Psalm 93: Communal Tragedy and Divine Kingship in the Book of Psalms

The entire collection of 150 Psalms has a single, profound message toward which every psalm is ultimately oriented. This message is prominent in a series of Enthronement Psalms at the beginning of Book IV of the Psalter. The proclamation, “The LORD reigns” is central to this group between Psalms 93 and 99, but we encounter it first in Psalm 93. While this psalm can be read in isolation as a proclamation of the sovereignty of the God of Israel, it has been set in a certain place within the collection of Psalms to convey both the reason for the proclamation and its result. The message of Psalm 93 is thus the summation of the message of the entire Book of Psalms, but that message is best understood within the organization of the Psalter as a collection.

When we see the structure of the entire Psalter, this analysis of Psalm 93 makes sense. We’ll look briefly at a few different ways of viewing and using the Psalms. After introducing the Psalter’s structure in five books, we’ll turn to the Psalter’s royal message and its root metaphor. We’ll then look at the end of Book III of the Psalms and how these psalms provide the context for the meaning of the Enthronement Psalms at the beginning of Book IV. Penultimately, we’ll look at the meaning and theology of Psalm 93 itself in the light of its context in the book. We’ll see how it responds to what has come before it and how it leads to the praise that follows it. Finally, we’ll look at similar language in the New Testament, reflecting on how proclamations of the Lord’s kingship in the Old Testament and claims about Jesus’s kingship in the New Testament are statements about the meaning of the world.

In the fourth century A.D., Athanasius of Alexandria (293­–373 A.D.)—the Athanasius of Nicene fame—wrote a letter to Augustine’s friend in Carthage named Marcellinus. In that letter, he compared the Psalms to a garden in which many types of fruits grow. Some of these fruits overlap a great deal with what one finds elsewhere in the Bible, but he also notes that the Psalms have “a peculiar marvel all their own.” One of the marvelous things about the Psalms, he says, is that “all the movements of the human soul” are “represented there and portrayed in all their great variety.” Many centuries later, John Calvin said the Psalms were like a mirror. Calvin states, “[N]ot an affection will anyone find in himself whose image is not reflected in this mirror. All the griefs, sorrows, fears, misgivings, hopes, cares, anxieties, in short all the disquieting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated, the Holy Spirit hath pictured here exactly.” In other words, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord breathed out an anthology of personal resources that all people from all times can relate to in some way.

These two images of a garden and a mirror together offer us one helpful and common model of how we read and use the Psalms. Let’s say, for our purposes, that this is a garden of flowers. We look into the mirror that is the Psalms and see the full range of our own emotions. Depending on our need, we peruse this large garden and pick the flower that is useful at the moment. The garden is decked with laments and complaints, petitions for rescue, meditations on creation, hymns of thanksgiving, and songs of praise. This great variety can speak to the many dimensions of the human soul, so long as we are familiar with our own state and with where each type of flower lives in the large garden. This approach calls for both for self-reflection and for mastery of the contents of the Psalter.

Much like using a proverb in a fitting way at the right time, we need to know the movements of each of the Psalms by heart and understand how to employ each in the right place, in the right manner, and at the right time.

But, in addition to combing through this garden for individual stems, what if the whole thing were intentionally arranged in a certain way? We are accustomed to admiring the beauty of individual flowers or certain clusters or bunches. But what if the garden of the Psalter is more like a great manicured collection that, when seen from a bird’s-eye view, tells a bigger story? I think of magnificent parks like those at the Herrenhausen royal summer palace in Hanover, Germany. This is a highly structured garden of gardens that was laid out and shaped with great care. The Psalter is a similar structure. It is not only filled with beautiful flowers and beds, but the sum of its parts is a massive structure that conveys a large-scale message.

