Psalm 21
Let’s hear from God’s Word together
as we read from Psalm 21. It says, O Lord, in your strength
the king rejoices, and in your salvation how greatly he exults. You have given him his heart’s
desire, and you have not withheld the request of his lips. For
you meet him with rich blessings. You set a crown of fine gold
upon his head. He asked life of you, and you
gave it to him, length of days forever and ever. His glory is
great through your salvation. Splendor and majesty you bestow
on him. For you make him most blessed
forever. You make him glad with the joy of your presence. For
the king trusts in the Lord, and through the steadfast love
of the Most High, he shall not be moved. Your hand will find
out all your enemies. Your right hand will find out
those who hate you. You will make them as a blazing
oven when you appear. The Lord will swallow them up
in his wrath and fire will consume them. You will destroy their
descendants from the earth and their offspring from among the
children of man. Though they plan evil against
you, though they devise mischief, they will not succeed, for you
will put them to flight. You will aim at their faces with
your bows. Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength,
and we will sing and praise your power. Amen. This is God’s holy
word for us. Let’s pray just a moment. Our
Lord bless the hearing of your word tonight so that we will
see the glory of your goodness to us, especially in Christ Jesus,
the great Davidic King, the great Messiah. And we pray that the
goodness that we have received from you would give our hearts
overwhelming joy and that our lips would praise you. and that
we might speak often to others of the goodness of Christ Jesus
in us. Help us, we do ask and we pray
this in the name of Jesus, our Savior, amen. As we look at Psalm
20 tonight, or 21, I want to remind you that Psalm 21 is an
answer to Psalm 20. We’ll see some of those things
as we make our way through it tonight. But also I want you
to notice something else, and that’s directly in the middle
of Psalm 21 in verse seven. Verse seven reads like this.
It says, the king trust in the Lord and through the steadfast
love of the most high, he shall not be moved. If you look at
Psalm 21 as a piece of Hebrew poetry, which it is, you’ll note
that Psalm or that verse seven is like a bridge. It connects
back to all the good things that God has done for David, the king
in Israel. And then it looks forward to
future blessings that God will give to David, the king, and
Israel. And so verse seven is like a
bridge, but there are two major structure pieces of that bridge.
It’s a literary bridge for sure, but think of a bridge, a bridge
we, in our modern world, drive over. And that bridge is made
up of two important pieces of covenant, What do you call it? Covenant
language. One is the steadfast love of the Lord. In Hebrew,
that’s the word hesed. The steadfast love of the Lord
never ceases. His mercies are new every morning.
The bridge, the connection in this psalm between these two
parts of thanksgiving and confidence, one is the steadfast love of
the Lord, but the other piece of that bridge is the trust of
man. It is one thing for God to be
a God of steadfast love. It is one thing for God to be
a God of a blessing toward his people, but it’s another thing
for you or for we, the people of God, to trust in that steadfast
love and to live by that steadfast love. In these last moments as
we prayed prayers of thanksgiving, we heard several examples of
how the steadfast love of God has sustained us. It’s sustained
our health, it’s sustained us in paying bills, it’s sustained
us and giving us jobs, it has sustained us in bringing babies
into the world. All kinds of ways, the steadfast
love of God sustains us. But one of the hard things for
Christians is to continually trust in God and his past steadfast
love to give us future energy, future joy as we face uncertainty. So I want you to think about
that as we approach Psalm 21. Now just thinking broadly or
in a more big picture, think of this. We need to give thanks. We need to give thanks. If you
read Romans chapter one, we’re pretty well versed on the whole
side of Romans one about what other people do and we don’t
want to be wicked like that. Romans one is about the godless
and it ends up landing into areas of sexual immorality and all
the rest and we say, Oh, we don’t want to be like that. We don’t
want to be like the people of Romans 1. But one of the characteristics
of the wicked or the unrighteous in Romans 1 is that they are
not thankful. So I want you to think very hard
tonight in this whole vein of thanksgiving that when we are
ungrateful, when we are not thankful to others and ultimately to God,
we are living like wicked pagans. One of the marks of paganism,
one of the marks of the wicked in the Bible is that they do
not give thanks to God for his blessings. So we need to give
thanks. We need to give thanks. We need
to have built-in times, built-in moments, built-in days and holidays
where we give thanks. We need to never forsake giving,
not giving, we need to never forsake giving a blessing at
a meal. We think very often that it is we who have provided. I
went to work. I went to the grocery store.
