Yahweh's Everlasting Kingdom (Psalm 145:10-13)

Show Notes

Jim Osman returns to Psalm 145, focusing on verses 10 through 13, which describe the eternal, everlasting, and infinite kingdom of God. He emphasizes that all creation testifies to God's greatness and goodness, but the saints have even greater reason to praise him because of his grace and redemption. Osman highlights the three characteristics of the kingdom: the pomp of the kingdom, the power of the kingdom, and the perpetuity of the kingdom. He points out that the three verses describing the kingdom begin with letters that, when reversed, spell out 'king.' Osman concludes by encouraging listeners to vote in a biblical way, reflecting the kingdom's characteristics of power, glory, and perpetuity, and to pass on the greatness of this king to future generations.

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Jim Osman

Pastor-Teacher, Kootenai Community Church

What is Kootenai Church Morning Worship?

The expository preaching ministry of Kootenai Community Church by Pastors/Elders Jim Osman, Jess Whetsel, Dave Rich, and Cornel Rasor. This podcast feed contains the weekly sermons preached from the pulpit on Sunday mornings at Kootenai Church.

The Elders/Teachers of Kootenai Church exposit verse-by-verse through whole books of the Bible. These sermons can be found within their own podcast series by visiting the KCC Audio Archive.

And please turn your Bibles again to Psalm 145. We're going to read together verses 10 through 13, and then we'll open in prayer before we begin our study. Psalm 145, beginning at verse 10. All your works, O Yahweh, shall give thanks to you, and your holy ones shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and talk of your might to make known to the sons of men his mighty deeds and the glory of the majesty of his kingdom. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures from generation to every generation. Let's bow our heads. Our great God, we pray that you would open our eyes and our hearts, our minds and our souls to your word, that you would grant to us understanding, that you would comfort us, that you would encourage us, that you would convict us, that you would strengthen us. And as we consider together the expanse of your kingdom, your rule, your majesty, and your reign, may our hearts be united together in adoration and trust and confidence in you, our great God and our King. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. Well, as I mentioned earlier, it is election season. It's actually always election season because on Wednesday they're going to start the next election season. So we just have in this country a perpetual election season, always worried about the next election. And if you doom scroll through the news and through social media enough, then you will find yourself in the midst of great anxiety and stress and distress and frustration and worry and fear and apprehension and maybe apathy. And just a half hour or so of doom scrolling on your phone is enough to almost make you throw up your hands and wish that you hadn't even opened the app to begin with and maybe even wish that you didn't know of any news headlines, let alone all of the doom and gloom headlines that you just spent the last 30 minutes looking at. And we are told every election season, every election, that this is the most important election of our lifetime. I've been hearing that as long as I have been voting. And you can tell by the hints of gray in my beard that I've been voting for a little while now, since at least 1990. But every election is the most important election of our lifetime. And this statement is intended, I think, to drive voter turnout, to always get the base for either party to go out and to sort of lay upon our shoulders this expectation and this burden that of all the things that we could be doing this next week, the election is the most significant thing that we have ever done. We are supposed to believe that every single election that we have ever voted in is not as important as the one coming up on Tuesday. Do you honestly believe that? Do they honestly expect us to believe that? Now, friends, I am in no way intending to downplay the importance of our responsibility. We get to vote in this country. That is a fantastic privilege that has been afforded to only a small margin of all of the human beings who have walked the face of this planet. We are in the minority that we actually have some say in who takes the levers of power at every level of our government. And we should vote. And further, you know me, you know that I believe that we should bring a biblical worldview in economics, in property, in theology, of freedom, of life, of liberty, all of that into the voting booth with us when we vote. And we should vote not as citizens who are hoping to get something from the treasury, but as those who represent an eternal kingdom, hoping to, in some way, do good to our fellow man by casting our vote in such a way as to influence what would be best for everyone according to what scripture says. And there are important things that are happening. And I've mentioned one of them. Proposition one in the state of Idaho that I mentioned spent a whole sermon on the life issue several weeks ago. We will decide whether unborn human beings in this state will be afforded the same right to life and will be valued the same as those who have been born, or if in the state of Idaho we will make the same disastrous, immoral decision that so many in the previous eras of human history have made, and that is to deprive legitimate human image bearers of life or liberty based upon some characteristic they have, whether that is their size, their level of development, their environment, or their degree of dependency. That is on the ballot on Tuesday. So these are big issues. And as Christians, we should speak to them and we should defend life, liberty, and property because these are not just cultural issues. They're not political issues. They're not propositional issues. They are moral, ethical, theological, and biblical issues that we do.

