Why Do the Nations Rage?

Psalm 2; Acts 4:23-31

Why do the nations rage? (“Nations” can also be translated as “heathen.” These are the unbelieving nations of the world who don’t know the God of Israel.) The world always seems to be in a state of restlessness and upheaval, like a storm-tossed sea. The world as a troubled sea is a Biblical image of unrest caused by ungodliness:

“But the wicked are like the tossing sea; for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up mire and dirt. There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked” (Isaiah 57:20-21). 

The Psalmist says that it is only the Lord

who stills the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of their waves,
the tumult of the peoples (Psalm 65:7)

In commenting on Psalm 65, Augustine says: “For the sea, by a figure, is used to indicate this world, with its bitter saltiness and troubled storms, where men with perverse and depraved appetites have become like fishes devouring one another.” In the Confessions Augustine also says: “thou dost curb the wicked lusts of men’s souls and fix their bounds: how far they are allowed to advance, and where their waves will be broken against each other – and thus thou makest it a sea, by the providence of thy governance of all things.” In other words, just as God sets the boundaries for the oceans of the world, He also reigns and rules over the nations of the world, setting limitations for how far the wickedness of man may go.

So the wicked world is raging like a restless, foaming sea! And until our voyage is over, we have to ride the waves and weather the storms of life in this world. Be prepared! The forecast calls for more storms!

There are times of peace and calm, yet these never seem to last very long. Have you found life to be something like an unpredictable sea, one that is calm in one moment and stormy the next? We often feel like the disciples on the storm-tossed sea of Galilee, with Jesus asleep in the boat: “Lord, don’t you care that we are going to drown?”

Master, the tempest is raging!
The billows are tossing high!
The sky is o’ershadowed with blackness,
No shelter or help is nigh;
Carest Thou not that we perish?
How canst Thou lie asleep,
When each moment so madly is threat’ning
A grave in the angry deep?

Jesus calls us over the tumult
Of our life’s wild, restless, sea

The nations continue to rage. Men are searching for peace but cannot seem to find it. Some seek it through politics, some through religion, some through economics. And some seek peace through inner reflection and psychology. People often try to find peace through some kind of escapism, or denial and detachment from reality. Everyone who tries drugs and alcohol is really looking for an escape or a sedative.

Why does the world today seem to be raging out of control? We see images of the chaos in the news every day. We see the war, pain, suffering, oppression, and death in the world. And all of this misery is caused by man, though in their insolence men often blame God for the state of the world! We do not want to pine for the good ole days, but there seems to have been a significant moral and spiritual degeneration in our culture in this generation. People do things today that the last generation would be ashamed to even talk about. People dive into sin with gusto, and they are proud of their sin. You can be a pervert now and be admired, maybe even have your own show!

Why? That is the first word in the text and it is still the great question of the world today. This situation is not new. Why is the world the way it is? Only the Word of God has the answer to this question. Worldly wisdom does not have the answer to this crucial question about human life. Modern man with all of his science and technology does not have the answers to the human condition. Worldly wisdom can make observations about what is seen and the way things are, but they cannot look deeper to find the cause. The whole problem of evil and suffering is a particular stumbling block to the modern mind. Modern man holds the position that men are basically good – so where does evil come from? They have no answer. The world does not have the answers to these questions because it has rejected the Word of God.

The Source of the World’s Raging (Psalm 2.1-3)

This Psalm reveals that behind this restlessness in the world is a desire and an intentional effort to do away with the authority of God. I am not by nature a conspiracy theorist, unless the Word of God reveals that a conspiracy actually exists! There IS a conspiracy in the World, and it goes up to the highest levels of power. The World and its rulers do not want God around and they are doing everything they can to get rid of Him.

The World seldom objects to religion. Religion, including institutional Christianity, is really just an extension of the World and its values. But the World will not tolerate the living God, His Law, and His Word. It is not that the world objects to the discussion of ideas about God. We can talk about God, as long as it is purely theoretical and lacks any real, concrete definitions. But the last thing they want is someone speaking in absolutes, or telling other people what they must believe about God. This kind of absolutism will not be tolerated today. You can entertain any private theory about God you want, but don’t tell anyone else what to believe!