The Psalter is a collection of collections, with its overall message conveyed by the way these smaller collections and the psalms within them were intentionally arranged by theological editors to contribute to the shape of the whole. There are signs all throughout the Psalter of these smaller collections that had life before they were incorporated into the larger book that we call the Psalms. We see superscriptions that ascribe psalms to David, to Solomon, to Asaph, to the sons of Korah, to Ethan the Ezrahite, and even to Moses. We recognize, for example, a small collection in Psalms 120–134 of Songs of Ascent that were likely sung or performed by travelers during their annual pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. There is a group of Psalms between Psalms 42–83 in which the divine name is consistently ʾĕlōhı̂m instead of the more common yhwh. And there are little notices here and there throughout the Psalter that seem to have marked the end of what was previously a discrete collection, such as “end of the prayers of David, son of Jesse,” in Psalm 72:20. Many biblical scholars have been interested in this prehistory and the life setting out of which these things arose. But what we are interested in is how these smaller collections were shaped into a unified collection. Because it is this new literary context, not the previous historical or liturgical context, that is ultimately determinative in shaping the theology of the Psalms.

The most obvious literary feature of the Psalter as a whole is that it is divided into five books. This is such a widely recognized feature that most every modern translation of the Psalms I’ve ever seen has headings that mark Books I, II, III, IV, and V where they begin in the Psalter: before Psalms 1, 42, 73, 90, and 107. The books are not equal in length, nor did they develop in a perfectly sequential way, from one to five. And while we refer to them as “books,” we might actually think of them more like chapters in a single narrative.

There is some debate as to why the Psalms were put together this way, but, following ancient rabbinic tradition, most contemporary scholars believe that this is at least partly a conscious imitation of the Five Books of Moses, or the Pentateuch. That is to say, whereas Moses had his “five books” from Genesis to Deuteronomy, so also David had “five books” associated with him in the Psalter. And while the quintessential focus of the Five Books of Moses was on the tôrâ, which we commonly translate as “law,” the first chapter of the Psalter seems to suggest that the Psalms themselves are also focused on tôrâ. We turn now to see how Psalm 1 introduces the Psalter.

Psalm 1 introduces the Psalter as a collection for instruction. Central to this psalm is the word tôrâ, which is commonly translated “law,” but may also be used for “instruction” more generally. The psalm presents the one who avoids the company of the wicked, of sinners, and of blasphemers as the same one who delights in the LORD’s tôrâ and meditates on it day and night (v. 2). We don’t know what that tôrâ is, exactly, but some have suggested that the word tôrâ here refers to the Psalter itself. That is to say, while Moses gave the Israelites a five-book tôrâ in the form of the Pentateuch, David now offers the Israelites a five-book work of tôrâ in the form of the Psalms. On this view, not only Psalm 1, but the entire Psalter, is focused on instruction in righteousness, and attentiveness to that instruction is one of the main things that separates the righteous from the wicked. We see similar messages in psalms like Psalm 19 and 119, among others. So just as Psalm 1 depicts two ways—righteousness or wickedness—so also the Psalter is a story of two ways—those who follow the ways of the Lord and those who depart from them. This is a depiction we normally associate with the Book of Proverbs, but by putting Psalm 1 in this introductory position, the editors of the Psalter are indicating that the Psalms are also about the opposing fates of the righteous and the wicked, and they call us to take our stand amongst one of those groups.

But the book of Psalms is actually prefaced by a double introduction. Psalms 1 and 2 are in fact tied together with several keywords—“fortunate,” “murmur,” “way,” and “perish”—all these suggest that the two psalms are to be read together as a diptych. Whereas Psalm 1 separates the righteous and the wicked on the basis of meditation on the Lord’s instruction, Psalm 2 distinguishes between those who serve the Lord’s anointed one as their king on the one hand and those who rebel against his authority on the other. The fortunate ones are not only those who avoid the company of the wicked and sinners, but also those who pay homage to the Lord’s anointed and take shelter in him (v. 12). Thus Psalm 2 makes a similar distinction to Psalm 1, but it does so with an explicitly royal focus.

