If you would turn back with me to the book of Psalms while we continue our summer series in the Psalms. This week we’re going to open up Psalm 20. That is page 456 in the pew Bibles. Psalm 20. This is a psalm written by King David, God’s Old Testament messiah, and yet here is the intriguing thing that I want us to keep an eye on as we read. For the first half of the psalm, it doesn’t seem to be David doing the speaking. In fact, it’s almost as if the psalmist’s having a bit of an identity crisis. The pronouns shift all over the place. It’s been a day for pronouns, hasn’t it? They were the key this morning in The Lord’s Prayer. They’re the key tonight in David’s prayer. Who said that grammar could not be thrilling?
First, if you look carefully, there is a “we,” God’s people, who sing this prayer. And they seem to sing it about the king. And then suddenly, verse 6, there is an “I,” one person, before the last verse where God’s people seem to take up the song again. And that blurred identity between people and king, that clues us into a very important principle. This psalm teases out for us the King’s battles are our battles. And more wonderful still, our battles become the King’s battle. Let me pray and then we’ll read it together.
Gracious God, whose Son, our King, has fought and died for us and who now rules us through His Word, we pray that by Your Spirit, Jesus’ rule over our hearts would be deepened tonight. Would we and others be brought into His kingdom of grace and kept in His kingdom of grace as His Word does its work here in our midst. And teach us, we pray, to long for the victory of our King, in whose name we pray. Amen.
Psalm 20:
“To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.
May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble! May the name of the God of Jacob protect you! May he send you help from the sanctuary and give you support from Zion! May he remember all your offerings and regard with favor your burnt sacrifices!
May he grant you your heart’s desire and fulfill all your plans! May we shout for joy over your salvation, and in the name of our God set up our banners! May the Lord fulfill all your petitions!
Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed; he will answer him from his holy heaven with the saving might of his right hand. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright.
O Lord, save the king! May he answer us when we call.”
Amen. This is God’s Word.
It is hard to imagine that there was one Sunday morning only eighty years ago when my entire country was on its knees, my secular, spiritually dead nation, was so worried, so desperate to pray together for one thing that people cued that Sunday to get into churches. Cathedrals were bursting at the seams. It was May 24, 1940, and the entire hope of the Allied war effort was cut off by the enemy and stranded on a beach. And if you search for the recording, you can still hear King George VI in absolute seriousness calling on the nation to do the only thing that was left to do. Imagine that was your brother on the beach, your father, your last line of defense, and you turned on the radio to hear this – “Let no one be mistaken. It is no mere territorial conquest that our enemy is seeking. It is the overthrow, complete and final of this empire, and after that, the world. At this moment, our thoughts are turned to our fighting men and to those who love them – mothers, wives, sweethearts at home. At this fateful hour, we turn as our fathers before us have turned in all times of trial to God most high. Here in the old country, I have asked that Sunday next should be observed as a day of national prayer. Let us with one heart and soul, humbly but confidently commit our cause to God and ask His aid that we may valiantly defend the right as it is given to us to see it. So now, peoples of the empire, men and women in all quarters of the globe, I say to you, put into your task all the courage and purpose of which you are capable. And with God’s help, we shall not fail.”
Now our modern, secular nations, they are not God’s covenant kingdom fighting holy wars, but that makes it all the more astonishing, does it not, when they recognize the reality that God alone rules over all things through His providence. It’s almost impossible to imagine now, isn’t it, the leader of a Western nation telling us that the one hope left was in God’s hands. My administration has no credible policy other than to trust God’s goodness and for us all to pray.
