Jesus: Our Victorious King and Faithful Defender

One of Jesus, Jesus, He is the king. And the King, He promised that three days after death. And He did, and He gave everything, bros. Jesus is the Lord. He's the one who's coming.

On Jesus, Jesus, He is the king. Just pray, Lord Jesus, we thank you that you are the king and you are the king who has spoken to us, the king who is with us, a king who rules.

As we turn to your word now, as we hear it read, we pray that you would give us hearts to hear your voice and we'll be ready to apply what you say to our lives. In your name we pray, amen, amen.

Please do, uh, do you find a Bible, whether you brought one or one of the ones from the pews, and if you'd like to turn to the Psalms, Roger is going to come and read to us.

O Lord, the king rejoices in your strength. How great is his joy in the victories you give! You granted him the desire of his heart and have not withheld the request of his lips. You welcomed him with rich blessings and placed the crown of your gold on his head. He asked you for life and you gave it to him, length of days forever and ever. Through the victories you gave, his glory is great; you have bestowed on him splendor and majesty. Surely you have granted him unending blessings and made him glad with the joy of your presence. For the king trusts in the Lord; through the unfailing love of the Most High he will not be shaken. Your hand will lay hold on all your enemies; your right hand will seize your foes. When you appear for battle, the Lord will swallow them up in his wrath, and his fire will consume them. You will destroy their descendants from the earth, their posterity from mankind. Though they plot evil against you and devise wicked schemes, they cannot succeed. For you will make them turn their backs when you aim at them with drawn bow. Be exalted in your strength, Lord; we will sing and praise your might. This is the word of the Lord.

Well, if you would, um, please keep that open in front of you for a few moments as we reflect on those words this morning and think about how they apply to our lives.

And one of the great things about being in the Psalms is that they point us to the Lord and help us to stop ourselves from becoming obsessed with ourselves and with the things that are on our minds. I think it was, was it C.S. Lewis who said that humility is not about thinking less of yourself, it's about thinking about yourself less, and the Psalms, I think, are one of the ways in which we can be helped to do that. They're the Bible's songbook; they've got songs for all kinds of seasons, haven't they, if you know them? From triumph to disaster, songs of sadness and songs of joy. The one we've got this morning is full of thanksgiving and celebration, as we will see. And they're powerful because they engage our hearts and our spirits as well as our minds. They do make us think, but they don't only make us think. And as we read the Psalms and sing them and pray them, it's always good to keep that thing in mind that primarily they're about God, they're about Jesus, and they're not about us. So Psalm 21.

First thing to say is that we're in the second half of a pair of Psalms here. It goes very much with Psalm 20, which I think you looked at last week if you were here in church. Don't worry if you weren't. In simple terms, Psalm 20 is kind of the prayer—the writer is asking God for help—and Psalm 21 is giving thanks for the answer.

So Psalm 20, verse 9, "Lord, give victory to the king!" The answer is "When we call," that's what's being asked, and Psalm 21, verse 1, "The king rejoices in your strength, Lord. How great is his joy in the victories you have given!"

And in Psalm 20, the kind of first verse and the last verse frame what is being said by the psalmist. If you look again at the end of the psalm, verse 13, "Be exalted in your strength, Lord; we will sing and praise your might." The psalm starts and finishes in the same vein.

Now, I don't know about you, maybe you feel like praising God this morning. Maybe you've come here full of joy and with things which you are thankful for. In a group of people this size, some of us, hopefully, do feel like that. But there will be others among us who really don't feel like that today. Maybe you've not had a great week. I'm honest, I think I probably feel a little bit like that this week. And even if that's not you today, at some point in life, that's all of us, isn't it? But again, remember the Psalms, and this one in particular, is not primarily about you or about me. It's here to point us to the Lord and to His victories and to remind us that whatever our week has been like, we too have things to give thanks for. Not because of how our lives are going, but because of His faithfulness.

Essentially, it's not a complicated Psalm. There are two reasons to praise the Lord that Psalm 21 offers to us this morning. You may have noticed that most of the first half of the psalm is in the past tense, and the second half is in the future tense. Pretty much. And so, first of all, we can praise the Lord for the victories He has already won. And second, we can praise the Lord because of His guaranteed promises that we look forward to.