The royal message of the Psalms is illustrated well by looking at the placement of psalms concerning kingship throughout the Psalter. These psalms are explicitly focused on the Lord as king, the Lord’s Davidic representative as king, or both. As we have already noted, the Psalter opens with Psalm 2 as a critical part of introducing the royal tenor of the whole. This psalm treats the Lord’s choice of Zion and of a Davidic monarch and his establishment of them on earth. Though the vassals of Judah may rebel and seek to oppose his reign, it is the Lord who is ultimately behind the Davidic monarch and who will guarantee his success.

While Psalm 2 is placed at the beginning of Book I of the Psalter, Book II closes with another royal psalm in Psalm 72. This psalm is concerned now with the rule of David’s son, Solomon, as the Lord’s royal representative and with the peaceable kingdom that he establishes with the Lord’s favor. Book III also closes with a royal psalm in Psalm 89, but this time the message is far from the ideal painted in Psalm 72. Rather, Psalm 89 paints a bleak picture of a rupture in the covenant relationship between the LORD and his people, including his king. While Books I through III of the Psalter thus focus on the installation and establishment of a royal Davidic king, Psalm 89 marks a significant shift in this focus and thus serves as a critical turning point in the Psalter. From this point on, the last two books of the Psalter—Books IV and V—begin to address the gaping hole in their communal identity by looking both backward and forward. When they look back at the beginning of Book IV, the Psalms proclaim that the Lord has always been their king.

Book IV of the Psalms, in fact, has the single greatest concentration of royal psalms in the entire Psalter. Psalms 93–99 are called Enthronement Psalms, and each of them contributes to recollecting the Lord’s eternal enthronement as king over the entire cosmos. The placement of these psalms after the communal tragedy recorded in Psalm 89 is hardly a coincidence. Finally, Book V of the Psalms looks forward more explicitly to a future Davidic figure who will bring salvation to a people in exile. Psalm 146:3 illustrates well the temptation to trust in something other than the coming Messiah. It says, “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings who cannot save.” The alternative to trusting in human powers is placing one’s trust fully in the Messiah who can save. And it is also hardly a coincidence that Psalm 110—the most explicitly Messianic psalm of all—is placed near the beginning of Book V of the Psalter. In fact, the message of Psalm 110 circles back in many respects to the message of Psalm 2 at the beginning of Book I. The writers of the New Testament rightly perceived these two psalms as pointing forward to Jesus as the Christ, the David-to-come, and Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 are the most cited Old Testament texts in the New Testament. There are no more important passages for understanding not only the royal and Messianic nature of the Psalter but also the royal and Messianic nature of Jesus Christ than these.

But while it is true that the Psalter is constructed on a backbone of royal psalms, from beginning to end, the focus on kingship in the Psalter goes even deeper than this. In a 1994 essay entitled “The Center of the Psalms: ‘The LORD Reigns’ as Root Metaphor,” James Mays persuasively argued that the statement “The LORD reigns!” serves as a metaphor that transcends and lies behind the variety of psalms in the Psalter. That is to say, while some psalms proclaim this message in an explicit way, all the psalms—even those that do not state this message so expressly—are best understood as being connected to that metaphor as the primary organizing reality of the Psalter. According to Mays, “The LORD reigns” is the theological center of the entire book of Psalms.

When viewed through this lens, it is easy to see all the gods, peoples, nations, forces of nature, and even philosophies of life strewn throughout the Book of Psalms as actors in the Lord’s cosmic sphere, over which he has dominion. There is no part of reality that the Lord’s sovereignty does not reach, and the diversity of the Psalms actually makes that argument by the very fact of their diversity. Each of these is something over which the Lord has dominion. On this view, it turns out that every single psalm speaks in some way—either directly or indirectly—to the reign and rule of the Lord, the God of Israel.

