When Jesus spoke with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, he made it clear that the Old Testament was about himself. Then when in the upper room, he specifically included the current book of the Bible I’m looking at. He told them, “Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” The next verse, Luke 24:25, is significant to anyone genuinely interested in understanding the Scriptures. Jesus “Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” Williams is right then when he says, “The Bible, as the written Word of God, reveals both God’s plan for the world and its center, the living Word of God, Jesus Christ (John 1:1–2, 14). Thus the psalms and the whole of the Bible must be interpreted christocentrically. As Luther puts it, in the Bible, we have the words of God, which are to be understood by the Word of God, Jesus Christ. All meditation on Scripture, therefore, and all movement in history must take us to Christ.”[1]

How do we look at this verse christocentrically? Psalm 2:1 says, “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?” Rage is an exciting word. According to one dictionary, related words are “acerbity, acrimony, asperity; frenzy, hysteria, mania; agitation, perturbation, upset.”[2] A word under which all of these might be is “chaos.” If God is a God of order, why all this chaos? God plans to bring order out of chaos, as demonstrated in the first book of the Bible. The world was “formless and void.” The Hebrew phrase is “tohu va bohu.” God’s spirit, through his word, hovers over the face of the deep and begins to bring order out of chaos. We read in both John’s Gospel and the book of Colossians that Jesus is the creator and the one who brings order from the chaos. There has always been war and confusion in the history of humanity. From the wars with the Canaanites in Genesis 15, through the Persian and Assyrian world conquests, Alexander the Great, the Roman empire, the countries of eastern and western Europe, the first and second world wars, the struggles in Korea, Vietnam, and the current war in Ukraine as I write this now, there has always been worldwide chaos. NATO has not been able to bring order! But Jesus will. We will see how every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. The beginning of bringing order out of chaos started in Genesis 1 and will be fulfilled with Christ’s return according to Revelation 22.

The Nations will one day unite against the King of Kings. There is a sense in which that unity has already come. All the nations’ raging for control and power throughout history will come to naught. The forces united against Jesus, and together they crucified him at Golgotha. The resurrection exposed the vanity of their raging against the true king of kings. Neither the Romans nor the King of Israel would surrender their power and position to Jesus, so they killed him. Courson says it well, “Why do the kings of the earth create federations of those who would normally be at odds with each other? I think of Herod and Pilate, an Idumean and a Roman. Normally, they would be at each other’s throats. But they came together in their hatred of Jesus, in their desire to destroy Him.”[3]

[1] Williams, Donald, and Lloyd J. Ogilvie. 1986. Psalms 1–72. Vol. 13. The Preacher’s Commentary Series. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.

[2] Merriam-Webster, Inc. 1996. In Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

[3] Courson, Jon. 2006. Jon Courson’s Application Commentary: Volume Two: Psalms-Malachi. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.