Well that is more or less the backdrop to Psalm 20. Israel, God’s covenant people, they have been brought to their fateful hour. Our translation slightly hides the bookends, but this psalm begins and ends with the whole nation on its knees. Verse 1, “Answer you on the day of trouble!” Verse 9, “Answer us on the day when we call.” Except that here, the numbers are even more extreme. Their fate is not tied to 300,000 people on a beach. No, it’s tied to one man, one king. David, God’s Old Testament messiah, is riding out to battle and on him rides the hope of the entire nation. Like when one champion fights in your place, representing all of you. Think of the time that David stepped forward to face Goliath. It was a war between two nations, but the fight was reduced down to two champions. David fought for the Israelites; Goliath fought for the Philistines. And the winner took all. His people were spared, but disaster for your champion meant disaster for you. It is a principle that we are going to see underlying psalm after psalm this summer, but perhaps it’s never made quite so explicit as it is here.
The hopes of the people rest on the king, which explains the sort of identity crisis that we’ve got to tackle as we read Psalm 20. Who exactly is this all about? Who is the speaker? We know from the title, the superscription, that it’s written by David, and so at first we might assume that he is the one praying. And yet for the first five verses, all the prayers are made for one person. There is a “you” singular and there is a “we” who are doing the praying. And it’s only when we get to verse 6 that we realize the “you” is God’s anointed, the king. It’s a prayer by him, but it’s also a prayer for him. It seems like the king is on his knees in the temple, verse 3, on the eve of war, while outside as he prays, the nation is on its knees praying with him, for him. And then at verse 6, suddenly a single voice speaks. It’s as if the messiah gets to his feet and addresses his flock. He leads them in prayer, encourages the troops, until finally in the last verse they know where to put their hope and together they join in again and their confidence soars.
And so what I want us to do is take the psalm fairly quickly. How do you pray on the day of trouble? And then we’ll save some time at the end to think through the message. Three basic sections to this prayer – the people plead, their champion leads, and Jesus bleeds.
Firstly, verses 1 to 5 – the people plead. And what they ask for is basically this – that God, in His love for His king, would listen to his prayers. “God, in Your love for Your messiah, would You listen to his prayers?” Verse 1, “May Yahweh answer you.” Verse 2, “May He send you help.” Verse 3, “May He grant you your heart’s desires.” That is the basic request, the love bit that shows in verse 3. It’s the basis for the prayer. They pray that the relationship between God and His messiah would be as close as it could be. “Would we have a king who meets You in worship? And would You look on his worship with pleasure? And would You accept whatever sacrifices he offers?”
Now think why that is so important for the relationship between God and His Christ, His king, to be loving, close. Almost always when one of us is forced to ask someone else for a favor, there are things going on between us that complicate the request. Aren’t there? Past debts. Feelings of guilt that we are asking, yet again. Not wanting to take advantage. Worst of all, unforgiven sin. Having to ask for help when things aren’t quite right between you. That is a horrible situation to be in. And so the prayer is, “God, love Your king. Let things be tight between You and him. Forgive him anything that’s got between you, so that when he speaks to his Father on behalf of his people, nothing at all could get in the way of what he asks for. Would You be able to give him whatever is on his heart?”
Now I wonder if you have ever prayed that God would give someone else their absolute heart’s desire. That seems to me quite a risky thing to ask for, isn’t it? We pray every week for our elected officials. I wonder how many of them you would want to have that kind of power. “Give him his heart’s desire.” But of course, we know what was in the heart of God’s good king. We’ll be listening to him pray this summer, again and again and again. His heart longs, I think, for three things above all. Number one, the heart of God’s good king longs for justice. He longs for wrongs to be put right and the weak to be defended. Number two, God’s good king longs for the good of His people. Think of Psalm 16 verse 3. “As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all My delight. I delight in My people. I long for their good, their blessing, their safety.” And above all, number three, God’s good king longs for God’s kingdom and glory and honor. He longs to bring the world under God’s rule. It’s what God has told him to pray for. Psalm 2, “Son, just ask of Me and I will make the nations your inheritance.” That is why God’s king is heading out to war. It is to win the world for his God because justice and the good of his people, those things will only be won when the world belongs to him. The good king of the good God.
