The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 3: Psalms XC.-CL.Maclaren, Alexander
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 3: Psalms XC.-CL.
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Psalms -- Commentaries
1 The oracle of Jehovah to my lord;
Sit Thou [enthroned] at My right hand,
Until I make Thine enemies the stool for Thy feet.
2 The sceptre of Thy might shall Jehovah stretch forth from Zion,
"Rule Thou in the midst of Thine enemies."
3 Thy people are free-will offerings in the day of Thine army;
In holy attire,
From the womb of the dawn,
[Comes] to Thee the dew of Thy youth[s].
4 Jehovah has sworn and will not repent,
Thou art a priest for ever,
After the manner of Melchizedek.
5 The Lord at Thy right hand
Has crushed kings in the day of His wrath.
6 He shall judge among the nations,
He has filled [the land] with corpses,
He has crushed the head over a wide land.
7 Of the brook shall He drink on the way,
Therefore shall He lift up [His] head.
Does our Lord's attribution of this psalm to David foreclose the
question of its authorship for those who accept His authority?
Many, who fully recognise and reverently bow to that authority,
think that it does not, and appeal for support of their view to the
unquestionable limitations of His earthly knowledge. It is urged
that His object in His argument with the Pharisees, in which this
psalm is quoted by Him (Matt. xxii. 41-46 and parallels), is not to
instruct them on the authorship of the psalm, but to argue from its
contents; and though He assumes the Davidic authorship, accepted
generally at the time, yet the cogency of His argument is unimpaired,
so long as it is recognised that the psalm is a Messianic one, and
that the august language used in it of the Messiah is not compatible
with the position of One who was a mere human son of David (Driver,
"Introd.," p. 363, note). So also Dr. Sanday ("Inspiration," p. 420)
says that "the Pharisees were taken upon their own ground, and the
fallacy of their conclusion was shown on their own premises." But
our Lord's argument is not drawn from the "august language" of the
psalm, but from David's relationship to the Messiah, and crumbles to
pieces if he is not the singer. It may freely be admitted that there
are instances in our Lord's references to the Old Testament in which
He speaks from the point of view of His hearers in regard to it; but
these are cases in which nothing turned on the question whether that
point of view was correct or not. Here everything turns on it; and
to maintain that, in so important a crisis, He based His arguments
on an error comes perilously near to imputing fallibility to Him as
our teacher. Most of recent writers who advocate the view in question
would recoil from such a consequence; but their position is divided
from it by a thin line. Whatever the limitations of our Lord's human
knowledge, they did not affect His authority in regard to what He did
teach; and the present writer ventures to believe that He did teach
that _David_ in this psalm calls Messiah his Lord.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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