A Word about the Son of Laughter

 Today I want to share a word about the Son of Laughter as I comment on the 2nd Psalm.

This will launch us into a new series that I am calling “An Old Testament Christmas.”  You might be familiar with the phrase, “An Old-Fashioned Christmas,” but that is not this. So why an Old Testament Christmas?

Because we have the entire canon of the Bible, we forget that the Bible that Jesus and the early church had was the Old Testament. Jesus, his disciples, and the early church pastors knew that the Old Testament was perfectly sufficient to demonstrate that Jesus was the Uniquely Begotten Son of God, and our Messiah, who came to take away the sins of the world.

In fact, the founding of the early church did not require a written New Testament at all. Peter’s sermon on Pentecost was the first recorded Christian sermon, and in it, he quoted from Joel and Psalms. If basing his sermon about Christ on Old Testament references was good enough for Peter, then it is certainly good enough for us!

It was only later, when the eyewitnesses to Jesus began to die, that the Holy Spirit prompted Matthew, Mark, and Luke to pen their Gospels. John’s Gospel was one of the last New Testament books written, near the end of the First Century and about sixty years after the events of the first Easter. It is very helpful to us that we have the New Testament, but the Old Testament certainly tells us about the coming of Christ.

So, as we journey back in time, before the first Christmas, we begin our Old Testament Christmas at Psalm 2, where we will see the Christ Child as the Son of Laughter. 

You will remember another time in the Old Testament when a parent laughed about the birth of a child.  In Sarah’s old age, some visitors from Heaven came to greet her with the news that she would have a son, and when she heard them, she laughed. We don’t know why she laughed, but when she was confronted about this by the visitors, she denied it. Certainly, she had been hoping for a child and giving birth for her would have been a joyous event. In any case, she did conceive and gave birth to a son, Isaac, which translated means, laughter.

When discussing the ministry of His Son in Psalm 2, God also laughed, but for a different reason. Let’s look at Psalm 2, beginning with verses 1-3.

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers conspire together against the Lord and his Anointed One: “Let’s tear off their chains and throw their ropes off of us.”

The Rebellion of Nations:

One of the lasting effects of the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden is a human tendency towards arrogance. The poem “Invictus” by William Henley is a good example of our arrogance:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

Of course, we also know how Frank Sinatra sang the song, “My Way.” The final verse declares,

For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught

To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels

The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!

Yes, it was my way

I can see two dimensions to this arrogance. The first is the ignorance of arrogance. We just don’t know what we don’t know, but that doesn’t stop us from coming up with our own ideas, like how the mongoose became known as one of the most invasive species on earth.

The mongoose was imported into Hawaii in the late 1800s by sugar plantation owners hoping it would control rats eating their sugarcane. In India, the mongoose is a fearsome killer of snakes, but no snakes exist in Hawaii. So, the planters thought that the mongoose would turn to killing the rats. This seems a logical plan on its face, but they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Unfortunately, because rats are nocturnal and mongooses are active during the day, the plan failed—and instead the mongoose devastated native Hawaiian wildlife.

The mongoose story is a classic cautionary tale of unintended consequences. What began as a quick fix for agriculture became a long-term ecological disaster. It underscores the danger of believing you know more than you actually do.

The other dimension of our arrogance is our opposition to God. It is one thing to stand alone in the world and declare your independence from other people. It is entirely a different thing to stand alone, or in company with other people to declare your independence from God Almighty. And yet, this is exactly what the Psalmist says that the nations of the world do.

Isaiah 17:12-14 puts it this way:

Ah! The roar of many peoples— they roar like the roaring of the seas. The raging of the nations— they rage like the rumble of rushing water. The nations rage like the rumble of a huge torrent. He rebukes them, and they flee far away, driven before the wind like chaff on the hills and like tumbleweeds before a gale. In the evening—sudden terror! Before morning—it is gone! This is the fate of those who plunder us and the lot of those who ravage us.

