Ps. 89.27 (David, the firstborn)

Also / I will make him / my firstborn
the most high / of the kings of the earth. 

These lines obviously need to be read in conjunction with the previous verse. There, David called out to his “Father”. Here, the Father makes him his “firstborn”. What we see is that these two verses establish the ‘family of God’ as originating in David, the ‘firstborn’. It does seem crucial to note that this sonship of Yhwh is the kingship of Israel. They are inseparable. To be Yhwh’s ‘firstborn’ is to be the ‘most high of the kings of the earth’. There are a few implications of this—it would seem that to be made a ‘son of Yhwh’ is to be made to imitate him, to be brought into a relationship with him of ‘image and likeness’. The reason I say this is two-fold. One is the fact that Yhwh has been portrayed almost exclusively as the ‘highest king of heaven’ in this psalm. Here, at the moment of David’s ‘sonship’ he is immediately identified as the ‘highest king of the earth’.  Second, and in line with the previous, we have seen through how the covenant with David becomes a ‘bridge’ over which Yhwh’s reign in heaven will be made present on earth. Through David Yhwh will pacify the earth in the same way that he enacted his “Rahab-power” in a primordial fashion in earlier verses. What both of these point toward is the fact that the sonship of David is the mission-ing of David. In other words, he is not brought into a static ‘relationship with Yhwh’ but a dynamic and enacted mediation of Yhwh’s power over the earth. 

Another point to make is that David is not only made into a son-of-Yhwh but is regarded as his ‘firstborn’. This has rather profound implications. One is to note that this designation parallels his being made “the most high of the kings of the earth”. Just as the firstborn son of a father is to inherit a special blessing and obtains to a type of primacy in the house after the father, so too is David now bestowed with Yhwh’s blessing. Along these lines is the clear parallel of this language with that contained in the first portion of the psalm where Yhwh is described, in heaven, as the ‘most high’. The firstborn is now given priority on earth just as Yhwh has priority in heaven. A third thing to note is that this ‘firstborn’ language places David at the head of the Davidic river—all of his successors/son will be embraced as ‘sons’ just as David. In other words, with the establishment of the Davidic covenant, a real ‘family of God’ is being established, one that is grounded not only in the reproducing of a father and mother, but in the divine establishment of their fruitfulness and stability (again, this is similar to Abraham who was ‘dead’ but then ‘made alive’ by Yhwh who would ‘make him fruitful and multiply’; this astonishing ‘resurrection’ power that infuses Abraham and his family is the blessing and establishment of Yhwh’s fruitfulness.).