Step into the ballot box in order to cast our vote in a biblical way on all of those things. So on Tuesday, millions of your fellow citizens whom you would not trust to watch your goldfish over the weekend will have some way in on the future of Western civilization. And that can be a cause of great angst for us. And so by God's providence, we are here in Psalm 145 picking up our study right where we left off. But here we are talking about the eternal, everlasting, and infinite kingdom of our God. And I think that by God's good providence, I didn't plan it this way. I took the last several weeks off, sort of my vacation at the end of the year. I didn't plan this, but a couple weeks ago, I picked up the passage to start looking at it again to prepare for today. And I realized how appropriate it is that we should be in this text on this Sunday right before an election. In this psalm of David's praise, Psalm 145, we are reminded that Yahweh is a great king, and he rules over all. Yahweh is a great king, and he rules over all. That is the central idea of Psalm 145. A little bit of a review is necessary, but it's been a couple of weeks since we are in Psalm 145. So I would just remind you that the psalm kind of falls into two halves. We looked at the first half before we took a little break from Psalm 145 in the last few weeks. The first half expresses David's personal commitment to praise his God. In verses 1 and 2, he describes his commitment to praise. He describes his commitment to bless his king, his God. Verses 1, every day I will bless you. Verse 2, I will praise your name forever and ever. It is very personal. It's very individual. Then in the following verses, verses 3 through verse 9, David gives two, primarily two reasons for praising Yahweh. First in verses 3 through 6, his greatness. And then in verses 7 through 9, his goodness. And it's a very personal description of Yahweh's greatness and his goodness. But then beginning in verse 10, we turn a little bit of a corner. And here the focus is less personal and more universal. Verse 3 describes Yahweh's greatness as being unsearchable. And verse 7, his goodness as being abundant. So those two reasons are the reasons for David's praise. But then in verse 10, you'll notice that it goes from, I will bless your name to all your holy ones will bless your name, and all your works shall praise your name. So now it becomes universal in its scope. But David is not changing subjects. In fact, he gives categorically the exact two reasons for praising Yahweh, for everything to praise him. In verse 10 through verse 13, his greatness is described, but here in terms of his kingdom, his rule, his majesty, that is his greatness. And then in verses 14 through verse 20, his goodness is described. And there, in terms of his provision and the nature of his good rule over all of his creation, including verse 20, his promise that he will destroy the wicked. That is an expression of his goodness. So verses 10 through 13 is our passage for today. Here, the greatness of Yahweh is expressed in terms of his kingdom. His kingdom, expressed in terms of his reign. And then in verses 14 through 20, his goodness is described in terms of how he treats and deals with all of those who are inside of his kingdom. We'll notice today in verse 10, first David's call for universal praise. And then we'll look at a description of his kingdom in verses 11 through 13. And we'll get through all four of these verses today. First, his call for universal praise. Read verse 10 with me again. All your works, O Yahweh, shall give thanks to you, and your holy ones shall bless you. It is all his works and all of his holy ones who praise and bless the name of our God. And the expansiveness of this kind of keys off of the description in verse 9 that Yahweh is good to all and his compassions are over all his works. So in verse 9, it begins to move from the personal to the universal, from the individual to the expanse of all of his works. And then in verse 10, David says, all your works, O Yahweh, shall give thanks to you. All of his works, by the way, describes all of creation, and all of creation has reason to give praise to God because all of creation owes its existence and its sustenance to the God who spoke it into being and continues to uphold it by the word of his power. So all creation praises him. He sustains it. He keeps it in existence. He moves it towards its appointed goal. And this unsearchable greatness of our God is made known through what he has made. So that as we look out upon the expanse of all of his works, we can only say, great is Yahweh and greatly to be praised. At every level,

