David's Son and David's Lord
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Read Psalm 110 in full before proceeding (it is only seven verses) and read it twice. Then read Matthew 22:41–46 and Hebrews 7, where the New Testament shows you how to read it. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Here is the LORD’s proclamation to my lord: “Sit down at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool!” … The LORD makes this promise on oath and will not revoke it: “You are an eternal priest after the pattern of Melchizedek.”
Psalm 110:1, 4
With the wisdom psalms behind us we step into a new room of the prayer book, the throne room of the royal psalms, and we begin with the greatest of them all. By one measure Psalm 110 is the most important psalm in the Bible: it is the Old Testament passage the New Testament quotes more often than any other. Its first verse echoes through the Gospels, through Acts, through Paul, through Hebrews, through Peter, more than a dozen times, and it is woven straight into the church’s creed, which confesses that the Lord Jesus sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. That line of the creed is Psalm 110:1, prayed by the whole church every Lord’s Day.
And all of that weight rests on a psalm of just seven verses: short, dense, and packed tighter than almost anything in the Psalter. In those seven verses two great oracles are spoken, each beginning with the solemn formula of a divine declaration. The first seats a King at God’s own right hand: Sit down at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool! (v. 1). The second, just as astonishingly, makes that same King a priest: You are an eternal priest after the pattern of Melchizedek (v. 4). King and priest, throne and altar, in one short song, and held together in one person, who is the burden of the whole psalm.
We have been in the royal room before, at the very start of this volume. Psalm 2 showed us the LORD’s Anointed installed on Zion, the begotten Son before whom the raging nations are summoned to bow. Psalm 110 is its companion and sequel: where Psalm 2 enthroned the King on the holy hill, Psalm 110 enthrones Him at the right hand of God Himself, and adds the thing Psalm 2 never said, that this King is also a priest. The two psalms are the twin pillars of the royal Psalter, and the New Testament reaches for both whenever it wants to say who the Lord Jesus is.
And there is a particular reason this psalm stands at the head of the cluster, which is that the Lord Jesus Himself made it the test question of His ministry. Near the end, cornered in the temple by His opponents, He turned the tables and asked them a riddle out of this psalm: a riddle they could not answer, and that no one has ever been able to answer except by confessing who He is. The riddle is folded into the psalm’s first three words, and it is where we must begin: how can David call his own descendant Lord?
So we will follow the psalm down its short, steep path: the riddle of the two lords, the King seated at the right hand, the reign carried on in the very midst of His enemies, the King who is also the eternal priest, and the fearsome day of His wrath. And we will find, in all of it, the Lord Jesus Christ, truly David’s son and truly David’s Lord, reigning for us and interceding for us at one and the same time.
The LORD Said to My Lord
Here is the LORD’s proclamation to my lord: “Sit down at my right hand …” (v. 1). Everything hangs on those two words, LORD and lord, and they are not the same word. The first, printed in the small capitals our Bibles use for it, is the divine name itself: the LORD, YHWH, the God of Israel. The second is a different Hebrew word, adoni, my lord, my master, the word you would use of a superior, someone over you, someone to whom you owe allegiance (which is why the NET prints it in lowercase). So the verse reports a conversation between two persons: the LORD God speaks to David’s Lord, David’s master, and tells him to sit at His right hand.
Now hold that against who is writing. This is a psalm of David, and David is the king. David is the highest human authority in Israel; there is no one above him on earth. And yet David, the king, speaks of someone as my lord, his own master and superior. Who outranks King David? Who is David’s Lord? That is the riddle, and the Lord Jesus drove it like a wedge into His opponents. What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he? He asked the Pharisees. They answered, easily, The son of David; everyone knew the Messiah would be David’s descendant. And then the Lord Jesus sprang it: How then does David by the Spirit call him “Lord,” saying, “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand …’”? If David then calls him “Lord,” how can he be his son? (Matthew 22:43–45). And Matthew adds the telling line: no one was able to answer him a word (v. 46).
They could not answer because the only answer is the one they were not yet willing to give. How can the Messiah be both David’s son and David’s Lord? Only if He is more than a man, only if the One who would be born of David’s line is also the eternal Lord who existed before David and stands above him. The riddle has exactly one solution, and the solution is the two natures of Christ. David’s son: truly man, born in time of David’s own house, of the same flesh and blood as the rest of us. David’s Lord: truly God, the eternal Son, who was David’s Lord a thousand years before David was born. The same person, both at once. As Paul would put it, the gospel concerns God’s Son, who was a descendant of David with reference to the flesh, who was appointed the Son-of-God-in-power … by the resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:3–4).
