Psalms 20:1-9

The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble.

A battle prayer

This, it is believed, is the battle prayer or litany which was solemnly chanted in the sanctuary on the eve of the great expedition to crush the formidable rebellion of the Ammonites and their Syrian allies (2 Samuel 10:1), and which was also used in after times upon similar undertakings.

1. To enter into its spirit we must transport ourselves in imagination to the old temple at Jerusalem while the special service invoking the blessing of Jehovah upon the intended enterprise is in progress. The courts are thronged with enthusiastic patriots, each eager to strengthen with his own voice the chorus of supplication for Israel’s success. The king in his robes of royalty is standing by the altar in the sanctuary. He has just presented his gifts and offered his sacrifice; and now the choir and the whole congregation break out into this mighty hymn on his behalf, assuring him that in this day of trouble, occasioned by the revolt of his subjects or the invasion of strangers, the Lord will hear him, will defend him, will send him help from the sanctuary, and uphold him out of Zion. These his offerings shall be remembered, this his sacrifice shall be accepted; the desire, too, of his heart--the overthrow of the enemy--shall be granted.

2. They cease. The vast multitude stands hushed, while one voice alone is heard; it is that of the king, or of some Levite deputed to speak as his representative. In a strain of fullest confidence he declares the petitions on his behalf have been heard.

3. As the king ceases the choir and people again break out into chorus. (Henry Housman.)

The day of trouble

Have we heard of that day? Is it a day in some exhausted calendar? Is this an ancient phrase that needs to be interpreted to us by men cunning in the use of language and in the history of terms? It might have been spoken in our own tongue: we might ourselves have spoken it. So criticism has no place here; only sympathy has a fight to utter these words; they would perish under a process of etymological vivisection; they bring with them healing, comfort, release, and contentment when spoken by the voice of sympathy. Is the day of trouble a whole day--twelve hours long? Is it a day that cannot be distinguished from night? and does it run through the whole circle of the twenty-four hours? Is it a day of that kind at all? In some instances is it not a life day, beginning with the first cry of infancy, concluding with the last sigh of old age? Is it a day all darkness, without any rent in the cloud, without any hint of light beyond the infinite burden of gloom? Whatever it is, it is provided for; it is recognised as a solemn fact in human life, and it is provided for by the grace and love of the eternal God. He knows every hour of the day--precisely how the day is made up; He knows the pulse beat of every moment; He is a God nigh at hand; so that we have no sorrow to tell Him by way of information, but only sorrow to relate that with it we may sing some hymn to His grace. The whole world is made kin by this opening expression. There is no human face, rightly read, that has not in it lines of sorrow--peculiar, mystic writing of long endurance, keen disappointment, hope deferred, mortification of soul unuttered in speech, but graved as with an iron tool upon the soul and the countenance. (Joseph Parker, D. D.)

Defence in the day of trouble

Commentators have positively perverted this whole Psalm. They have put it all down to David; but it is a beautiful dialogue between Christ and His Church,--He addressing her as her Advocate and Intercessor amid all her troubles.

I. Christ’s recognition of His people in the day of trouble. All have to bear trouble, but the believer has a God to go to. His troubles arise from his inflexible enemies, the world and its children, the devil, the flesh. And from his spiritual conflicts when first brought to conversion. The thunders of Sinai, the Slough of Despond--these are some of his troubles at such time. And when he is pardoned and hugs his pardon in his bosom, there are some troubles yet, through miserable backslidings.

II. The excitement which our intercessor gives us to prayer. “The Lord hear thee”; this intimates that we are already excited to earnest prayer. For our encouragement let us remember Christ’s constant intercession on our behalf in heaven.

III. The appeal which the intercessor makes to our covenant head. “The name of the God of Jacob defend thee.” Who is the God of Jacob? The God that gave him the blessing of the birthright, though he was the junior; the God that delivered him from the murderous hand of his brother in the day of his trouble; the God that enriched him with Laban’s spoil, and gave him the desire of his heart; the God that protected him, and manifested Himself to him--his covenant God. How I have been delighted with the thought that Jehovah should recognise the unregenerate name!--for Jacob was the name of the patriarch in his unregeneracy.

