The Ends of the Earth

We live in a strange moment. Our public discourse obsesses over borders, military budgets, and which party controls which lever of power. The language of sovereignty fills our newsfeeds: who has authority, who deserves it, who must be stopped from seizing it. Both the political left and right weaponize biblical categories for their tribal battles, as though the God (YHWH) of Scripture were primarily concerned with securing the outcomes of our latest election cycle.

I understand the impulse. Having grown up in religious environments where faith and politics were tightly woven together, I've seen how easily we conflate the two. I've watched communities become convinced that heaven's agenda aligns neatly with their political platform. The conviction was always the same: our side speaks for God, and the other side threatens everything holy.

But here is what strikes me as most remarkable. While we squabble over our narrow definitions of power and authority, the biblical writers are telling a very different story. It's a story about a kingdom that makes our political categories look embarrassingly small. And it begins, oddly enough, with an ancient coronation psalm.

When Local Kingship Points to Universal Reign

Psalm 2 opens with a scene of rebellion. The nations rage, the peoples plot in vain, the kings of the earth set themselves against the Lord and his anointed. It's a poem about resistance to royal authority. But then comes the promise: "You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask, and I will give you all the nations; the whole earth will be yours."

Now, one might read this as ancient Near Eastern royal propaganda. Every king claimed divine backing. Every coronation ceremony included grandiose promises about ruling "from sea to sea." The genre is familiar enough. Scholars have long recognized the formal elements of ancient enthronement rituals in this psalm.

But here is where things get interesting. This text operates on two levels simultaneously, and both matter. On one level, yes, it's a coronation psalm. Some Davidic king stood in Jerusalem while priests recited these words, affirming his God-given authority. The psalm worked in that concrete historical moment as liturgy, as political theology, as royal ideology.

On another level, though, something else is happening. The language refuses to stay contained within the boundaries of that historical moment. "All the nations." "The whole earth." "The ends of the earth." These aren't the typical claims of ancient Near Eastern monarchs. David's kingdom, at its height, controlled a relatively small territory. His successors ruled even less. But the psalm's vision explodes far beyond those realities.

The biblical writers understood something we keep forgetting. The story of Israel's king was always meant to be bigger than Israel. The promise to Abraham was never simply about one people in one land. It was about blessing for all the families of the earth. And Psalm 2 makes explicit what the larger narrative implies: this king's authority knows no borders, recognizes no human boundaries, and ultimately answers to no earthly power structure.

So which reading is correct? Both. The psalm worked in its original setting as coronation liturgy. And it pointed beyond that setting to a future reality that would fulfill what the local ceremony could only symbolize. The early followers of Jesus (YHWShA) weren't inventing a new interpretation. They were recognizing that the larger vision Psalm 2 always contained had finally found its proper subject.

The Resurrection Changes Everything

The early followers of Jesus read Psalm 2 and saw something we often miss. They recognized that the coronation it described had already happened, not in some future apocalyptic moment, but in the past, at a specific point in history. The resurrection was not merely a miracle to prove Jesus's divinity. It was his enthronement as the king whom Psalm 2 had announced centuries earlier.

Matthew records the risen Jesus declaring, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." Notice the tense. Not "will be given" someday. Has been given. Already. The coronation is complete. The authority is total. Heaven and earth (not just one nation, not just the "holy land," but the entire cosmos) now stands under his rule.

This is not merely theological abstraction. It's a claim about reality. John's Gospel puts it starkly: "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him." The stakes could not be higher, and the scope could not be broader. Every tribe, every nation, every human being stands in relation to this enthroned king.

The resurrection, in other words, was the moment when Psalm 2's promise became operational reality. The Son received all authority. The nations became his inheritance. The ends of the earth came under his dominion. What had been prophetic expectation became historical fact.

I realize this claim sounds audacious, perhaps especially to those who find religious claims generally suspect. One can certainly reject it. Many do, and for reasons they find compelling. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what the claim actually is. The early Christians weren't saying their teacher had some nice spiritual insights about universal brotherhood. They were making a concrete historical claim: that at a specific moment in time, authority over the cosmos changed hands. The resurrection was the transfer of power. Everything else follows from that.

The Vision at the End of the Story

The Book of Revelation shows us where this goes. John sees "a crowd too large to count: people from every nation, tribe, race, and language" standing before the throne. This is the fulfillment of Psalm 2's promise. Not some revised version scaled down to manageable size. Not a remnant from one favored people group. But the full, staggering reality: the king's authority extends to everyone, everywhere.

I remember a Bible study years ago where someone asked whether heaven would have different sections for different denominations. The question sounds almost comical now, but it revealed how deeply we've shrunk the biblical vision. We've traded cosmic kingship for our comfortable tribal boundaries. We've replaced "every nation, tribe, race, and language" with our preferred in-group.

Revelation refuses to play that game. The vision is relentlessly universal. No empire escapes this king's authority. No ruler stands outside his jurisdiction. The ends of the earth are his, full stop.