And this is no abstract puzzle to be admired and set down; our whole salvation hangs on the answer. We needed a Savior who was truly man, for it was man who sinned, man who owed the debt, man who had to render the obedience and die the death; a Savior not of our own kind could not stand in our place. And we needed a Savior who was truly God, for no mere man, however good, could bear the sin of the whole world or break the grip of death; the weight would have crushed any creature. Only the God-man could do it: man enough to take our place, God enough to carry what He took there. Strip away His humanity and He cannot be our substitute; strip away His deity and His sacrifice cannot save. The riddle of David’s son and David’s Lord is not a riddle the church solves and moves past. It is the very ground we stand on, for the One who is both is the only Savior there could ever have been.
This is the christological treasure the old Lutheran teachers guarded so jealously, and Chemnitz wrote a whole great book defending it: the two natures, divine and human, united in the one person of Christ, neither confused into a blend nor split into two sons, but joined so completely that the one Lord Jesus is at once David’s descendant and David’s God. Take away either nature and the riddle has no answer; worse, the gospel has no Savior, for we need One who is man enough to stand in our place and God enough to bear the weight of it. Psalm 110 puts both natures into a single sentence, and the Lord Jesus pointed straight at it and dared His opponents to explain it without Him. They could not. Neither can we, except on our knees.
Sit at My Right Hand
Sit down at my right hand. The right hand of a king was the place of highest honor and delegated authority; to be seated there was to share the throne, to rule with the king’s own power. And the LORD invites David’s Lord to sit at His right hand, to be enthroned in the very seat of God’s authority over all things. This is the language the New Testament uses for the ascension and exaltation of the Lord Jesus: raised from the dead, He was carried up and sat down at the right hand of God (Hebrews 10:12; Ephesians 1:20). The humiliation that ran from the manger to the cross gives way to the exaltation that runs from the empty tomb to the throne.
We saw the first half of this back at Psalm 16, and now the second half arrives. At Pentecost, Peter preached the resurrection out of Psalm 16 (David’s body saw corruption, but Christ’s did not), and then he moved, in the same breath, straight to Psalm 110: For David did not ascend into heaven, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my lord, “Sit at my right hand …”’ (Acts 2:34). The argument is the same one we watched him make with Psalm 16: David said it, but it was not true of David (David never ascended to God’s right hand), so the psalm was always reaching past David to Another. And Peter names Him, the very One they had crucified: Therefore let all the house of Israel know beyond a doubt that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36). The resurrection led to the throne. The empty tomb of Psalm 16 ends at the right hand of Psalm 110.
Here we should say a word our tradition has always pressed, because it changes how a Christian feels about the ascension. The right hand of God is not a spot in the sky, a distant throne in a far corner of the universe where the Lord Jesus now sits remote from us. The right hand of God is the almighty power and reign of God, which fills all things and is everywhere at once. To say that Christ is seated at the right hand is to say that He reigns over all, with the full power of God, in every place. It does not mean that He has gone away to a distant heaven and left us behind. This is why the ascension is not a sad farewell but a coronation, and why the Christ enthroned at the right hand can still be truly present with His people, even giving us His own body and blood at His table. The King did not leave. The King was enthroned, and reigns now over the very room you are sitting in.
Until I make your enemies your footstool. The enthroned King is not yet unopposed; there are still enemies, and the Father promises to put them, one by one, under the King’s feet, the image of a conqueror resting his foot on the neck of the defeated. Paul takes this exact promise and tells us how far it runs: For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be eliminated is death (1 Corinthians 15:25–26). There is the scope of it. Every enemy of the King and His people (sin, the devil, every power that wars against God) will be made His footstool, and the very last of them to go down will be death itself, already mortally wounded at the empty tomb and awaiting its final destruction when the King returns. The footstool is not yet complete. But the King is already seated, and the outcome is already certain.
