Him Who Has No Helper

Read Psalm 72 in full before proceeding. As you read, notice how often the king’s reign is described in terms of justice for the poor and needy, and watch for the moment the psalm’s hopes outrun anything an earthly king could deliver. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun! May people be blessed in him, all nations call him blessed!
Psalm 72:17 (ESV)

We have seen the King enthroned at the right hand of God, and we have seen Him wed to His bride. The royal cluster closes by asking the question the first two psalms never quite answered: what is the King’s reign actually for? What does He do with all that power? Psalm 72 is the answer, and it is not the answer the world expects from a king.

The psalm is headed of Solomon, and it reads as a great prayer for the king, most likely a prayer prayed at a coronation, or for the king year by year, asking God to make his reign everything a reign ought to be. And the very first petition tells you what kind of reign that is: Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son! May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice! (vv. 1–2 ESV). Notice already where the prayer’s eye falls: not on the king’s glory or his armies or his treasury, but on your poor. From its opening breath the psalm is praying for a reign measured by how it treats the lowly.

But as the prayer goes on, its hopes swell past anything Solomon, for all his golden age, ever delivered, past anything any son of David ever could. It looks for the king’s reign to last as long as the sun and moon remain in the sky (v. 5), as long as the moon remains in the sky (v. 7); it asks that he rule from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth (v. 8); it foresees the day when all kings will bow down to him; all nations will serve him (v. 11); it prays that his name endure forever and that all nations call him blessed (v. 17 ESV). No mortal king reigns as long as the moon remains in the sky. No son of David ever ruled all the nations of the earth. The prayer, as it climbs, leaves Solomon far behind. The language is straining, the way the royal psalms always strain, past the king on the throne toward the King the whole line was waiting to produce.

And so we read Psalm 72 the way the Lord Jesus taught us to read everything written about the kings: as a prayer that found its yes in Him. Something greater than Solomon is here, He said of Himself (Matthew 12:42), and Psalm 72 is the prayer that greater One answers: the true Son of David, whose reign is eternal, whose dominion reaches the ends of the earth, in whom all the nations are blessed. This is, in fact, the prayer the whole Old Testament was praying without quite knowing His name, the longing of every faithful Israelite for the King who would finally come and reign as God always meant a king to reign.

And how does that King reign? That is the wonder of this psalm, and the thing that sets His kingdom apart from every kingdom the world has ever built. He reigns by mercy. The center of the psalm is not conquest but compassion: a King who will rescue the needy when they cry out for help, and the oppressed who have no defender (v. 12). We will follow the prayer through its hopes for the King’s righteousness, the life-giving gentleness of His rule, its reach to the ends of the earth, and above all its heart of mercy for the helpless, and we will find, at the center of the greatest royal psalm, a King whose glory is that He bends down to those who have no one else.

Give the King Your Justice

Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son! (v. 1 ESV). Before the prayer asks for anything else, it asks for this. And notice that the king’s righteousness is not assumed to be his own. It must be given to him, and it is God’s righteousness, God’s justice, that he needs. (Here we keep the older rendering, because the NET’s grant the king the ability to make just decisions loses the words your righteousness.) No king rules rightly out of his own resources; left to himself, even the best king bends justice toward the strong and away from the weak, as the whole sorry history of kings makes plain. So the psalm begins by asking God to put His own righteousness into the king, that the king might rule as God Himself would rule.

Of the true King this is gloriously true, though in a way that goes deeper than the psalmist knew. The Lord Jesus does not merely receive God’s righteousness as a gift from outside; He is the righteousness of God in person, the One in whom God’s justice and mercy are perfectly joined. His reign is righteous through and through because He is righteous through and through. But there is a second truth folded in here for us, the King’s subjects, and it is the gospel itself. We too have no righteousness of our own; we too must have God’s righteousness given to us, and the wonder of the gospel is that the righteous King gives us His. The same word the psalm uses to pray that God would give the king His righteousness is the word Paul will use for what God does for the believer in Christ: He credits to us a righteousness that is not our own. The King who rules in righteousness clothes His people in the very righteousness by which He rules.