So people create their own gods, in their own image. Men today are really worshiping themselves. We have about six billion people on this planet who all want to be God, and this is bound to cause trouble!

1. A Vain Thing (v. 1)

Of course, God will not be gotten rid of so easily. All of the world’s plans are ultimately vain, especially this plan to get rid of God. Now you have to come up to get a higher view to see this, because it often looks like the plans of the world are quite successful. The Psalmist is a Man of God, and he can see the truth about the world and its schemes. “The peoples plot a vain thing.” Or as someone else has said: “Man proposes and God disposes.”

Even Solomon knew that everything that is under the sun, or what is done by man, is vanity, which is just a lot of hard work that ultimately comes to nothing. The history of the human race is like someone riding a stationary bike. They pedal the stationary bike like mad, get tired, die and fall off the bike, only to be replaced by a new generation that didn’t learn anything from the previous one and starts pedaling all over again. Every generation rages against God, dies, and gives birth to a new generation that rises to do the same thing! The world has always been raging. This is the world – life under the sun – as Solomon in his earthly wisdom could correctly observe. Other thinkers have seen it too.

William Shakespeare put this truth about human life in the mouth of one of his characters in Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." What is life in the world like, apart from God? It is “full of sound and fury”–the nations are raging against God–but it amounts to nothing. “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot a vain thing?” The question is meant to be rhetorical. Why live as if there is no God? It is a vain thing to do! Apart from God, life amounts to nothing.

2. Freedom from God (v. 3)

But the world has a reason for its anti-God agenda. The world views God and His Law as a restriction, keeping them from doing what they want. This is the meaning of “let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us” (Psalm 2:3).

God is viewed as a harsh taskmaster or a cosmic killjoy, who wants to tie man down, make him a prisoner or a slave, and keep man from really pursuing his own happiness. This is exactly why so many people today say they do not want to become Christians: there are just too many rules and restrictions. Man wants to be free to pursue his own desires. But there is God with His Law ruining all of man’s enjoyment and expression. This is at the heart of the nature of man, or what Paul calls the Flesh:

“For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7-8). 

Children rage against their parents because the children want to have their way, and the parents stand in their way. When kids get a little older and leave their parent’s home, going off to college, we say that they want to sow their wild oats – do everything they want to do that their parents kept them from doing!

One of the great values of our Age is our so-called freedom, which is understood as the ability to pursue every desire without restriction, especially from religion or from a domineering and interfering deity! There are things that people want to do and God simply gets in their way, so God must go away! This is true on an individual level and on a societal level. Our society does not want God to stand in the way of progress! They do not want to hear the Word or the Law of God, telling them what to do, or that their behavior is wrong and will have consequences. The perfect example of this is the present campaign for the acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

One of Satan’s oldest lies whispered in the ears of humanity is that God is trying to keep you down and is refusing to allow you some wonderful blessing or experience. This is what the serpent said to Eve:

“You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5). 

The lie is that God cannot be trusted. God is not good and does not have your best interests in mind. You must take matters into your own hands and break free from this ogre we call God! And man believes the lie!

But the authority of God is benevolent – it is for the ultimate good of man – which makes the world’s raging against God irrational. God is the source of everything that is good. This means that man needs God and cannot live without Him. We are not self-sufficient but are dependent. That was the real lesson of Eden. With God there is life. Without God there is nothing but death. Death is nothingness: separation from the Source of life itself.

Why would man want to be separate from God? Sin is a form of insanity. But at the root of all sin is unbelief. Man does not really believe in the goodness of God and is convinced that the consequences of being without God are really not all that bad, and may actually be advantageous. As John Milton said in his epic poem, Paradise Lost, the mantra of the damned is “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

The great tragedy of human history is that man has refused the only thing that can really help him. Imagine a hospital ward filled with cancer patients. The doctor announces that a cure has been found! But the patients will not trust the doctor and refuse to receive the healing! That is the madness of the world that continues to rage against God and refuse the only one who could save them.

