A head of state can declare a strait sovereign territory by decree, but the verse names exactly what that declaration is worth from where God sits.

A Christian responds to a unilateral claim over a shipping chokepoint, and to a market that shrugs at it, by treating both the decree and the rally as equally unstable objects of trust. The opening of Psalm 2 was written for exactly this posture of power: "Why do the nations rage in noisy tumult (the Hebrew is rah-GASH, ragash — the word describes a restless mob throwing itself into commotion, not calm deliberation), and the peoples murmur an empty, worthless plot?" (Psalm 2:1). A strait does not become anyone's territory because a leader announces it is; a market rally does not become safe because it keeps climbing while war-financing risk goes unpriced beneath it. The Psalm's answer to both is the same: "He who is enthroned in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds their scheming in derision" (Psalm 2:4). That is not comfort for the anxious — it is a plain statement about the actual weight-class of human decree next to divine rule, and it applies as much to a bond market pretending a chokepoint standoff is priced correctly as it does to the standoff itself.

Underneath today's market euphoria sits a pattern scripture has a name for: insiders converting a hype cycle into personal cash while the public is still being told the story is strength, not distribution. Jeremiah gives this exact behavior an image from the natural world — a bird that gathers young she did not hatch: "As the partridge (the Hebrew qore, ko-REH, literally 'the caller' — a bird whose brood scatters and abandons her once they discover the eggs are not her own) gathers a nest that is not hers, so is one who gains wealth unjustly; in the middle of his days it will leave him, and at his end he will be shown a fool" (Jeremiah 17:11). The application is not a verdict on any single trade — it is a warning about what a system built on unpriced risk eventually does to those who profited from it while it was still climbing. Wealth built on a foundation nobody has actually inspected does not stay in the hand that gathered it.

The same word — decree — connects the territorial claim over Hormuz to the quieter overreach happening domestically, and Isaiah names both under one indictment: "Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees (the Hebrew chakak, khah-KAK, means to engrave or cut a statute into stone — the same root behind the ordinary word for law — used here of a ruling class that carves injustice into official form), who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and rob the poor of my people of their right" (Isaiah 10:1-2). A government that can surveil a lawful protest movement's finances, or retroactively strip medical coverage through coding enforcement, is exercising the same instrument named here — the machinery of official decree — regardless of which side of a given policy a reader lands on. And as nations abroad move to hedge their security away from reliance on any single power, the Psalmist's own conclusion still stands ahead of every alliance chart: "It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in man; it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in nobles (Hebrew nedivim, neh-dee-VEEM — the ruling and propertied class, precisely the actors signing today's pacts)" (Psalm 118:8-9). Every actor in today's brief — a president, a treasury secretary, a bloc of allied states, a rally of institutional money — is a noble in that verse's sense. None of them is the refuge.