Psalm 21 – God Save the King

Today’s passage: Psalm 21

Today’s chocolate: Green & Black’s 85% Cacao Dark Chocolate

And that’s the last of the Green & Black’s. I gotta get some new chocolate over the weekend, so if you have any suggestions for fair-trade chocolate for me to eat next, please leave a comment.

So here’s Psalm 21. Oh, great, more stuff about kings! I already spent all I got on kings in yesterday’s post. How am I supposed to come up with more 21st-century life application wisdom from this anthem for the king, by the king?

This thing’s a modern-day minefield. It opens with six verses about how great it is that God has blessed the king: blessed him with strength (1), salvation (1), his heart’s desire (2), long life (4), glory (5), and in conclusion, the list goes on. We don’t have kings in contemporary America; in fact, we kinda hate ’em! We hate hierarchy in our politics and in our religion. (Though we’ll gladly embrace hierarchy based on wealth, because of course wealth measures how virtuous you are–but I’m about to go off.) And then there’s God stomping the enemies of the king and the nation: “You will make them as a fiery oven in the time of your anger; the Lord will swallow them up in His wrath, and fire will devour them” (9). I could point out that in verse 11 we see that these enemies plotted evil against God, so that God’s wrath is not unprovoked, but I doubt that’ll convince anyone who expects God to “be the bigger man” and spare these evil men unconditionally. Like I said: a minefield!

But look, here’s what I got. Right in the center, it reads: “For the king trusts in the Lord, and through the lovingkindness of the Most High he will not be shaken” (7). Is there anything that could make a king a good king? I’d suggest it’s what makes anyone a good leader of any sort: recognizing the leadership of the only all-good being in the entire universe, namely its Creator.