Psalm 28:9

The psalm begins with an urgent plea. David asks the LORD to hear him and to keep him from being drawn away with the wicked, who speak peace to their neighbours while mischief is in their hearts (Psalm 28:1–3). He asks God to repay them for their deeds, and he is sure that God will (28:4–5). Then his prayer turns to praise, because the LORD has heard him: “The LORD is my strength and my shield” (28:6–7). The psalm leaves its occasion unnamed. It may come from one of the dangerous seasons of David’s life, such as Saul’s long pursuit of him or Absalom’s rebellion.

David has just said, “The LORD is my strength.” Now he says the same of all God’s people: “The LORD is their strength.” What he learned in his own trouble is true for the whole community of faith, and in the next verse he turns it into a prayer for them. Verse 8 joins the people and their king. The LORD is the strength of his people, and he is the saving strength of the king who leads them.

“The LORD” is the KJV’s way of printing Yᵉhôvâh, the name of Israel’s God. The word for strength, ʻôz, means strength or might, and it can also mean a stronghold. Both senses fit here. God is the power his people lean on and the safe place they run to. Israel often lived with war and invasion, and a stronghold meant walls to shelter behind when an enemy came. David’s praise is that the LORD himself is that power and that shelter, and that all true strength and security are found in him.

Another psalm says it in nearly the same words: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1). Isaiah gives the words of the one who comes to the LORD: “Surely, shall one say, in the LORD have I righteousness and strength” (Isaiah 45:24).

“Saving strength” renders two Hebrew words, mâʻôwz yᵉshûwʻâh, which mean literally “fortress of salvations” or “stronghold of deliverances”. The word for salvation stands in the plural. The LORD is a stronghold where his king finds rescue again and again, as often as danger comes, in body and in soul.

yᵉshûwʻâh is a noun meaning salvation or deliverance. Scripture can use it of a rescue brought about by people, as when Jonathan is said to have “wrought this great salvation in Israel”, and yet it traces every salvation in the end to the LORD. In this verse the salvation is God’s own from the start. He is himself the fortress, and the deliverances come from him.

Another psalm of David uses the same English words of the same king: “Now know I that the LORD saveth his anointed; he will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand” (Psalm 20:6).

In verse 9 the king whose prayer has been heard becomes the one who prays for everyone else. His four requests are save, bless, feed and lift up, and each one adds to the one before, so that together they ask for the whole of God’s care.

“Save thy people” is a plea for rescue from whatever threatens them, whether danger, oppression or destruction, in body or in soul. “Bless thine inheritance” asks for God’s favour on them as well, with the well-being and plenty that come with it. David calls them “thy people” and “thine inheritance”, and those words are his reason for asking, because the people he prays for belong to God.

“Feed” is a shepherd’s word. râʻâh means to tend a flock, to pasture it or let it graze, and it covers all that a shepherd does: leading, guarding, nourishing and caring for the sheep. When David asks God to feed his people, he asks for the whole of a shepherd’s care, with food for the body, nourishment for the soul through God’s word, guidance on the way and protection from danger. Israel often spoke of its leaders as shepherds, and the LORD had said to David himself, “Thou shalt feed my people Israel.” Here the king who was called to shepherd Israel asks the LORD to shepherd them himself, as David knew him to do: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1).

“Lift them up” translates nâsâʾ, a verb meaning to lift, used in a great variety of ways, literal and figurative. Here David asks God to raise his people out of distress, to hold them up and to give them lasting honour and security. “For ever” carries the prayer past any one battle or season, so David is asking for care that lasts as long as God himself. Isaiah gives the same hope to those who wait on the LORD: “they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31).

All that David asks in verse 9, God gives in Jesus Christ. He is “the good shepherd” (John 10:11), and he saves his sheep by laying down his life for them (John 10:15). He feeds them with himself, for he says, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven” (John 6:51), and with his words, which “are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). Through his work on the cross he has won for all who believe the blessing of adoption into God’s family, as joint-heirs with him. He lifts his people up now, for God “hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5–6), and he will lift them up at the last, when he “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20–21).

Verse 8 also comes to its fullness in him. He is the true Anointed King, and through him God delivers his people from sin, from death and from evil. Hebrews describes believers as those “who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us” (Hebrews 6:18), and that refuge and hope are in him. The strength he gives meets us in our weakness, for he says, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). So Paul can say, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).

David’s prayer began with his own need and ended with the needs of all God’s people. The New Testament asks the same of us: “that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority” (1 Timothy 2:1–2). The welfare of one believer is bound up with the welfare of the whole body, and when God has helped you, his help is a reason to pray for others.

These two verses give us words for that prayer. We can say with David that the LORD is our strength and the stronghold of his Anointed, and we can ask him to save, bless, feed and lift up his people, the church he has made his own. He hears that prayer, because the people we pray for are his inheritance, and he is both strong enough to save them and tender enough to shepherd them through every season of life and into his glory.