Introduction
Faith is not manipulative. Nor is faith transactional. God is not like Amazon Prime where you shop for the promise you want, use your Jesus’ Blood credit card and get 2-5 day shipping.
Faith is primarily covenant relationship and cooperative obedience. It’s building a relationship with God built on trust in His character and His word, and obedient responses to His instructions. How do we nurture this relationship and obedience? Prayer.
Prayer is one of the most powerful and important things we can do as believers (the church). Prayer is one of the primary ways that we nurture our relationship with a God we are in covenant with, and one of the primary ways we learn cooperative obedience. Prayer then is how we build the trust needed for obedience.
The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you think He should do. The primary purpose of prayer is relationship, and in that relationship we are transformed. Prayer must be primarily about being with God, not primarily about asking (or especially demanding) something from God. It is within the context of this relationship that our trust is built and our character transformed that we learn how to pray rightly and live rightly while enacting His will in cooperative obedience.
The Psalms is the prayer book of the Bible. It was Jesus’ prayer book, as well as the Apostles’ prayer book. In learning how to pray the Psalms, we are learning the language of prayer, the language that deepens our communion and fellowship with God. We learn how to pray without pretense, eyes wide-open to the challenges of life and the pains in the world, but also with hope for God’s sovereign action and trust in His saving character.
Psalm 93
Psalm 93 begins a grouping of Psalms known as the “Enthronement Psalms” that contain the phrase “YHWH is King.”1 These Psalms are asserting that no matter what we see in the world, God is ultimately in charge.
Psalm 93:1-5 (ESV)
The LORD reigns; he is robed in majesty;
the LORD is robed; he has put on strength as his belt.
Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. Your throne is established from of old;
you are from everlasting.
The floods have lifted up, O LORD,
the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring.
Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea,
the LORD on high is mighty!
Your decrees are very trustworthy; holiness befits your house,
O LORD, forevermore.
Sovereignty
As followers of Jesus we must understand that our primary citizenship is not in a political system or nation of this world. Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). The political system we belong to first and foremost is not our birth nation, but the Kingdom of God. And ultimately, we do not belong to ourselves, but to God. Regardless of any political science or philosophy that works or is useful in the natural, we must humbly submit to the reality that humans are not ultimately sovereign, YHWH is.
In prayer, the church lives from a reality that is not shaped by public policy and political pundits, but God’s sovereign reign. The Church in Prayer is in a point of collision: recognizing the reality that God is king and calls me to submit to Him, and the world that demands to have a voice and a vote on everything and revolts when their demands are not met.
1 The notable exception to this is Psalm 94, which does not contain this phrase. However, the theme of Psalm 94 is that YHWH is Judge, which is a royal task in Scripture. So many scholars are quite confident to keep the Psalm in the grouping of “Enthronement Psalms.” Psalm 47 is also included in this category of “Enthronement Psalms,” though not in this particular grouping.
YHWH Reigns
In the “Enthronement Psalms,” God’s rule is pondered and prayed. When we pray these psalms, we are confronted with the truth that our little kingdoms and our self-governed lives are a blundering mess and that God’s sovereign rule pervades all of creation, including, and especially, my little kingdom. Psalm 93 ushers us into this reality.
“Regal in its artless simplicity, imposing in its unpretentious brevity, memorable in its strong rhythms, it attracts and convinces.” ~ Eugene Peterson
Psalm 93:1-2 (ESV)
The LORD reigns;
he is robed in majesty;
the LORD is robed;
he has put on strength as his belt.
Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.
Your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting.
These four pillars establish God’s sovereignty beyond the merely spiritual or theological, but into the political and historical realms as well. In our prayer, shaped by Psalms like Psalm 93, we strengthen our conviction that God’s rule is being exercised in the world of community and politics where we are living in right here and now. For Israel, praying this Psalm was supposed to keep them from assuming that having a natural king somehow took precedence over having God as their king. We would do well to follow the same.
Human kings dress themselves in fine ornamental clothing, God’s robes are His majesty. Human kings wield a scepter in court and a sword into battle, but God’s weapon is His strength.
Just as solid as the earth beneath our feet, more so is the solidity of God’s throne. As a result of His stable rule and reign, the world is stable. His rule is not in question or becomes unstable every election cycle in our country, any political revolutions or rising tyrant around the globe. We serve One who is ultimately sovereign and His strength is unmatched.
Taming the Chaos
To many who look at the world in chaos, or have personal experiences of pain and confusion, it seems as though there are many times and seasons in our personal life and our national life where it appears as though God isn’t in charge at all. If we are to remain in covenant relationship and cooperative obedience to the God who rules, these times of chaos must be prayed through.
Quoted from Eugene Peterson’s book, “Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community,” page 54.
Psalm 93:3 (ESV)
The floods have lifted up, O LORD,
the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring.