I went to the bank. I went to the farmer’s market,
whatever it may be. But we forget that every good
and perfect gift comes down from the Father of heavenly lights.
So we need to give thanks at meals. We need to honor and observe
Thanksgiving in our own country. Thanksgiving is now a national
shopping day. We have Black Friday and now
we have, what is it, Thanksgiving Thursday. I don’t know what they
call it used to be. You didn’t go shopping till Friday.
Now it’s creeping in on Thursday. But we need to honor Thanksgiving
and actually give thanks. We need to observe dedications
like maybe a church gets a new building and they have a special
service and say we thank the Lord for what he has provided
for us. We need to honor special days. Think about the Old Testament,
the Old Covenant people, they had feast days, they had feast
weeks. Built into their yearly cycle
were times of worship and praise and thanksgiving to God for all
his blessings. And so we need to give thanks.
But we need, from time to time, to utilize special times, special
opportunities to give thanks. Memorial Day, Veterans Day, The
Fourth of July, those are national days in our own country where
we remember. Now, how many of you let Memorial
Day go by without thinking about those who’ve served us? Or the
Fourth of July, we can enjoy fireworks and hot dogs and swimming
pools and whatever else, but never think about what our forefathers
did to help provide this nation we live in. And so we need to
take care to be thankful. The parable of the lepers, It’s
a big lesson, isn’t it? And what do we always have to
say when we approach a passage like the parable of the lepers?
Are you the one who returned and gave thanks, or are you one
of the nine? Well, the good rule to follow, as someone has once
said, is anytime there’s a good character in the scriptures,
you’re not it. Okay? And if there’s one or more
bad characters, you’re one or more bad characters. You’re all
of them. So we’re like the nine lepers. We’re not thankful. But
what did God do for those lepers? He saved them. He saved them,
they were sick, they were outcast, they were lost, they were without
hope. It’s a little bit of a parallel
or a picture of salvation. How often should we be thankful
that God has forgiven us? Do you know what it is to be
at odds with God? Do you know what it is to be not forgiven?
Do you know what it is to be alienated from the God of the
universe? So we ought to be thankful that we are saved by Christ Jesus. And the parable of the lepers,
I think, is a good reminder of that. We have a lady that lives
across the street from us, and she talks about, she’s not married,
has no kids, but she gives gifts to her nieces and nephews. She was mentioning maybe in the
last year or so, she said, they never tell me thank you. So guess
what? I don’t give them anything. She
said, I’ve stopped giving them gifts because they stopped, or
they never said thank you. And I thought, what a smart aunt. I mean, probably not from their
perspective. But she said, you know, if they’re not grateful,
why should I give them something? And so we ought to be mindful
that when people do things for us, they do a kindness for us.
We ought to offer some sort of token of thanks. How about a
show of hands here? How many of you grew up with
a generation of thank you notes? Somebody did something for you?
Yeah, that’s a lot of you. How many of you still do it? Or is
that, OK, that’s pretty good. And some people will say, oh,
you know, we’re Southern, right? So you’ve got to have your own
little station area, and you’ve got to do it nice. I want to
tell you there’s something about that that we still ought to keep
because it shows thoughtfulness. You know, we can send a little
text or shoot a little email or we can, you know, in passing
say thanks. But to receive something in the
mail that says, I took the time to write a note to give thanks
to you for what you did. That’s a real blessing. But we
also ought to put our thanks into practice. We don’t just
have to do it the Southern way. But we can put our hands on somebody’s
shoulder and we can say thank you for what you did. We can
recognize their labor, recognize their sacrifice, recognize their
hard work, recognize the goodness of God in them and that they
were used by God to provide something for us. I was thankful for the
prayer tonight, thanking the Lord for our deacons. Because
I get a little irritated when I get hot around here. And it’s
nice to have a new air conditioning system, because that means I’m
less irritable. But we give thanks to our deacons for their work.