And so I wonder if that encourages you to pray for King Jesus. Maybe we don’t think of praying for Christ. How would that even work? He is the Lord of glory. He is the one who intercedes for us. He doesn’t need anything except that His battle isn’t quite finished yet, is it? And we are commanded to pray for the growth of His kingdom. He has conquered death and hell on the cross, but there is a lot of mopping up to do, a lot of enemies still to subdue, a lot of souls still to win. There are still battles ahead for His church with real ups and real downs, and so a disaster for Jesus’ kingdom is a disaster for all of us. And at the same time, verse 5, their joy is in David’s joy, David’s victory. How much more joy is there for us in Jesus’ victory? God always answers His prayers. God always looks on Him with love. And His heart’s desire is only ever good. And so the people plead.
And then verses 6 to 8 – their champion leads. It’s almost as if this one man in whom all their hopes are riding gets lifted up above the crowd so that he can speak with his people. They have prayed for him, and now he is going to teach them how to pray, how to hope. But it’s not the sort of speech you might expect from a great general on the brink of battle. He isn’t banging his sword against his shield or boasting about his strength. It’s almost the opposite. “Now I know that Yahweh saves His anointed.” Maybe somehow, as he has been praying, God has reassured him that all is well. “You are My son, whom I love. Of course I’ll answer you.” Or maybe, more likely I think, he is just leaning all his weight on God’s promise that He will always protect and deliver His covenant king. But he knows this fight will not be won by human strength. It will be won by God’s grace. Some trust in chariots, the super weapon of the day, and some in horses, and some in F16s and hellfire missiles, and some trust in medicine and some in their politics and some in their money and some in their kids’ education. We all have our stables, don’t we, full of beautiful, gleaming, reassuring warhorses – the things that it’s tempting to lean on when our day of trouble comes. But verse 8, all who trust in them collapse and fall. Not us. We will trust in the name of Yahweh our God and He will hold us upright.
Now what does it mean to trust in Yahweh’s name? Have you noticed how he has mentioned that three times in this psalm? Well, God’s name stands here for His integrity. It stands for His promises. It stands for His interests in the world. It stands for His commitment to His people, His covenant. Notice how in verse 1 it was the name of the God of Jacob. So He’s a God who identifies Himself with His people, commits Himself by name to them. They can trust in God’s name because God has put His name behind His king and God will not let that name be tarnished. And so as they go out to battle for the kingdom, it is all those promises they will look to for courage. Not their might, but His name. That word “trust” in verse 7 is literally the verb, “to remember.” It’s a word in this time that means something like “to proclaim” or “to boast in.” As we go out to fight for the kingdom, we don’t lean on our own resources, don’t boast in all of that. We’ll lean on who God is. We’ll lean on His love for our king. That is what we will boast in.
What impressive resources, then, do we need to win the city of Jackson for the Lord Jesus in an age when the whole world seems to be turning its backs on Him? We have some pretty beautiful chariots to boast in, don’t we? I don’t mean the trucks out in the parking lot. We have this beautiful old church building that we love. We have our long history of faithfulness. We’ve even got preachers with fancy accents. Our stable of horses might look pretty fine, but God’s king tells his people there is only one thing worth trusting in the day of trouble. God will keep us from collapse because He has promised to build a church for His Son, and He’s promised to do it through our ordinary little meetings where we open up the Bible and pray and gather around His table. His ordinary people gathering here on ordinary Sundays and meeting Christ in ordinary sermons in Leviticus or Matthew. That is the most powerful evangelistic weapon on the planet. Do you believe it? It will reshape this world and everyone in it with more lasting effects than a nuclear bomb or all the warhorses of Egypt because that is what God has promised to use to display Jesus, His Champion, to mankind. And His name is far too precious for Him to break that promise. The people plead. Their champion leads.