In the spirit of the poem by William Henley and the song by Frank Sinatra, the nations of the world stand and shake their fist in the face of God. They plot and they scheme against God, against God’s people, and against each other. They declare their independence, proclaiming, “We are going to do it our way.”  This is how Psalm 83:1-2 describes their attitude:

See how your enemies make an uproar; those who hate you have acted arrogantly. They devise clever schemes against your people; they conspire against your treasured ones.

So how does God respond? Let’s read verses 4-6:

The one enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord ridicules them. Then he speaks to them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath: “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”

The Response of God:

How did God respond? He laughed!

Not only did God laugh, He also ridiculed the feeble efforts of people to stand up and to resist His power.

In the last days of World War II in Europe, the Allied armies were driving deeper and deeper into Germany. Because their armies were collapsing and unable to resist the advance of the Allies, Nazi mayors, in an effort to slow their progress, would require their citizens to gather everything they could find to build barricades across the roads leading into their towns. These barricades consisted of piles of furniture, barrels, wagons, and other common household items. The towns people might work all day to create these barricades, which became known as “Thirty-one Minute Roadblocks.” They were called this because when an Allied column of troops came up to them, they would laugh at them for a half-an-hour, and then it would take them about a minute to knock the barrier down!

The scheming of the nations was just as futile in the face of the Almighty God of the Universe. Jeremiah 49:19 says,

“Look, it will be like a lion coming from the thickets of the Jordan to the watered grazing land. I will chase Edom away from her land in a flash. I will appoint whoever is chosen for her. For who is like me? Who will issue me a summons? Who is the shepherd who can stand against me?”

In fact, God did not even have to act to spark fear in the hearts of the kings. All He had to do was to speak, and they would turn to Jello. This reminds me of what Rahab the Harlot told the two spies about the people of Jericho:

[She] said to them, “I know that the Lord has given you this land and that the terror of you has fallen on us, and everyone who lives in the land is panicking because of you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two Amorite kings you completely destroyed across the Jordan. When we heard this, we lost heart, and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below.

Words have so much more power than we know. We speak, and we can crush someone’s hopes and dreams. We speak, and we can break someone’s heart. We speak, and we can inspire someone to achieve great things, or we speak, and we can inspire someone to commit acts of terrorism. If our words have this much power, the power inherent in God’s Word is beyond our human comprehension.

As powerful as His Word is, God also acted, however. Not only did He show His power by what He said, He doubled down on His wrath and anger by installing His Son as King on His holy mountain.

When the Romans conquered the Jews and put an end to the Maccabean Revolt, they built the Fortress of Antonia on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Not only was it a symbol of the Roman victory, but it also let the Romans surveil the Temple and keep tabs on what was going on there. Militarily, this was not just a flex, but it was also a wise precaution.

What the Romans did was wise, but God had this idea first. From eternity, God had planned to send His Son to be the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords, and so we can take two lessons from this:

First, any good thing we can do, God can do it better, and He did it first. 

Second, we need to pay attention to the lessons that God teaches us and apply them to our lives. He does know what He is doing! We can see His plan in verses 7-9:

I will declare the Lord’s decree. He said to me, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession. You will break them with an iron scepter; you will shatter them like pottery.”

The Rule of the Son:

It was a common plan during the age of kings for a ruler to send his son to be king over a portion of his empire. The same would be true for landowners whose property was dispersed over long distances. In fact, Jesus told a parable about this very thing in Matthew 21:33-46.

Listen to another parable: There was a landowner, who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. He leased it to tenant farmers and went away. When the time came to harvest fruit, he sent his servants to the farmers to collect his fruit. The farmers took his servants, beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Again, he sent other servants, more than the first group, and they did the same to them. Finally, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. “But when the tenant farmers saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those farmers?” “He will completely destroy those terrible men,” they told him, “and lease his vineyard to other farmers who will give him his fruit at the harvest.”

Jesus taught this parable to describe how He would become the sacrifice for all the sin of humanity. On the other hand, the disciples were correct about the response of the landowner. Both of these facts were revealed to David when he wrote the 2nd Psalm. God also revealed the truth about the reign of His Son to Samuel. 2 Samuel 2:10 says, 

Those who oppose the LORD will be shattered; he will thunder in the heavens against them. The LORD will judge the ends of the earth. He will give power to his king; he will lift up the horn of his anointed.

