Waging War
For the last several months I’ve been stuck on Psalm 18 verse 34: “He trains my hands for war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.” David then goes on to describe all the warlike things that God enables him to do, including (but not limited to): pursuing enemies, consuming enemies, running enemies through, beating enemies as fine as dust, and so on.
Aren’t we supposed to love our enemies? The answer, of course, is yes. At the risk of stating the obvious, beating as fine as dust the waiter who got your order wrong runs counter to Jesus’ command. So, what do we do with Psalm 18?
First, we remember the context in which the psalm is placed. Psalm 18 is within a series of psalms that focus on God’s king. Just the other Sunday, we read Psalm 24 which asks, “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?” This is a variation of the question asked in Psalm 15: “Oh Lord . . . who shall dwell on your holy hill?” These two psalms form bookends around poems that David writes from his experience, but also of the coming king of whom they prophecy.
As with many psalms, two lives are being written about. The first is David’s, and in the psalms between 15 and 19, we see his pleas for protection based on his claims of innocence and rightness before God. We understand these claims to be limited. David is not claiming complete innocence for himself, just as he is not saying in Psalm 16 that he has perfectly set God before him.
After Psalm 19, we see David accepting the title and role of king (21), enduring suffering inflicted on him by his enemies so he can testify to God’s goodness (22) and receiving God’s rest (23 and 24). If this sounds somewhat familiar it is because we understand David as a type— expressing imperfectly what Christ expresses perfectly.
That brings us to the second life we often see in the psalms. Peter tells us in Acts 2 that in the end of Psalm 16, David is prophesying about Jesus when he says, “I have set the Lord always before me . . . at your right hand are pleasures forever more.” What David sets as his goal Christ achieves as the perfect king. We also rightly see that Psalm 22 is a prophecy about the crucifixion of Christ. So, when we read Psalm 24, we see that the perfect and final king who ascends God’s hill is “the Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle!”
Psalm 18, then, is to remind us what it means for a king to be mighty in battle. It is gruesome. It is bloody and horrifying. David drove out the enemies of Israel to establish his kingdom. Christ drives out His enemies to establish His Kingdom. It is a battle that He fights and the judgment of it will be executed by Him alone.
What is our role in this war? We must ask God to make us strong in battle to fight the war in our own hearts. We have enemies. The devil uses sin and the ugly inclinations of our own wills against us. Our job is to fight the war that surrounds our attitudes and our decisions, and our weapon is God’s Word.
To this end, Psalm 19 stands in the middle of this series as the lone psalm devoted solely to God’s instruction. As David writes: “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression!”