And see at once what that righteous reign produces. He will defend the oppressed among the people; he will deliver the children of the poor and crush the oppressor (v. 4). Here are the two edges of the King’s justice, and we must hold both. The reign that defends the poor will also crush the oppressor. There is a hard, downward stroke against those who prey on the weak, and the psalm does not flinch from it any more than Psalm 110 flinched from the day of wrath. But the purpose of the crushing is the deliverance; the King breaks the oppressor in order to free the oppressed. His justice is not cold; it is justice in the service of mercy, the strong arm of a King raised on behalf of those who cannot raise their own.

And this is exactly where Israel’s kings, almost to a man, failed. The measure God set for a king was never the size of his army or the gold in his treasury; it was how he treated the widow, the orphan, the sojourner, and the poor, the people with no power to defend themselves. The prophets thunder against the kings precisely here: for grinding the faces of the poor, for selling the needy for a pair of sandals, for building their palaces by injustice. The throne that was supposed to be the poor man’s last refuge became, again and again, the engine of his oppression. So Psalm 72 is, in a quiet way, a prayer for a king Israel never actually had, a king who would truly be what every king was meant to be and almost none of them were. And the prayer waited, unanswered, through the whole long succession of failed and half-failed kings, until at last a King came who fed the hungry, lifted the lowly, defended the despised, and had not even a place to lay His own head. The prayer that no son of David ever answered, the Son of David finally did.

Like Rain on the Mown Grass

The prayer then reaches for an image of what this reign feels like to live under, and it is the gentlest image imaginable. He will descend like rain on the mown grass, like showers that drench the earth (v. 6). Not like a storm that flattens, not like a fire that consumes, but like rain on the mown grass, the soft, life-giving rain that comes after the mowing and coaxes the cut field green again. The reign of this King is not a weight pressing down on His people but a refreshment falling on them, bringing life up out of ground that looked finished. Where He reigns, the godly will flourish; peace will prevail (v. 7). That peace is shalom, the deep wholeness and well-being that is the signature of God’s own kingdom. The King’s rule makes things grow.

And the psalm looks for this flourishing to last: as long as the sun and moon remain in the sky, for generation after generation (v. 5); as long as the moon remains in the sky (v. 7). Here is the first place the prayer plainly outruns any earthly king. Solomon died; his kingdom split in two within a generation and was carried off into exile within a few centuries. No son of David held a throne as long as the sun and moon remain in the sky. But the angel Gabriel would one day stand before a girl in Nazareth and say of her child, the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David … and his kingdom will never end (Luke 1:32–33). The eternal reign the psalm could only pray for is the reign the angel announced: a kingdom that does not die with its King, because its King does not stay dead, and that will outlast the sun and the moon themselves.

And the peace this King brings is no thin truce. The word is shalom: not merely the absence of conflict but the deep wholeness, the flourishing rightness, that the world lost at the fall and has ached for ever since. It means things mended, relationships healed, the creation itself at rest under a good and gentle rule. Isaiah would give this King a name that gathers it all up, Prince of Peace, and say of His reign, His dominion will be vast and he will bring immeasurable prosperity. He will rule on David’s throne and over David’s kingdom … from this time forward and forevermore (Isaiah 9:6–7). The word the NET renders prosperity is again shalom. That is the very reign Psalm 72 is praying for: an everlasting reign of shalom on David’s throne. The rain that falls on the mown grass, coaxing life out of ground that looked finished, is a fitting picture of what this King does wherever He reigns. He brings the dead field of a fallen world, and a fallen heart, green again.

From Sea to Sea

The prayer’s horizon widens until it takes in the whole earth. May he rule from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth (v. 8). The kings of Tarshish and the coastlands will offer gifts; the kings of Sheba and Seba will bring tribute. All kings will bow down to him; all nations will serve him (vv. 10–11). Tarshish and Sheba and Seba were the far edges of the known world, the distant places at the rim of the map; the psalm looks for even those farthest kings to come bowing, bearing gifts, to serve this King. It is a dominion not of one nation but of all of them, reaching to the very ends of the earth.