3. Opposition to God’s Anointed (vs. 2)

God came into a world that was raging against Him, in the person of Christ. He left heaven, humbling Himself as a man, and making Himself vulnerable to the hatred of the world. How the world really feels about God was seen in how it treated the Son of God. The world was face to face with God, and they condemned Him to die! All of the world’s raging against God came to a burning focus in Jesus.

Both the religious and the political establishments rejected Jesus. In fact, they worked together to get rid of Jesus, coming together in a rare act of cooperation against a common enemy. Jesus did not fit the agenda of the religious leaders and he even posed a possible threat to their position, so they conspired against him. Jesus and His Kingdom were mocked by the authority of Rome as an insignificant nuisance. Pilate washed his hands and refused to be troubled by this Galilean, sending him to Herod, his political rival. Herod mocked him and sent him back, and the two actually became friends after they both had done away with the nuisance Jesus and they at last had something in common! In a final act of mockery and revenge on the Jews for bothering him, Pilate inscribed a sign above Jesus’ head as He hung dying: “The King of the Jews.” Pilate was saying “this is what I think of you Jews and your pathetic king!”

There are those today who, like the Jewish leaders, have an intense hatred for Jesus and want to get rid of him, seeing him as a threat to their own, little kingdoms.  There are also those, like Pilate and Herod, who have so little esteem for him that they will not waste any of their time listening to him, choosing to simply set him aside, as someone would scrape a bug off their windshield, and then go about their business as if nothing had happened.

The world is still rejecting Jesus. And when you reject the Son of God you are rejecting the Father. There may be many things the world disagrees about, but when it comes to their hatred for God and His Christ they are united.

4. Opposition to God’s People (Acts 4.23-31)

The experience of the early Church reveals that the world is also in opposition to the people of God. When the early Church was persecuted by the Jews for the first time – the same people who had killed the Lord – they got together to pray and they remembered Psalm 2! The Jews had always believed that Psalm 2 was a prophecy about the Messiah. The early Christians saw that Psalm 2 had been fulfilled!

The world could no longer persecute Jesus directly, but it could persecute His Body! Now the hatred of the world for God, once focused in Jesus, is turned on the Church. And the Church should not be surprised by the animosity from the World. Jesus said it would happen. The only thing we really need to be concerned about is the world’s friendship, not its hatred! In some of His final moments with His closest disciples, Jesus warned them about the world’s hatred so they would be prepared for it and not be caught unawares. We should understand the world’s attitude toward God and His Christ and expect opposition. We should heed this warning, which is almost a commentary on the second Psalm:

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my Father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause’” (John 15:18-25). 

There seems to be so little in the institutional Church today that the World could actually persecute! The Church has shaken hands with the World and become friends, which is a very dangerous position! To be the World’s friend is to be an enemy of God. It is impossible to really serve God while also courting the favor and approval of the World. If we love the World and its pleasures, we cannot love God (1 Jn. 2.15-17). The world has not changed and cannot ever be changed. We are to come out of the World, to be separate, and refuse all the seductive advances of the Great Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17.1-6).

Our best defense against the World and its opposition is prayer. We go to the Throne of God in our time of need, acknowledging that above all the tumult and raging of the nations, is our Father in Heaven.

God’s Response to the World’s Raging (Psalm 2.4-9)

1. God Laughs at the Wicked (v. 4)

How does the one seated on the Throne view all the raging of the nations? He laughs! This is a laugh of scorn for all the pathetic attempts of wicked men to overthrow His reign. It would be much easier to try to move the earth itself than to move the Lord from His Throne! One writer said that “the Throne of God is the central fact of all Biblical revelation.” God’s sovereignty is THE absolute upon which all truth is built. We build our lives and our hope on the Throne of God:

“A glorious throne set on high from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary (Jeremiah 17:12)”. 

“The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD sits enthroned as king forever” (Psalm 29:10). 

At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne (Revelation 4:2).

When we have the right view of God all of the evil in the world seems pathetically small. Wicked man cannot do all that he would. Man does not have a free will to do whatever he chooses to do! The very thought is absurd to anyone who knows anything about the Scriptures! The whole world once gathered together against God to build themselves a city. And God laughed at them and scattered them in His wrath!