That said, the Lord’s dominion over every sphere does not stop the authors of the Psalms from recounting—time and again—opposition to his reign and rule. In fact, the Lord’s enemies are named at every point, and each psalm re-asserts the kingship of God. As Mays points out, numerous psalms speak of the Lord’s battle against those who oppose him. Primary among those things that threaten the order of his kingdom are the raging waters. These waters represent the threat of an uncontrollable flood that could shake the foundations of the world itself. In fact, many ancient Near Eastern stories portray a god’s victory over chaotic waters as an integral part of that same god’s establishment of world order. As Psalm 24 says, the Lord established the world on the seas (v. 2), and it is these very seas that raise their white-capped heads again and again with the potential undo the order the Lord has created. That picture of foundations that seem to be crumbling on account of the surging waters is famously expressed in Psalm 46:2–3: “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.” As we often sing in celebration of Reformation Day, the God of Israel is a mighty fortress against which these breakers will not prevail.

We must admit, however, that simply noting that the Lord demonstrates sovereignty repeatedly in the Psalms is a bit divorced from both the experience of threat and the newfound comfort of safe haven in the Lord that the psalmists discover again and again. We should be cautious about stating rather abstractly that “the Lord is sovereign in the Psalms” and leave it at that. We need to notice and identify with the ways the psalmists themselves struggle to believe in the Lord’s kingship or the ways in which they are tempted toward another narrative, only to be re-directed time and again to the reorienting proclamation, “The LORD reigns!” The Psalter recounts such temptations toward other ways of seeing reality again and again, such as in Psalm 37 or Psalm 73. As the psalmist declares in Psalm 73:3: “I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” I do not want us merely to stand at a distance and proclaim a theological truth about the God of the Psalms; rather, I want us to come to grips with how we also totter in our loyalty to the Great King when the waters seem to surge or when it appears the wicked prosper or when God does not answer our cries for help.

In that vein, we can all resonate to some degree with the disorientation expressed at the end of Book III. Psalms 88 and 89 represent the Psalter’s darkest hour. As the only psalm in the entire Psalter that does not end in praise, Psalm 88 is sometimes referred to as the “black sheep” of the Psalms. Psalm 88 begins by calling the LORD “God of my salvation.” But this statement contrasts sharply with the psalmist’s experience that God has not, in fact, saved. The last stanza of the psalm speaks of rejection and suffering, God’s anger, the psalmist’s terror, and the feeling of God’s distance. The last word in the psalm in Hebrew has to do with darkness—maḥšok. Here the psalmist experiences all three areas of suffering narrated in most other lament psalms: suffering due to God’s anger, bodily or emotional suffering, and social rejection by those closest to him. Remember the threat of surging waters in the Psalms. In Psalm 88, these destroying floods are said to originate with God himself: “[with] all your breakers you afflict” (v. 8).

The individual psalmist’s sense of isolation and overwhelm in Psalm 88 ultimately foreshadows the sense of national tragedy and communal loss in Psalm 89. Once again, there is a strong tension in this psalm between its beginning and its end. In the first line, the psalmist states, “I will sing of the LORD’s covenant love forever” (v. 2). But near the end of the psalm, the same psalmist asks, “Master, where is your former covenant love [which] you swore to David in your faithfulness?” (v. 50). The center of the psalm recounts the divine decree of the Davidic covenant that we also know from 2 Samuel 7. In that decree, as the psalmist recounts in v. 34, the Lord says, “My covenant love I will not take away from him, and I will not be untrue to my faithfulness.” These two words—“covenant love” and “faithfulness”—are precisely what the psalmist says in verse 50 he can no longer see. Thus, the covenant seems to have been broken. The royal narrative begun in the Psalter’s introduction in Psalm 2 has come to an end by Psalm 89. While in Psalm 2 a Davidic Messiah was installed as king over Judah and thus as ruler of the earth, Psalm 89 points to the end of that reign and rule as the people of God had known it up to this point. The Davidic covenant is no longer in effect, and God’s people are left to question what their future might be—or if they even have a future.

You’ll recall that only a few paragraphs ago, I wrote that I did not want us to stand at a distance from the theology of the Psalter and talk about it in the abstract; nor do I want us to narrate the sense of collapse in Psalm 89 as if it were something related only to God’s people in the past. So, in that vein, I’d like to draw some potential connecting lines between the psalmists’ experience and our own.

