John Calvin Commentary Psalms 22:27

"All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto Jehovah; And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee." — Psalms 22:27 (ASV)

All the ends of the earth shall remember. This passage, beyond all doubt, shows that David does not stop at his own person, but that using himself as a type, he describes the promised Messiah. For even then, it should have been a well-known point that he had been made king by God, so that the people might be united together and enjoy a happy life under one head; and this was finally completely fulfilled in Christ.

David’s name, I admit, was great and renowned among the neighboring nations; but what was the territory which they occupied in comparison to the whole world? Besides, the foreign nations whom he had subdued had never been converted by him to the true worship of God. That forced and slavish submission, therefore, which the heathen nations had been brought by conquest to yield to an earthly king, was very different from the willing obedience of true godliness by which they would be recovered from their miserable wanderings and gathered to God.

Nor does the Psalmist mean an ordinary change when he says that the nations shall return to God after becoming well acquainted with His grace. Moreover, by uniting them to the fellowship of the holy feast, He clearly grafts them into the body of the Church. Some explain these words, They shall remember, as meaning that upon the restoration of the light of faith to the Gentiles, they should then come to remember God, whom they had for a time forgotten; but this seems to me too refined and far from the meaning.

I allow that the conversion or return mentioned here implies that they had previously been alienated from God by wicked defection. But this remembrance simply means that the Gentiles, awakened by the remarkable miracles performed by God, would again come to embrace the true religion, from which they had fallen away.

Furthermore, it is to be observed that the true worship of God proceeds from the knowledge of Him. For the Psalmist’s language implies that those will come to prostrate themselves before God in humble adoration who will have profited so much from meditating on His works that they will no longer desire proudly and contemptuously to rebel against Him.

This sense is more fully confirmed by the reason added in the following verse, Psalms 22:28: The kingdom is Jehovah’s, that he may rule over the nations. Some explain these words as follows: It is not surprising if the Gentiles should be compelled to give honor to God, by whom they were created and by whose hand they are governed, even though He has not entered into a covenant of life with them. But I reject this as a meager and unsatisfactory interpretation.

This passage, I have no doubt, agrees with many other prophecies which represent the throne of God as erected, on which Christ may sit to superintend and govern the world. Therefore, although the providence of God extends to the whole world, without any part of it being excepted, let us remember that He then truly exercises His authority when, having dispelled the darkness of ignorance and diffused the light of His word, He appears conspicuous on His throne. We have such a description of His kingdom by the prophet Isaiah:

He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people (Isaiah 2:4).

Moreover, as God had not subdued the world to Himself before the time when those who were previously unconquerable were subdued to a willing obedience by the preaching of the gospel, we may conclude that this conversion was brought about only under the management and government of Christ.

If it is objected that the whole world has not yet been converted, the solution is easy. A comparison is made here between that remarkable period when God suddenly became known everywhere by the preaching of the gospel, and the ancient dispensation, when He kept the knowledge of Himself confined within the limits of Judea. Christ, we know, penetrated with amazing speed, from the east to the west, like the lightning’s flash, in order to bring into the Church the Gentiles from all parts of the world.