We give thanks that somebody unlocked the door this week.
Somebody made worship possible for us. But we ought to be thankful
people for many, many things. We ought to be thankful to God
so much so that every Lord’s Day, every Lord’s Day, we want
to enter the house of God and give thanks. It’s one thing to miss church
because we got to or need to or something has come up, but
we ought to give it our all to get into the house of God, to
give thanks to God for all that he’s done. That’s part of what
worship is. It’s an opportunity to thanksgiving. I think our
nation, our country, even the Christian aspects of our nation
has gotten where it is because we’re ungrateful. We fit worship
in when we can. But you know, one of the things
we need to remember is what are the saints gonna be doing for eternity? They’re going to be worshiping.
But what are we going to be worshiping? We’re going to be worshiping
the Redeemer for the redemption. And so we’ll spend the rest of
our lives giving thanks to God for his bounteous care for us.
Why not get practiced as we keep the Lord’s Day and worship? And
see, if we don’t do these things, if we don’t do these helpful
things, memorial days and holidays and prayer times and blessings,
If we do those things, we’ll begin to forget our blessings.
We’ll begin to think that everything is due us. Everything is obligated
to us. And we will not only forget that
these things come from our God above, we will trudge along in
life with hearts of ingratitude. And then, then we’ll become those
people who have our hands out and we expect goodness. because
we think it is due us. And that is not a place we want
to be as Christians. And so this Psalm is helpful
to us to show us that we need to set apart and solemnize certain
times for Thanksgiving. Let’s look at, if we can, at
this Psalm in two ways. Verses one through seven show
us Thanksgiving related to Psalm 20. And then verses eight through
12 give us confidence for the future. Look, if you will, though,
Starting at verse one, it says, oh Lord, in your strength, the
King rejoices. And in your salvation, how greatly
he exalts. Well, if you want to know what
he’s thankful for, just look back to Psalm 20. Verse one,
he was in a day of trouble. He asked for the God of Jacob
to protect him. He asked for help from Zion,
from the sanctuary. He asked that God would remember
his worship and offerings, that God would give him his heart’s
desire or fulfill his battle plans. He looked for a day where
God would answer his prayers with salvation in the midst of
war. And so verse one says, God gave
salvation, God gave victory. And verse two tells us, you have
given him his heart’s desire. Remember that was the prayer
request of Psalm 20 in verse four. May he grant you your heart’s
desire and fulfill all your plans. And he says very declaratively
in 21.2, you have given him, you’ve given the king his heart’s
desire. There was success. You’ve not withheld the request
of his lips. Now, anytime you see that word
Selah in the Psalm, it’s a, at least we think it is, it’s a
cue to pause. And so you read verses one and
two and you pause. You pause and you give thanks
and say, look at what God has done. It was mighty. We’re looking
back on this. We’re trying to think we know
what the context is. Maybe war, maybe some hardship
in the Davidic kingdom, but God blessed. And maybe a year’s time
passed, the enemies ramped their ramparts up and came against
Israel. And maybe David planned and went
to battle. And maybe it took about a year’s time for this
to see resolution. And so to say, Lord, your strength,
in your strength, the King rejoices. You’ve saved me. You’ve given
me good things. You’ve given what my heart desires.
And he just pauses and stops and thinks. You know, every year
on September 11th, we still read the names of those who died.
And you think maybe after about the 10th time, we can forget,
we could we could stop. But you know, it’s important
to stop and to pause and to name, name names to name thanksgivings
in the case we’re speaking of tonight, and to pause. And that
may take time. That may take time, but we give
thanks to our God for all that he has done for us. Then it moves
on in verse three. He says, for you meet him with
rich blessings. You set a crown of fine gold
upon his head. When kings went off to war, they
often came back with spoil. They often came back with spoil.