Even as Psalm 89 depicts a communal tragedy in which God’s special relationship with his people seems to have been broken, so also many Christians in the West feel that the social and political power they once enjoyed has come to an end. Starting decades ago in Western Europe and moving rapidly now through the United States, we have witnessed the erosion or even removal of Christianity from the public sphere. The strong foundation and center of gravity it provided in many countries and cultures since the period of the Reformation has been replaced by other forms of religion or dogmatism. This upending of Christianity in the broader cultural landscape has led many Christians to feel a deep sense of loss and has imbued others with a longing for what once was. Some decry a return to the ideals on which the country was founded, perhaps even citing a “Christian America” as the foundation stone for our culture. Others have turned to current political structures in hopes of using them to revive the American Christianity they once knew. Feeling threatened on all sides, they turn to nearly anyone who claims to speak and act on their behalf, even when those people, in reality, stand at odds with the fundamental commitments and commandments of the religion they claim to speak for. To return to the psalmists’ metaphors, surging waves and tottering foundations are fitting images for the way many Christians feel in the West today, and this feeling of displacement and unsteadiness has led to several different attempts to re-establish the foundations. Unease, loss, tottering, without compass, desperate, scared, and even frenzied. Many of us are looking desperately for solid ground. It seems we are at an important juncture. What are we to do now? Which direction should we go?

The large-scale structure of the Psalter points us toward an answer. Just after narrating the collapse of the Davidic covenant at the end of Book III, Book IV opens with an entirely new outlook. When it seems that time and history have been shattered for Israel, the Psalter moves back to a past when there was no human king or Davidic covenant. One notices immediately that Psalm 90 is attributed in its superscription to the prophet Moses. The opening lines run as follows: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (vv. 1–2). As a prayer of Moses himself, these could be considered the most ancient words in the Psalter. As they so often do, the Psalms address problems in the present by turning to the past. Memory is a critical faculty in the life of God’s people, and in this psalm, memory reaches as far back as it can possibly reach—to time before time. Verse 2 declares that the Lord was God even before the mountains, the earth, and the world were created. Following the sense of an ending narrated in Psalm 89, Psalm 90 offers a new direction by going backward. It is, however, by no means a romantic psalm. Even though it offers comfort, Psalm 90 also narrates the troubling nature of human existence that is lived under God’s judgment. Still, there is a way forward here when all seems lost, and the psalm asks its audience to reflect on God’s time and human time, and on the meaning of their lives between them.

As we saw earlier, many psalms in the Psalter are set in proximity to one another to create an interpretive inter-relationship. The claims in verse 2 of Psalm 90 are echoed closely just a few psalms later in the second verse of Psalm 93. There we read: “Your throne was established long ago; you are from all eternity” (93:2). Though the claims of these two psalms are similar, Psalm 93 pushes the claim in a slightly different direction by mentioning God’s throne. And in fact, Psalm 93 introduces six other Enthronement Psalms that follow it. These psalms express a particular form of praise that focuses on the Lord’s kingship, and four of these seven psalms contain the two-word proclamation, “Yhwh mālak,” “The LORD reigns!” (Pss 93, 96, 97, 99).

This statement provides the root metaphor of the entire book of Psalms. But it is also critically important that this proclamation, “The LORD reigns!” is found in especial concentration here at the beginning of Book IV of the Psalter. Because this statement, “The LORD reigns!” is a direct answer to the sense of personal and political collapse expressed at the end of Book III in Psalms 88 and 89. And this too is where we are to go. Feeling displaced and unsteady, the Psalter reminds us that this is also our foundation now. I’d like to turn now to focus on the picture of kingship depicted in Psalm 93, the relationship of Psalm 93 to what comes both before and after it, and how the theology of Psalm 93 anticipates the Christological claims of the New Testament writers.

As we turn to look at Psalm 93, consider Psalm 93 from my translation. I’m unable to attend to a couple of difficulties in translation here, but it should serve our purposes well:

1 The LORD reigns!

He puts on eminence.

The LORD puts on,

He girds himself with power.

The world is absolutely fixed.

It will not be made to totter.