Rule in the Midst of Your Enemies
The LORD extends your dominion from Zion. Rule in the midst of your enemies! (v. 2). Catch the four words that hold the whole of the Christian’s present life: in the midst of your enemies. The King does not wait to begin reigning until all opposition has been cleared away. He reigns now, already, with His dominion going out from Zion, and He reigns in the midst of enemies not yet subdued. His kingdom is real and present and advancing, and it advances through contested ground, surrounded by what still opposes it.
This is precisely the strange, in-between time the church lives in, and naming it rightly saves a believer from two opposite mistakes. One mistake is to look at the world (the scoffing, the violence, the apparent triumph of everything against God, the very prosperity of the wicked that nearly capsized Asaph) and conclude that Christ is not really reigning at all, that the throne is empty or far off. The other mistake is to expect that if Christ reigns, His people should find the world already friendly, the enemies already gone, the Christian life a victory lap. Psalm 110:2 forbids both. The King reigns: truly, now, with real authority. And He reigns in the midst of enemies who are not yet His footstool. The believer lives in occupied territory under a King whose throne is secure and whose victory is certain but not yet complete. That is not a contradiction. That is the gospel’s already and not yet, and Psalm 110 states it in four words.
Your people willingly follow you when you go into battle. On the holy hills at sunrise the dew of your youth belongs to you (v. 3). This is the hardest verse in the psalm to translate. The Hebrew is genuinely difficult here, and faithful versions render it in noticeably different ways, so we will not build a doctrine on its obscurer corners. But its main lines are clear enough and lovely. The King has a people, and when He goes into battle they willingly follow; they are a willing army, not conscripts dragged into service but volunteers, glad to be His. We have learned where such willingness comes from: not from the natural heart, which does not want God, but from the heart God frees and enables, as in Psalm 119 the believer runs along the path of God’s commands only because, as he prays, you enable me to do so. The King’s willing people are made willing by grace. And they come on the holy hills at sunrise (older translations read in holy garments, as if arrayed for sacred service), fresh as the dew that is born with the dawn: a young, glad, sacred host, given to the King in the day of His battle.
And we should not miss how this King’s scepter goes out and how His kingdom advances, because it is not the way earthly kingdoms grow. The LORD extends your dominion from Zion (the Hebrew pictures it as the King’s mighty scepter): from Zion, that is, from the place of God’s worship and word, the scepter of the King goes out into the world. The King does not extend His reign by armies and conquest in the midst of His enemies; He extends it by the word that goes out from Zion, the preaching of the gospel that calls the enemies of the King to lay down their arms and makes them His willing people. This is why the church’s weapon in occupied territory is not the sword but the word, and why the believer’s part in the King’s campaign is to pray, thy kingdom come, and to carry that word to the next person still living as an enemy. The scepter from Zion is the gospel, and every time it is preached the King’s reign reaches a little further into the midst of His enemies, turning enemies into subjects one heart at a time, until the day He returns to make the rest of them His footstool by another means entirely.
A Priest Forever
And now the psalm does the thing no other royal psalm dares, the thing that would have been scandalous to every Israelite who first heard it. The LORD makes this promise on oath and will not revoke it: “You are an eternal priest after the pattern of Melchizedek” (v. 4). The King is declared a priest. To feel the shock of it you have to remember how rigidly Israel kept the two offices apart. Kings came from the tribe of Judah; priests came from the tribe of Levi, the house of Aaron; and the line between them was not to be crossed. When King Uzziah, a good king grown proud, walked into the temple to burn incense (to do a priest’s work), leprosy broke out on his forehead on the spot, and he was a leper until the day he died (2 Chronicles 26). King and priest did not mix. A king who reached for the censer was struck down. And here is the LORD, swearing an oath, declaring His King a priest.
The escape from the contradiction is in a single phrase: after the pattern of Melchizedek. Not in Aaron’s order (not a Levitical priest at all) but a priest of a different and older order entirely, the order of a man who appears for a single strange moment back in Genesis. Melchizedek, king of Salem, comes out to meet Abraham, and he is named the priest of the Most High God; he brings out bread and wine, blesses Abraham, and receives a tithe from him (Genesis 14:18–20). And then he vanishes from the story as suddenly as he came, with no recorded genealogy, no father or mother named, no death recorded. King and priest in one man, before there was a Levi or an Aaron: king of Salem, which means peace, and his very name means king of righteousness. He is the one Old Testament figure who already holds both offices together, and the psalm reaches back over the whole Levitical system to him to describe its King-Priest.