Solomon received tribute and the visit of a foreign queen, and for a brief season his fame spread; but the nations did not serve him, and the kings of the earth did not bow down to him. The prayer is reaching for something only Christ would fulfill, and the church has always heard the first notes of its fulfillment at His cradle. For when the King was born, kings from the east, from far-off Gentile lands, came following a star and bowed down and worshiped him, opening their treasure boxes and bringing him gold (Matthew 2:11). There were the kings of the distant coastlands, bringing their gifts, bowing down to the King: the firstfruits of all nations will serve him. The Magi at Bethlehem were Psalm 72 beginning to come true.

But mark how this worldwide dominion is actually won, because it is not by the sword. We learned in Psalm 110 that the King’s scepter goes out from Zion, that He rules in the midst of His enemies by the word that turns enemies into willing subjects. The dominion from sea to sea is the reach of the gospel, the King’s reign extending to the ends of the earth one preached word and one converted heart at a time. All nations will serve him is not the boast of an empire built on conquest; it is the Great Commission, the King’s reign spreading across the world as the good news is carried to every people. The nations are not crushed into submission; they are won into glad service. And every time the gospel crosses another border and another heart bows to the King, Psalm 72 reaches a little nearer its yes.

There is a sobering note in the middle of the worldwide vision, though, that we should not skip: his enemies will lick the dust (v. 9). Not every knee that bows to this King bows gladly. The psalm knows what Paul would later make explicit, that one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:10–11), and that there are two ways to come to that bowing. Some bow now, willingly, won by the gospel into glad service, the willing people of Psalm 110 made willing by grace. Others will bow at last as defeated enemies, compelled, when the King’s reign is consummated and every opposing power is brought down to the dust. The reign reaches every nation either way. The law summons every knee to bow and warns that those who will not bow now will bow at last in the dust, when bowing is no longer a rescue but a reckoning. The gospel does not answer that summons by laying a choice on the sinner; it brings the King Himself, who delivers the helpless and, by His Spirit working through His Word, bends stubborn hearts into glad surrender before the day of reckoning comes.

And now we come to the heart of the psalm, the verses that tell us what this King treasures and whom His whole reign is bent toward. For he will rescue the needy when they cry out for help, and the oppressed who have no defender. He will take pity on the poor and needy; the lives of the needy he will save (vv. 12–13). From oppression and violence he redeems their life, and precious is their blood in his sight (v. 14 ESV). Read that slowly, because it is the gospel. The King’s reign is for the needy, the poor, the weak, and, in the phrase that ought to undo us, the oppressed who have no defender (older translations: him who has no helper). The one with no one else. The one at the bottom, beyond the reach of every other rescue, with no friend in high places and no resources of his own. That one the King will rescue.

We should not read past that phrase as though it described only other people. To have no defender is the truest description of every one of us before God. We like to imagine we bring something to our own rescue (some goodness, some effort, some claim), but the gospel strips that away and tells us the truth: before God we are the helpless, the ones with no defender, who cannot save ourselves and have no other savior to turn to. For while we were still helpless, Paul says, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6). That is the timing of the gospel exactly: not when we had pulled ourselves halfway up, but while we were still helpless, with nothing to offer and no one else to call on. And precisely these, the helpless, this King rescues when they cry out. The reign of Christ is good news in direct proportion to how poor and helpless you know yourself to be.

And one phrase in these verses opens straight onto the cross: precious is their blood in his sight (v. 14 ESV). (The NET’s he will value their lives keeps the sense but loses the word blood, which is why we keep the older rendering here.) The lives of the lowly, which the world counts cheap and spends without a second thought, are precious to this King; He will not have their blood shed carelessly. But the King who counts the blood of the needy precious did something no other king has ever done for his subjects: He shed His own. To redeem the lives of the helpless from oppression and violence, He gave His own life-blood, precious blood like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb, namely Christ (1 Peter 1:19). The King values the blood of the poor so highly that He paid for them with His own. There has never been a kingdom like this one, and there never will be: a King whose glory is not the blood of His enemies spilled for His honor, but His own blood spilled for His subjects’ rescue.

