Psalm 18:1-2

I read this psalm recently and these verses just leapt out. I must have read the passage many times before, but I’m not sure I had really read it. I mean I’m sure I understood that God was looking after me or something! But there’s so much in these two verses. This is how it reads in the NIV:

I love You, Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

As we look closely at these verses, we see there are actually seven images here, seven different but complementary ways of understanding God’s desire to protect and save.

The Lord is my Strength. He makes me strong. In myself I am weak, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13). The Bible also says that the joy of the Lord is our strength (Nehemiah 8:10). The joy of the Lord is not a superficial happy-clappy joy; at its heart is the joy of heaven, the joy that sustained the Lord Jesus when “for the joy set before Him, He endured the cross. (Hebrews 12:2). That sort of joy can take us through the toughest times and situations.

The Lord is my Rock. I love a good rock, preferably by the sea, though Yorkshire and Derbyshire have some amazing rocks that are miles from any shore. When we say God is a rock, we are talking about His eternity, and His immutability. A rock stays the same for a long time, but God is the same “yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). From eternity, to eternity, no beginning, no end. So we can build our life on Him, trust Him, and be sure He will never let us down.

The Lord is my Fortress. And later in the verse it says my stronghold. Both these words bring to mind a castle, with thick strong walls and massive impregnable gates. No matter what the enemy comes against us with, the Lord has put walls around us that cannot be broken or breached.

The Lord is my Deliverer. The image here is of a champion, a hero, going out to fight on our behalf. David going forth to crush Goliath, or perhaps Abraham going to fight the kings to rescue his nephew Lot in Genesis 14. And ultimately this is Jesus, our Saviour Deliverer, going to die on the cross to utterly defeat Satan and set us free from sin and death forever.

The Lord is my Refuge. Similar to the fortress image, but here we are looking, searching, even running to find a place of safety. Joshua established cities of refuge at the Lord’s command in Joshua 20, places you could run to if you had accidentally killed someone, where you would be safe from their family’s revenge. We likewise run from trouble, run into the arms of God, finding safety and security.

The Lord is my Shield. Now instead of being in a fortress, we are in the heat of battle, swords swinging and arrows flying. This life is a battle, a spiritual battle, and as we know from Ephesians 6 we are not fighting against people but against the devil’s schemes and spiritual forces. Paul says we need the shield of faith, and the promise is that this shield will extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one (Ephesians 6:16). We may feel alone and outnumbered, but the battle is the Lord’s.

The Lord is the Horn of my Salvation. The horn symbolises strength, so this means that the Lord has the power to save. In fact salvation can only be found in the name of Jesus, as Peter makes clear in Acts 4:12 when he says there is no other name given to man by which we must be saved. We see something of the wonder of salvation now, but we won’t fully know or understand until we join with the heavenly choirs, singing:

Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb. Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honour and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen. (Revelation 7:10-12)