Psalm 144 is our text today, Psalm 144. Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord. As we continue our series of sermons through the Psalms, we've reached a place now in our series of studies through the Psalms where we are leaving laments behind. We've finished the last one. We are ascending to God. The reality of his salvation is working out in our lives as it's expressed to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. And we are rejoicing in it. In fact, the last several Psalms from Psalm 145 on are simply Psalms of praise, absolute rejoicing in God. But before we get there, We do have one more psalm that's just a little bit different than that, sometimes called a royal psalm, as we'll see why in just a minute, but very much expresses our confidence in the Lord working out his salvation in our lives. So here's the theme, if you will, of this psalm. Bless the Lord, for he delivers his king in order to bless his people. That's what we're gonna see in this psalm. This psalm moves from blessing the Lord, there in verse one, blessed be the Lord, my rock. In other words, giving yourselves entirely to him as living sacrifices, to all the way to being in a condition of true blessedness. Blessed are the people to whom such blessings fall. Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord. In other words, fullness of life in the presence of God. all that it means to be truly happy, truly fulfilled, because of a right relationship with the life-giving God. Let's read this psalm out loud together. Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. He is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me. O Lord, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him? Man is like a breath. His days are like a passing shadow. Bow your heavens, O Lord, and come down. Touch the mountains so that they smoke. Flash forth the lightning and scatter them. Send out your arrows and rout them. Stretch out your hand from on high. Rescue me and deliver me from the many waters, from the hand of foreigners, whose mouths speak lies and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood. I will sing a new song to you, O God. Upon a 10-stringed harp I will play to you, who gives victory to kings, who rescues David, his servant, from the cruel sword. Rescue me and deliver me from the hand of foreigners, whose mouths speak lies and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood. May our sons, in their youth, be like plants full grown. Our daughters, like corner pillars, cut for the structure of a palace. May our granaries be full, providing all kinds of produce. May our sheep bring forth thousands and ten thousands in our fields. May our cattle be heavy with young, suffering no mishap or failure in bearing. May there be no cry of distress in our streets. Blessed are the people to whom such blessings fall. Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord. As we enter into this psalm today, I want you to notice, first of all, who is speaking. The voice of this psalm is the voice of a king. The I here, who speaks, you've noticed, goes into battle. He talks about God training his hands for war and his fingers for battle. He has peoples subdued under him. As it says in verse two, And he especially looks to the Lord who gives salvation to kings, to David and his line. In other words, this is a royal psalm. It's a psalm spoken by a king. It has many similarities, in fact, in phrasing and wording to another royal psalm that we saw back at the beginning of this altar, Psalm 18. So as we come toward the end of the Book of Psalms, we have, if you will, another prayer of David. reprising, further developing the relationship between the Lord and His anointed King, and rejoicing in all that that means for His people. And yet, I'd like to ask today, if the King is the one who's speaking this song, this is His voice that we're hearing, that we're singing, why should we sing it? How is this our voice? How do we take this psalm upon our lips and rehearse it and chant it and sing it and delight in it to the Lord? I would submit to you today that we should sing this psalm because this is the song of our King Jesus, and it becomes our song because of Him. We enter into the dynamic of blessing that this psalm is talking about, this blessing and being blessed, in union with Christ. We bless the Lord because he blesses us in Christ. He brings us to his abundant life by giving victory to Jesus Christ. So let's play out this psalm here together. First of all, in the first stanza, verses 1 and 2, bless the Lord. Of course, this song begins with, blessed be the Lord. This is the final time in the book of Psalms that we will see that pronouncement, blessed be the Lord. You must remember, of course, as you read this, that this is exactly the phrase that has been used in the seams of the Psalter up until this point, tying together book one with book two, book two with book three, book three with book four, and so on. In other words, all the praise and the prayer, all of the pain and the lament, all of the struggle and the sorrows, all of the Lord's salvation is coming to culmination in this Blessed be the Lord. Psalm 41 verse 13 closes the first book of the Psalms with, blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting, amen and amen. Psalm 72, 18 closes the second book of the Psalms with, blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Psalm 89, 52 closes the third book of the Psalms, blessed be the Lord forever, amen and amen. And Psalm 106 verse 48 concludes the fourth book of the Psalms. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting, and let all the people say amen. Praise the Lord. You can see from that even how this very expression, blessed be the Lord, is a culminating kind of expression. The psalmist here is expecting that you, as you sing this, you understand all the work of salvation that God is doing for a sinner like you and bring this to fruition even by saying this. That's what the king is expressing when he says, blessed be the Lord. And let's remember what it means to bless the Lord. It means to gratefully receive the life that He gives to us. Remember, a blessing, like God did from Genesis 1 onward, is to give the power of life, real life, productivity, fruitfulness, goodness. And so it's to gratefully receive the life that God gives us through His salvation, and then to give it all back to Him in wonder, love, and praise. We devote ourselves to him. We give all of our lives to him. That's how we bless the Lord. The king here blesses the Lord as his rock, who trains his hands for war and his fingers for battle. In other words, the Lord has been a king, excuse me, has been a rock for the king by making him strong and skillful in battle. The king, of course, is responsible for protecting his people. And if the people are going to be prosperous, if they're going to live in peace, then the king must be able to defeat the enemies of righteousness. And the Lord equips his anointed king for this fight. This is why he blesses the Lord. And so in verse two, the king extols all that the Lord is to him. He is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge who subdues peoples under me. He's simply delighting in adding name after name, if you will, to God and his relationship with him because of all that God does to him. And surely having worked through the Psalms, you've seen these names a lot, right? my fortress, my stronghold, my deliverer, my shield, he in whom I take refuge. I mean, these are just common stock. This is how God's people speak to God because this is what they see him doing for them. But uniquely in this psalm, in fact, as far as I know, uniquely in all of the scripture, the king here says, as he starts this off in verse 2, he is my steadfast love. He is my chesed. We've read over and over again in the Psalms of the Lord's steadfast love, how it's his nature, his character, to be a God of covenant loyalty, to always be true to himself and to his people, to his promises, to accomplish everything he has set out to do. He keeps his covenant with them. He is a God of steadfast love. But here, in this kind of an expression, the Lord becomes, if you will, the steadfast love of the king. It is as if the king indwells the steadfast love of the Lord. That becomes part of him, too. And he's living in that whole realm of steadfast love. And here I can't help but pause and show you how this teaches us of Jesus, the great son of David, who is himself, as is revealed in John chapter one, full of grace and truth, a New Testament expression equivalent to that Old Testament speaking of God being a God of steadfast love and faithfulness, of mercy and truth. This is who Jesus is. He embodies, if you will, the steadfast love of the Lord worked out in this creation. His person and his work are exactly what the steadfast love of the Lord is as it comes to fruition in this world. And I think that's why you see in Jesus exactly what the king praises the Lord for here, for subduing peoples under me. David could rejoice in that because his life was a foretaste of God accomplishing his kingdom work in Jesus Christ. But it's Jesus who ultimately will say, pardon me, that all will come to worship him. Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. That's exactly what Jesus's mission was as described in Philippians 2, right? He humbled himself, took on the form of a man, became a servant, laid became a servant all the way to the point of death. And for that very reason, God has exalted him above all, given him the name that is above every name, so that to him every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. This is exactly what this psalm looks forward to, the hope, the joy. It's why it's blessing God. Because there is ultimate salvation. God will give ultimate victory to his king. And all the earth will worship. Now this expression of who the Lord is leads to a reflection then on who man is. A breath and a passing shadow in verses three and four. Oh Lord, what is man? Adam, Adam. That you regard him, that you know him. Or the son of man, the son of Enosh, the man in his weakness even, that you think of him. Certainly you can't read this but having Psalm 8 come back to your mind, right? Although here, interestingly enough, the terms are reversed in terms of man and son of man. But it's the same truth. It's as if, what we can see here, the contrast between the Lord and man could hardly be greater. If this is who God is, who is man? And when you start considering man, it would seem that man is not even worthy of the Lord's attention. Why should he pay attention to man? If you're one of that character known as man, why should God even acknowledge you, much less care for you and think about you? The gap between you and him is infinite. And yet, he does. Man is like a breath he's described here. His days are like a passing shadow, just a shadow that passes by. Pardon me. Everything about mankind is transient, passing away. We are unable to establish ourselves in our own life. But that transience in this psalm functions as the very reason why the Lord must deliver. Having reflected on that then, the king turns to the Lord, and appeals to him, come down to deliver in verses five through eight. The king calls upon the Lord truly to come down and to fight on his behalf. All the powers of this creation bow, we see here in the psalm, to the Lord's superior power and simply become instruments in his hand to defeat his enemies. In fact, All the powers of creation here now manifest his presence as he comes as a warrior to save his king. Bow your heavens, O Lord, and come down. I