And this matters more than we might think. Because the question our moment asks is not "Which political party speaks for God?" The question is coherence. Can we maintain our moral vocabulary (justice, human dignity, the sacred worth of every person) while simultaneously denying the story that gave those concepts meaning? Can we insist on universal human rights while rejecting the king whose universal reign makes such rights intelligible?

The Problem of Borrowed Moral Language

Here is the oddity that strikes anyone paying attention. Our secular age insists there is no God, no transcendent order, no universal king. We are told we live in a cosmos of blind matter and evolutionary accident. Meaning is constructed, not discovered. Morality is preference, not truth.

And yet. We still speak of human dignity. We still invoke justice. We still insist that certain things are fundamentally wrong, not just personally distasteful but objectively evil. When someone commits an atrocity, we don't merely say "I happen to dislike that." We say "That violates human dignity. That transgresses a moral order that transcends cultural preference."

Where does this vocabulary come from? Not from evolutionary biology. Natural selection doesn't care about human dignity. It cares about survival and reproduction. Not from social contract theory. Contracts can be rewritten when inconvenient. Not from the will to power. That framework celebrates strength, not dignity.

No, this moral vocabulary comes from a very specific story. The story of a God who created humans in his image, who values each person with infinite worth, who established moral order as part of the fabric of reality itself. The story of a king whose universal reign grounds universal human rights.

You can reject that story. Many do. But what you cannot do, not if you want to remain coherent, is keep using the moral vocabulary the story provides while denying the narrative that makes it meaningful. A world without God may critique hatred, but it cannot explain why hatred is fundamentally wrong. It may denounce injustice, but it cannot ground the concept of justice in anything more solid than cultural preference or personal feeling.

That's the problem. We want the fruit while denying the tree that bears it. We want the moral categories Christianity introduced into Western consciousness without acknowledging where they came from or what sustains them.

The biblical writers would not find this surprising. They understood that the God who created all things continues to pursue us through the very categories we cannot stop using. Our moral intuitions, our sense of human dignity, our revulsion at injustice—these point beyond themselves to the king whose reign makes them intelligible.

Borrowed Power and Its Inevitable End

Psalm 2 continues with language that makes us uncomfortable: "You will break them with an iron rod; you will shatter them in pieces like clay pots." This isn't gentle pastoral imagery. It's a declaration of unstoppable power exercised against those who resist.

Now, one might wish the biblical writers had chosen softer metaphors. Surely God could be described in less violent terms. And indeed, much of Scripture does exactly that: shepherd, father, mother hen gathering her chicks. The Bible contains multitudes.

But here is what we must reckon with. This particular text uses this particular imagery for a reason. It's addressing the specific reality of human power structures that set themselves in opposition to God's reign. The "iron rod" isn't arbitrary cruelty. It's the inevitable result of finite power colliding with infinite authority.

Think of it this way. A clay pot is useful, even beautiful in its proper place. But set a clay pot against an iron rod and the outcome is predetermined. The pot doesn't lose because it's evil. It loses because it's attempting something it was never designed to do. It's asserting a strength it doesn't possess against a force that cannot be resisted.

Human power works the same way. Within its proper sphere, it's good and necessary. Governments maintain order. Leaders coordinate collective action. Authority structures help communities function. But when human power claims ultimacy, when it sets itself against the king to whom all authority belongs, the collision can only end one way.

The biblical writers knew what we prefer to forget. Human power is borrowed. Every empire, every regime, every strongman who claims ultimate authority is merely a steward holding temporary sway over what ultimately belongs to another. History demonstrates this with brutal clarity.

Consider Herod, that petty tyrant who heard about a newborn king and responded with infanticide. He commanded armies, controlled territory, exercised the power of life and death. And where is Herod now? His power shattered like pottery. His dynasty collapsed. His name survives only as a cautionary tale about the futility of resisting what God has ordained.

Or think of the Roman emperors who claimed divinity for themselves, who built monuments to their eternal glory, who persecuted the early church for refusing to acknowledge their ultimate authority. Where are their empires now? Ruins and museum exhibits. Their borrowed power returned to its rightful owner.

Move forward through history. The Soviet Union seemed invincible. Its ideology claimed inevitability. Its military power threatened the entire world. Its leaders believed they had discovered the final form of human society. I was in college when the Berlin Wall fell, when the whole massive structure collapsed almost overnight. Seventy years of totalitarian control ended not with nuclear war but with people simply walking through checkpoints that no one defended anymore. The iron rod of history shattered the clay pot of Soviet power.

Or consider apartheid South Africa. A regime that claimed biblical justification for racial hierarchy, that built an entire society around white supremacy, that seemed entrenched and permanent. Where is it now? Dismantled, discredited, its leaders either dead or pleading that they were just following orders. Another clay pot, broken.