And as they marched their way back into Jerusalem or wherever
their kingdom was housed, they came back with the spoils of
war. And the people lined the streets and watched the king
return. And there were buckets of gold. There were chariots.
took in battle, maybe horses being led in procession, and
he says, you meet him with rich blessings. But you set a crown
of fine gold on his head. This is probably kingly language
that’s saying you spared the king, you saved the king, he
went out to war and he brought home riches, but you have put
that crown of righteousness, that crown of gold, that crown
of majesty upon his head. And it’s in a sense saying our
king and our kingdom were threatened, but now reestablished. And so
we think of that kingly language and see how blessed David the
king was. Well, there’s a fourth thing.
We find it in verse four. He asked life of you and you
gave it to him. So he spared his life, but length
of days forever and ever. Last week, we saw the prayer
of God saved the king. Today, we see the answer to that
prayer. God saved the king. Now David
lived to be about age 70. And David is one of those who
in the Psalms, we know, he knew that every breath was from God.
Every moment of life was from God. Now age 70 in those days
was a pretty good life. We have a number in here over
that age now, and you know, that’s a different lifespan these days.
But length of days is a blessing. We only live, we only breathe
because God has given it to us. When a king is living, we say,
long live the king. May God save the king. And so
how do we look at not just the king having life, but long life? Well, that could mean a couple
of things. One, it could mean that David needs to live to be
an old man. If David is an old man, that
means we have a good king on the throne longer. It could mean
the house of David. Long live the king. Long live
the house of David. What did God promise to Israel?
I will establish a throne. And it will be not the throne
of Saul, but it’ll be the throne of David. And there will always
be somebody on that throne. And also it could speak of the
Messiah. It could speak of the Messiah,
long live the Messiah, long live the ultimate King, long live
the ultimate King of David. In verse five, we see about the
glory. God gave glory that is great.
His glory is great throughout your salvation. Splendor and
majesty you bestow on him. God did not bring shame on David.
God did not allow his enemies to triumph over him. God did
not allow the kingdom of Israel to suffer in the eyes of the surrounding
nations. The people of the surrounding nations know that God saves Israel,
that God saves David. And he moves on in verse six,
you make him the most blessed forever. And you make him glad
with the joy of your presence. What more could David ask for
than the presence of God? Where does God dwell? He dwells
in the midst of Jerusalem with his people. At the time of David,
it’s in the tabernacle, the temple not yet built. But what ultimately
here did God provide? He provided presence. And that’s
ultimately going to be fulfilled, not in Jerusalem, not in a tabernacle,
and not in a temple, and not even in God’s indwelling with
us. But it’s ultimately going to be fulfilled when we come
to God’s kingdom, where Jesus, the great Davidic king, sits
on the throne. And the dwelling place of God,
as Revelation says, will now be with men. And God will live
with his people, and he will How did we read of it today in
Zephaniah? He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy, for the
Lord our God is in our midst, and we are with him. So the presence
of God is one of the great blessings that God gave. Then verse seven,
he says, for the king trusts in the Lord, and through the
steadfast love of the Most High, he shall not be moved. You see, it was the steadfast
love of the Lord that brought David to this point of victory
and salvation. But it was David’s trust in God.
It was his trust in God that we saw exemplified in Psalm 20. I will trust in God, he will
save me. I will not trust in chariots or horses. I will not
trust in my fighting men or my trained army, but I’ll trust
in God. And then as we finish our way
through verses one through six and land at verse seven that
bridges us to verses eight through 12, We come to a place of confidence. And it’s hard to know who is
speaking here, but it’s probably the people of God speaking to
the king, wishing for future blessings, giving the king future
confidence. And it reminds us that much of
life is lived by faith. Tomorrow, each of us has a day.
Each of us has a week. We’ve heard of our sister Ellen,
who has an anxious appointment with her heart doctor, and then
probably with her dentist. But she can do that by faith.
And her future faith can rely on her past experience with God. God has always taken care of
my body. He’s always given me good medical care. He’s always
taken care of my heart. He’s given me good helpers to
get me to the doctor. And you can reach back and say,
God has been a faithful, steadfast, loving God, and he’s going to
do it in the future. That’s what David did in Psalm 20, and we
see the answer to it now. But at the end of verse, chapter
21, he’s going to speak of future confidence. And look at how it
begins in verse eight. It says your hand will find all
your enemies, future success. Your right hand will find out
those who hate you and you will make them as a blazing oven.
