And for the first time in my life,

I was just truly desperate to know Jesus,

and I knew that I needed more,

I needed more than the

abstraction, and so do you.

You need more than an

impersonal God, and you need more,

I mean, it's not enough to

just go through the motions

of the Christian life and

not know Jesus personally.

It's not enough to just have the

vocabulary of Christianity

and the grammar of religion

to verbalize your own experiences.

We need God to speak into our world.

And so in that spirit, I

want us to look to Psalm 110,

because Jesus said this

psalm was about himself.

He used it to challenge these Pharisees,

and I hope that he uses it

to challenge us this morning.

The main figure in this

psalm embodies three paradoxes,

three sets of these seemingly

contradictory characteristics.

And so I wanna look at what they are

and then talk about

how Jesus fulfills them.

So looking to Psalm 110,

we see that this character, Jesus,

is both human and

divine, both human and divine.

In verses one and two,

says the Lord says to my Lord.

Now, the English word

Lord is used twice there,

but it's two different words in Hebrew.

The first one, the first Lord is Yahweh,

referring to God, the

covenant name of God,

I am that I am.

The second Lord is

the Hebrew word Adonai,

not Adonai, which you

recognize from Josh's talk

a couple of weeks ago, but Adonai,

which is the singular form of Adonai,

and the overwhelming

majority of uses of Adonai

in the Old Testament

refer to a human being.

So David's Lord is a human being,

and yet Jesus' point to the Pharisees is

if this character is a

human descendant of David,

then David would have

never called him my Lord.

Never, he would have

never called him my general.

He would have never

called him my king, my Adonai.

He would have called him my son.

And so we have the human and the divine.

God also says to this

Lord, sit at my right hand.

The sitting at the right hand indicates

that David's Lord,

Jesus, has a unique privilege

and a unique

position, because human beings

do not ascend to heaven to

sit at the right hand of God.

Angels do not sit at

the right hand of God.

Only someone equal with

God, only someone divine,

could sit at the right hand of God,

because he is above all

angels and all earthly beings.

And so that's why

Jesus has this privilege.

So we see that this

character is both human and divine,

and if you're a Christian person,

the idea that Jesus is

both human and divine

is probably not something

you're tripping over, right?

You're like, I think I knew that.

We covered that in the intro class.

But let's keep going.

We also see that because

he is human and divine,

he is equal to God, but

also different from God.

Equal to God, but different from God.

So David's Lord is divine, equal to God,

but at the same time distinct.

So look at this, in verse two,

he shares equally in God's ruling power.

He's at the right hand of God,

and then it says, "The

Lord will extend your scepter

"from Zion, saying, rule in

the midst of your enemies."

Now, the scepter is

symbolic of authority,

and in this case, the scepter is shared.

It's God's scepter,

which is then extended

to the human divine king,

and so it is a distinct action

from one character to another.

So they're distinct people.

And then in verse

five, David addresses God,

the first Lord, in the second person,

and refers to the

Messiah in the third person,

saying, "The Lord,

David's Lord, the Messiah,

"is at your God's right hand.

"He will crush kings on

the day of his wrath."

So we have these two discrete actors.

We have the Lord, we

have David's Lord, God,

and the Messiah, the Father and the Son,

equal and yet distinct.

And so, so far in this psalm,

we've covered some things

that you're probably expecting

in a talk about Jesus.

He's human and divine.

He is equal to God, but also distinct.

And Jesus claimed to be this Messiah,

and the earliest

Christians proclaimed him as such,

and so this was Jesus'

whole point to the Pharisees.

The Messiah is not

just a human warrior king

who's gonna come in to deliver you

from your political enemies.

He is human and divine.

He's God in the flesh.

And so the enemies that he will conquer

are not necessarily flesh and blood.

He didn't just come to overthrow

their geopolitical enemies.

I mean, he didn't just

come to overthrow Egypt

or Babylon or at this point, Rome.

He came to wage this

all-out relentless war

on sin and evil.

But what that means then

is that every human empire

is on a road to

disillusion, including ours.

But there's still one

more paradox to see,

and it kind of

demands our full attention.

The last thing that we see,

when we see that Jesus

is both human and divine,

we see he's different than

God, and also equal to God.

Jesus is a king, as we've established

in the first couple of

verses of this psalm,

but he is also a priest.

He's a king and a priest.

Let's talk about this.

So in verses one to two,

we have Jesus sitting

at God's right hand,

and he's been given this scepter

to rule in the midst of his enemies.

So he is sharing prestige with God,

sharing power with God.

He's sharing in God's authority,

he's sharing in God's rule.

And in verse three, we do

see that he's a warrior king.

It says, "Your troops will be willing

on your day of battle.

A raid and holy splendor.

Your young men will come to you like dew

from the morning's womb."

In other words, he won't

have to conscript anybody.

He's not gonna have to

force anybody to fight for him.

He's gonna be this beloved king.

People are going to

be eager to follow him,

eager to serve him,

eager to sort of be with him.

