Day 51 - Thursday, April 21
Title: A PRIEST FOREVER
Scripture: Psalm 110
The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
The Lord shall send the rod of Your strength out of Zion.
Rule in the midst of Your enemies!

Your people shall be volunteers
In the day of Your power;
In the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning,
You have the dew of Your youth.
The Lord has sworn
And will not relent,
“You are a priest forever
According to the order of Melchizedek.”

The Lord is at Your right hand;
He shall execute kings in the day of His wrath.
He shall judge among the nations,
He shall fill the places with dead bodies,
He shall execute the heads of many countries.
He shall drink of the brook by the wayside;
Therefore He shall lift up the head.

Poetry:
ARGUMENT, DOLE V. ARCO
921 F.2d 484 (3d Cir. 1990)
by Laura Fargas

The trees are burning, burning.
Underneath, a lawyer practices her speech:
may it please the court. Leaves fall
as if from the weight of my looking.
Berkeley said we are held suspended
in God's mind, whose forgetfulness would
be our annihilation. I cannot say this
to the court, though I am addressing
the death of an 18-year-old girl who
was blown open. The efficient cause,
a fire extinguisher, itself burning so
slowly no one noticed. Except after,
traces of the seeping fire, like the cool
fires above me. Rust she would have seen,
if they had trained her to look for it.
I will not mention love to the judges.
How it survives all the damage we inflict.
I say the ginkgo sheds her golden hair
without grief, and even this civil suit
is for love. And death a form of fruiting.

THE COMING RULE OF GOD ON EARTH

Psalm 110 presents a vision of the victorious Messiah defeating the ‘kings of the earth’––the powers that compete with the rule of God on earth.  We see that the Messiah is made strong, and ultimately victorious, by the power of God.  The vivid portrayal of the struggle––and its violence––may strike us as surprising, but the psalmist is using language and imagery reflecting the modes of warfare of the time. 

This is especially clear in the reference to the Messiah’s enemies being made a footstool.  In the ancient Near East, it was customary for the victorious king to place his feet on the necks of his vanquished foes to demonstrate his absolute control over them. 

The struggle between the forces of God and the forces of evil, and the vindication of the righteous over the unrighteous, was seen in King David’s time––our Psalmist here––primarily in geopolitical terms; it was the struggle of Israel against her often militarily stronger neighbors.

This psalm looks forward to the final defeat of Israel’s foes through her divinely empowered final king––the Messiah himself. 

As the biblical narrative unfolds, however, this view of the contest between the creator and his wayward creation comes to be seen with greater complexity and sophistication, and by the time of the writings of the New Testament, it is not just wayward nations and political entities that are seen to resist the governance of God, but a shadow over creation itself.  As Paul puts it in chapter 8 of Romans, all creation is groaning under the weight of sin, under the burden of the disorder humans have introduced.  And creation looks forward longingly to its deliverance. 

In Isaiah, in Peter, and again in Revelation, the language of a renewed heavens and earth (language referring to the created order, harkening back to Genesis 1) is used to describe the world once it is in fact delivered from the burden of our fallenness. 

And yet, interestingly, in Revelation 13, John reverts to the imagery of military and political conflict in describing the struggle that ensues when God reclaims his wayward creation.  There, the conflict is between the Messiah and the apocalyptic ‘beast’, the instantiation of what Augustine called the human lust for dominion, and what other commentators have described as the ‘idolatry of empire,’ the notion that humans can order themselves and history itself by force.  It is this, our fallen wills, and our rebellious idolatry that God will finally confront and defeat.  On the other side of that cataclysm, the effects of the fall are erased. 

Our poem, “ARGUMENT, DOLE V. ARCO,” describes with haunting beauty the ways in which the created order and our lives and histories, are shaped by the distortion, the destruction, and the tragedy and sorrow that sin and death wreak upon our lives.  When the Kingdom of God comes, when, as Jesus instructs us to pray, the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, we leave behind the heartbreak described in today’s poem. 

Prayer
Our Father, comfort us in our sorrow, and encourage us in the hope that you will one day deliver us, and creation itself, from the tragic effects of sin. 
Amen.

Dr. Ryan Patrick Murphy
Director of Educational Programs
Development Associates International (DAI)
Colorado Springs, Colorado

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.