So, first of all, in verses 2 to 7, we're encouraged to celebrate the Lord's past victories. Verse 1 starts with the king, most likely King David as the name in italics at the top, by the title suggests, and God, it seems, has answered David's prayer from Psalm 20. A prayer before a battle of some sort, we don't know which one of David's many battles this was, but verse 2 is quite specific, isn't it? "You have granted him his heart's desire, and have not withheld the request of his lips." David's prayer for victory in battle and the establishment of his rule has been answered. Verse 4, his life has been preserved. He asked for this and it was given. And isn't it striking? David adds, "Length of days. He's been given forever and ever." Maybe that seems a bit strange at first sight. I mean, David had a quite long and successful reign, but he didn't live forever, did he? Only the length of a normal human life. There's a hint of something bigger just here. And actually, that's really important for us as Christians as we come to pray this psalm. The answer to prayer here in verse 4, well, it's picking up on the famous promise that God gave to David in 2 Samuel 7, that his house and his throne would be established forever. A promise that even when David was no longer around, his line would not end. There would be a descendant whose reign would not end. In other words, there is a pointer here in Psalm 21 already to a greater King who will be David's descendant, and that's crucial for us. Because otherwise, we might read a Psalm like this and wonder, "What can we do with it? What does it mean for us? What difference does it make to us? We're not part of a nation of God's people like Israel, are we? We're not called to go out on some kind of military campaign against the other nations like they were."

So, Psalm 21, and a kind of thanksgiving for answers to prayer, for success in battle, what does it mean to us? But the same God who committed Himself to David and his family, the people he led, by the same covenant has bound Himself to David's everlasting, ever-reigning descendant, Jesus, and His family, His church. And the length of days forever and ever, which for Jesus' Old Testament ancestors was either a kind of exaggerated compliment or, at best, the promise of many descendants, for Jesus, it's literal truth. And as David praises God for His victory and His deliverance in these verses, we can kind of see that it's like when you stand in front of a mountain range and you can see the nearest hilltop and then further horizons in the distance. And it's pointing us to things which David was looking to, perhaps in their coming years, but pointing also much further ahead to David's descendant and successor. Verse 5, look, through the victories God has given, His glory is great. We can apply that to David's life, but how much more to Jesus' life? Verse 6, He has been granted unending blessings. Again, there's that eternal angle there. The sense that God's King will be both blessed by His Father and be a blessing to others, as we find when we get to the New Testament. And verse 7, why all this success? It's because the king trusts in the Lord and in His unfailing love. That committed, covenant love of God for His people and for His King. It's because of what God is like, His faithfulness, His love, that the kingdom of the king is secure.

So when we read Psalm 21, the psalm of David praising God for the victories He has given him, we need to read it remembering that all of those victories were only, if you like, small signposts to an even greater victory, the ones given to Jesus by His Father in heaven as a result of Jesus' faithfulness and obedience to His call.

Now, one of the things that I've done in this church with children on various occasions is get them to hunt for crosses, and there was a surprising number if you start looking in windows and on kneelers and different parts of the church architecture. And that shouldn't surprise us, of course, should it? Because the cross is the symbol of our faith, isn't it? The symbol at the center of our Christian faith. And of course, as we've noted many times before, it's a strange symbol, isn't it? Because the cross, on the face of it, looks like a symbol of defeat. Jesus is arrested and executed by His enemies, He's deserted by His friends, rejected by His people, dealt with by these foreign powers. And yet, at the cross, that is the place where Jesus is victorious over His enemies. Who are Jesus' enemies? We need to remember that primarily, it's not the Pharisees, it's not the Romans, it's not Judas, but it's the evil one and all of his powers. That's the battle Jesus was fighting at the cross.

Now, when we speak of the cross in church, quite understandably and rightly, we talk of what it means for us as those who believe in Jesus. We speak about forgiveness, we speak about hope, and the life that we have. But remember this, it's not primarily about us, it's about Him. First and foremost, Jesus' promised Kingdom will be one of justice and of total and certain victory over His enemies. Remember, though, the war He's fighting is not a war against another nation. He's fighting a very different war to the wars of history. Famous chapter, Ephesians chapter 6, some of you will be familiar with it. Paul puts it like this, "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood." It's not against nations or other people. Our struggle is against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. That's why Paul, who wrote those words, then goes on to speak of putting on the whole armor of God, doesn't he? Not in terms of acquiring military hardware, but he speaks of the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. Our fighting is done with a sword, but it's not a sword of steel, but the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Because the kind of war in which we find ourselves in the midst of as the people of Jesus Christ is a spiritual battle. And the closer we get to it, the closer we need to be to the king who fights on our behalf.