And David uses this incredible picture

of dew from the morning's womb.

And so I think of it this way.

I used to work at a golf course,

and I had to get to work like real early

before the sun came up.

I was always the first person in there.

And if I got

everything set up fast enough,

then I could get it done before sunrise,

and I could sit, and I

could watch the sunrise come up,

and like the back of this

country club faced east.

And so I could watch the sunrise come up

over three different fairways

that had all had the sprinklers running,

and they had the dew and

stuff, and they were wet,

and I would see the

glistening of the water droplets,

like a billion little

knights in shining armor.

And that's what David is

kind of drawing upon here.

This king priest, he's a warrior king.

He's gonna lead this army into battle,

and yet he's also a priest.

He's also a priest.

Verse four, "The Lord is sworn and will

not change his mind.

You're a priest forever in

the order of Melchizedek."

Now, to be simultaneously a

king and a priest in Judah

was essentially

impossible in David's time.

Here's why.

The priesthood was

restricted to the descendants

of Aaron and the Levites.

So they were the only

people who could be priests.

David and his

descendants could not be priests.

And the kingship was

restricted to David and his house.

So Aaron and his

descendants couldn't be king.

And so because these two offices,

these two roles and

functions have been reserved

for these two specific family

lines, they don't cross over.

You don't ever have one person occupying

both of these roles.

In fact, kings were forbidden

from performing priestly functions.

They didn't have any

priestly prerogatives.

And so you see multiple

times in the Old Testament,

kings getting themselves in trouble

because they try and act like priests.

So for example, David's predecessor Saul

did all kinds of things

that made the Lord angry.

But the final straw was that

he offered a burnt offering

on his own without a priest.

And that is the last

thing before he's removed

from the throne and rejected by God.

King Uzziah, who is David's descendant,

David's seventh great grandson,

he went into the temple alone

to offer an incense offering.

And the priests saw him going in there

and they followed him in.

And they were like, "You

can't do this, your grace.

Please don't, this is not your role.

We have to be the ones to do this."

Uzziah became angry with them

and he was stricken

with leprosy on the spot

and had to give away the

throne to his son Jotham.

And so we see that the

king and the priest's role

are both incredibly

important in ancient Israel.

They're incredibly important.

And at the same time,

they're sort of

contradictory and mutually exclusive.

And nevertheless, God makes an oath

with this divine human king.

He says he'll be a priest forever

in the order of

Melchizedek, forever the way to God.

It will be you.

Now who is Melchizedek?

Melchizedek is like Jack

Nicholson and a Few Good Men

or Anthony Hopkins and

Silence of the Lambs.

Like he's like barely in the movie,

but he makes a huge impact.

So he shows up in Genesis 14.

It's the only other Old

Testament mention of Melchizedek.

He shows up in Psalm 110

and he's gonna show up in the New

Testament a little bit.

But Melchizedek,

we're told in Genesis 14,

Abraham meets him after

defeating the king of Sodom.

And Melchizedek's name

means king of righteousness.

And he's described in the

text as the king of Salem,

that is Jerusalem.

And Salem means peace.

So he's a king,

but the text also describes

him as a priest of El Elyon,

God the Most High.

And so Melchizedek blesses Abraham

and he gives him bread and wine.

Now some interpreters

do think they insist

that Melchizedek is actually Jesus Christ

making a cameo in the Old Testament.

I don't think that's the case.

But the author of Hebrews,

who like I said, the

entire book of Hebrews

is based on this Psalm,

the author of Hebrews

interprets Melchizedek

as being what's called a type.

Sort of a forerunner, a

foreshadowing of Christ.

And so here's how this works.

Melchizedek was a priest long before

Aaron and the Levites.

They're not gonna come

around until much later.

He's a priest and a king all

the way back in Genesis 14.

And Jesus is not a descendant of Aaron.

And so he doesn't come

from the priestly family,

but he is a priest in the order

that predates Aaron's order.

And that's part of why

Jesus is a superior priest.

So here's the rub.

King and priest,

they're mutually exclusive,

they're contradictory roles.

And even if they were

embodied in the same person,

they have different functions.

They have different functions.

They're contradictory roles with

contradictory purposes.

And the contrast is made very clear

once we jump into the following verse.

Cause right after we

have this priestly oath,

right after God swears to David's Lord,

to Jesus, to the Messiah,

that he'll be a priest forever

in this order of Melchizedek.

David in the Psalm begins to address God

and refers to the Messiah.

And it goes pretty dark.

He says, "The Lord is at your right hand.

He will crush Kings on

the day of his wrath.

He will judge the nations,

heaping up the dead, heaping up bodies,

heaping up corpses,

and crushing the

rulers of the whole earth.

And he will drink

from a brookle on the way

and so he will lift his head high."

I mean, that doesn't

sound very priestly, does it?

Based on everything

you know about priests

from the Old Testament,

it doesn't sound like a priest at all.

Here's the problem.

The king is meant to

represent God to the people.

The priests are meant to

represent people to God.

