Acts 4:26

Acts 4:26. The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his anointed. The 2d Psalm, the first two verses of which are woven into the earliest fragment we possess of Christian public worship, was interpreted originally by the Jews as referring to King Messiah. Only in later times, when the well-known circumstances of the history of Jesus of Nazareth seemed so exactly to correspond to what the Psalm relates of the ‘Anointed of Jehovah,' Jewish learned men tried to do away with the received Messianic interpretation, which they were obliged at the same time to confess was originally admitted generally. Rabbi D. Kimchi, for instance, says: ‘According to the interpretation of some, “the Anointed” is King Messiah, and so our blessed Rabbis have expounded it.' Raschi makes the same statement as to the ancient interpretation, and then adds how in his opinion it is better to keep to the literal sense, and to explain it of David himself, that we may be able to answer the heretics, i.e. Christians. In the mind of the writer of the Psalm at first an earthly king is present, and the circumstances of his own (David's) chequered career supply the imagery; ‘but his words are too great to have all their meaning exhausted in David or any Jewish monarch. Or ever he is aware, the local and the temporal are swallowed up in the universal and eternal. The king who sits on David's throne has become glorified and transfigured in the light of the promise. The picture is half ideal, half actual; it concerns itself with the present, but with that only so far as it is typical of greater things to come. The true king, who to the prophet's mind is to fulfil all his largest hopes, has taken the place of the visible and earthly king. The nations are not merely those who are now mustering for the battle, but whatsoever opposeth and exalteth itself against Jehovah and against His Anointed' (Dean Perowne, Introd. to Psalms 2).

There is an exact correspondence between the leading enemies mentioned in the Psalm, who arose against the Lord and His Anointed, and those who were present at the scenes of the condemnation and death of Jesus. The heathen (or Gentiles) were represented by the Roman soldiery and officials of the great Gentile empire; the people, by Israel. The kings of the earth, by king Herod; the rulers, by Pontius Pilate the governor. The Lord in the Psalm corresponds to the Maker of heaven and earth, to whom the prayer is addressed; and the Lord's Anointed, to ‘Thy holy child Jesus.' There is a very remarkable Jewish comment (see Perowne on this Psalm) on the words, against Jehovah and against His Anointed, in the Mechilta quoted in the Jalkut Schimoni: ‘ Like a robber who was standing and expressing his contempt behind the palace of the king, and saying, If I find the son of the king, I will seize him, and kill him, and crucify him, and put him to a terrible death; but the Holy Spirit mocks at it, and saith, He that dwelleth in the heavens laughs.'