May those who desire my vindication shout for joy and rejoice! – Psalm 35:27a (NET)
The thirty-fifth Psalm begins with “O Lord, fight those who fight with me! Attack those who attack me! …Rise up to help me! …Assure me with these words: I am your deliverer!” (35:1,2b,3b) As we read these words in the light of our knowledge of our Savior, and of His crucifixion and Resurrection, it is quite natural to want to place them on the lips of Jesus as He endured His saving ordeal. Because Jesus did not speak against His accusers, nor against those that carried out the sentence of death that was passed against Him, it is not appropriate to have Him asking God to fight and attack them. Instead, Jesus asked that His Father readily forgive them for their actions performed in ignorance. So if we do in fact ascribe these words to Jesus, we must make sure that they are properly directed.
Ultimately, who was it that fought with Jesus? Who attacked Him? Who was His great enemy and from whom did He desire deliverance? The answer to these questions is “death.” It was the battle with death into which Jesus asked the Father to enter, to fight on His behalf, to rise up to attack. Because Jesus entered the battle as well, and did not ask the Father to deliver Him in a way that allowed Him to stand absent from the pain of death, Jesus knew that the cross must be endured. Owing to that, He asked for an assurance that He would be delivered up from the power of death, after willingly allowing Himself to be overcome by His great enemy.
The Resurrection that followed stripped death of its power. From that point on, though very real and very present, death would be a toothless foe in the face of the promise of the power of resurrection and new life for the people of God. Death had held sway from the fall, but with the Resurrection, what might be seen as a further request of Jesus, of “May those who seek my life be embarrassed and humiliated! May those who plan to harm be turned back and ashamed!” (35:4) was answered in the affirmative. In a culture in which shame was very much equated with death, it is death itself that is now to be ashamed. In an ironic twist, it is death alone that now experiences its long held and once mighty power. Though it had rightfully entered into God’s creation, with its corruption and decay, death had been an over-reaching usurper within God’s creation.
God had long desired, through the use of those that He had created to be the wise, image-bearing stewards of His creation, to set that creation to rights and to redeem and restore it. This would ultimately be accomplished through Jesus, and through those that would be brought into union with Jesus by submission to His royal authority, as He was the One that bore the precise and exact image of God, and the One Who would share that image with His brethren. By the Spirit, because of a trusting allegiance to Jesus, God would then work through His covenant people to deal with the corruption and decay and evil that represent death’s residual power and lingering effects in a world now ruled by Jesus. With the Resurrection power of Jesus in the world and being administered through the Spirit’s work of faith and its preaching of the Gospel of Jesus, death was now little more than a roaring lion, lacking the power that it had once possessed.
Death had made an attempt to oppress Jesus and to rob Him of His victory, and through that oppression, because Jesus stood as the King and representative of all of God’s people, to oppress and to rob those very people of God; but death’s conquering by the Resurrection, which redeemed mankind and the creation from its long exile and ushered in the kingdom of God and an entirely new age of restoration and renewal and reconciliation through the very power of the Gospel and its declaration of the universal Lordship of Jesus, causes God’s people, in union with our Lord and Savior, to say “O Lord, who can compare to You? You rescue the oppressed and needy from those who try to overpower them; the oppressed and needy from those who try to rob them” (35:10b).
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