IV. The demand for our defence. “The name of the God of,” etc. But you say, how will the name of the God of Jacob defend me? Try it: I have over and over again; therefore I speak what I do know, and testify what I have seen. “The name of the God of Jacob defend thee.” Get encircled with covenant engagements and covenant grace, and covenant promises, and covenant securities; then will “the Lord hear you in the time of trouble, and the name of the God of Jacob will defend you.” (Joseph Irons.)

The war spirit of the Old Testament

I. The probable time and occasion of its composition. They are related in 2 Samuel 10:1.

II. Its construction. It begins with an address to the monarch under the peculiar circumstances of the exigency. Then, with the words, “We will rejoice in Thy salvation,” the speakers turn from prayer to the avowal of their confidence and of the spirit in which they would go to the war. Then the high priest might add the next clause, “The Lord fulfil all thy petitions.” And now there appears to be a pause, and the sacrifices are offered, and the priest, catching sight of the auspicious omen, exclaims, “Now know I” (from what I observe of the indications of the Divine acceptance of the sacrifices--now know I) “that the Lord sayeth His anointed,” etc. Then comes a response from the people, encouraged by what they have heard. “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses”--the very preparations that had been made against them, “but we will,” etc. The whole closes by the acclamations of the people. “The Lord save the king! God will hear us. Save, Lord; let the king hear us when we call: we will pray for the king, we will call upon the Lord, we who remain at home when the army advances to the field. This reminds us of and illustrates a passage from R. Hall, entitled “Sentiments Proper to the Present Crisis,” a warlike, though at first sight it appears not a very Christian, address, written about forty-four years ago, at the time of the threatened invasion. Addressing a company of volunteers, he introduces a sentiment very similar to that which concludes this Psalm. “Go, then, ye defenders of your country, accompanied with every auspicious omen; advance with alacrity into the field, where God Himself musters the hosts to war. Religion is too much interested in your success not to lend you her aid; she will shed over this enterprise her selected influence. While you are engaged in the field, many will repair to the closet, many to the sanctuary; the faithful of every name will employ that prayer which has power with God; the feeble hands which are unequal to any other weapon will grasp the sword of the spirit; and from myriads of humble, contrite hearts the voice of intercession, supplication, and weeping will mingle with the shouts of battle and the shock of arms.”

III. Suggestions from this review of the Psalm.

1. Although all this is very imposing and grand, yet it is not the ideal of humanity. We do not wish such scenes to be permanent or universal. It was all very well for the time, but it is not well now. This is not the way in which God should be worshipped, nor the feelings which we should carry away from His altar. The New Testament tells us again and again that its aim is something altogether different from this “mustering of the hosts to war”--this “Go, ye defenders of your country”--this murdering and slaughtering. War may be brilliant, but it is not a good thing for the world, for humanity.

2. In proportion as the spirit of the Old Testament has been imbibed by nations, they have been retarded in the development of national character, and in the realisation of the Christian ideal. Ceremonies, hierarchies, ritual, a national priesthood, a vicarious religion, an ecclesiastical eastern special class of men being set apart to spend their nights and days in praying for the people--all these come from Judaisers. And so again with the national war spirit, the military art regarded as a profession, the consecration of colours, and the rest,--these are Jewish, not Christian. We laugh at the Covenanter and the Roundhead, but where they were wrong was in imbibing the Old Testament spirit.

3. War is not always without justification, but we ought to shrink from it as an abhorred thing.

4. Let the Psalm remind you of King Jesus, and of His victory and our own through Him. (Thomas Binney.)

Help in trouble

A sentinel posted on the walls, when he sees a party of the enemy advancing, does not attempt to make head against them himself, but at once informs his commanding officer of the enemy’s approach, and awaits his word as to how the foe is to be met. So the Christian does not attempt to resist temptation in his own strength, but in prayer calls upon his Captain for aid, and in His might and His Word goes forth to meet it.