When you appear, the Lord will swallow them up in his wrath
and fire will consume them. You will destroy their descendants
from the earth and their offspring from among the children of man.
Though they plan evil against you, though they devise mischief,
they will not succeed, for you will put them to flight. You
will aim at their faces with your bows.” And they’re in some
sense saying to David, look, you went into battle and God
gave you success. You’re a strong king. You’re a mighty warrior.
There is no enemy, no foe that can come your way and destroy
you or the kingdom of God that is here on earth. His success
is their blessing. They recognize it, but their
confidence in what God has done. Maybe it’s a spiritual high,
we might call it. Maybe it’s joy from these present
victories they’re experiencing, but they’re speaking to the king
in this way. But it’s a good reminder to us,
those of us who are living under the new covenant, those of us
who’ve seen greater David, even King Jesus, there is no enemy
of God that God will not find out. There is no enemy of God
that will prevail against the church. What does the scripture
say? The gates of Hades will not prevail against the church
of Jesus Christ. There will not be failure on
the part of King Jesus and his ultimate kingship, because guess
what? When we see Jesus at Calvary
under attack from all of evil. God saves the king. And so in
the same way, no, in a greater way, when God saves David, the
king, we see a future. We see the blessing of God saving
King Jesus. And so we’re thankful for that.
Jesus is the son of David. He’s the king of Israel. He did
not wear a crown of splendor, but he wore a crown of thorns.
He had to bear up under the wrath of almighty God. He had to take
on the sin of his beloved and God sustained him through it. And so verse 13 is a good ending
to the Psalm. It’s like a doxology. It says,
be exalted, O Lord, be exalted, Yahweh, in your strength. We
will sing and praise your power. Yes, they trust. Yes, they have
confidence. Yes, they’re thankful. But ultimately,
they go before the throne and give thanks to our God and King,
our Yahweh, who gives victory to greater David, even Jesus. And so the challenge for us,
is to be thankful, but to look to King Jesus, the victorious
one, for our help in life. Let’s pause and pray together.
Our God and Savior, we thank you for Jesus, and we thank you
for his faithfulness, more faithful than David, greater than David,
faithful even unto death. And we pray, Father, that we
would rejoice in the fact that we are his subjects, that he
rules with all authority and all power and that his kingdom
shall never be shaken, his reign will never end, that no enemy
can overtake him, no foe can put him to death, and that he
has the wondrous victory over sin, and over death, and even
over the grave, and that his victories are our victories.
And so let us live in thanksgiving, but also in confidence in these
truths, so that as we make our way to the heavenly city, we
will not be shaken. Give us thankful hearts and confident
spirits, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen. Let’s stand together as
we respond to God’s word, and let’s sing from your handout,
Psalm 21. And I can’t remember the tune,
but maybe we’ll play it through once and get familiar with it. Look ye in thy great strength,
O Lord, shall fear and joy flow thee. And in thy saving help
each hour be trustful, true, and meek. For thou, O God, have
hast first seen For Thou, O King, didst call
it like this, the blessings that it bore, and Thou didst set up
all its life, that while the world was ♪ And thy salvation be as wine
♪ ♪ And glorified as day ♪ ♪ And thou, O God, and blessed Son
♪ ♪ Most glorious and most dear ♪ ♪ For thou wilt ever serve
our God ♪ ♪ Because the King doth still the
Lord ♪ ♪ Who cometh from his fruit ♪ ♪ Who brings of him who
is most high ♪ ♪ The King shall not be moved ♪ ♪ By that shall
reach to every man who is that ♪ for Thou wilt bring them places
far in presence of the God. The oceans follow Him in power,
the fire shall end there, ♪ Most renowned strifer ♪ ♪ Their
sin was once condemned ♪ ♪ Their evil plans they’re not in light
♪ ♪ But they stay on their way ♪ ♪ For Thou who made them turn
their back ♪ ♪ Thou with Thine arrows ♪ and praise you, and guide your
way, O Tensor, exalt yourselves, O God. If we shall see results
of praise, we might be more than glad.