There is a great pastoral reversal here that sets believers free. We carry, most of us, a deep and stubborn instinct that we must make ourselves presentable before we come to God: clean ourselves up, get our lives in order, bring some improvement to lay at His feet, and then approach the King. Psalm 72 turns that instinct on its head. The King’s reign is for the needy, the weak, the oppressed who have no defender, which means the way to come to this King is not to arrive having helped yourself, but to come as the one who cannot. The very thing we are ashamed of (our helplessness, our emptiness, our having nothing to offer) is the thing that qualifies us for His deliverance, because His deliverance is for the helpless. This has been the quiet refrain of the whole volume: the meek inherit, not the mighty; the one who takes refuge is saved, not the one who stands on his own feet; the bride brings nothing and is clothed by the Bridegroom. And here it is again, in the King’s coronation prayer: the needy are rescued when they cry out for help. Not when they qualify. When they cry out. The helpless bring nothing but their cry, and even that cry the King Himself draws out of them by His Word; His whole reign is bent toward answering it.

All Nations Call Him Blessed

Before the prayer reaches its summit it lingers over the sheer abundance of the King’s reign. May he live! May they offer him gold from Sheba. … May there be an abundance of grain in the earth; on the tops of the mountains may it sway. May its fruit trees flourish like the forests of Lebanon (vv. 15–16). Where this King reigns, there is bread: grain swaying even on the barren mountaintops, fruit trees flourishing like the forests of Lebanon, plenty where there was want. It is the language of a land made full under a good king. And it is hard, reading it on this side of the Gospels, not to think of the King who took a few loaves on a hillside and fed thousands until they were satisfied with baskets to spare, and who called Himself the bread of life, and who feeds His people still with His own body. The abundance of Psalm 72 is not finally about full barns; it is about a King in whose reign no one who comes to Him goes hungry.

The prayer climbs to its summit. May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun! May people be blessed in him, all nations call him blessed! (v. 17 ESV). And that last line is not a new hope; it is the oldest hope in the Bible, come round at last. For these are the very words the LORD spoke to Abraham at the beginning of the whole story of redemption: in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed (Genesis 12:3 ESV); in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed (Genesis 22:18 ESV). (The NET renders these promises as the nations pronouncing blessings by Abraham’s name, which hides the very echo Paul hears in them; so here we keep the older wording.) The promise that set the entire history of Israel in motion, that through Abraham’s family blessing would come to every nation on earth, lands here, in the prayer for the King, as a prayer that in him all nations would be blessed.

And the New Testament tells us plainly that this is the gospel, and that the offspring of Abraham in whom the nations are blessed is Christ. The scripture … proclaimed the gospel to Abraham ahead of time, saying, “All the nations will be blessed in you” (Galatians 3:8); and the promised descendant, Paul says, is one person, who is Christ (Galatians 3:16). So Psalm 72:17 is the Abrahamic promise and the gospel and the King all folded together: in the true Son of David, who is also the offspring of Abraham, every nation on earth is blessed. The blessing the world has been waiting for since Genesis is the blessing the gospel carries to the ends of the earth: forgiveness of sins, life, and the favor of God, for people of every tribe and tongue, in him.

This is why the church can never be a club for one people or one place. The King’s own psalm prays for the blessing of all nations, and the King’s own commission sends His people to all nations with it. The worldwide reach is not an optional add-on to the gospel; it is written into the King’s coronation prayer. Every missionary who ever crossed an ocean, every translator who put the Scriptures into a new tongue, every believer who told a neighbor of another nation about the Lord Jesus, was answering Psalm 72, carrying the blessing of Abraham, in Christ, toward the day when all nations will indeed call Him blessed.

And this gathering of the nations is the great undoing of an old catastrophe. At Babel the nations were scattered, their language confused, the human family broken into pieces that could no longer understand one another (Genesis 11). The blessing promised to Abraham just a chapter later was God’s answer to that scattering, and at Pentecost the answer arrived, when the Spirit fell and people from every nation under heaven heard of the great deeds God had done, each in his own language (Acts 2): Babel running in reverse. And the end of the story shows where it is all going: a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and crying salvation to the King (Revelation 7:9). Psalm 72’s all nations call him blessed is that final scene praying for itself ahead of time: the scattered family of Babel gathered home at last, in Christ, into one worshiping multitude that no one can count.