This pattern repeats across history. The powerful imagine themselves untouchable. They accumulate wealth, weapons, and influence. They construct elaborate systems to preserve their control. And then, sooner or later, reality intrudes. The clay pot shatters. The iron rod breaks them.

That's the point. The world's power structures are not eternal. They're provisional, temporary arrangements permitted to exist until the true king claims what has always been his. Recognizing this doesn't make us quietist or apolitical. It makes us realistic about where true authority lies.

Kingdom Citizenship Beyond Partisan Battle

Here is what I am not saying. I am not suggesting we withdraw from civic life or ignore injustice or pretend political decisions don't matter. Those decisions have real consequences for real people, and followers of Jesus should care deeply about such things.

What I am saying is this: our citizenship in the kingdom of heaven relativizes every other loyalty. Neither the political left nor the right gets to claim the biblical narrative for their tribal warfare. The story is bigger than our partisan categories. The king's reign transcends our electoral cycles. And our primary allegiance must be to him, not to any political party or national identity.

Both sides misuse biblical language. Both invoke God's name for their agendas. Both claim to represent authentic Christianity. But the moment we subordinate the kingdom of heaven to earthly political projects (the moment we imagine that God's primary concern is securing our preferred electoral outcome) we've betrayed the very vision Psalm 2 and Revelation proclaim.

I've watched this happen in congregation after congregation. Good people, sincere believers, convinced that their political tribe speaks for God while the other side represents apostasy or wickedness. The biblical story gets reduced to a weapon in culture war battles. The universal king gets conscripted into partisan service.

The true King's authority is total. It includes every nation. It encompasses every tribe and language. It cannot be reduced to American politics or any other human power structure. This is not comfortable truth. It means we cannot domesticate the biblical story to serve our tribal purposes. It means the kingdom relativizes our most cherished political commitments.

Perhaps that's exactly what our fractured moment needs. A vision large enough to put our partisan battles in perspective. A story that reminds us where true power lies. A king whose reign makes our political divisions look as small as they actually are.

An Invitation to Skeptics

Now, if you've read this far and find yourself skeptical of religious claims generally, I understand. The track record of Christianity in politics has not always been edifying. We've seen too many examples of religious language weaponized for tribal purposes, of divine authority invoked to justify injustice, of universal claims twisted into tools of oppression.

One can acknowledge all of that and still recognize something remarkable. The moral vocabulary we use, the categories that structure our ethical thinking, the very concept of universal human dignity—these come from somewhere. They have a history. And that history is inseparable from the biblical narrative, from the claim that a transcendent God created humans in his image and established moral order as part of reality itself.

You need not believe the story to recognize its explanatory power. You need not accept Jesus as king to notice how difficult it is to ground concepts like justice or human rights in purely materialist frameworks. You need not embrace Christianity to wonder whether our moral intuitions might be pointing toward something real, something that transcends cultural preference or evolutionary accident.

The claim Psalm 2 makes is not that you must believe or face immediate judgment. The claim is that a king has been enthroned, that his authority extends to all people and all nations, and that the invitation to acknowledge his reign remains open. You can reject that invitation. Many do. But the question worth asking is not "Do I like this claim?" but "What if it's true?" What if reality is actually structured this way? What if our moral vocabulary makes sense precisely because there is a moral order, grounded in the reign of a king whose authority is universal?

I'm not asking for immediate conversion. I'm suggesting that the biblical narrative deserves serious consideration, not as ancient mythology or tribal propaganda, but as a coherent account of reality that explains features of human experience that secular frameworks struggle to ground. The ends of the earth belonging to a universal king is either the most audacious delusion in human history or the most important truth about the cosmos. Either way, it's worth thinking about carefully.

Where This Leaves Us

So where does this reflection on Psalm 2 and Revelation lead? Not to despair about human power structures, but to proper perspective. The empires rise and fall. The politicians come and go. The party in power changes. But the king enthroned at the resurrection continues his reign, gathering people from every nation into the kingdom that will never end.

This changes how we engage with political power. We participate in civic life, yes. We work for justice and human flourishing, certainly. But we do so without illusion that these earthly structures represent ultimate reality. We recognize them for what they are: temporary, provisional, borrowed authority that will eventually return to its source.

And perhaps most importantly, we extend the invitation that Revelation pictures. The crowd from every nation, tribe, race, and language didn't arrive through conquest or coercion. They came because they recognized the king's authority and aligned themselves with his reign. The invitation still stands. The door remains open. The king continues to call people from all the nations into his kingdom.

You may find, as I did through wrestling with these questions across different religious contexts, that the biblical story offers something far bigger and more beautiful than partisan Christianity ever could. A kingdom that transcends borders. A king whose authority makes our moral vocabulary coherent. A vision that includes everyone who will receive it, regardless of nationality or political tribe.

The ends of the earth belong to him. That's not threat. It's promise. And the invitation to enter that kingdom, to acknowledge that king, remains open to all who have ears to hear.