The name of the God of Jacob defend thee.

The name of Jehovah

I. The name of Jehovah a consolation in trouble. No character is exempt from the ills of life. The highest dignity cannot guard off trouble; and crowns especially are often lined with thorns. Few plants, says an old writer, have both the morning and the evening sun; and an older than he has said, Man is born to trouble. But in the deepest, darkest, wildest distress, Jehovah is the refuge of His people; and His name soothes the keenest anguish and lifts up the most despairing.

II. The name of Jehovah an inspiring battle cry. “In the name of our God will we set up our banners” (Psalms 20:5). Banners are a part of our military equipage, borne in times of war to assemble, direct, distinguish, and inspirit the soldiers. They have been often used in religious ceremonies. It is the practice of some people to erect a banner in honour of their deity. In a certain part of Thibet it is customary for a priest to ascend a hill every month to set up a white flag and perform some religions ceremonies to conciliate the favour of a dewta, or invisible being, who is the presiding genius of the place. The Hindus describe Siva the Supreme as having a banner in the celestial world. The militant Church goes to war with the name of the Lord of Hosts on her banner.

III. The name of Jehovah is the strength of the militant Church. “We will remember the name of the Lord our God” (Psalms 20:7). The world trusts in the material--in rifles, mitrailleuse, turret ships, and torpedoes; but the Church is taught to trust in the spiritual--the mysterious, invisible, but almighty power of Jehovah. The material fails, the spiritual never. When the saint relies fully on Jehovah, and is absorbed in His holy cause, he is surrounded with an impenetrable defence. (W. L. Watkinson.)

The God of Jacob

I. Its history. The character of Jacob is one of the standing difficulties of the Old Testament, because of the interest and love God cherished for him. David offers to us much the same difficulty: “the man after God’s own heart,” and yet so base and vile in his great sin. But it is the Bible which tells us what these men were. Its frankness is conspicuous. But David, after all, does not puzzle us as Jacob does. There is a vein of pure nobility and of splendid genius through David’s character and life, which helps us to understand the relation of God to him. But Jacob’s character fails to kindle a corresponding enthusiasm. He does not stand out before us a man of genius, as a hearty lover, a faithful friend, or even as a noble and gallant foe. A vein of trickery and treachery runs through his nature, so unlike David’s frank and self-forgetful generosity. Stratagems are his delight; the easy refuge of his weakness. And when we find through life the same tendency to underhand tricks prevailing, we begin to wonder what God could see in the man to make him a prince in the heavenly order, and why throughout the Scripture the name God of Jacob, God of Israel is the name in which He especially delights. It seems to them the purest exercise of the Divine sovereignty on record. But it is sovereignty of the same order as that which moves Him to elect to be the Redeemer of the world. The spring of that redeeming love lies within His own nature. It arose out of the depths of the Divine nature, and must be based, we may be sure, on essential reason. God chose Jacob, and chooses to be called the God of Jacob, just because he was a man so full of human infirmity and littleness, mingled with those higher and nobler qualities without which the spiritual culture of mankind becomes impossible. Had God chosen only to be called the God of Abraham or Moses, and to take supreme interest in such lofty lives alone, alas! for you and for me and for mankind. Jacob is more within our sphere. What God was to him, we can believe that He may be, He will be, to us; thus the name “God of Jacob” has a sound hill of comfort, full of assurance to our ears. That it might be so, we may be sure. He chose it. Now, see this when developed in history. God, as the God of Jacob, did make Himself a glorious name in the earth (Deuteronomy 2:25; Joshua 2:4). Their internal organisation under the constitution which God had ordained marked them out as a favoured people. There was nothing like them in the wide world, until the German races appeared and brought the same love of freedom, the same domestic affections, the same noble womanhood, the same essential manliness, to build on the foundation of Christian society. Again, Israel was the only nation of freemen, in the largest sense, in the Old World. The people were knit into a brotherhood of liberty, with special safeguards in their constitution as a nation against the lapse of any Jewish freeman into serfdom, or even into penury (Deuteronomy 15:1; Leviticus 25:23). They were facile princeps among nations, witnessing to the heathen around them of the blessedness of obedience to God. And what men they produced! The Greeks are their only rivals. But while Greece produced the heroes of the schools, the Jews produced the heroes of the common human world. Every man and every people is conscious of a relation to them, such as he sustains to no other race which has played its part in history. The lives of the great Hebrews belong to us as no Greek belongs to us. They are literally part of our history. How few know Greek; who knows not the histories of the Bible? They are our fathers whose lives we read there, our history, our hymns. Man’s history is the elucidation of this title; the God of Jacob has written for Himself a glorious name in the records of the world.

