Trust in King Jesus

Psalm 110

Here we are at the end of 2025!

Can you believe it? the next time we gather as a church it will be 2026, and boy am I not ready for that!

I haven’t even started to think about my New Years Resolutions!

Maybe you have? Maybe you’re going to hit the gym a few more times, hand in those assignments a day or two early, or even commit to learning a new hobby!

Good on ya if you have those plans,

May you be blessed in your pursuit of them,

However, the difficuly we often face with a new years resolution, or perhaps a dream that we plan to fulfil, is that when the going gets tough, our plans, our dreams tend to fall by the wayside.

And I mention this, sad reality because our passage this morning was written by a man, who was very much praying fa great change in his life.

The song writer David, or better known as King David, has a situation going on that he tell us about in the previous Psalm, Psalm 109

In that Psalm we learn that David is being trouble by the enemies of God’s people, David cries out in verse 1 and 2:

1  Be not silent, O God of my praise!

2  For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me,

speaking against me with lying tongues.

Now if David was to have a New Years resolution, if we were to be so bold to give him one. It might have been, Next Year, I plan to have better defences of our city. Or I plan to take down one set of enemies each month for the year.

He prays to God for help with his situation in verses 26 and 27:

26  Help me, O LORD my God!

Save me according to your steadfast love!

27  Let them know that this is your hand;

you, O LORD, have done it!

And he commits to praising the Lord, as David is well known for doing.

You see, David’s Psalm 109, is kind of like us at the end of the year sometimes. We might be determined to have a better life in the new year, determined to be free of the troubles that we faced in the year we just had.

And so we might call out to God for help, as David has done.

And wait

and wait.

And perhaps we often wait for so long that we forget to keep reading our Bibles, because along comes Psalm 110, our passage today, and with this Psalm we ought to rejoice because this is very much God's reply to David.

God responds to David’s pleas in the most God like way,

What I mean is that, God hears David’s cries for help and essentially says “Righteo David, hold my juice box” I’ll sort this mess out for you.

And so David records this very powerful Psalm,

A very short Psalm that tells us much about how God plans to fix the problems of the world, which today we will draw out three key ideas to encouage us as we look to embrace the new year. This Psalm directs us towards

God's Exhalted King (v1)

God's Redemptive Plan (v2-4)

God’s Victory (v5-7)

1 God's Exhalted King (v1)

This Psalm is very laden with God’s work and what God does, and it doesn’t hold back, right at the get go verse 1:

1  The LORD says to my Lord:

“Sit at my right hand,

until I make your enemies your footstool.”

First, we ought to notice the words LORD in capitals, and also Lord in lowercase. The capital words signify the divine name for God, YHWH. And the lower case is used for royal kingship the word is Adoni, it’s a human term. It would be appropriate to use this word for referrencing king Charles of England.

Like in the olden days when people would say, me Lord how may I be of service? with a fancy accent.

This Psalm, therefore, kicks off with a divine decree. that is, David is capturing a dialogue of God speaking to the king of king David.

And for the first audience of this song, there is a great question to be asked,

Who is the king of David? Is not he our king?

And can all get a bit messy with trying to work out who David is referring to.

Now, look there’s always the Sunday school answer of, well he talking about Jesus!

And that is the right answer,

but why is it Jesus?

And it’s helpful understand that Jesus asks this question to the Pharasees in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 12: 35-37

35 And as Jesus taught in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David? 36 David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared,

“ ‘The Lord said to my Lord,

“Sit at my right hand,

until I put your enemies under your feet.” ’

37 David himself calls him Lord. So how is he his son?” And the great throng heard him gladly.

Jesus’ riddle here is not without context. In cultural custom of David and Jesus’ day, a son would never ever be honoured above their father.

Which is really to say, that in Psalm 110 David is not speaking of his son nor the royal line of David.

Rather, as picked up by the prophet Daniel in Chapter 7 of his book, that was read earlier in the service, Daniel was given a vision of the “son of Man” who is to recieve the kingdom and have dominion and glory forever.

