The Most Quoted Psalm?

Let’s say that you are at a New Year’s Eve gathering later this week. As you wait for the ball to drop, the conversation begins to lull. That’s when you can hit your friends with a trivia question: “What is the most-quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament?” It will be a hit! The answer is Psalm 110. Does that surprise you?

Royal Psalm 110 is probably not on any of our top-ten lists. Its words are strange to our ears—not to mention violent. But Jesus loved Psalm 110. He was talking about it all the way up to the last week of his life on earth. The New Testament writers, guided by the Holy Spirit, see in Psalm 110 a vivid, powerful portrait of Jesus. But not Jesus the way we typically think of him—as a baby in the manger, or even as our sacrifice on the cross. Psalm 110 presents Jesus as the risen and reigning king. This is Jesus as he is right now, in the final week of 2024. All December, we’ve looked at the hope of a coming Messiah in the psalms. Psalm 2 began it all, if you remember; Psalm 110 is the climactic picture.

The whole psalm turns on a conversation that David as prophet overhears between God and the Messiah to come. David reports: “The Lord said to ‘my Lord (1).’” Huh. We know who that first “Lord” is: Yahweh, the Creator, the God of Israel. But why does David also call Yahweh’s conversation partner “my Lord”? After all, if this is a future king in David’s line, this is David’s descendant. David would be older than this person. In this culture, the older family member does not address the younger family member with a title of honor like “my Lord;” the honor should flow the other way, from the younger to the older. This would have puzzled any Jewish reader who thought about it.

Only Christmas could settle the long-standing mystery of Psalm 110:1. That’s when God does the unthinkable: he sends his own, Eternal Son into the world to become a man in David’s line. “And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,” the angel told Mary (Luke 1:32). When no merely human son of David could keep the Davidic covenant, God himself came down to do it for us. He alone is able to fulfill all the promises, prayers, and dreams in the psalms of a perfect king who would rescue his people and rule the world for God’s glory.

So is the Messiah to come David’s son, or David’s lord? Jesus puts this question to the Pharisees during Passion Week (Matt 22:41–46). He was pressing them to think through Psalm 110:1. He was showing them who their own Scriptures prophesied him to be, confronting them with his own identity, as both King and God. They refused to acknowledge the truth, and just a few days after this confrontation, they nailed Jesus to a cross. But their evil didn’t prevent Psalm 110 from happening—it just activated it. This is a very big God we are dealing with here, and Jesus is an unstoppable King!

So while Psalm 110:1 may seem a little obscure to us, it is critical to understanding the Biblical story we have been drawn into. In fact, the last time that we hear Jesus speak in the Bible, this is how he chooses to identify himself: “I am the root and offspring of David, the bright morning star…surely I am coming soon (Rev 22:16, 20).”

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Article by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church