Professor Justin Stratis preached this timely sermon in Founders’ Chapel on March 4, 2025.
Here's a link to the full service: https://vimeo.com/1062415942
The sermon begins at the 17:50 mark.
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Lord, we believe. Help thou our unbelief. Amen.
It has been an interesting few weeks of geopolitics. I don’t know if it’s just me – and please forgive my pessimism – but personally, I feel like I’m beginning to lose just a smidge of confidence in the political leaders of this world. Maybe you can relate, but I have the sense that we’re careening toward something dangerous, and that whatever stability we had assumed was a standard feature of this world is turning out to be much more transient than we thought. For many of us, it is a scary time, and no one knows how any of this will end up.
Now, to be clear, this feeling of unsettledness might just be a consequence of Western naiveté. While most of the world is pretty used to struggling with poverty, despotic leadership, war and injustice, many of us in the West have lived under the delusion that peace and prosperity is the default. I’m reminded of one of my favourite lines from The Sopranos, spoken by a Russian immigrant to the United States: “That’s the trouble with you Americans – you expect nothing bad ever to happen, when the rest of the world expects only bad to happen, and they are not disappointed.”
So, what do we do now? How do we cope with this “new” reality – or perhaps the reality that was always there? This is a question that God’s people have always asked, from Augustine pondering over the ruins of Rome, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer looking out his tiny window in Tegel prison as Europe burned around him. And, of course, it’s a question that constantly arose for ancient Israel, threatened as she was by hostile, pagan nations from without, and by the wickedness of her own kings from within.
Israel, God’s chosen nation, had to face the ephemeral nature of her own stability. Think, for example, of Psalm 89, which is the last psalm of Book III of the Psalter. There, the psalmist begins with an exuberant celebration of the royal line as he recounts all of God’s promises to David. And so, speaking in God’s voice, verses 19-21 read: “I have set the crown on one who is mighty, I have exalted one chosen from the people. I have found my servant David; with my holy oil I have anointed him; my hand shall always remain with him; my arm also shall strengthen him.” The message is clear: God has made a covenant with David, and therefore Israel can be confident that she will endure as a nation under David’s dynastic rule.
But then, the psalm pivots to a set of darker themes: “But now, you [God] have spurned and rejected [David]; you are full of wrath against your anointed. You have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust…How long, O LORD? Will you hide yourself forever? ... LORD, where is your steadfast love of old[?]”
Can’t you just feel the confusion here? For the psalmist, none of this makes any sense. David’s line was supposed to endure forever: “Forever I will keep my steadfast love for him, and my covenant with him will stand firm” (Psalm 89:28). But now it seems as if God has reneged on the deal – something we might expect from tyrants and despots, but certainly not the holy one of Israel!
And so, it seems, Israel needed to recalibrate. This brings us to Book IV – Psalms 90 through 106 – the context in which today’s Psalm is found. If I were to summarise Book IV, it might go something like this: the only peace – the only stability you’re ever going to find in this world resides in God, who reigns over the earth, so put your trust in Him. And so, with that in mind, I want to take a look at Psalm 99. And I pray that as we do so, we too might be recalibrated in our assessment of this unstable world.
Psalm 99:1 says, “The LORD is king; let the peoples tremble! He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake!”
Now, why would people tremble before God? What sort of threat does God pose to the world? Surely there are other things that are scarier than God, right? Over the last six weeks, I haven’t been opening my news apps in the morning and thinking, oh no, what has God done now? I wonder if God has cut off international aid – I wonder if God berated the president of Ukraine today. What crazy thing is God gonna do next? No, if I’m honest with myself, I’ve spent most of 2025 trembling before leaders other than God.
And you know what? I’m sure the Israelites often did the same. Who were the scariest ones in the Ancient Near East? Nebuchadnezzar … Tigleth-Pileser III … Sennacherib. These were the ones before whom the world trembled. These were the ones who posed an existential threat to the global order as Israel understood it.
But according to the psalmist, these men, these imposing figures had neither the power nor the rights to the total sovereignty they sought to achieve. For the psalmist, it is only “The LORD [who] is great in Zion,” only God who is “exalted over all the peoples (verse 2). In truth, it wasn’t mighty Assyria that sat atop the world; it wasn’t Babylon; it wasn’t even Israel herself, whose kings didn’t just include David, Solomon, and Josiah, but also Jeroboam, Ahab, and Manasseh. The true king of the earth was and is Israel’s God – YHWH himself – who reigns not as Zion, but from Zion.
