Psalm 110 is one the “psalms about the king of Israel (or of Judah)” I led discussion on at one of our Wednesday evening sessions a few weeks ago, and it is the Old Testament chapter quoted most often in the New Testament. There are two sorts of contexts where most of those quotations of the psalm come.
1. Jesus posed a quandary based on the first verse of the psalm (Matthew 22:41–45; Mark 12:35–37; Luke 20:41-44). That verse, as it is usually translated into English — “The Lord says to my lord . . .” — can be a head-scratcher until you know that two different words are translated “lord,” the first referring to God and the second to the anointed king of Israel. The question raised by Jesus is about the second “lord,” the human king, who in a forward-looking understanding of the psalm is Israel’s awaited Messiah, who is a descendant of King David. If David was the author of the psalm, which Jesus assumes is the case, then why does he call this descendant of his “my lord”? This looks like not much more than a word-game, but it did put the issue of the identity of the Messiah front and center.
Peter was apparently listening, because he later made a similar preaching point based on the conjunction of psalm-writer and ancestor of the Messiah in the person of King David, but based on Psalm 68, not Psalm 110 (in Acts 2:25–31). And then he linked that to the business of David calling the Messiah “my lord” in Psalm 110:1 (Acts 2:34–35).
2. The other major location for New Testament quotations of Psalm 110 are references to “a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek” (Psalm 110:4) in a section of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 5:6, 10; 6:20; 7:10, 11, 15, 17). King David was remembered as having particularly prepared for and encouraged the worship of Israel’s God in Jerusalem. 1 Chronicles particularly dwells on the bringing of the Ark of the Covenant to the city (chapters 13 and 15), David’s preparations for the building of the temple (chapters 21–22 and 28–29), and the organization of personnel for the temple (chapter 23–26). David came as close as a non-member of the priestly tribe could to acting in the role of a priest, to scandalous extremes in the eyes of his wife Michal (1 Chronicles 15:27, 29). All this involvement in the worship of God in Jerusalem was particularly celebrated in another “psalm about the king,” Psalm 132.
It was, indeed, a question how a king could have an acknowledged priestly role, when through the period of the Old Testament the line was clearly drawn between clergy (so to speak) and royalty. A partial answer came by reference to Melchizedek, who himself passed through patriarchal history almost too quickly to be noticed (Genesis 14:18-20). But he was both a king and a priest. Furthermore, he was king of Salem, which was probably Jerusalem. So Psalm 110 can call on him as the ancestor of a priesthood that the king of Judah could represent. Then Jesus the Messiah can be spoken of as priest as well as king in the letter to the Hebrews by being not only the descendant of David but also the priest in the order of Melchizedek.
Jesus is prophet, priest, and king for his people. Some might, like Queen Michal, be scandalized (1 Corinthians 1:23), but “all of God’s promises have their Yes in him” (2 Corinthians 1:20).
- These posts on the Psalms are in aid of the reading of the Psalms—one a day through the first five months of 2022—by members, attenders, friends, et al. of Together Church, Wyoming, MI.
The One Story 