Thankfulness
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It’s not often that psalms follow another but these two form a pair of royal psalms. Psalm 21 goes with Psalm 20. Psalm 20 is a prayer that God will give success to David in battle. And Psalm 21 gives thanks to God for answering the request of Psalm 20.
A good part of the reason for preaching through the psalms is that understanding this week’s sermon isn’t necessarily dependent upon hearing last week’s sermon. Well, that’s only half true this week. It’s not going to throw you off too much if you missed last week, but we will reference Psalm 20 a few times as we go through this psalm.
You might need to look back to Psalm 20 as we venture through Psalm 21, just FYI.
>If you have your Bible (and I hope you do), please turn with me to Psalm 21 and follow along as we read from God’s Holy Word:
1 The king rejoices in your strength, Lord.
How great is his joy in the victories you give!
2 You have granted him his heart’s desire
and have not withheld the request of his lips.
3 You came to greet him with rich blessings
and placed a crown of pure gold on his head.
4 He asked you for life, and you gave it to him—
length of days, for ever and ever.
5 Through the victories you gave, his glory is great;
you have bestowed on him splendor and majesty.
6 Surely you have granted him unending blessings
and made him glad with the joy of your presence.
Particular Thankfulness
Particular Thankfulness
As I mentioned, this psalm is remembering the previous psalm. The first part of Psalm 20 was a prayer—a prayer of the people on behalf of the king. The people had prayed for the safety and the victory of the king as he prepared to go to war.
And now, the people declare that the Lord has indeed answered both their petition and the king’s:
2 You have granted him his heart’s desire
and have not withheld the request of his lips.
What we’re dealing with here, then, is thanksgiving. The Lord has given a positive answer to Israel’s prayers and their gratitude is showing; they sing a song of thankfulness to their God, as would you.
Even more, they go into detail and tell what was involved in the Lord’s answer to their prayers.
Verses 1-2 are the basic recognition of the Lord’s goodness.
Verses 3-6 are the rehashing of the details, the fleshing-out of what was mentioned in verses 1-2.
The people highlight the goodness that the Lord has lavished upon the king: the gold crown, the glory and splendor, the rich blessings and victory, the preservation of the king (he asked you for life and you gave it to him).
It’s pretty incredible, really. The people sing that the Lord gave him length of days, for ever and ever.
Without much question, this refers to the ongoing royal line of David that the Lord promised would go on forever:
16 Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.’ ”
All this goes right along with what the peoples’ praise:
6 Surely you have granted him unending blessings
and made him glad with the joy of your presence.
Unending blessings...
All the gifts and goodness the Lord heaps upon the appointed head of His people overflow to that people as well. And the joy, the joy, the king has in the Lord’s presence is the king’s supreme good; nothing’s as good as that.
These first six verses amount to thankfulness—thankfulness for answered prayer, thankfulness for blessing and preserving the king—a particular thankfulness. The people are careful to remember a particular deliverance of the king.
I believe this to be our first take-away from this psalm, that we remember particular deliverances with particular thanks.
“Too often we are not particularly particular about particularizing.”
We are masters of grand generalizations: “Thank you, Lord, for your many, many blessings. Thanks for all you have done.” It’s not wrong to pray that, just very, very general.
I’m guilty of praying very general, highly generalized prayers. The Holy Spirit is using Psalm 21 to break me of that habit. Psalm 21 is trying its best to get me to particularize.
Instead of praying/thanking the Lord for a generic “everything You’ve done for us”, we should be more particular. Just a sampling of the particular deliverances of the Lord:
“Lord, we thank you for sparing Don’s life from that railroad accident and for saving Roy’s life despite that massive brain bleed; for keeping Richard Kithcart alive after his fall, for watching over Helen in the hospital. What grace you have shown us in bringing Tyler through heart surgery, Tishy through brain surgery, for keeping Boots with us for all these years; for your mercy amid cancer diagnoses, through loss, through hardship and heartache.”