The Book of the Revelation is a harrowing account of the judgment of the King of Kings on those who oppose Him and His rule. Anyone who reads Revelation with any understanding at all would not wish that their worst enemy should experience the kinds of wrath that will be poured out upon the wicked, who, by the way, is anyone not saved by the Son. This brings us to the next vital fact: the Son not only judges, but he makes a way to escape the judgment! 2 Samuel 22:51 tells us.

He is a tower of salvation for his king; he shows loyalty to his anointed, to David and his descendants forever.

No son wants to inherit a burned-over battlefield! Jesus does not want to destroy His inheritance, but He wants to save it from its own destructive tendencies! One way for that to happened is found in verses 10-12:

So now, kings, be wise; receive instruction, you judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with reverential awe and rejoice with trembling. Pay homage to the Son or he will be angry and you will perish in your rebellion, for his anger may ignite at any moment. All who take refuge in him are happy.

The Reverence of the Nations:

An old saying is that a “word to the wise is sufficient.” Sadly, we are not always wise.

I remember a time when I was working on a project around our house and I asked my father for advice. He gave me a long and detailed set of instructions about how to complete the task, which I considered with some skepticism. “Surely,” I thought, “this job can’t be that complicated.” I went my own way, leaving out some steps, and modifying others. Well, in short, it didn’t work. When I told my dad what I had (and had not) done, and how it turned out he said, “If you had done it like what I told you, it would have worked.” And he was right! 

Proverbs 1:20-33 says,

Wisdom calls out in the street; she makes her voice heard in the public squares. She cries out above the commotion; she speaks at the entrance of the city gates: “How long, inexperienced ones, will you love ignorance? How long will you mockers enjoy mocking and you fools hate knowledge? If you respond to my warning, then I will pour out my spirit on you and teach you my words. Since I called out and you refused, extended my hand and no one paid attention, since you neglected all my counsel and did not accept my correction, I, in turn, will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when terror strikes you, when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when trouble and stress overcome you. Then they will call me, but I won’t answer; they will search for me, but won’t find me. Because they hated knowledge, didn’t choose to fear the Lord, were not interested in my counsel, and rejected all my correction, they will eat the fruit of their way and be glutted with their own schemes. For the apostasy of the inexperienced will kill them and the complacency of fools will destroy them. But whoever listens to me will live securely and be undisturbed by the dread of danger.”

We often pray to receive God’s guidance, but what we need to recognize is that He is eager to give it to us, and that He already has. Paul asserted in Romans 1 that the natural world reflects God to us and reveals His will to us. Sadly, we found ways to ignore the truth that we continue to see all around us today. God could have washed His hands of us then and there, but, in His grace He did not give up on us, however.

Psalm 2, Proverbs 1, 2 Timothy 3:16, and other passages also show us that God went the extra mile to give us His own words to guide us. What we need to do is pray for the willingness to obey the guidance He has already given to us. Like my father told me years ago, “If you had done it like what I told you, it would have worked.”  God would tell us the same thing!

A childhood friend described his relationship to God this way, “I have to pray that God will give me the desire, to desire to know Him more first, before I can pray to desire Him more.” Let’s pray to God to give us the wisdom to embrace His wisdom in our lives!

Conclusion:

Psalm 2 clearly shows us that the birth of the Son of Laughter is an extension of the eternal plan of God. Jeremiah 31:31-34 says,

"Look, the days are coming”—this is the Lord’s declaration—“when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. This one will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors on the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—my covenant that they broke even though I am their master”—the Lord’s declaration. “Instead, this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days”—the Lord’s declaration. “I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will one teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know me, from the least to the greatest of them”—this is the Lord’s declaration. “For I will forgive their iniquity and never again remember their sin.

Christmas is a key part of God’s plan, and we can see that clearly as we celebrate an Old Testament Christmas!

Every blessing,

Dr. Otis Corbitt