2. God Raised and Exalted Christ (v. 6-9)

And then the world gathered together against the Lord’s Christ. They condemned Him to die. They thought they had gotten rid of the Son of God! They even put Him in a tomb and rolled a stone in front of the entrance, just to make sure He stayed in the grave. But God laughed and raised Him from the dead! Jesus is currently reigning over this world in spite of the world’s objections to His authority. The resurrection was God’s vindication of Christ and His overthrow of the world’s schemes.

Jesus has been exalted to a place where He can no longer be seen by the World, but is only seen by the faith which comes through the preaching of the Gospel, until He comes again in power and glory for the judgment of the world (Acts 17.31). Jesus will destroy all these nations that are now raging against God and against His reign. “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:25). Paul is alluding to another Messianic Psalm:

The LORD says to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.”
The LORD sends forth from Zion
your mighty scepter.
Rule in the midst of your enemies! (Psalm 110:1-2)

Jesus is ruling in order to bring many sons to Glory through this present, evil world. We need an exalted Savior to get us through this raging, hostile world all the way to the Throne of God. This is the saving power that God

worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:20-23).

God has a plan for His people and nothing can stop it! Nothing in this world, not even the god of this world which is Satan himself, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Only Jesus, the Prince of Peace, can calm the troubled sea that is our world. There will come a time when there will be no troubled sea and the world will finally be at rest (Rev. 21.1).

We are to live with that confidence, knowing that our faith overcomes the world because Jesus has overcome the world. And He will deliver us out of this raging world that is like a troubled sea so we can one day stand before the Throne of God on a sea of glass, peaceful and calm forever (Rev. 15.2). If we stay with Jesus He will bring us all the way from this world to glory because God has set His King on Zion!

God’s Final Words to a Raging World (Psalm 2.10-12)

Americans have trouble with passages like this Psalm because we have trouble with kings. The idea of someone who has absolute power seems to us like the greatest form of evil in the world! We believe, being children of the Enlightenment, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We believe that absolute power is to be resisted at all costs!

If we don’t like those in authority, we just vote them out of office. But there is no voting in the Kingdom of God. God has already cast His vote for His Son. And God’s vote is the only vote that counts.

1. A Gracious Offer (vs. 10-12)

The Gospel is really a royal proclamation from the Throne of God that He has made Jesus His King and every knee must bow and every tongue must confess that Jesus Christ is Lord! Now is the time to bow the knee to Christ. If we bow the knee now, during the Day of Salvation, we will receive the King’s mercy and grace. In those countries that have kings it is customary to get down on one knee and kiss the king’s ring on his hand. Kiss the Son! Jesus is holding out His hands to the nations of the world. We can bow and kiss His hand and serve Him, making peace with Him, or we can declare war on Him and fight against His authority. That is a fight that we will lose.

But the Church carries the message to the world to be reconciled to God through Christ:

“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). 

To be reconciled means to make peace where there was once enmity. God has made peace with the world that is raging against Him. We preach this peace, offering men a way to stop their raging against God. We are in the final stage of history, which is a space for repentance and salvation. God has provided a shelter from His own wrath. Christ is the only safe place to hide from the wrath of God that is to come on the world. So let us be at peace with Him now so that Day will bring our salvation and not our destruction.

2. A Stern Warning (v. 12)

But the time for making peace will not last forever. The unrepentant world is storing up wrath (Rom 2.5). Jesus will come to this world again, not as a humble baby in a manger, but

in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9)

As long as the world keeps up its raging God’s wrath and anger is rising like water behind a dam. Someday the dam will burst and the wrath of God will flood this world. Then the people of the world will call for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the wrath of the Lamb (Rev. 6.15-17). But there will be no place to hide.

In light of this coming Day of Wrath God's people should be bold and speak the Gospel no matter what the world says. When the early Church prayed, after being persecuted by the world, they prayed that God would look on their enemies, and consider their threats, and that they would have boldness to continue speaking the Word of God, which is the Gospel! We should not let the threats of the world intimidate us. We should only fear God, not men. What can men do to us, after they have killed the body? But we must all stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ to give an account of our deeds (2 Cor. 5.10). So while we are still in this raging world let us not be afraid of the world, but let us “serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.”