Psalms: A Messianic Hope

The Psalms regularly and clearly invite us to hope in the coming Messiah of David’s line, who will

deliver and redeem and rule over God’s people in a way that no one else can. Consider Psalm 89, where

the throne of David’s offspring is established “forever,” “as the days of the heavens,” “for all

generations.” Or consider Psalm 110, where “The LORD” speaks to David’s “Lord” - apparently the

future king from his line - about the glory of his future reign. The hope for the promised seed of David to

come and make all things right appears front and center throughout the Psalms.

There are also indicators of Messianic hope that we may not initially notice. One example comes in Psalm

16:9-10, when David claims that God “will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see

corruption.” If we assume that David is merely writing of his own experience, we may be surprised by the

disciple Peter’s speech in Acts 2, where he claims that David in this Psalm “foresaw and spoke about the

resurrection of Christ”!

What exactly does this mean? Did David have a heavenly vision of Jesus? Or was Peter maybe just

extrapolating the meaning of the text beyond David’s intentions?

Hamilton and Damico offer a different view in their book, Reading the Psalms as Scripture. They argue

that David saw himself as a “type,” or an installment in the pattern, of the Messiah. This pattern went

back at least as far as Joseph in the book of Genesis, where Joseph was rejected by his kinsmen but raised

up to deliver God’s people. Moses shares many similarities to Joseph, and Moses intentionally hits on

these similarities in his narrative, thus demonstrating that other biblical figures were inclined to notice and

emphasize this pattern as well.

David then carries the pattern further in the Psalms, citing parallels between himself and Joseph as well as

Moses. This at least makes it plausible that David was recognizing a pattern - and here’s the key point -

that the future king from his line would be the final installment and fulfillment of that same pattern. If

David was truly aware of this pattern, he could write about his own experiences in such a way that he

expected the future king to experience and overcome a greater version of some similar difficulties, and to

fulfill God’s promises to rule in a similar but more permanent and glorious way than David himself.

Even if one does not want to accept Hamilton and Damico’s understanding of how David might have

been foreseeing the resurrected Christ, their subtle pointers to Messianic patterns in the Psalms are

fascinating. God has made a habit of raising up deliverers for His people, and we can trust that no great

sin or exile can remove us so far that He cannot bring us home again.