And finally, verse 9 – Jesus bleeds. I just want us to notice some intriguing things about this last verse. Firstly, notice how the identity crisis seems to reach its peak here. This is everyone joining in again, the whole church praying, and the end of the psalm is almost a perfect bookend with the beginning. Symmetrical, except for a few key details. Firstly, who they are praying for. In verse 1, it was, “May God answer you.” They were praying for the king. But look at verse 9, “Answer us.” You see, the king’s answer is their answer. They identify themselves with Him. God answers us by answering Jesus.
Next intriguing thing – Who is it in this last line of the psalm doing the answering? It looks, in our ESVs, it’s ambiguous, but it looks as if God is answering and He is answering by saving the king. But actually it’s very, very hard to work out in the Hebrew where line 1 breaks off and line 2 begins. It’s a really tough call. If you follow the traditional accents, you will probably translate it something like this – “Save, O Yahweh! May the king answer us on the day we call.” Suddenly it’s the people who are praying and the king doing the answering. You’d be in pretty good company if you read it like that. It was how the ancient Hebrew ninjas used to read it, the masoretic scribes. It was how John Calvin read it. It’s how The King James Version reads it. My hunch is they are probably right. “Save, O Yahweh! May the king answer us on the day we call.”
Track back in the psalm and look where their answer comes from. In verse 6, it’s from God, from His holy heaven. But in verse 2, it’s from God’s royal city. David’s help comes from Zion. Either way you read it, God saves His people through His king, and I suspect that is the point being made rather strongly at the end of the psalm. On the desperate day, the day they cried for help, God answered His people, but He answered them through His Christ. He answered them at the cross, lifted up on Zion’s hill. It was the King who rode out to fight on our day of trouble, the King who died, and the King who won His kingdom, and the King who saves. The people plead. Their champion leads. And Jesus bleeds.
Well there is the psalm, but what is the message? I want us to take a little time before we close to reflect on two main ways that the identity crisis of this psalm ought to change our thinking a little. And surely the key one, the central thing you and I need to get into our heads and our hearts is this. Our biggest battle is His battle. Whatever else I have on my plate today, however much I have going on, the biggest battle I face is Jesus’ battle. The welfare of my King, His struggle for His kingdom, that dominates everything and how that battle goes today, His fight against sin and death and evil, that will help or hurt me more than all the other decisions I have to make.
Now we need to spell that out, because our instinct is to constantly see the universe inside out – me at the center; Christ at the periphery. He is there to serve me, help me. His Gospel is really all about His love for me. And so I’ll bet if you are anything like I am, your instinct when you first read this prayer is to hijack it straight away and make it a prayer all about us. “Protect me, Lord. Help me. Grant my heart’s desires. How I want that.” And yet it’s not quite how the psalm works, is it? David is teaching us to pray for God’s King. We’re cheering for Jesus, for God to answer Him. And we’re probably not very used to that. But this psalm is teaching us that how things fare for Jesus and His kingdom is intimately tied to you and me. A disaster for the King is a disaster for us. When Jesus’ servants fall, it is a disaster for us all. When we slip into sin, when His preachers are disgraced, when His people are martyred, when His messengers lose courage and chicken out of fighting for truth and goodness and holiness. All of those are little setbacks in His great battle for the kingdom. But we share the tears, and it’s right that we do. And when He wins, we share the joy. His joy is our joy. A kid in the communicant class professes faith. A friend that we’ve been praying for for years comes to church. His kingdom grows, and verse 5, we shout for joy. There is no struggle on your plate this week that is more important than those struggles. No more urgent call on your prayers, your money, your heart.
But here is the wonderful news – because it is His battle, we can share His confidence. It means that in the single biggest battle you have to face today, you have total security because there is not a hope in hell that Jesus is going to lose. In fact, it’s all but over already, isn’t it? Love’s redeeming work is done. Fought the fight. The battle won. Death was broken. Sin was paid for. Jesus’ offering was accepted. That was the fateful hour when God looked with favor at the God-Man, His beloved Son, verse 3, stretched out on the cross for you and me. The most perfect, pleasing sacrifice ever made when a perfect King died to take away the sins of the world, once and for all. He has faced His battle, and all we are doing now is cleaning up the battlefield. Our job is to proclaim His victory to the world, to call on them to put down their weapons because the fighting is done.