The Letter to the Hebrews builds whole chapters on this single verse, and its argument is worth carrying home. A Levitical priest held his office by descent, and died, and handed it on to the next man in the line; the priesthood was a relay of mortal men, none of whom lasted. But a priest in the order of Melchizedek, who has, as it were, neither beginning of days nor end of life, holds a priesthood that does not pass on because it does not die. You are a priest forever. The Lord Jesus is a priest who never has to be replaced, because He always lives (Hebrews 7:24–25). And because He lives forever, His priestly work never lapses: he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them (Hebrews 7:25). The King on the throne is, at this very moment, the Priest at the altar, praying for His people without ceasing.
And mark what this Priest offered. The Levitical priests offered the blood of bulls and goats, over and over, year after year, because no animal’s blood could finally take sin away. The Melchizedek-Priest offered something else; as Hebrews says, he did this in offering himself once for all (Hebrews 7:27). He is the only priest in the history of the world who was also the sacrifice. He laid Himself on the altar, made the one offering that actually cleanses, and then sat down, because the work was finished and would never need repeating. There is a quiet foreshadowing, too, in that Melchizedek brought out bread and wine to Abraham, for our King and Priest, on the night He was betrayed, took the bread and the cup and gave them to His people as His own body and blood. The oath the LORD swore and will not take back is the guarantee of all of it: we have a Priest who does not die, whose one sacrifice stands forever, and who lives to pray for us still.
Stop and let that last phrase do its pastoral work, because it is one of the deepest comforts the gospel holds. At this very moment, while you read, the Lord Jesus is interceding for you before the Father. Paul gathers up the whole of Psalm 110 into a single sentence and turns it into the believer’s defense: Who is the one who will condemn? Christ is the one who died (and more than that, he was raised), who is at the right hand of God, and who also is interceding for us (Romans 8:34). There is the resurrection of Psalm 16, the right hand of Psalm 110:1, and the priesthood of Psalm 110:4, all in one breath, all marshaled to answer the accusation against a sinner. The believer never prays alone and never stands before God unrepresented; the High Priest who carries his very name has gone in ahead of him and is pleading his cause with the merit of His own finished sacrifice. When the conscience accuses, when the devil accuses, when the believer can find nothing in himself to answer the charge, the answer is not in himself at all. It is at the right hand of God, where his Priest-King is interceding for him, and where the only verdict that matters has already been handed down in his favor.
The Day of His Wrath
The last three verses turn fearsome, and we must not soften them, because they are part of what it means that this King reigns. O sovereign Lord, at your right hand he strikes down kings in the day he unleashes his anger. He executes judgment against the nations; he fills the valleys with corpses; he shatters their heads over the vast battlefield (vv. 5–6). This is the King as Judge and Conqueror, and the imagery is of a battlefield. The same King who is seated in honor will rise in wrath; the same enemies who are being made His footstool will, on the last day, be shattered. The reign that looks so patient now, ruling in the midst of its enemies, ends in a final and total victory in which every power that set itself against God is broken. The gentleness of the King is not weakness, and His patience is not indifference. There is a day of wrath coming, and the psalm will not let us forget it.
How does the gospel hold this together? By asking who the wrath falls on, and on what the answer turns. The wrath of the King falls on His enemies, on all that has set itself against God and refused His reign. And the dividing line between the King’s enemies and the King’s people is drawn precisely at the altar where the King is also the Priest. For the wrath that will one day shatter the rebellious is the very wrath the Priest-King already bore in His own body on the cross, for the sins of the whole world, and so for all who are His. The believer does not face the day of wrath as one of the shattered, because the One who will do the shattering is the same One who stood in his place and took the blow meant for him. The terror of verses 5 and 6 is law (real, final law) for everyone who will not have the King; and it is gospel for everyone who is hidden in the Priest, because their wrath has already fallen, on Him, and is spent. Which side of the footstool a person stands on is decided at the cross.
