The Apostle Paul
would latch on to this theme of kneeling, echoed elsewhere in the Hebrew
Scriptures, and include in his letter to the believers in Philippi “that at the
name of Jesus every knee will bow---in heaven and on earth and under the earth”
(2:10). Not only could Jesus come to believe that, if He was correct in
His assessment of the messianic vocation, His enemy would kneel and bow before
Him, but Jesus could also look to this Psalm and go to the cross with the
confident declaration that “You make My enemies retreat” (18:40a). With
the power of the faithful, covenant-making-and-keeping God at His back, Jesus
could make the assertion that “I destroy those who hate Me” (18:40b). Surely, the powers of death and destruction
could be understood to hate the bringers of life, renewal, restoration, and
re-creation.
His enemies would not
go down without a battle, nor without an assertion of their rights. In
fact, those enemies would cry out. The Psalmist would write, “they cry
out, but there is no one to help them” (18:41a). More than that, His
enemies, death and the grave, would even “cry out to the Lord, but He does not
answer them” (18:41b). Wait a minute. How could death cry out to
the Lord? Why would death cry out to the sovereign Lord of the cosmos?
In crying out to the
Lord, if in its own death throes as the power of resurrection life was about to
be unleashed into the world, death would be doing nothing more than asserting
its rightful claim against all of mankind. According to the narrative by
which Jesus would have ordered and defined His own life, and by which His
thinking would be shaped, that rightful claim began with Adam. More
specifically, death would be asserting its rightful claim against Israel (of
which Jesus was part), which had been in constant violation of their God’s
commandments to them, as evidenced by their ongoing experience of His promised curses and their continual state of exile, being oppressed and subjugated while
in their own land
Among a number of
reasons, it was this failure of Israel that would make it necessary, because the
covenant God is faithful to His promises, for their King to undergo that which
was seen as the greatest curse, the cross, going there as the representative of
His people, to undergo the curses of suffering and death. Though death
was certainly a usurper and an interloper in the God of Israel’s good creation,
it was not an unlawful usurpation, as death had only entered because of
mankind’s failure, and remained through the divine image-bearer’s (whether Adam
or Israel) relinquishing of his God-given dominion over all things. Though death and its associates cry out, the
Creator God’s answer would come through His anointed King’s power to “grind
them as fine windblown dust” (18:42a), and His strength to “beat them underfoot
like clay in the streets” (18:42b). This would be accomplished by a
Resurrection, as God would brook no bargains with death in the process of
setting His world to rights (and right standing with Him) through His
Christ.
As one ponders what
has been accomplished by the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and as one continues
to imagine the strength and confidence for His mission that Jesus would have
gained through His study and exploration of the Scriptures, one is able to go
on to read “You rescue Me from a hostile army” (Psalm 18:43a). For Jesus,
this involves a two-fold application. Though in the natural He was not
rescued from a hostile army---that being the Roman army---by being raised up
from His grave (which actually does indicate something of a rescue from Rome’s
military might), He was rescued from death and its vengeful hordes. By
going into the curse of death on a cross as the singular representative of His
people Israel, it can be seen that Jesus took yet another aspect of the
Deuteronomic curse upon Himself.
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