Psalm 21

⁰⁷          For the king trusts in the Lord,

and through the steadfast love of the Most High

he shall not be moved.

⁰⁸          You  will unmask all Your enemies;

Your right hand will reveal those who hate You.

⁰⁹             You will make them as a blazing oven

when You appear.

            The Lord will swallow them up in His wrath,

                        and fire will consume them.

¹⁰             You will destroy their descendants from the earth,

                        and their offspring from among the sons of men.

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Enemies Condemned

For the Lord’s Day:  the 12^th of September 2004

Introduction:  There are many in our day and time who view these United States and our foundational documents to be the last best hope for the world.  You may be certain of this sense whenever you hear people confess that these United States are and always have been a Christian nation or Republic.  While we may applaud the Christian foundations that were carefully laid, we have to remember that very few of the founding fathers would recognize the contemporary building which was erected upon the serious underpinnings that they labored so hard and long for!

 

Yes, ancient Israel under the kings was a type of the great Kingdom of the Spirit to be realized in the coming and continuous reign of our Lord Jesus Christ.  But let us put to rest any secular notions that the crass and sinful carcass of a once great nation still has any Christian aspirations before a watching world.  Certainly, we may understand the worldly envy of the Dictators, the Socialists and the Islamists around the globe.  However, there is precious little of the gospel and grace of Christ reflected to a worldly crowd that resents our prosperity, power and hedonism as it is portrayed by the media products exported to the ends of the earth.

 

At the very least, if we were still something of a religious nation in any Christian context we could understand the worldly hatred for the cause of Christ.  However, the very intense secularism so intrusive around the globe is cause for a very different kind of worldly envy.  It goes something like this – if the greatest country on earth lives so badly at a moral level, why do the gods smile on such an apparent form of ungodliness?  And why can’t we achieve the same power and influence with our system of thought and demand economies?

 

Development:  Yes we do appreciate that the Creator God of heaven and earth does indeed use all nations to advance His cause one way or another.  And this is certainly apparent in these patriotic palms that we have studied this late summer and early fall.  However, we must learn to appreciate that the history of Israel had a profound purpose there on the center stage of the geographic meeting point of three continents.

 

“For the king trusts in the Lord,

and through the steadfast love of the Most High

he shall not be moved.”

 

The Psalmist here appreciates the profound providence and the anterior blessings of the God of Abraham upon the children of his seed.  Calvin notes that “here again the pious Israelites glory that their king shall be established, because he relies upon God; and they express at the same time how he relies upon him, namely, by hope or trust.”  And therefore, because God has purposed David’s reign, he will not be undone – the throne is his for not only a time – but by promise for all time.

 

In this whole section it is the very enemies of their king that are condemned and eventually destroyed by the same God who has established their kingdom in their present and symbolically into the future and eternity, as we should appreciate this psalm in a Christian context.

 

There is a certain sense here that neither David nor Israel could really affect the great hopes being placed upon the person and cause.  David, like all of our leaders in every time and place was flawed with a predilection to sin and it was his own personal sins that eventually weakened his rule and reputation.  Indeed, in another generation – the House of David was divided into two kingdoms, one worldlier of course than the other.

So therefore, may we understand in that division: an almost symbolic declaration that the City of God and the City of Man cannot long endure in the same organization?  The clash of cultures became the ongoing disgrace of former Israel’s affection for the God of Creation.  And gradually, as the elect migrated more and more to Judah, the open opposition to the rule of God in Israel led to the disappearance of the ten tribes.

 

Truthfully did the Psalmist declare in their case, as well as in the cases of the surrounding pagan nations:

 

“You  will unmask all Your enemies;

Your right hand will reveal those who hate You.”

