Ready to do some riding? Here comes our Champion, calling us to join Him in His triumphal march.
In Psalm 68, along with Psalms 69, 71, and 72, we meet four massive mountains of truth, like sentinels protecting the way into the goodness and glory of God. To enrich us, David utilizes everything he has learned about God in this psalm. In fact, there are 13 words he uses here that are found nowhere else in Scripture! He utilizes almost every name of God that he knows: Elohim (26x), Adonai, Jehovah, Jah, Shaddai, and El. And as we shall see, the psalm includes a vital Messianic linchpin to help us lock in some New Testament truth. Let’s examine the design of this victory song. The pattern of verses is 6, 4, 4, 4, 5, 4, 4, 4. Stanza 1 (vv 1-6) portrays the God of heaven riding forth on His great mission to rescue the human race. Stanza 2 (vv 7-10) directs a prayer to God, and presents His strategy in selecting Israel as a protest against the notion that the world is run by impersonal forces. This section recounts the Lord leading them in the Exodus from Egypt and on the wilderness journey. Stanza 3 (vv 11-14) describes the next chapter in Israel’s history—the conquest of Canaan. Stanza 4 (vv 15-18) is the times of the Judges, where we have a description of Messiah’s epic battle from the Incarnation through the Crucifixion, and on to the establishment of the Church. It uses Deborah and Barak’s fight against Sisera as a backdrop (Jdg 4–5) and the quotation appears again in Ephesians 4:8. This continues the war for souls, largely abandoned by the Jewish nation in rejecting their Messiah. Stanza 5 (vv 19-23) and Stanza 6 (vv 24-27) portray various aspects of the remnant of Israel’s restoration. Stanza 7 (vv 28- 31) and Stanza 8 (vv 32-35) show the final and universal triumph of His breathtaking plan.