We should let both halves of that stand at full strength, because our age is tempted to soften the first into nothing. The wrath is real. There is a day of judgment coming in which the King will shatter every power that refused Him, and to pretend otherwise (to imagine a King so gentle He finally lets all evil simply pass) is not mercy but a lie that empties the cross of its meaning, for why would the Priest-King bear a wrath that was never going to fall? But this day of wrath is also, for the suffering and the wronged, the answer to a prayer the Psalter has taught us to pray. When we read the imprecatory psalms we heard the martyrs under the altar crying How long, Sovereign Master … before you judge those who live on the earth and avenge our blood? Psalm 110 is the LORD’s answer: there is a day, it is fixed, the King will rise and shatter the kings of the earth, and every Babylon will fall. The believer does not take that vengeance into his own hands; he hands it to the King whose day is coming, and waits, neither doubting the wrath nor dreading it, because the One who will pour it out is the One who already drank it for him.
And the psalm ends on a strange, quiet note after all that thunder: From the stream along the road he drinks; then he lifts up his head (v. 7). The verse is difficult, but its picture is of the King pausing in His pursuit to drink from a wayside stream, stooping low, taking the refreshment of the road, and then lifting up His head in triumph. It is hard not to see in it the shape of the whole gospel: the King who stooped to the lowest place, who drank a bitter cup along the road of the cross, and who was therefore lifted up, His head raised in resurrection and ascension, exalted to the right hand where the psalm began. The One who humbled Himself was lifted up. The stream of His suffering ran straight to the throne.
King and Priest, for Us
Gather the seven verses up and see what we have been given. In one short psalm the Lord Jesus is shown to be David’s son and David’s Lord: truly man and truly God, the two natures in one person, the riddle no one could answer apart from Him. He is the King enthroned at the right hand of God, reigning now with the full power of God over all things, including the very ground we stand on. And He is the eternal Priest after the pattern of Melchizedek, who offered Himself once for all and ever lives to intercede: King and Priest in one person, the two offices Israel was forbidden to combine, united at last in the only One who could hold them.
And the two offices this psalm unites are part of a threefold whole the church has long confessed. Christ is Prophet, Priest, and King: the three anointed offices of the Old Testament gathered into one anointed Person, the mashiach, the Christ. He is the Prophet who does not merely bring God’s word but is Himself the Word, speaking the Father to us finally and fully. He is the Priest who offered the one sacrifice and lives to intercede. He is the King enthroned at the right hand, reigning over all. Psalm 110 sets two of those three side by side in a single short song, King and Priest, where Israel had kept them rigidly apart. In doing so it shows us that the offices were always meant to converge, that they were three streams running toward one sea, and the sea is Christ. The prophets spoke of Him, the priests pictured Him, the kings foreshadowed Him; and when He came, He was all three at once, because all three had only ever been about Him.
And see how much comfort is folded into that union. The King who reigns over all the powers of the universe is the very same person as the Priest who prays for you by name. The hand that holds the scepter is the hand that was pierced for you. The One seated in unapproachable majesty at the right hand of God is the One who took your flesh, drank from the bitter stream, and bore the wrath that would otherwise have shattered you. You do not have a distant King in one place and a sympathetic Priest in another; you have one Lord Jesus Christ who is both, reigning and interceding in the same breath, ruling history and remembering you in it at the same moment.
So the believer lives in the in-between time with his head up. The King reigns in the midst of His enemies, and so the church lives in the midst of its enemies too, in occupied territory, under a throne that is secure and a victory that is certain but not yet finished. The enemies are being made His footstool one by one; the last of them, death, has already been mortally wounded and waits only for the King’s return to be destroyed outright. Until then His willing people, made willing by grace and arrayed in the holiness He gives them, follow their King-Priest through the contested ground, fearing no day of wrath, because their wrath was spent at the cross, and lifting up their heads, because the One who stooped to the stream has been lifted to the throne, and will lift them after Him. David’s son and David’s Lord reigns, and prays for us, and is coming. That is the whole of the Christian’s confidence, and it is all here, in seven verses David could not fully have understood, about a Lord he could only call his own.
Gathering the Threads
We entered the throne room of the Psalter with its greatest royal psalm: the Old Testament passage the New Testament quotes most, and the one woven into the creed’s confession that Christ sits at the right hand of God. We began with the riddle the Lord Jesus used to silence His opponents: how can David call his own descendant Lord? The only answer is the two natures (David’s son according to the flesh, David’s Lord as the eternal God), the whole of Christ in a single sentence. We saw the King seated at the right hand, the exaltation that follows the resurrection, with Peter at Pentecost moving from Psalm 16’s empty tomb straight to Psalm 110’s throne; and we heard our tradition’s reminder that the right hand of God is not a distant place but God’s almighty reign everywhere, so that the ascended King is not absent but enthroned over all and present with His people.