When we pray the Lord's Prayer, we pray, "Your kingdom come," don't we? We will say those words in a few minutes. And that prayer means, "Lord, destroy the devil's work and the work of those who oppose you." And we pray, confident that because Jesus won His great victory in the past, that we can look forward to His guaranteed future return in triumph, which is also certain and not in doubt. That's the Gospel of Jesus for us again this morning. There's a real sense that verse 11 does say something about us. We, by nature, are His enemies, and yet His victory is enough to turn His enemies into His friends. I read a few verses from Romans 5 earlier on in the service, but it also says this: When we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to Him, how? By the death of His Son.

So finally, why does all this matter? We know, as Christians, don't we, that Jesus won the victory of the cross. Sometimes, it doesn't feel like that very much for various reasons. The church feels small, whether that's our own church or just the church in the UK in general, where it is relatively small compared to some other countries and other generations. Maybe it doesn't feel like that because we know how much we struggle to live out our faith, and we so often seem to be defeated by those old foes that were named in our baptism services: sin, the world, the devil. Maybe it doesn't feel like that just because we get older day by day, don't we? We move towards the death to which we all come. We know Jesus won the victory, but it just doesn't feel that way.

Well, that is why we need not only to look back and praise God, but also to look forward to the triumph which is guaranteed. Psalm 21 has a very simple logic to it. In the end, the Lord has proved Himself faithful in the past. He has answered the people's prayers and granted victory. And so surely, He can be trusted with the future as well. We have something to hold on to, an anchor to secure us in the storms. And I've noted, haven't I, in conclusion, a number of times that we need to be careful not to jump in to these words as if they're all about us. They're about God's king and His victory, David first, but then even more Jesus. But just because this psalm is not about us doesn't mean it's not for us. It's a psalm about the victories of God's king, bringing hope and life.

What's our part in all of this, then? I think it's to join in with the singing praise that the psalmist encourages us to do, isn't it? Verse 1, "Join in with the king rejoicing in the strength given by the Lord," and verse 13, "We pray, 'Be exalted in your strength, Lord; we will sing and praise your might.'" The heartbeat of this psalm is praise and thanksgiving.

Now, we all praise things, don't we? Your favorite football team, you sing praises of your team. I imagine that is literally true of some of us here. You praise the people you love, you praise the food that you enjoy. There's all kinds of ways in which we use praise, some more serious than others. But in Psalm 21, we're invited to join in praising our faithful Lord and King who has won the victory and is coming to claim His people. It is praise that does not depend on our circumstances. It's very easy, isn't it, to praise the Lord when circumstances are good? I'm feeling better, my prayer has been answered, God is good. I mean, that's true, but it also sometimes seems to imply, you know, what do we say if I wasn't healed? My work has gone well, praise the Lord. Well, yes, but what about when your work has gone badly? Praise the Lord.

Psalm 21 says to us, "Yes, whatever may have happened, whatever good stuff you've got in your life this week and whatever bad stuff, praise the Lord because the stuff He gives us is bigger and better. It's not about us." And even when life is frankly rubbish and we can barely come up with the words to say, we can use the words of psalms to praise the Lord for what He has done. I know how easy it is for my circumstances to shape my prayer life. It often feels like that and works like that, doesn't it? Someone wise once said, "For every one look I take at my circumstances, I need to take ten looks at Jesus." Well, Psalm 21 helps us to do that. We need the Psalm 21 soundtrack in our lives to think less about ourselves and to praise and glorify Him more and more. Amen.

We're going to do that now, and we're going to do it in two different ways, by saying some words together and then by singing some words together which praise our great King of kings. First of all, though, our affirmation of faith. And if you're able to, do stand with me as we say these words.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day, He rose again. He ascended into Heaven, He is seated at the right hand of the Father, and He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

Let's sing together.