And thankfully for us, Daniel explains further what is happening in the vision he recorded, to which we learn in verse 27 of Chapter 7 in Daniel:

27  And the kingdom and the dominion

and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven

shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High;

his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom,

and all dominions shall serve and obey him.’

Notice here, that this kingdom of the Son of Man is “given to the people of the saints of the Most High”

Which is what Jesus confirms for us in Mark chapter 14 verse 62:

 And Jesus said, “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

This is Jesus bringing together Daniel 7 with Psalm 110.

Meaning that our Psalm 110, is speaking of the end times, but specifically this helps us to see the comfort David and Israel experienced in singing this song.

Because David was not imagining that he would have to wait around for this earthly king to appear for all his troubles of Psalm 109 to be put to rest. His hope wasn’t in the lineage of his royal throne, that one of his future sons will sort the mess out.

No, his hope was in the Son of Man, the one to be sent from God, the forever ruler of God’s eternal kingdom. He didn’t know that name Jesus, but he trusted in God’s work through this exhalted human king.

And it’s amazing to see the closeness that David felt to this exhalted king.

Because this a present king for David, a present king for God’s people.

Which is such good news, it was good news for David, and it’s still good news for us today, because this human exhalted king Jesus reveals God’s Redemptive Plan

Verses 2 - 4 reveals:

God’s Redemptive Plan

2  The LORD sends forth from Zion

your mighty scepter.

Rule in the midst of your enemies!

3  Your people will offer themselves freely

on the day of your power,

in holy garments;

from the womb of the morning,

the dew of your youth will be yours.

4  The LORD has sworn

and will not change his mind,

“You are a priest forever

after the order of Melchizedek.”

We just have to note the amount of heavy lifting God is doing in this Psalm, it truly is God’s work through the exhalted king Jesus that we are to notice. David’s emphasis of God’s work is really that we would have confidence to trust in God’s exhalted king Jesus because God himself does all the hard work.

Now, There’s an interesting juxtaposition happening here between verse 2 and 3,

Rule in the midst of your enemies!

3  Your people will offer themselves freely

on the day of your power,

We have to ask,

Who is David suggesting are the enemies? and who are the group called your people?

The answer being, those who God redeems.

And it’s worth examining Jesus’ ministry at this point to gain clarity on the matter, because if the enemies are a certain group for David, they must be the same for Jesus.

Encouragingly, the enemies of Jesus were actually the full range of people groups. Jesus had enemies from the Jewish nation, who were known as God’s people, and he had enemies from the gentiles, who were Romans and Greeks and any foriegn nation not known as the Jews.

Importantly, not one people group were united in their views towards Jesus, whether in support of or against. Meaning that every classifyable people group were enemies of God, as they were enemies of Jesus. Just as every classifyable people group had followers of Jesus.

And do you know that it was the same for David day?

The Bible speaks of God’s people as being the nation of Israel, which is true as that is how God classified them when he set them apart. However, having the label was never enough. God always operated on a faith basis.

Meaning the actual people of God have always been those whotrust in God, freely giving themselves to him.

And the mark of those who did give themselves to God was evidenced by their relationship towards God.

In David’s day, God’s people related to God through the temple and its priests.

These days we relate to God through Jesus by his Spirit.

But notice what David had said in Verse 4

“You are a priest forever

after the order of Melchizedek.”

David is revealing that God’s means of relating to his people has always been and will continue to be through the exhalted human king.

David’s not making comment on the administration of how his people relate to God in his day, rather he revealing the truth that God’s people have always known,

The truth that God’s plan for redeeming his people has always been through trusting in God’s promise to crush sin and death, when sin and death came into the world and seperated God’s people from God.

Because that is who the real enemy is.

its Satan, and his lies. The enemy is sin.

Which is why this Psalm is so powerful, because God is declaring to David, to his people, that God has given his people his mighty scepter,

This is royal imagery of God sending of his Word and Spirit into the world.

verse 2 is essentially saying that we are to live our lives in the power of God’s Word and Spirit. He’s saying to David, rule with his mighty scepter. Do this today, you have all that you need, given from God to do the task that God has set before you.

