Big Idea: God’s overpowering strength plus his overpowering love not only saves us but provides a life of joy.

Understanding the Text

This psalm belongs to the broad genre of royal psalms. Like Psalm 20, Craigie calls it a royal liturgy,[1] which suggests that it was used in worship. It is as if we are standing outside the temple and hearing the voices of worship, and we have a vague idea of what is going on inside the building as we try to picture the action in our mind’s eye. The question that the form critics put forward, and quite validly, is, What was taking place behind the words of the psalm, a scene for which the words of the psalm are either a description or an illusion? Since one liturgy, to continue the analogy, has just ended (Psalm 20), the strains of that service are still …