need you to be present in power to establish this kingdom. I need you to be defeating enemies. Touch the mountains so that they smoke. You cannot help but hear, see echoes here of Mount Sinai. Flash forth the lightning and scatter the enemies. Send out your arrows and rout them. Stretch out your hand from on high. Rescue me and deliver me from the many waters, from the hand of literally the sons of a foreign land. That is, those who are not sons of the covenant, those who are not sons of God's people, those who do not submit to the true God and worship him, those who oppose God and all of his purposes. God, you have to come down, even in and through this very created order, and show your power. pardon me. This is, as the king knew, the real spiritual battle that was going on then and that's still going on to this day, and that we look to Jesus Christ to win on our behalf. We often read in Ephesians chapter 6 phrases like this, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. We wrestle against things like the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places in this present time. But I think you can see from this psalm even more of what that means. This does not mean, as we sometimes take it, that flesh and blood is not the scene of action, where the battle takes place. It does not mean that people do not become enemies of God and of his people. That is actually true. The Psalms themselves amply attest that. How often throughout the Psalms have we prayed against the evil man, the man who does not acknowledge God, the twisted man of iniquity, right? People are very much involved in this spiritual battle. So when we say we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, we're not saying, well, it doesn't have anything to do with people. It just has to do with spiritual powers. Now, what we're saying is the battle is never merely about flesh and blood. Flesh and blood are caught up into a much bigger picture. Now, the battle itself does work out in this created order in the physical realm, but it is always a spiritual battle. You need to recognize that about your life even, and that's the way the King is praying. Look at the life of Jesus. as he did battle, truly, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. You note that even in the very entry into his earthly ministry, what happened? He went out into the wilderness and he was tempted by Satan. He had to overcome there. But did it stop there? No, even as he engaged other people in the course of his ministry, this spiritual battle was still going on. What did he have to tell the Pharisees who opposed him? You are of your father, the devil, right? This is why you're acting the way you're acting. This is what's going on in this world. Even, think about this, sometimes his own disciples. How did he have to rebuke Peter one time? Get behind me, Satan. because that's the reality that was going on. There was a spiritual battle taking place. God had to be at work here to give the victory. And folks, don't ever forget that that is the reality. In our materialist world that wants to even define ourselves as merely material things, scientists try to define humans as merely created stuff. I shouldn't even say the word created. They don't believe that, right? Just merely stuff. And you just act the way you act because, well, that's the chemicals happening in your body or in your brain or there's really nothing transcendent about you or your life or anything that's going on in your life. And so when it comes to the realm of politics, well, certainly that's not a spiritual battle, is it? Oh, but it is. This king here is fighting that battle. It's always involved. Even if we take this down to the individual level, and even what's going on in your body, do you realize that whenever you have issues in your life, we sometimes talk about, well, is it physical or is it spiritual? Sometimes it's a physical issue, sometimes it's a spiritual issue. We'll say it in those terms. And I would submit to you today, folks, yes, we do have bodily issues in this sinful world, don't we? And those do affect us very much. At the same time, you have to realize it is always a spiritual issue, always. We don't say, well, because it's a physical issue, therefore it's not a spiritual issue. No, might even just say because it's a physical issue, because it's actually with a human being, it is a spiritual issue. There are always temptations involved in all your bodily weaknesses, aren't there? There are always challenges involved. There's always a work of faith that has to take place in everything you go through. There's a work of hope. There's a work of love that works out in your very body. And so it's no surprise here that this psalm prays that God would come down in the very created order, if you will, and bend it all to his will. Make it accomplish your purposes, defeat your enemies, send out your lightning and so forth. Do your work. The Bible tells us about Jesus that in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able, pardon me, to save him from death. And he was heard because of his reverence, his godliness, his fear of the Lord. Pardon me. That's what Jesus was fighting. That's the battle Jesus was taking up. And he was doing it on behalf of his people as our king. Now, once again, as you come back to the psalm here, you note that, as we've seen in so many psalms, the weapon of the enemy here is lies. He asks in verse 8 as God stretches out his hand to deliver him from those whose mouths speak lies and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood. In fact, he's going to reiterate those exact words in verse 11 as he comes back to this request. Rescue me and deliver me from the hand of foreigners whose mouths speak lies and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood. We're talking in