II. Its work--the functions which this name fulfils in the culture of our personal spiritual life.

1. The God of Jacob tells us, by the very name, that He is a God who is not deterred by a great transgression, or by great proneness to transgression, from constituting Himself the guide of our pilgrim life. If ever your heart dies down within you under the consciousness of an inbred sinfulness, which you think must alienate you from God’s love and care, let the name of the God of Jacob reassure you. “Long suffering” is the quality which the name of “the God of Jacob” seems specially to suggest to us. Jacob was a man of many and grave infirmities. And the God who came to Adam with a promise which implied a pardon came also to Jacob, and comes to us all. God undertook the guidance of that man’s pilgrimage, because he was a sinful man, a man full of infirmities and treacheries, but with a nobler nature beneath and behind which He made it His work to educate by suffering, until Jacob the supplanter became Israel the prince. Jacob was as full of folly, falsity, and selfish ambition as most of us; but he had an instinct and a yearning for deliverance. God’s promise rang full sweetly on his ear. The worm Jacob, trained to be a prince, is full of precious suggestions to us all.

2. The God of Jacob must be a God who can bear to inflict very stern chastisement on His children, and to train His pilgrims in a very hard, sharp school of discipline, without forfeiting the name of their merciful and loving God. “Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been,” said the aged patriarch, reviewing his life course before Pharaoh. Why? Because through life he had been under the hard, stern discipline of the hand of God. And so, as his life was spent in learning, it was spent in suffering. God did not shrink from wielding the scourge to the very close. Then, he witnessed a sad confession before Pharaoh, such as Abraham and Isaac would have had no occasion for; for they lived better and happier lives than Jacob. But it is this very discipline which makes Jacob’s life so instructive. It teaches us--

(1) The thoroughness of the Divine method, that we have to do with One who will sanctify us wholly; will search out the very real fibres of evil within us, and scathe them, whatever may be the cost.

(2) Let the name of the God of Jacob assure you that there is no extremity in which you have a right to cry, “The Lord hath forsaken me, my God hath forgotten me.” Jacob’s life is surely the witness that the veriest exile cannot wander beyond the shelter of the Father’s home; the most utter outcast cannot stray beyond the shield of the Father’s love. There is no condition of darkness, of straits, of anguish, inconsistent with your standing as a son and God’s tenderness as a Father. For--

(3) The God of Jacob is the God who will bring the pilgrims home. “He is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared for them a city.” Led by the God of Jacob, your bones can never whiten the sands of the desert; your choking cry can ever be heard from the waves of Jordan. Mark the splendid and joyous picture of the end of all our pilgrim wanderings, toils, and pains, which is painted there. The Angel which redeemed him from all evil is redeeming us through pain as sharp, through patience as long, through discipline as stern. And He has caused all this to be written for our learning, that the hope of a final and eternal triumph over evil might sustain us through the conflict, through the wanderings, and assure us that in His good time the God of the pilgrim Jacob will bring us into His rest. Weary, worn, with shattered armour and dinted shield, we may struggle on to the shore of the dark river. A moment, a gasp--and there is a white-robed conqueror, with the dew of immortal youth upon his brow, led by the angels before the Throne of God and of the Lamb. (J. Baldwin Brown, B. A.)