Psalms 21

1. THE king shall joy in thy strength, O LORD; And in thy salvation how greatly shall he rejoice! 2 Thou hast given him his heart’s desire, And hast not withholden the request of his lips. [Selah] 3 For thou preventest [comest to meet] him with the blessings of goodness: Thou settest a crown of fine gold on his head. 4 He asked life of thee, thou gavest it him; Even length of days for ever and ever. 5 His glory is great in thy salvation: Honour and majesty dost thou lay upon him. 6 For thou makest him most blessed [to be blessings] for ever: Thou makest him glad with joy in thy presence. 7 For the king trusteth in the LORD, And through the lovingkindness of the Most High he shall not be moved.

In the preceding Psalm the people, interceding for their king, cried to him, “May Jehovah fulfil all thy desires;” in this they can say thankfully to God, “The desire of his heart hast Thou granted him.” In both Psalms the people appear before God in connection with matters that concern their king; in the former desiring and praying, in the latter thanking and hoping; here as well as there in the midst of war; here, however, now that the king has recovered, in the assurance that the war will be brought to a victorious issue. The Targum and the Talmud understand this Psalm as referring to king Messiah. Raschi remarks that, because of the Christians one should rather give up this Messianic interpretation. But even Christian exegesis cannot be disposed to maintain the Messianic interpretation in the rigid and direct manner of earlier days. The two Psalms treat of David; David’s cause, however, in its way through suffering to victory, is typically the cause of the coming Christ. D.—Like the last, this Psalm is Messianic, and in the same sense. Each Jewish monarch was but a feeble type of Israel’s true King; and all the hopes and aspirations of pious hearts, however they might have for their immediate object the then reigning monarch, whether David him-

8. Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies: Thy right hand shall find out those that hate thee. 9 Thou shalt make them as a fiery furnace in the time of thine anger. The LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, And the fire shall devour them. 10 Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, And their seed from among the children of men. 11 For they intended evil against thee: They imagined a device, which they are not able to perform. 12 For thou shalt make them turn their back, Thou shalt make ready with thy bowstrings against the face of them. 13 Be thou exalted, O LORD, in thy strength: So will we sing and praise thy power.

self or one of David’s children, still looked beyond these to Him who should be David’s Lord as well as his son. P

1. The king shall joy in Thy strength, O Lord. This king is David. The Hebrew word lacks the article which distinguishes it from the King, the great King of Psalm 20:9. Yet the relations were close between David, the Lord’s chosen and anointed king of Israel, and the Great Anointed One (Messiah), his prophetic son and his successor on an eternal throne. The tone of this verse is that of exultant joy in the strength of the Most High, who had given David a signal victory over his most formidable enemies. C.—David wrote of himself in the third person, and as “the king.” He penned the Psalm, not so much for his own use, as for his people’s. It is, in fact, a national anthem, celebrating the majesty and glory of David, but ascribing both to God—expressing confidence in David’s future, but building that confidence upon God alone. S. Martin.

In Thy salvation shall he rejoice. Oh, it is good rejoicing in the strength of that arm which shall never wither, and in the shadow of those wings which shall never cast their feathers! in Him that is not there yesterday and here to day, but the same yesterday, to-day, and forever! For as He is, so shall the joy be. Launcelot Andrews.

3. Thou preventest him with blessings of goodness.** Mercy, in the case of many of us, ran before our desires and prayers, and it ever outruns our endeavors and expectancies, and even our hopes are left to lag behind. Prevenient grace deserves a song: we may make one out of this sentence. All our mercies are to be viewed as “blessings;” gifts of a blessed God, meant to make us blessed; they are “blessings of goodness,” not of merit, but of free favor; and they come to us in a preventing way, such as only preventing love could have arranged. In this light the verse is itself a sonnet! S.

“Thou goest before him—with goodness,” The words “blessings of goodness” suggest that God’s gifts are God’s love embodied and expressed. And this greatly enhances the value of our blessings—that they are cups as full of God and of God’s kindness as of happiness and blessedness. S. Martin.—A large portion of our blessing is given us before our asking or seeking. Existence, reason, intellect, a birth in a Christian land, the calling of our nation to the knowledge of Christ, and Christ Himself, with many other things, are unsought bestowed on men. Plumer.

4. The last clause shows that the life which David prayed for was not personal longevity, but the indefinite continuation of his race, an honor which was granted to him, even beyond his hopes and wishes, in the person of our Saviour. A.—The form of expression here and v. 6 supposed to be inapplicable to any earthly monarch, has led some to refer the Psalm to the Messiah. Still, this would not exclude a primary reference to David, although we know that whatever was true of the glory and dignity and length of life of David as king of Israel, is far truer in its spiritual and eternal sense of Christ the Son of David. P.—See also, and rejoice in, the length of the days of Christ’s kingdom. He was dead indeed, that we might live through Him; but He is alive, and lives forevermore, and of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end; and because He thus lives, we shall thus live also. H.

5. Great shall be his majesty in Thy salvation; glory and honor Thou wilt put upon him. His personal experience of God’s saving grace, and his connection with the great scheme of salvation for mankind, would raise him to a dignity far beyond that of any other monarch, and completely justifying even the most exalted terms used in Scripture from the charge of adulation or extravagance.

6. For Thou wilt make him a blessing to eternity. He shall not only be blessed himself, but a blessing to others, the idea and expression being both derived from the promise to Abraham in Gen. 12:2, an allusion which serves also to connect the Davidic with the Abrahamic covenant, and thus to preserve unbroken the great chain of Messianic prophecies. Make him a blessing literally, place him for (or constitute him) blessing. The plural form suggests variety and fulness. A.

“Thou hast set him to be blessings forever” (so the margin reads it), “Thou hast made him to be a universal, everlasting blessing to the world, in whom the families of the earth are and shall be blessed; and so Thou hast made him exceeding glad with the countenance thou hast given to his undertaking, and to him in the prosecution of it.” See how the spirit of prophecy gradually rises here to that which is peculiar to Christ, for none besides is blessed forever, much less a blessing forever to that eminence that the expression denotes; and of him it is said, that God made him full of joy with His countenance. H.

Glad with joy. The language shows that when the light of God’s countenance shines, and men walk in it, there is no stint, no limit, no measure, to the full heart’s joy. Exceeding gladness is not gladness which can be measured. It is gladness which capacity does not equal and even desire cannot surpass, gladness beyond our utmost wish, in excess of our largest conception. Long as our capacity for enjoyment lasts, God’s countenance makes the heart glad. If God has lifted upon us the light of His countenance, let us try constantly to realize what that means and be of good cheer. W. Landels.

7. A reason why the blessing is vouchsafed. It is a blessing given to faith. The king trusts not in himself, not in chariots or horses, but in the Most High. The king, who was spoken of in the third person at the beginning of the Psalm, is here again also spoken of in the third person. And thus a preparation is made for the transition to a direct address, with which the next strophe opens. P.

8. Thy hand shall find out all Thine enemies; Thy right hand shall find (those) hating Thoe. Having shown what God would do for His anointed, the Psalm now describes what the latter shall accomplish through Divine assistance. By a kind of climax in the form of expression, hand is followed by right hand, a still more emphatic sign of active strength. To

find, in this connection, includes the ideas of detecting and reaching. A.—It is not meant only of a discovery of a person (though it be a truth that the Lord will discover all that are His enemies), but Thine hand shall find them out, it shall take hold of them, grasp them, and arrest them. “Thine hand shall find out” all “thine enemies,” though close, though covert enemies; not only Thy above-ground enemies, but Thy under-ground enemies; as well those that undermine Thee, as those that assault Thee. Caryl.