our seminar hour this morning about what is truth. And that's the perennial battle, isn't it? What is really true and what is false? What is right and what is wrong? And Satan's whole purpose in this world is to confuse that very thing. He's a deceiver. He's a liar. He likes to muddy the waters about what's actually true. And when Jesus Christ came in the flesh and was fighting on behalf of his people, he was fighting that battle of truth, to proclaim, to make known, to establish in this world absolute truth, which is why he would say, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. There is no truth outside of Jesus. We must get that in our world today. The king here confesses that. He prays that. He knows that. So as the enemy unsheathes his weapon of lies, and his power, his right hand, which is vanity, emptiness, falsehood, and tries to use that. It's the undoing of God's reality. It's the opposite. It's not fullness. It's not reality. It's not completeness. It's emptiness. And he tries to use that. But the king fights as he calls upon the Lord to deliver him, and that leads him to a commitment to praise. in verses nine through 11. I will sing a new song to you, O God, upon a 10-stringed harp I will play to you, who gives victory to kings, who rescues David, his servant, from the cruel sword, and repeats his prayer request, rescue me and deliver me. What is his commitment here? His commitment, as he has called upon the name of the Lord for deliverance, called upon God to act on behalf of his anointed king, he looks for that to result in praise. because that's what praise is. It's the result of God's salvation. Why should we gather this morning and sing a new song to the Lord? I mean, we did that last week, right? Why do it all over again? We did that the week before and the week before and you keep doing this all over and over and over again. Isn't good enough just to say, okay, we praise the Lord and that was, we got that done. No. The whole point of a new song here, as you've seen it in the Psalms, is that this is a new expression of praise for the Lord's continuing deliverance. God keeps delivering. God keeps saving. God keeps acting. And so we praise Him. And God acts, and we praise Him. And God acts, and we praise Him. So that ultimately, all of life becomes praise. Our whole life culminates in his salvation, and so our whole reason for being becomes praise. Psalm 40 verse 3 says, he put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord. They will see God working on behalf of his people. They will see he is a great king. They see he's a good God who saves his people, and they will trust him. Psalm 98.1 rejoices in the Lord's saving reign by singing, O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things. His right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him. And folks, this simply is the life of faith, which Jesus, our King, lived before us and now brings us into. Jesus walked this very pathway. He called upon the name of the Lord. He sang praise to him because God delivered him. And he continues to do that, by the way. One man, Jim Hamilton, makes a good observation at this point in the Psalm. He says the progression of thought in Psalm 144 is like a recipe for the life of faith. David meditates on all God is to him. He blesses the Lord. his insignificance, he recognized he is nothing, then on his need in God's power and pledges praise when God acts on his behalf. I wanna ask you today, how is that dynamic working in your life? Are you seeing the life of faith lived out in you as you follow Jesus, right? You meditate on all that God is. Blessed be the Lord, my rock. You realize your own insignificance, your own weakness and transience, that you have no power. You recognize your need, and then you look to God and His power, which supersedes all of this created order. You look to Him to act on your behalf, and then you pledge praise to Him. You commit yourself. Because He acts, you give yourself to Him. pardon me, this is the life of faith, and that's why the psalm is teaching you to sing this, to sing this, to make it a part of your soul, shape your soul to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And how does it end then? This royal psalm turns its attention now in a unique ending of all of the psalms in verses 12 through 15 to how God enabling his king to reign in righteousness and defeat his enemies will actually bring peace and prosperity, blessing to all of his people. True life, abundant life in the presence of God. We need to see here that verses 12 through 15 are the result of this prayer or the purpose of this prayer. And in that regard, I do need to mention something that I don't mention often, In this particular case, I think there is a translation issue that might cloud our understanding of this. In the English Standard Version, which I am preaching from, and some others, like the New American Standard Version, it treats this like a request, like a prayer. May our sons in their youth be like plants full grown, and so on and so forth, in these final few verses. Calling upon God to make this true. That's certainly correct biblically, but I don't think that's what this passage is actually saying. There is a little bit of an unusual word here used, but one very natural way to see it is that it is a result. He's saying, God, rescue me and deliver me, and then this will happen. When you act, then this will happen. Save me so that this will happen. And that's exactly what verses 12 through 14 talk about. As you read these verses, what are we seeing? We're actually seeing an outworking of God's blessing. You should hear echoes of creation in this. When God created this world, formed and filled his good world, he created mankind, male and female, in his image, and he said to them, He blessed them and said