2 Your throne was fixed from back then.

You are from antiquity.

3 The rivers lifted up, O LORD,

the rivers lifted up their voice,

the rivers will lift up their crushing.

4 Than the voices of the great waters,

mightier than the breakers of the sea,

mighty on the height, the LORD.

5 Your decrees are very

Pleasantness, holiness belongs to your house,

O LORD, for length of days.

Psalm 93 opens, much as Psalms 97 and 99 do, with the proclamation, “The LORD reigns!” These two Hebrew words, yhwh mālak, can be translated in several different ways. The primary options are three. First, as I’ve translated it here, “The LORD reigns!” Second, “The LORD is king!” And third, “The LORD has become king!” Related to the question of translation is the supposed function of the statement in its context.

At least since the early 20^th century, biblical scholars have been especially interested in reconstructing the social situation out of which each psalm arose. Some, like Scandinavian scholar Sigmund Mowinckel or German scholar Hans-Joachim Kraus have posited that the Enthronement Psalms originally functioned as proclamations of the kingship of the Lord in a liturgical context during an annual enthronement festival in ancient Israel. While this basic claim is sensible, scholars continue to debate where and when such a festival may have taken place, or even if one took place at all.

Despite the controversy surrounding a hypothetical enthronement festival in ancient Israel, the primary point as it relates to the translation of the phrase, yhwh mālak, is that it was an announcement that “the LORD has become king” during an annual Israelite rehearsal of the Lord’s kingship. Meaning, though the Israelites believed that the LORD had always been king, they rehearsed his enthronement as king anew each year in a liturgical fashion. This is much like Christians who celebrate the resurrection of Christ in the past by saying in their worship services, “Christ is risen!” They do not believe Christ is rising again each time they say this; rather, they are re-living the reality of that past even in the present. Thus, in the translation of what seems to be a simple phrase, yhwh mālak, there is a tension between emphasizing the Lord’s kingship as a past event and emphasizing its ongoing reality. In light of all the possibilities, I choose to render it as “The LORD reigns” which allows us to emphasize the Lord’s kingship as a past, present, and future reality.

The psalm then moves to proclaim the Lord’s two-fold robing: first with eminence, then with power. These are the royal robes of the great king who is sovereign over all. He is exalted and omnipotent. The last half of verse 1 and all of verse 2 speak of the connection between the Lord’s kingship and the world’s stability. “The world is absolutely fixed. It will not be made to totter” (v. 1b). It is the Lord’s eternal kingship that is ultimately the stabilizing power of the cosmos. When, as Psalm 46 says, the earth gives way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, it is the Lord who is the foundation upon which his people can place their hope. And that has always been the case. As verse 2 states: “Your throne was fixed from back then. You are from antiquity.” For God, the political sphere is a cosmic sphere, and the cosmic sphere is also political. It is not as if the Lord is king over one, but not the other. The Lord is not merely a spiritual king over a spiritual realm, because the whole earth belongs to him.

But God’s ancient kingship does not mean he is unopposed. As elsewhere in the Bible, there are powerful enemies that rise up against him. Verses 3 and 4 detail the threat of the cosmic waters, and in verse 3 there is a three-fold mention of the rivers rising or lifting.

This vocabulary recalls the language of the Lord’s eminence in the first verse of the psalm, and it indicates that there is a competition for exaltation or height. Even the long poetic lines in the verse structure illustrate a kind of heaping up of the waters and their thundering. In ancient Israel and its environment, the saltwater ocean was often portrayed as a powerful force that was opposed to life. This makes sense when one reflects on the fact that the sea’s waves can wreak havoc and destruction, its waters are non-potable, and its composition is the opposite of a firm foundation on which humans can build a flourishing society. While Psalm 93 mentions “rivers” and not a sea, these are to be understood as a similar sort of destructive threat. Psalm 29 recounted the Lord’s victorious enthronement over the great Flood, while those in attendance proclaimed his glory (Ps 29:10). Psalm 93 is not so explicit as to how or when the Lord conquered the waters, but verse 4 twice proclaims the Lord’s might. Despite the opposition, the Lord remains exalted and unmoved—and so does his kingdom.