 

This is of course, the work of God in Christ and there is in the context of this Psalm a finality of fury that transcends the worldly history.  And what is the purpose of history at bottom?  In the treasured poetry of the children’s story about the ugly duckling – the real and providential purpose in history is to expose the difference between those vessels crafted for eternity and those who have been molded for destruction.  Like the ten lost tribes, there be many who may count themselves within the fold – Europe too for a time expressed a once Christian witness, but in our day appear little better than the Isalmists whom they have armed to the teeth to do us in: so much for culture, let alone civility in the cradle of Western Civilization.

 

The next verse, the ninth contains a double couplet in the Hebrew once it is translated to our common tongue today.

 

“You will make them as a blazing oven

when You appear.

                The Lord will swallow them up in His wrath,

                                and fire will consume them.”

 

Do you sense the end of the age in these terse predictions?  Certainly there is no record that any king of Judah ever consumed his enemies in a burning oven.  Thus, we must read this in the context of the final age to come, when all of mankind will be divided between eternal bliss and ongoing destruction.  The tone does indeed shift here to an intensity of destruction not ordinarily realized in the history of Judah’s kings.  While there may be some application here to the treatment of specific Ammonites, Calvin leans more towards a metaphorical destruction which awaits the adversaries of Christ at the end of time.

 

Matthew Henry observes that the image here is not of being cast into a lake of fire, but in becoming a blazing torment of their own making:  “they shall be their own tormentors, the reflections and terrors of their own consciences will be their hell.  Those that might have had Christ to rule and save them, but rejected him, and fought against him, even the remembrance of that will be enough to make them to eternity a fiery oven to themselves.”  There is a rare human medical condition that creates a spontaneous human combustion in a sleeping human that leads to their destruction.  While it is extremely rare, it is a reminder that without Christ – we are all fuel for the final furnace of hell.

 

“When You appear,” the psalmists writes, then “the  Lord will swallow them up in His wrath.”  This obviously means the coming of the Lord God Himself in glory, that everything in opposition to His person, power and pleasure must be consumed in His terrible fury.  In the history of England, one powerful noble fainted away in fear at the terrible fury of a king who found out that a rebellion was in the works.  The one who was guilty was carried out, but it was discovered that he was beyond recovery – he had simply died of fright.

 

Application:  One of the sad commentaries on the worldly wicked is that they count this old world of more value than the next, and so they are constantly plotting how to take control and manage things according to their own calculated utopia.  The perfection of mankind is always a dangerous process.  An ancient Greek philosopher dreamed of perfection in his Republic where slaves would do all the work.  The Jesuits created their own version in the remote mountain valleys of Uruguay and Paraguay.  The secular humanists dream of a totalitarian paradise where Christ and Church must be exorcised to make way for their risqué “Age of Aquarius.”  Their ultimate solution to the problem of sin is to change all deviant behavior to the simplicity of choices in how one might enjoy life to the fullest.

 

But the Lord has revealed through the Psalmist, that these are nothing more than mere pipe dreams and the weeds that stoke the worldly fancies will come back to haunt them in a timely fashion.

 

“You will destroy their descendants from the earth,

                and their offspring from among the sons of men.”

 

One interesting political consequence in this regard, is that every election cycle that comes round finds the pro-life population several percentage points stronger.  I can remember when solid conservatives were fortunate to consider themselves 27% of the population; and simply because the liberals have been aborting more of their own supporters for so long, that more civilized portion of the nation has now increased to a little over 38%.  Thus, we see the prophetic implications of the Psalmist in our own day and age.

 

But there is a long way to go before we can even consider a restored civilization in our midst, and it will have to be within the providence of God that such events come to pass.  We can hope for the present and near future, but we must always remember that Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, but neither will the worldly end up with the material remnants either.  At long last in the eternity of heaven all of the worldly will be forgotten and the elect of all the earth will have memories only of God’s people – this old world, its pains and problems will one day disappear at the glorious appearance of our God and King.  “Come quickly Lord Jesus, come quickly.”  Amen.

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PREACHING RESOURCES

Calvin, John:  Commentary on Book of Psalms.

Delitzsch, F:  Commentary on the Old Testament – Psalms.

Spurgeon, C.H:  Treasury of David.

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