The earth may be solid and unmoving, but the floods of unruliness easily sweep us off our feet and batter us against the rocks and under the waves. Chaotic waters are used as a metaphor in Scripture to describe the chaos in our lives and enemies coming against us. In Genesis 1, creation is described as dark waters of chaos. The Creator God is the only one who can go into the “formless and void” and bring order and beauty and goodness.
The floods of our lives and world sweep us into violence, it is a metaphor for anarchy and chaos. There are the floodwaters of a global pandemic, floodwaters of political, social, and economic upheaval, and floodwaters of fear, panic, greed, lust, and ego. What is God’s response to the violence of these floodwaters?
Psalm 93:4 (ESV)
Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the LORD on high is mighty!
The floodwaters of chaos and anarchy are matched by the sovereign Lord. Three times the floods lift up their voice; three times the Lord’s might proves sovereign.
God’s Rule in Effect
Many take God’s sovereignty to mean that because He is in charge, we can do nothing. If He is sovereign, I am not responsible, right? But throughout history, the praying church who lived out God as sovereign, did not sit back and do nothing. Our faith that God is sovereign and actively ruling in time moves us into appropriate action.
How is God’s mighty rule put into effect? How is His kingship lived out in history and in our lives? Three lines describe how:
Psalm 93:5 (ESV)
Your decrees are very trustworthy; holiness befits your house,
O LORD, forevermore.
“Your decrees are very sure.” The waves are subdued by the word. The violence of the waters is not countered by the violence from God.
“The means by which God puts His rule into effect is word not muscle, decrees not armies, creative speech not coercive act.” ~ Eugene Peterson
It’s God’s word that puts God’s rule into effect in this world. The word of God stands up in opposition to the violence and chaos of the world. The word is firm and sure when nothing else is.
God’s people in cooperative obedience to His word live out the trustworthiness and surety of His rule that outlasts the violence and chaos the enemy tries to ensue upon our hearts, minds, and lives, or the violence and chaos the forces of darkness ensue upon our country or world. We trust that God is faithful, no matter what the headlines say or the experts report. We believe God reigns, no matter how we feel or what we see.
In addition to God’s rule being perceived in the cooperative obedience to His word in His people, we perceive His rule in the second line: “holiness befits your house.” Other translations use the word “adorn” (NKJV), which is to say “makes lovely, adorns becomingly.” This word is used more frequently in the Old Testament book Song of Songs, a love song between two lovers, the poetic dialogue of two powerful and sovereign wills touching and responding in the beauty of love. Here in this collision, there is no force, no acquiescence, only loving, passionate, responsive relationship.
This idea of a love song with the beauty of two lives uniting into one is the same framework of how God’s rule is put into effect in an unruly world; not force or acquiescence, but a love that draws us into covenantal relationship with the God of steadfast love and holiness. God’s holiness and beauty enters into our lives through our covenantal relationship and cooperative obedience to His word. It is a patient, gradual, penetrating beauty of God’s rule into our desecrated and profaned world and lives.
“O Lord, forevermore.” One translation has it as, “for the length of days,” or “as the days stretch out through history.” Prayer is not patiently waiting for His rule to come into effect sometime in the future, but patiently participating in His rule in the present.
His rule is not always obvious. His decrees are often ignored or misunderstood. His holiness is often treated with desecration and profanity. His present rule sometimes gets overshadowed by fear and anxiety, pandemics and riots. Yet in the midst of the ignorance and indifference, the violence and chaos, it remains the eternal truth: YHWH reigns.
Three lines of violent waters lifting up their rebellious roar countered by three lines of the Lord’s mightier rule, expounded by three lines of the way His rule comes into effect in the world.
Quoted from Eugene Peterson’s book, “Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community,” page 61.
Jesus
Christians celebrate God’s kingship in the person of Jesus Christ, the “anointed king” (Messiah, Christ) who establishes the Kingdom of God (Matthew 4:17). In Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:17) we see Him go through the waters of baptism, affirmed by the Father as “my beloved son,” a quotation from Psalm 2 as a designation of divinely ordained royal authority. Messiah emerges from the violence and chaos of death and emerges resurrected on the other side to rule over the chaos.
Matthew 28:18-20 (ESV) And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Covenant Relationship / Cooperative Obedience
Conclusion
Learning to pray Psalm 93 in light of Jesus has a subtle, transformative effect on our character and our lives. We learn how to be in covenant relationship with the God who rules all of creation. We develop the relational trust necessary to live in cooperative obedience. The floodwaters of politics, news media, academia, medicine, and culture lift up their voice in defiance and chaos; the floodwaters of fear, anxiety, depression, anger, greed, lust, and pride lift up their voice, but the Lord is mightier. His word is sure. His promises are “yes, and amen in Christ Jesus” (2 Corinthians 1:20). His house (which is His covenant people – 2 Corinthians 6:16-18) is adorned with His beauty as we live in humble submission to His rule.