Sermon Tone Analysis

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:

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:

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:

All this goes right along with what the peoples’ praise:

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!

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:

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.

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.

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

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:

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:

It’s certain and it will be complete:

And be sure to notice the justice of it all:

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.