Psalms 20

The psalm opens not with a king's boast but with a people's prayer: The LORD hear thee in the day of trouble. Picture the setting the words assume - the army drawn up, the enemy somewhere over the horizon, the offerings still smoking on the altar - and notice what the nation does in that charged moment. It does not chant for war; it turns to God on behalf of its king. The whole first half of the psalm is spoken in the second person, thee and thy, a blessing said straight to the one who is about to ride out. And the very first thing they ask is simply that God would hear him. Before victory, before strength, before anything else, the deepest need of the one in danger is to be heard by heaven - to know that when he cries out in the day of trouble, the cry will land on an open ear. The phrase itself is a quiet admission woven through the whole Psalter: trouble will come, even to the LORD's anointed; the question is never whether the day of trouble arrives, but who hears us when it does.

The second petition tells us where the people expect help to come from: Send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen thee out of Zion. This is striking. The battle will be fought on some distant field, where chariots and horses and the strength of arms would seem to decide everything - and yet the prayer looks in the opposite direction, back to the sanctuary, back to Zion, the place where God had set His name. The real reinforcements, they believe, do not march out from the armory; they come down from the holy place. The help that matters most travels from the altar to the battlefield, not the other way around. There is a deep order of things hidden in this line: what is settled in worship is what holds on the field of trouble. The king who has been remembered at the sanctuary is the king who can stand in the day of battle. And so even the most active, dangerous, do-or-die moment of national life is traced back to its quiet source - the presence of God among His people.

The prayer continues: Remember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt sacrifice. Before he ever drew a sword, the king had come to the altar; the offerings were already given, the burnt sacrifice already laid down. Now the people ask God to remember them - not because God forgets, but because in the language of Scripture for God to remember is for Him to act on what He has seen, to bring a past devotion to bear on a present need. The offerings are not a bribe to buy victory; they are the sign of a heart already surrendered to God, and the people are asking that this surrender be honored. Then comes verse 4, the most personal petition of all: Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfil all thy counsel. It is a bold thing to pray over a leader - that God would give him the very desire of his heart - and it only makes sense because of everything that has come before. This is the heart of one who has laid his offerings at the sanctuary, whose counsel is shaped by devotion to God. When such a heart asks, its desires have already been bent toward God's, and so the people can dare to pray that they be fully granted.

The first movement ends not in the king's strength but in the people's joy: We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners. A banner is what an army raises to declare whose it is and under whose authority it fights - and the people resolve to raise theirs not in their own name, nor even in the king's, but in the name of our God. Their identity on the field is borrowed; the colors they fly are God's. And notice the tense: we will rejoice… we will set up. The victory has not been won; the battle has not been fought. Yet they already speak of rejoicing as a settled thing, so sure of the outcome that they plan the celebration in advance. This is the peculiar confidence of those who pray: they begin to thank before they see, because their hope rests not on the visible odds but on the One they have asked. The movement closes by gathering every separate petition into one: the LORD fulfil all thy petitions - let every prayer just prayed be answered, every request granted, nothing left out.

The whole psalm pivots on its sixth verse, and the pivot is one word: know. Now know I that the LORD saveth his anointed. For five verses the people have been asking - hear, defend, send, remember, grant - and now, suddenly, a single voice steps forward and stops asking. It declares. The grammar of the psalm shifts from petition to certainty, from we will to now know I. Many have heard in this a real moment in the liturgy - perhaps a priest or the king himself answering the congregation's prayer with a word of assurance - but whatever the setting, the spiritual movement is unmistakable, and it is the movement faith is always making. Nothing in the circumstances has changed. The battle still lies ahead; the enemy is no smaller. What has changed is that prayer has done its quiet work, and the one who prayed now knows. This is not the knowledge of having seen the outcome; it is the deeper knowledge of having entrusted the outcome to the One who saves. Faith often arrives here: not when the trouble lifts, but when, having handed it over, the heart is given a strange and steady certainty before anything visible has moved.

The confidence of verse 6 is not vague optimism; it is anchored in a vivid picture of where the help comes from and how: he will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand. Back in verse 2 the people had asked for help from the sanctuary… out of Zion - help from the earthly holy place. Now the answer is traced to its true source, higher still: his holy heaven. The God who set His name in Zion is not contained there; He hears and acts from heaven itself. And He acts with His right hand - throughout Scripture the hand of strength and skill and decisive action, the hand that brought Israel through the sea: thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power (Exod. 15:6). The phrase is doubly weighted: it is the saving strength, strength bent toward rescue, and it belongs to the right hand, the place of highest power. This is not faint or distant help, a god who means well from far away. It is the full might of heaven, leaning down to save. The same right hand becomes, in the New Testament, the place where the risen Anointed is seated - set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20) - saving strength and exalted King meeting in one image.

Now comes the line the whole psalm is remembered for, and it lands as a clean, deliberate contrast: Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. Chariots and horses were the most advanced military power of the ancient world - the iron technology that decided battles, the thing every serious army stockpiled and every king was tempted to count. To trust in chariots was simply common sense; it was what the strong did. And against all that good sense the people set one word: but. But we will remember the name of the LORD our God. Notice the contrast is not between trusting something and trusting nothing - both sides trust; both rest their weight somewhere. The question the psalm presses is not whether you will trust, but what you will trust, where you will finally lean when everything is on the line. Israel had this written into its law from the start: its kings were warned not to multiply horses (Deut. 17:16), precisely because the heart so easily slides from trusting the Giver to trusting the gift, from the name of the LORD to the strength of the stable. This verse is the psalm's great fork in the road, and it is one every generation walks up to again: the chariots are always real, always impressive, always available - and the invitation is always to remember the name instead.

The contrast of verse 7 yields its result in verse 8, and the result is stated as flatly as a verdict already handed down: They are brought down and fallen: but we are risen, and stand upright. Two destinies, two postures. Those who trusted in chariots are brought down and fallen - the very height of their strength collapses; the impressive thing topples. And those who remembered the name are risen, and stand upright - lifted up, set on their feet, holding their ground. It is worth seeing that the psalm speaks of this as accomplished, not hoped for: not we shall rise but we are risen. This is faith's peculiar grammar again, the same certainty that said now know I in verse 6 - so sure of the outcome that it describes the standing as a thing already true. The fallen and the risen are not finally sorted by who had the better equipment, but by whose name they trusted. And the words themselves - fallen… risen… stand upright - carry a resonance the rest of Scripture will deepen: for the deepest fall is death, and the deepest rising is resurrection, and there too the One who trusted His Father wholly was not left among the fallen but raised to stand forever.

The psalm ends as it began, with a cry to be heard - but listen to how the prayer has turned: Save, LORD: let the king hear us when we call. In verse 1 the people prayed that the LORD would hear thee, the king; now they pray let the king hear us. The two readings have long stood side by side here, and both are full: it is a plea that the LORD, the true King, would hear His people when they call - and it is a plea that the king, having been heard and saved by God, would now in turn hear and lead the people who prayed him through. Either way, the circle has closed and widened at once. The psalm that opened by interceding for one man ends by asking salvation for the whole calling congregation: Save, LORD. Two words, stripped of everything but the essential - no chariots named, no strategy, no conditions, just the bare cry of a people who have learned where salvation comes from. It is the same word that runs through the whole Bible and finally became a shout in the streets of Jerusalem - Hosanna, which means save now - flung at the feet of the Anointed King as He rode in. The psalm leaves us there, on that one urgent word, with the king and the people and the reader all crying the same thing: Save, LORD.