We saw the King ruling in the midst of His enemies (the gospel’s already and not yet in four words), gathering a willing people made willing by grace. We watched the psalm do the unthinkable and crown the King a priest, not after Aaron but after Melchizedek: a priest who does not die, whose one self-offering stands forever, who always lives to intercede, and who gives His people the bread and the cup that are His body and blood. We let the fearsome day of wrath stand, and found the gospel in it: the wrath that will shatter the King’s enemies is the wrath the Priest-King already bore on the cross, so that the cross decides which side of the footstool a person stands on. And we saw the King stoop to the stream and lift up His head. King and priest, throne and altar, divine and human, wrath and mercy: all of it held together in the one Lord Jesus Christ, David’s son and David’s Lord, who reigns for us and prays for us and is coming for us.
For Discussion
The Lord Jesus posed a riddle from this psalm that silenced His opponents (Matthew 22:41–46): if the Messiah is David’s son, how can David call him Lord? What answer is the riddle driving at, and how does it hold the two natures of Christ, truly man and truly God, together in a single verse?
At Pentecost Peter moved straight from Psalm 16 (the resurrection) to Psalm 110:1 (Acts 2:34–36) and concluded, God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ. Why does the resurrection lead to the session at God’s right hand, and what does it mean to confess with the creed that Christ sits at the right hand of God?
Psalm 110:2 says, Rule in the midst of your enemies! How is it a comfort that Christ reigns now (already, but among enemies not yet made His footstool) rather than only after the final victory? Read 1 Corinthians 15:25–26 alongside it.
Under the old covenant, king and priest were kept strictly apart; King Uzziah was struck with leprosy for usurping the priest’s office (2 Chronicles 26). Why is it so significant that Psalm 110:4 declares the King also a priest, and a priest after the pattern of Melchizedek rather than of Levi? Read Hebrews 7.
Verses 5–7 are fearsome: the day of wrath, the shattering of kings, judgment among the nations. How does the session hold this together with the gospel: on whom does the King’s wrath fall, and how does His priestly work decide which side of the footstool a person stands on?
The same Christ is both the King reigning at God’s right hand and the Priest who always lives to intercede for His people (Hebrews 7:25). What comfort is there for a believer in having a King and an Intercessor who are one and the same person?
Looking Ahead
Psalm 110 enthroned the King and crowned Him priest. The next psalm dresses Him for a wedding. The next session takes up Psalm 45, a royal wedding song: a poem composed for the marriage of a king, full of the King’s beauty, His robes fragrant with myrrh, His sword on His thigh, His throne and His bride. On its surface it is a courtly love song for a royal wedding day. But it says one thing no court poet could rightly say of any earthly groom: Your throne, O God, is permanent (Psalm 45:6). It addresses the King as God.
And the Letter to the Hebrews picks up that very line and applies it, without hesitation, to the Son: but of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever” (Hebrews 1:8–9). So Psalm 45 turns out to be another royal psalm straining past its earthly occasion to the true King, the divine Bridegroom and His bride, which the whole New Testament will reveal to be Christ and His church. We will read it as the wedding song of the Lord Jesus and the people He has made His own, and find the gospel in the most unlikely of places, a love poem.
Read Psalm 45 in full before the next session, and then read Hebrews 1:8–9, where the New Testament addresses its King as God. As you read the psalm, notice where it speaks to the King and where it turns to speak to the bride.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, David’s son and David’s Lord, we worship You as both true man and true God: born of David’s line for us, and yet David’s own Lord from before the world began. We bless You that the Father has seated You at His right hand, that You reign now with almighty power over all things, and that Your throne is no distant place but Your living reign over the very ground we stand on. Rule in the midst of Your enemies, and in the midst of ours; make us Your willing people, freely offered, arrayed in the holiness You give.
We thank You that You are an eternal priest after the pattern of Melchizedek, that You offered Yourself once for all and live still to intercede for us, so that the same hands that hold the scepter were pierced for our sake. Hide us in Your priestly work, that on the day of wrath we may not be among the shattered but among the ransomed whose judgment You have already borne. And as You stooped to the stream along the road and lifted up Your head, lift us after You, and keep our heads up in the in-between time, until every enemy is made Your footstool and death itself is destroyed. For You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.