May the Whole Earth Be Filled with His Glory

And so the prayer ends in praise. The LORD God, the God of Israel, deserves praise. He alone accomplishes amazing things. His glorious name deserves praise forevermore. May his majestic splendor fill the whole earth. We agree! We agree! (vv. 18–19). The prayer for the King’s worldwide, merciful, everlasting reign resolves, as it must, into the cry that the whole earth be filled with God’s glory, for that is what the King’s reign accomplishes. When all nations are blessed in Him, when the gospel has run from sea to sea, when the helpless have been delivered and the King’s shalom has watered the whole earth like rain, then the earth is full of the glory of God, as the waters fill up the sea. The King’s reign and the Father’s glory are one thing seen from two sides.

That cry, May his majestic splendor fill the whole earth, is not wishful poetry; it is a promise the Scriptures make in their own voice. Recognition of the LORD’s sovereign majesty will fill the earth just as the waters fill up the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). It is the future the King’s reign is carrying the world toward, the day the loud voices in heaven will announce, The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever (Revelation 11:15). We live now in the long middle of it, between the King’s enthronement and that day, in the time when His reign is real but the earth is not yet full of His glory, and so the doxology of Psalm 72 becomes the church’s daily prayer. Every time a believer prays thy kingdom come, he is praying this psalm: asking that the reign of the gentle, merciful, helpless-delivering King would spread from sea to sea until the whole earth is filled with the glory of God. We agree! We agree! the psalm says (older translations keep the Hebrew word, Amen and Amen), and the church says it still.

There is a quiet line after the doxology that is easy to skip and worth a moment: This collection of the prayers of David son of Jesse ends here (v. 20). It marks the close of a great collection of David’s psalms. But there is something fitting, almost designed, in where David’s prayers come to rest: not on himself, not on his own reign or his own troubles, but on this, a prayer for his Son, the King who would reign forever, deliver the helpless, and bless all nations. David’s prayers end by reaching past David to the Son who would answer them. The last thing the great king prays for is the greater King to come. And we who live on the far side of Bethlehem and the empty tomb know His name.

And there is a quiet summons in all of this for the King’s people, for a kingdom shapes its subjects into its own likeness. If we have been delivered by a King whose glory is mercy to the helpless, then we cannot go on living as though the poor and the needy and those with no helper were no concern of ours. The subjects of this King learn to count precious what He counts precious: the lives the world spends cheaply, the people with no one to defend them. We who were the helpless delivered become, in our small way, helpers of the helpless; we who received the blessing of Abraham become couriers of it to the nations; we who were fed by the Bread of Life share our bread. This is not how we earn a place in the kingdom (we were let in as beggars and remain beggars to the end), but it is how the kingdom, having gotten into us, begins to show. The reign of the merciful King makes merciful people, the way rain on mown grass makes a field green.

So the royal cluster ends. We have seen the King enthroned at God’s right hand, the King wed to His bride, and now the King reigning, and we have learned what His reign is for. It is a reign of given righteousness, life-giving as rain, reaching to the ends of the earth, blessing all nations; and at its very heart, the thing that makes it unlike every kingdom the world has built, it is a reign of mercy for the helpless, for the poor and the weak and the oppressed who have no defender. Which means the gospel of this King is not finally a message for the strong and the deserving. It is a message for the helpless, and the only “qualification” for the deliverance of this King is need itself; the King Himself, by His word, draws out the cry. We are all qualified. That is the kindness at the center of His crown.

Gathering the Threads

We closed the royal cluster with the greatest royal psalm of all, a prayer for the king whose hopes swell so far past Solomon that they can only be praying for the true Son of David. We heard it ask for a reign founded on God’s own given righteousness; a reign gentle as rain on mown grass, making the godly flourish and peace prevail; a reign lasting as long as the sun and moon remain in the sky, which the angel Gabriel would one day announce as the kingdom that will never end; a reign reaching from sea to sea to the ends of the earth, its firstfruits the Gentile Magi bowing down before the cradle, its dominion spread not by the sword but by the gospel going out from Zion.