Maybe you had a grandma or some person in your life who prayed for you particularly, each day, by name, covering your particular situation and all the topics specific to you. We can learn something from pray-ers who pray particularly.
Maybe Joshua 12 is a long as it is because instead of short-circuiting and saying that Joshua and Israel stuck down more than 30 kings west of the Jordan, the writer itemizes all 31 of the felled kings by name as a way to highlight all 31 flavors of the faithfulness of God.
Instead of a blanket prayer, shouldn’t I take the time to name one or three or thirty-one of the Lord’s blessings and then dwell upon them in praise?
Instead of thanking God generally for His many, many blessings, maybe I should pray:
“Lord, thank you for another year of life, even with all its ups and downs; I know your hand was in it all.”
“Heavenly Father, I praise you for 8.5 years of marriage to the most amazing wife, 9 years of pastoring this incredible church, and 1 year as a father to four wonderful children.”
I could camp out in praise upon those particular blessings until the cows came home, and then some.
Ronnie Martin writes: “No shortage of thankfulnesses if we dare make a list.”
Maybe the hymn writer was on to something: “Count your many blessings, name them one by one.”
Be thankful and be particular about it!
7 For the king trusts in the Lord;
through the unfailing love of the Most High
he will not be shaken.
Current Thankfulness
Current Thankfulness
Here again is the faithful, steadfast, covenant love of God—unfailing love.
No matter who followed David in the line of kingly succession, no matter their faithlessness, no matter how badly they’d try to screw it all up for David & Company, the Lord promised David: “My hesed I will never take away from David’s offspring.”
In spite of human sinfulness and historic stupidity, there is a defiant indestructibility about the Lord Yahweh’s covenant with David. It has to do with hesed, God’s faithful love. It will never, ever, ever fade or falter or fall.
We know this has proved to be the case, because, well…here we are. After multiple generations of God’s people making a royal mess of things, here we are. After years in exile and the bleak years after they returned to the land, it may have seemed like the Lord’s kingdom was finally finished.
But then a shoot shot up from the stump of Jesse and a virgin living in Nazareth heard this about her son:
32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
The Lord’s hesed prevailed. No way was the Lord going to let His David-plan sit on the bench or get lost in the back of some closet.
The confidence David has here in this psalm is this: there was no way the Lord would allow His plan to fail. And this confidence isn’t just for kings in the Old Testament; it’s for “Doug and Debbie Israelite” as well. It’s for the common folk. It’s for all His people.
Our life is flimsy stuff. It kind of has that “here-today, gone-tomorrow” shape to it. But the hesed love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting and it extends to all who fear Him and to their children’s children.
The hesed-love of God is as eternal as He is; it’s everlasting and so is He. His hesed-love is a reflection of Him. So my fragile life which is always day-to-day is taken up, wrapped around, and held fast in an everlasting love.
7 For the king trusts in the Lord;
through the unfailing love of the Most High
he will not be shaken.
This verse begs us to draw a conclusion: The Lord’s hesed-love, then, will keep hold of you through death, into resurrection, and beyond. And so that last line—he will not be shaken—describes your lot as much as it does David’s.
Jesus’ hesed is love that refuses to budge, love that refuses to let go. Jesus’ hesed is not simply “love”; it’s love with super glue on it. It’s hermetically sealed and stitched on.
38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is our current state. When nothing else is known about today, when we have nothing else, as Christians we absolutely have this. For this, we can be thankful.
Advance Thankfulness
Advance Thankfulness
Here in these last verses, God’s people are anticipating final triumph. The future tenses in verses 8-12 point to the ongoing success of the king; notice the “wills” and the “whens”.
David’s most recent victory, the victory the people prayed for in Psalm 20, is not David’s last victory. It’s part of a continuing pattern which will culminate in the final triumph of his kingdom—a triumph that will take place when David’s Descendant (aka Jesus) appears in glory and puts down all His and His peoples’ enemies:
6 God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you 7 and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. 8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might 10 on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.