And the peoples of the earth tremble before Him, because Israel’s God doesn’t just reign; He reigns with justice. Verse 4 says: “Mighty king, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.” What does it mean for God to reign with equity? Well, for one thing, it means that even God’s chosen nation is judged according to the standards of His own righteousness. Indeed, if God enforces His justice within Israel – allowing her, for instance, to experience exile as a result of her wickedness – how much more will the nations have to answer for their evil deeds? This is true equity. Unlike the tyrants of this world, the LORD doesn’t take a hard line on His enemies while excusing the misdeeds of His friends. The LORD is a just ruler – and His concern is for righteousness, because that is the only context in which the world can ultimately flourish.
And all of this adds up to one logical conclusion: if God is the only one with rights to rule the world, and if He does so with a justice and righteousness that no other leader can guarantee (let alone provide), then the LORD is not just the only king to be feared; He is the only king who is worthy of actual, legitimate allegiance. And the proper form that that allegiance takes is worship. “Let [the peoples] praise your great and awesome name … Extol the LORD our God; worship at his footstool” (verses 3 and 5). In other words, unlike every other ruler on this earth, God is a king worthy of putting our trust in – because at the end of the day, God’s reign is holy – that is, set apart – mercifully different from any other ruler we’ve ever encountered or could even imagine. In other words, God is not just a king; He is a holy king.
I don’t know about you, but for me, the thought of a holy leader fully committed to justice and righteousness sounds like just about the greatest thing ever right about now. Imagine living under such a leader – such a king. Imagine not having to guess what sort of angle this king is working, which constituency is pulling the strings, how this king stands to gain from some policy, or what sort of self-serving designs and machinations lie behind his public words. A king who exacts justice not performatively, not vindictively, but from a righteous heart of love. Sounds pretty good, right?
Well, ancient Israel had just such a king. As verses 6-7 read: “Moses and Aaron were among his priests, Samuel also was among those who called on his name. They cried to the LORD, and he answered them.” Israel’s God didn’t just reign; Israel’s God reigned responsively and relationally – dwelling with His people “in the pillar of cloud” and giving them all they needed to live in the fullness of His presence: His statutes and decrees, which the wise amongst the people were zealous to keep. This is a vision of not only a just king, but a just kingdom – a place where the holiness of God sanctifies both His people and the land in which they live – where wrongdoing is rooted out, but the wrongdoer is redeemed. Hence, the psalmist’s final exhortation: “Extol the LORD our God, and worship at his holy mountain, for the LORD our God is holy” (verse 9).
So how does this psalm apply to us today? It might not surprise you to learn that when St Augustine read this psalm, he saw Christ and the Church all over it. For him, the tension that exists between Books III and IV of the Psalter represents more than the struggle of Israel in the face of its crumbling national stability. For Augustine, this tension also – even primarily – reflected the struggle of the Church to put its faith in the city of God over the city of man, and ultimately how that struggle is resolved through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Indeed, he writes: “Now … our whole design is … when we hear a Psalm, a Prophet, or the Law … to see Christ there, to understand Christ there. Attend therefore, beloved, to this Psalm, with me, and let us herein seek Christ.”
And so, in Augustine’s reading, the king before whom the peoples tremble is none other than Jesus Christ – and the holy mountain from which Jesus reigns is the holy catholic church. Moreover, he says, it’s only in the bosom of the Church that believers, like Moses, Aaron and Samuel, may “cry out to the Lord” and receive righteousness and holiness in the presence of the God who is with His people by the bond of the Holy Spirit.
In other words, Augustine encourages us to read this psalm as both a comfort and a charge. When it seems like the world is falling apart around us – as it was in Augustine’s day – we, like the Israelites, should not be deceived into thinking that someone other than the LORD holds history in their hands. Indeed, to be a Christian, as Jesus taught us, is to put all our stock in the kingdom of God; to build our house on the rock, rather than the sand, and to return daily to the holy mountain where God dwells, that is, the Church, where we will worship and cry out to God in prayer, trusting in faith that the heavenly city will one day be revealed to us.
Is this hard? YES, it’s hard. It takes faith – and heavenly vision – to trust in the promises of God. It takes the kind of faith that says, “Let God be true, and every human being a liar” (Romans 3:4). The kind of faith that stands tall while all the others bow before Nebuchadnezzar. The kind of faith that refuses to compromise when everyone else succumbs to the Realpolitik of whatever regime du jour is claiming ultimate power. It takes the kind of faith that can sing Psalm 99, even while languishing in exile, far from the home we were promised.
But it’s also the kind of faith that God offers to us freely as a gift – the kind of faith that Jesus enacted on our behalf to reconcile us to God.
I don’t know where we are headed. I don’t know how this will all end up. But let us pray for the faith to stand strong, and not to give up in crying out to Jesus Christ, our righteous, holy, and just king, who reigns in the Church and is coming back to save and redeem this world, which He loves.
Amen.
Image: Psalms Frontispiece, (detail), Donald Jackson, © 2004 The Saint John’s Bible, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