Then in verse 3:

God’s people are not fought over, nor pursuaded, pushed or proded. Rather thanks to the power of God’s Spirit, God’s people freely give themselves to God.

And verse 4:

This is all possible because the true means of relating to God is found through the exhalted king Jesus.

For Jesus being appointed in the order of Melchizedek, is greater than all the priests of Israel. Jesus is the path to having a right relationship with God. Jesus is our redemption, Jesus is our saviour from sin.

For that’s what Jesus acheives through his death on the cross and ressurection from the grave. We can freely turn to the exhalted human king Jesus, who, right now, sits on his throne in heaven, and has sent his Spirit, that we can have a right relationship with God, through the forgiveness of our sins.

Praise God for his redemptive plan, that through Jesus he fulfils his promise to crush sin and death.

Which is exactly what the last section of this Psalm is saying:

The victory is Gods.

5  The Lord is at your right hand;

he will shatter kings on the day of his wrath.

6  He will execute judgment among the nations,

filling them with corpses;

he will shatter chiefs

over the wide earth.

Powerful imagry of battle and destuction of God’s enemies,

Perhaps this kind of language makes us uncomfortable though,

It’s a lot of destruction and death.

And it’s incredibly sad to think of the reality of this.

Which for me is that there really is no fence sitting on this.

Basically, we can say from this Psalm is you’re either redeemed by the exhalted king Jesus, or your destined to destruction. There’s no other category, like the one many people are placing their bets on, the let’s just ignore Jesus and see what happens.

But who are the kings? Chiefs? those judged in the nations?

In David’s day, kings and chiefs were their peoples representative, where the king went their people went too.

And for us today, while we don’t live with king or chief representatives like in David’s day, Today we are our own kings, our own chiefs, all over the world, people live according to their own rules and morals.

Which is a hard thing to do, look I’ve tried it. For a time I was living to trust in myself as the ruler of my own life. And I thought it was all good! I thought I was free,

and superficially I was, I used my words how I wanted, I used my body how I wanted. But thankfully God through his Spirit revealed how enslaved I was to sin, enslaved to Satan and his lies.

I didn’t realise that I could lie to myself so much and so well, that when as a 22 year old, I was heading towards depression and mental health problems, God intervened.

He came beside my right hand, and he shattered king of my heart.

God by his Spirit freed me from my love of sin, and the worship of my own kingship. A King died the day that I was redeemed. King Joe, he’s gone.

And in that freedom from the king of sin, I am free to give my life to Jesus and his power. And I do so, freely because there is no other power greater than that of God to redeem a sinner from the sure path of destruction.

For all of redemption and judgement is God’s work.

God is the one who has the everlasting victory over sin. Satan dies, he has no future.

And that’s super super good news!

We don’t have to fear the enemy

Because as we read verses 5-7 we ought to have confidence in the ministry of Jesus, living by trusting in his saving grace and his mighty powerful hand.

We don’t have to fear sin and death. We can turn to king Jesus and trust that he will deal with it. Which is why this Psalm is such comfort to David and God’s people through all of time.

God is the one at work, and he is calling us to live with Jesus king. Revealing in this Psalm that we can trust the ministry of Jesus, we can trust the work of God. So we are to live with confidence in king Jesus.

Which leaves us with two really great application points as we prepare our lives to face 2026. For your News Years resolution,

make sure that you include these two goals:

Increase your confidence in the kingship of Jesus.

Live in the midst of sin, trusting that Jesus has the victory and provides the path of redemption.

And we

Because David ends this Psalm in a similar fashion with verse 7

He will drink from the brook by the way;

therefore he will lift up his head.

God’s exhalted king is still human, just as you and I are. Jesus will continue to drink from the brook by the way. But God lifts his head.

Meaning that in all that you do next year, whether you drink by the brook or go to work or play in the sports team, do it with confidence in Jesus, trusting in his victory over sin.

Then after all that by all means, tackle any other resolutions and goals for 2026.

Let’s pray