In some ways they're

opposing agendas, right?

The king has to rule and

judge and enforce the law

and go to war and kill people.

The priest serves and advocates and heals

and offers sacrifices and

removes sin and preserves life.

And so in these two roles,

we have this classic tension.

I mean, the classic tension.

It's justice and mercy, right?

Law and grace, Javert and Valjean.

And so we see this paradox

in other places in the Bible

and especially in one

very important place

that Josh also

mentioned a couple weeks ago

and that I talked about

the last time I was up here,

but it's Exodus 34.

Exodus 34.

And in Exodus 34, what we have is that

Moses has asked God,

he wants to see God's glory.

And God's like, "Well, here's the,

if I show it to you, you'll die.

And so I can't do that.

So I will pass by and then

you can look at the place

where I just was.

And that like just the

glowing spot where I used to be.

I mean, that's all we can do.

And so he's gonna, he says to Moses,

he says, "I'll make all my

goodness pass before you."

And in this text, we're

gonna see this paradox,

this contradiction in

the very heart of God.

So when the Lord

reveals his glory to Moses,

reveals his goodness, it says,

"Then the Lord came down in the cloud

and stood there with him

and proclaimed his name,

the Lord," and listen to the name.

"He passed in front

of Moses, proclaiming,

the Lord, the Lord, the

compassionate and gracious God,

slow to anger, abounding

in love and faithfulness,

maintaining love to thousands,

and forgiving

wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

And yet he does not

leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the

children and their children

for the sin of the parents

to the third and fourth generation."

Now, I don't wanna get

too off track on this,

but punish is kind of a

weird translation here.

Essentially the idea is

that sin, if it goes unchecked,

it perpetuates itself

generationally, okay?

What you live with, you learn,

what you learn, you

practice, what you practice,

you become, what you

become has consequences.

That's how this works.

So Jesus is not just

arbitrarily punishing kids

because their parents

did something wrong.

Jesus is talking about

a generational transfer

of a destructive habit or a

pattern or emotional pattern

or a sin pattern, something like that,

but it perpetuates

through the generations.

Now, getting back to the main point,

did you see the

contradiction in the heart of God?

On one hand, he is so

compassionate and gracious

and so abounding in love and faithfulness

that he will forgive

wickedness and rebellion and sin.

And yet at the same time,

he is just and righteous

and does not leave sin unpunished.

He does not leave the guilty unpunished.

And so this is the

paradox of God's goodness.

And unless we learn to

appreciate both sides

of this paradox and

unless we learn to hold them

in tandem and intention together,

be really hard to engage

fully with the goodness of God

in our lives.

And so we had this issue.

He's so good that he wants to

forgive all sin and wickedness,

but if he gives sin

and wickedness a pass,

then he's not good.

Because no judge who

looks at evil and says,

"No problem," is a good

judge, and all of you believe that.

So at the same time, though,

he doesn't leave the guilty unpunished,

but if he only ever

punished and was never merciful,

he wouldn't be good either.

So he is merciful.

But how does this work?

How does all of this get resolved?

The paradox is resolved in Jesus Christ.

The paradox is

resolved in the priest king,

in David's Lord.

Here's how.

Jesus resolves this

contradiction in the heart of God,

in his own body, in his own life,

and he does it by becoming the judge

who is judged in our place.

He is the judge who

is judged in our place.

Here's what it says in Colossians 1.

Paul writes this.

It says, "Once you

were alienated from God,

enemies because of your evil behavior,

but now he has reconciled you

through Christ's physical body,

through his death, to

present you holy in his sight,

without blemish and

free from accusation."

Now you see, Jesus, on one hand,

he proclaims our guilt.

He proclaims our guilt.

He judges our guilt, but

also he became our sin.

And so he is at the same time,

he is the judge, the just

judge, the righteous judge,

but he is so gracious

and so compassionate

that he will become sin

and he will place himself

under God's righteous judgment.

And this is how Jesus the priest king

destroys his enemies.

He reconciles us to God.

He makes us friends,

which is the ultimate

destruction of an enemy.

He judges our wickedness,

but then he takes the

responsibility on himself

to make us holy.

And then when the hand

that holds this scepter

that's been extended from Zion,

when this hand deals

the final killing blow

to sin and evil, all it

does is hang there and bleed.

That's our priest king.

And I'd like for us to contemplate that

as the band comes up and

as the communion service

distribute the elements.

I'd like to encourage you just to take

a couple silent minutes and pray.

And consider our priest king.

Consider David's Lord,

the human and divine Messiah

who comes to wage war on sin and evil

and in fact has done it.

And that is why he is now

seated at the right hand of God

awaiting the final

surrender of all of his enemies

when they become his footstool.

Just take a couple silent moments,

just to pray and reflect and have a moment with God.

- Thank you for

listening to the Midtown Church

Sermon podcast.

We invite you to

practice the way of Jesus

in Austin with us because

as we become more like Jesus, Austin will become more like heaven. (upbeat music)