And we found its beating heart in the King’s mercy to the lowly. He rescues the needy, the poor, and the oppressed who have no defender, which is the truest name for every one of us before God, the helpless ones for whom Christ died while we were still helpless. We saw the cross in precious is their blood in his sight: a King who valued the blood of the poor so highly He gave His own to redeem them. We heard the Abrahamic promise come full circle in all nations call him blessed, the gospel carried to every people in the offspring of Abraham who is Christ. And we watched the prayer resolve into praise (May his majestic splendor fill the whole earth) and David’s own prayers come to rest, fittingly, on the greater King to come. A reign of righteousness, mercy, and worldwide blessing, with kindness to the helpless at its very center: that is the kingdom of the Son of David, and the only “qualification” for entering it is need, the need the King Himself meets and answers.

For Discussion

Psalm 72 prays that God would give the king your justice … and your righteousness (vv. 1–2 ESV). Why does even the king need God’s righteousness given to him, and how does that point to the way a believer comes to be righteous before God?
The psalm’s hopes plainly outrun any earthly king: an eternal reign (vv. 5, 7), dominion to the ends of the earth (v. 8), all nations serving him (v. 11). How does that overreaching language point past Solomon to the true Son of David, and what does it teach us about reading the royal psalms?
The heart of the reign is mercy to the lowly: the King will rescue the oppressed who have no defender (v. 12). Why is it good news that the King’s reign is for those who have no other helper, and how is that the condition of every sinner before God? Read Romans 5:6 alongside it.
Verse 17 reaches its climax, may people be blessed in him, all nations call him blessed (ESV), which is the promise once made to Abraham (Genesis 12:3; 22:18). How is that promise fulfilled in Christ (compare Galatians 3:8, 16), and what does it mean for the church’s mission to all nations?
Distant kings bring gifts and bow down to the King (vv. 10–11), which the church has long heard echoed in the Magi who brought gold to the infant Christ (Matthew 2). What does it mean that the first to fulfill this verse were Gentiles from far away?
Verse 14 says of the needy, precious is their blood in his sight (ESV), and the King would one day shed His own precious blood for them (1 Peter 1:19). How does the reign of this King differ from every worldly kingdom in what it counts precious?

Looking Ahead

With the royal psalms behind us, we turn into one of the largest rooms in the whole prayer book: the room of the laments, where a third of the Psalter cries out of trouble. We saw its shape back in the genre map: address, complaint, petition, and then, in most of them, the turn from the dark to trust. The next session takes up the clearest, simplest example of that shape in the whole Psalter, a lament short enough to hold in one hand: Psalm 13.

It opens with the rawest words a believer ever prays, How long, LORD, will you continue to ignore me? How long will you pay no attention to me? (Psalm 13:1), the cry of a soul that feels abandoned by God and is honest enough to say so to His face. And a few short verses later it has turned all the way around: But I trust in your faithfulness. May I rejoice because of your deliverance! (v. 5). How a believer travels from how long to I trust in the space of one short prayer: that is the lesson of the lament, and we will learn it from Psalm 13. After the throne room, we sit down in the place where most honest praying is actually done: in the dark, holding on.

Read Psalm 13 in full before the next session (it is only six verses) and read it twice. Mark where the psalm turns from complaint to trust, and notice how few words it takes to get there.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, true Son of David and greater than Solomon, we praise You for the kingdom that has no end, a reign gentle as rain, reaching to the ends of the earth, in which all nations are blessed. We confess that we came to You as the helpless come, the poor and the weak and those who had no other helper, with nothing to offer but our need. And You delivered us when we called; You had pity on us; You counted our blood precious and redeemed us with Your own.
Reign over us as the rain reigns over the dry field, and make us flourish. Crush the oppressors that war against us (our sin, the devil, and death itself) and free us to serve You gladly. Carry Your gospel from sea to sea, that all nations may be blessed in You and call You blessed, and make us willing couriers of that blessing to the people You set around us. And hasten the day when the whole earth is filled with Your glory and every knee bows to the King who reigns forever. For You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.