to them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, exercise dominion, right? That's what mankind is for. That's God's blessing working out in our lives. Now we fail in that because of our sin, but there is a King who arises, who overcomes all the enemies and brings true blessing to his whole world. And that's what this psalm is actually looking forward to. I believe it's looking forward to the abundance of life in God's kingdom. We see foretastes of that in this life. We see little adumbrations or shadows or hints at it. But it's looking forward to life in the kingdom. What will happen when God rescues his anointed king? Our sons in their youth will be like plants full grown. They will become great and strong. Pardon me. Our daughters will be like corner pillars cut for the structure of a palace. Our daughters will, if you will, be integrated into the very dwelling place of God, is what the psalmist is looking forward to. The Psalms themselves have hinted at this. What is it like to be in the presence of God? I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, right, than anything else. Why? Because this is the place of blessing. This is the place of fruitfulness. This is where what Eden was a foretaste of comes to fruition. What were the carvings even on the temple? They were fruitfulness. There was pomegranates. There's blessing. There's life. Because we're in the presence of God here, and God gives life. And when God works to save his anointed king, that's what his people experience. They start to experience what we were made for from the beginning. They start to experience that the effects of the curse are put down and put away. And all that would stand against us, all the powers that we can't overcome because we are breath and passing shadows, now start to be established and we start to experience them. And it passes on to our children and those we love. Pardon me. He says, let our granaries will be full, providing all kinds of produce. Our sheep will bring forth thousands and 10,000s in our fields. Pardon me. And the imagery of fruitfulness just continues here in verse 14, although there's a little bit of interpretive issue here on our cattle being laden or heavy. The ESV interprets that as being laden or heavy with young, and therefore the following line it interprets as not having any failures in bearing. But it could be the picture of our cattle being laden in the sense of laden with produce. pulling carts full of grain, having abundance of God heaping in, and there's no, literally, no breaking in or going out happening. In other words, we are secure in the land because God's anointed king is defending us and giving us the place here of life with God. And we're not taken away out of the land, going out, exile. Instead, we enjoy God's salvation here because God is blessing his anointed king. And then there will be no cry of distress in our streets. True life under God's blessing of his king. And so that's why the psalm concludes on this note of blessing. Just as we, it began by giving ourselves to bless the Lord who makes all this possible when he works Blessed are the people to whom such blessings fall. Truly happy. And I can't help but remind us of this theme in the Psalms as well. How does the whole book of Psalms begin? Blessed is the man, right? And that's on purpose. When Jesus came in the book of Matthew, introduces him as the Messiah, and he teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, what does his teaching start with in Matthew chapter five? blessed, right, the beatitudes. This is the fullness of life I'm giving to you. This is me, the anointed king, the Messiah, bringing you true life with God. You enjoy what it means to really be alive. Blessed are the people to whom such blessings fall. Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord. Folks, this psalm, I believe, becomes our song. not just David's song, and not even just the song of David's line, but even becomes our song in Jesus Christ. He is the anointed king whom God has placed on his holy hill of Zion. And when we pray, your kingdom come, we are asking for Jesus's work as God's king to take effect. We're saying, may that be reality. We look for that. and we are asking for his work to take effect in and through his body, the church, so that as he pours out his spirit on us and he irrigates the dry ground of our spirits, life in his body, the church, becomes a kind of a new Eden, a kind of a place where the rivers are flowing, where life is good because God is forgiving our sins and he is bringing us to him and we enjoy forgiveness and life with him. We do see that the powers of the God of this world rage today. The many waters that the psalmist asked God to deliver him from are roaring. There is no doubt about that. But we, as God's people, have been taken up in Christ into God's dynamic of blessing. Now life is a life of blessing because of his royal king. There is no more lament. Like I said at the beginning, that's now done in the Psalms. We've been through the lament, it's real. The sorrows are there, but now it's done. God's King wins. That's the hope this Psalm is inculcating into your spirit as you sing it together. So I would encourage you today to bless the Lord. Give yourselves to bless the Lord because, specifically because, He delivers His King in order to bring us as His people blessing. If that is your hope today, I would invite you to confess your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and His great work. We've been doing that with the words of 1 Timothy 3, verse 16. This confession of faith in Jesus Christ, if you don't have it memorized, you can look at it in the bulletin there together. Let's confess our faith together in response to the Lord. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. Jesus is Lord. Amen.