The Mountain Is Not Yet Ascended: The King and His People as the Nations Rage in Psalms 25–33
By Harrison Perkins - Posted at The Heidelblog:
Published July 18, 2026
(Part 1)—Introduction
Life is full of tension between the good and the bad. Most of us would like to find a way to resolve these tensions to simplify our experience and understanding of the world. Nonetheless, usually by giving up one side of the tension, we end up with a lopsided view of life. Our blind optimism leaves people around us sensing that we are unable to recognize the true difficulties in their lives. Unflinching negativity gives the impression that we fail to see God’s blessings. Life is simply full of good and bad, and sometimes we have to live with them alongside each other without either one being crushed completely under the weight of the other.The Psalter instructs us about how to hold tensions of life together in the Christian experience and how to bring them before the Lord. Two tensions dominate this book. First, Psalm 1 instructs us that the blessed life is for the one who keeps God’s law. Yet the psalmist often needs to confess his sin, showing that David is not the ultimate fulfillment of the king who would earn blessings of refuge for his people by his obedience to God. Psalm 2 introduces the second tension with the promise of the obedient king who would possess the nations as his heritage even though they foolishly rage and plot against the Lord and his anointed. As the Psalter unfolds, we see the psalmist’s struggle with the burden of the raging nations. The tension is that God’s promises of sure blessing and victory over raging nations do not erase the king’s lived experience of hardship, and the king’s people, in the king, endure that raging.
This essay argues that the third major section in the first book of the Psalter is Psalms 25–33, which help us pray as we feel the tension of that lived experience of hardship. It introduces this batch of psalms as teaching us about how God’s ultimate king persevered against adversaries in gospel victory by never taking his eyes off his heavenly Father and heavenly mission. In this respect, we are reminded that the Psalter is a unified book telling a story about something specific as it starts somewhere, develops, and ends somewhere. This story is about the king who is God’s Son and his victory to give refuge and blessing to his people (Ps 2:7, 11).
As part of this argument, this essay also reflects on how this section of the Psalms equips us to pray as those who belong to the king. We are able to use each psalm to give voice to our own prayers, even though they are foremost about God’s king, because we are those who belong to this king. Accordingly, these psalms also teach us the godly response to the full spectrum of experience and emotion we encounter in the Christian life.