This is something to be thankful for now, even though it’s a ways off; it’s not here yet, but it should flavor our praise.
We need to take notice of the form of this triumph. This triumph comes by the elimination of the king’s enemies; their elimination is certain:
8 Your hand will lay hold on all your enemies;
your right hand will seize your foes.
It’s certain and it will be complete:
9 When you appear for battle,
you will burn them up as in a blazing furnace.
The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath,
and his fire will consume them.
10 You will destroy their descendants from the earth,
their posterity from mankind.
And be sure to notice the justice of it all:
11 Though they plot evil against you
and devise wicked schemes, they cannot succeed.
The people are only getting their just desserts, for they plotted and schemed and connived in an attempt to overthrow the Lord’s appointed.
This is the teaching, the truth, one might call “the dark side” of the kingdom. But realize, if you pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom, you are, by that very prayer, praying for all that opposes and assaults God’s kingdom to be put down.
Part of what we’re praying when we pray “Thy kingdom come’ is “destroy the devil’s work; destroy every force which revolts against you and every conspiracy against your Word.”
The victory of the kingdom means—it requires—the defeat of its enemies. This understanding ought to infect our thinking, praying, and living. But too often it gets lost in our sentimentality.
There a story about Scottish pastor, Alexander Pope who served in a town where the local bar seemed to draw a larger crowd than the church. One Lord’s Day evening after church service, Mr. Pope was sitting outside his home which was very near the bar. A couple of drunks invited Mr. Pope to join them. He refused and rebuked them for desecrating the Lord’s Day. They got angry and headed into the tavern.
A few minutes later, they returned with a bunch of their intoxicated bar mates. Mr. Pope rose from his chair and kept his back to the wall. An important detail in the story is that Mr. Pope usually carried with him a small, stout club called ‘the bailie’.
The leader of the thugs decided to make a gesture of “peace” and filled a glass with whiskey, offering it to Mr. Pope. The pastor refused and rebuked the mob again. They were, as you can imagine, in no mood for sermons. The bottle of whiskey was hurled at Mr. Pope’s head and the leader rushed at him. A quick and nicely aimed blow with the club dropped the fellow at the pastor’s feet.
Several more tried to attack Mr. Pope and met the same fate. The sight of several men rolling on the ground in pain and agony was enough to dissipate the crowd.
It’s really quite simple. If Mr. Pope was to stay on his feet, they must be knocked off theirs; if he was to remain in one piece, some skulls had to be cracked.
Even if it sounds brutal, the principle is clear: if the kingdom comes, opposition crumbles; if the kingdom triumphs, all that despises and opposes and assails must be taken out.
Our prayers and our praise are seasoned by this understanding. We should be thankful in advance for the triumph of the King of Kings (it’s coming!). And in our praying, we reflect this understanding. On the one hand, we know that we are to pray for our enemies and for those who persecute us. Our Lord gave us our marching orders:
44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
When, however, the enemies are not only our enemies but God’s enemies, there are times when we also pray against persecutors, like David’s prayer in Psalm 17:
13 Rise up, Lord, confront them, bring them down;
with your sword rescue me from the wicked.
We pray with the assumption that if God’s Kingdom is to come then those torturing and persecuting His people must be dealt with. It’s a proper way to pray: anticipating Christ’s final victory, we plead for Him to give us glimpses of that victory now in the thick of the Church’s sufferings.
With David, we join our voices in worship:
13 Be exalted in your strength, Lord;
we will sing and praise your might.
In our praise, we give thanks for the strength and might of the Lord.
We praise Him for all He has done—recent deliverances, recent blessings, particular praises.
We praise Him for the current assurance we have of His unfailing hesed love.
And we give thanks in advance to the King whose kingdom will prevail, this we know.
Be thankful—particularly, currently, and in advance. Be thankful!