Now what is going to happen when that reality gets a grip on our hearts? How is that going to change the way we fight? Well think of what a soldier looks like who has absolutely no fear. Someone who fights with absolute confidence. That is the last person you want to face in battle, isn’t it, because they are going to fight like a total lunatic! Is that us, First Pres? When we go out there to speak for the Gospel, get verse 7 into our hearts as we go out to battle for Jesus’ kingdom, and we will be ready to risk everything. It’s counterintuitive because normally the very thing that holds us back is the fear that we don’t have the right resources. I’m no good for evangelism because I don’t have the guts, I don’t have the wayward words. Leave that to somebody else. I’m no good at living boldly for the Gospel because I don’t have the integrity. Look how I fell yesterday. How am I meant to do any better today? But our trust is not in our resources. It’s in God’s determination to crown His king.
And so when we pray before the service starts, in that little distracted moment before the Prelude, we’re praying for the King and His kingdom. We are praying it would advance. We are expressing verse 7, “Lord, we have no resources here to win people’s souls. Not our preacher, not our musicians, not our welcoming personalities. Our trust is in You. Would You work now?” When you are getting ready to meet someone for coffee, or to prepare a lesson for VBS, or to sit down and grieve with another Christian, that’s the time to pray like Psalm 20. “Lord God, will your King triumph in this conversation?” It’s teaching us to long for the joy of seeing Jesus conquer. The biggest battle we face is His battle. The greatest joy we will ever know is the joy of seeing Jesus put on the throne, and He is not going to let us down. And so this isn’t first of all a prayer for us; it’s a prayer for Him.
But there is another lesson here, and it’s the flipside. You see, once we hand this prayer back to Jesus and we realize that it is primarily about Him, then actually it takes on a far richer, more comforting message for us. You are so tightly connected, you and your King, that yes, His battle for the kingdom becomes your number one concern, but at the same time, our own little battles become His battle. He is on your side. He went out to fight for you. And so there’s nothing that matters to you that isn’t a concern for Him. Your tears, over falling again into the same sin, that is His fight. Your anxiety at school that holds you back from living confidently for Him, that’s His fight. Your difficulties at home that keep your marriage from serving the Gospel, that’s His fight. Your awkwardness at work every time someone mentions Christ, that’s His fight. All of it has bearing on His kingdom, and He has fought too long and too hard for you that you slip away now. So we get on our knees and we pray that God would answer His King. And we know that somewhere in heaven at God’s right hand, our King is there praying for us. He has offered the perfect sacrifice and His Father looks on Him with love and promises Him absolutely everything that’s on His heart.
And one day, when every one of us faces our last great final day of trouble, and we commit ourselves trembling into Jesus’ hands, we know that even the death each one of us has to face, all on our own, even that is His battle – one He walked ahead of us, and one that He alone walks with us, hand in hand until we are safe in His Father’s home. It is a wonderful, wonderful thing to pray to His Father knowing that your identity and His are utterly mixed up. So pray for your King, long for His kingdom to grow, and trust that this good King cares more about you than you could ever imagine. Why don’t we do that now. Let’s bow our heads.
Loving, heavenly Father, we thank You that on the great day of trouble You answered the cries of Your Son and the very gates of death and hell could not stand in His way. And so now, would You teach each one of us what it means to live in Him. Would our deepest joy truly be in His triumph. Would our great longing truly be seeing men and women, boys and girls come to know and love Him as Lord and King. Would we truly know that the most important thing on our plates every day is the battle to live and work for Jesus Christ. And would we trust not in our own might or resolve our ability, but in the name of our ever gracious God. For we ask it all to the praise of Your Son, our King, amen.