Verse 5 closes the poem with something that sounds a bit odd at first. It speaks of the Lord’s decrees and of his temple. “Your decrees are very reliable. Pleasantness, holiness belongs to your house.” The psalm clearly connects the Lord’s rule over the created order in antiquity with the ongoing governance of the people of Israel and to the Lord’s worship in the temple. Here the distant past and the present stand as close as possible, because the Lord’s enthronement as king creates the conditions in which he can be worshiped in the temple and by which he can issue decrees for his loyal subjects to follow. Obedience to these decrees and ascribing worship to the One True God are also the ways in which God’s people participate in the stability of the world this king has created. As one commentator says, “[T]he decrees of God are as given a part of reality as the very continuity and stability of the world” (Mays, p. 302). And these decrees are as reliable as the One who stands behind them. It is remarkable, I think, that in the sixth century A.D., in his Abbreviated Psalter, the Venerable Bede used this line to summarize the message of the entire psalm: “Your testimonies have become very trustworthy.”

So, in sum: the Lord’s enthronement in Psalm 93 is not only connected to a now-lost ancient Israelite enthronement festival. Rather, the Psalter itself builds a literary context in which God’s enthronement can be rehearsed again and again in every century and every millennium by everyone who reads and prays the Psalms. The Psalter provides the literary context for the proclamation and the reason for its rehearsal.

Thus Psalm 93 not only proclaims the central message of the Psalms; it proclaims, as James Mays says, “the meaning of the world” (p. 301). It is the proclamation of the sovereignty of the Creator and Sustainer of all things, one whose rule guarantees stability for his people when chaos threatens to tear the world apart. It also assures his people that his decrees are trustworthy and that his temple is a haven for those who seek refuge in him and pay fealty to his lordship. And as is always the case in the Bible, it is a proclamation of God’s sovereignty when others are actively competing for that same sovereignty.

But even as the Psalter provides the reason for this proclamation, the end of the Psalter also provides its result. And that result is cosmic praise. The Psalms are indeed about praise; the title, “Book of Praises” is fitting. But in light of the stamp the Enthronement Psalms put on the Psalter, this praise is unavoidably political in nature. It is the praise of the Great King. It is always a statement about the fullness of reality itself. And the Psalter continues to expound on this reality as it moves forward toward the final Hallel in Psalms 146–150, where each psalm begins and ends with the proclamation, “Praise the LORD!” This praise is both the result of the Lord’s kingship and the goal of all the king’s subjects. The multi-instrumental celebrations at the end of the Psalms—and especially in Psalm 150, where every line says “Praise the LORD!”—may be seen as a fitting response by the LORD’s servants to his royal reign and rule.

The New Testament parallel, of course, is the claim, “Jesus Christ is Lord!” (see Philippians 2:11; 1 Corinthians 12:3; Romans 10:9; Acts 2:36). And that, much like the proclamation, “The LORD reigns!” in the Old Testament world, stands in direct contradiction to the alternatives, so prevalent in the Roman Empire, such as “Caesar is Lord!” Jesus as the Son of David is the Messiah-to-come pictured in the Psalter, and he too demonstrated sovereignty over the forces of chaos that threatened his rule. His resurrection is the eternal moment that once-and-for-all declared him to be the victor over death, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians. But Jesus’s resurrection is also, as Acts 13:29–33 states, the moment of his coronation as king. These two interrelated facts are ones that Christians continue to proclaim as the organizing center of our lives. When we say together, “Christ is Risen!” we are making a claim about reality—and not just a reality in church. We as Christ’s loyal subjects are commanded to live out of that reality everywhere, and in the face of all opposition. Let us encourage one another to faithfulness when what we once hoped in has failed and continue to ascribe praise and loyalty to the only one who deserves it and who has issued reliable and trustworthy decrees for us to live by. Though the earth crumbles and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, we do not put our trust in princes who cannot save; instead, we say, “The LORD reigns!”