Whether the small, the medium-sized, or the great, all of creation declares his greatness and his goodness. It is an incomplete picture of God that we get through the works that he has made. It is marred by sin, but it nonetheless testifies of his greatness. That the heavens are declaring the glory of God and the expanse is declaring the work of his hands. Romans 1 Paul says that that revelation of God is enough to hold sinful men accountable for their sin, since his invisible attributes, including his eternal power and Godhead, his divine nature, have been clearly seen through the things that have been made, so that they are without excuse. So all creation testifies to the greatness of our God. From the inner workings of a single cell, which is marvelous to behold, to the knitting together of a baby in the womb of its mother, to the expanse of this world and all of the delights that we get to enjoy as we look upon the creation that God has placed us in, and all the way to the heavens themselves, the stars, and the infinitude of the galaxies and the universe around us. It all testifies to his greatness. And he rules over it all. Not just this planet, not just our county, not just our solar system, but all of it is under his control. Let the heavens be glad and let the earth rejoice. This is Psalm 96. Let the sea roar as well as all its fullness. Let the field exult and all that is in it. Let all the trees of the forest will sing for joy before Yahweh, for he is coming. He is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and all the peoples in his faithfulness. All of his works bear testimony to his power, his wisdom, his goodness, his mercy, and his glory. And if all of creation bears witness to that, listen to me, how much more you, his saints? How much more us? How much more us, the works of his grace? We who have known grace. He says in verse 10, your holy ones shall bless you. We have known his grace, and we have even greater reason to praise him than the trees, the stars, the moon, the sun, the waves, the mountains. We have even greater reason to bless his name. For he has not dealt with us according to our sinfulness, but instead he has laid all of our sin upon a substitute, and he has dealt with us, his holy ones, as if we had lived a righteous life because our substitute, the Lord Jesus Christ, lived that righteous life in our stead. So you and I have even greater reason to praise him, for he has forgiven us of our transgressions, and he has wiped away our iniquity, and he has given us his righteousness, and he has adopted us as his children, and he has promised us the kingdom that is to come. He who has not spared his own son, but has given him up for us all, he will not withhold from us any good thing. But our king is one who has purchased our very redemption by his own blood, by his own life and death on the cross and his resurrection three days later. So how much more ought we, his holy ones, to praise his great name? Matthew Henry said, Of all God's works, his saints, we who are the workmanship of his grace, the first fruits of his creatures, have the most reason to bless him. Notice that in verse 10, he speaks of giving thanks or praise, depending on your translation in the first half of that verse, to being to blessing in the last half of that verse. There is a difference between praising and blessing. This word that is translated blessed, it's the same word in verse 1, means to bow down or to kneel down, but it carries with it the idea of having a personal affection toward the one before whom you are bowing. So if you were to bow down before a conquering king of another nation who came in and destroyed your village and your capital city and made you his slave or his subject, you might bow down to him, but it would not be, you would not use this word blessed to describe that because this word has the idea of bowing down in personal adoration and affection for the one to whom you bow. So it is more than just to speak highly of God, but in fact it is to wish him good, to desire his blessedness. It means it has the idea of desiring that he be even more blessed than he is, if such a thing were possible. And this is something that the creation cannot do. The stars, the moon, the sun, the waves, the trees, the birds, the animals, they cannot do that. They have neither the intellect nor the affections nor the understanding to love God. Spurgeon said this, and this is really good. Listen, Spurgeon said, but to observe neither the flower nor the sea nor the bird praises with intent to praise. To them, it is no exercise of intellect, for they do not know God and cannot understand his worthiness, nor do they even know that they are praising him. They exhibit his skill and his goodness and so forth. And in

So doing, they do much, but we must learn to do more. When you and I praise God, there is an element of will, of intelligence, of desire, of intent. And in the saints of God, there is another element, namely to love him, of reverent gratitude towards him. And this turns the praise into blessing. You see, it is one thing to praise. It is another thing to bless. Praising and blessing are two different ideas. There is a difference between giving praise to somebody because you can praise somebody that you do not know. I can describe to you the glorious abilities of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, but I do not know these men, and my love for them pales in comparison to my love even for any one of you, as much as I love them. But it is another thing to bless somebody because to bless them implies that you know them, that you have affection for them, and that you love them in a personal way. Spurgeon said you may have high praise and compliments for a skilled man. Then he goes on to say this. A man is an, he gives this illustration, a man is an eminent painter, and you exclaim, his pencil is instinct with life. Still, the man is no friend of yours. You pronounce no blessings on his name. It may be that your feeling towards him is that of deep regret that such abilities should be united with so ill a character. A certain person is exceedingly skillful in his profession, but he treats you unjustly, and therefore, though you often praise him for his extraordinary performances, you cannot bless him, for you have no cause to do so. I am afraid that there might be such a feeling as that of admiration of God for his great skill, his wonder, his power, his extraordinary justness, and yet no warmth of love in the heart towards him. But in the saints, the praise is sweetened with love and is full of blessing. Then Spurgeon goes on to say this. Some works praise him by their being, other works by their well-being, some by their mere existence, and others by their hearty volition. These holy ones come nearer and render sweeter adoration. men have been known to praise those whom they hated, As we may admire the prowess of a warrior who is our foe, but saints lovingly praise and therefore are said to bless. They wish well to God. They would make him more blessed if such a thing were possible. They desire blessings upon his cause and his children and invoke success upon his work and warfare, close quote. That's what it means to bless. Not just to say what is true about God, but to speak those things that are true about God out of a heart of love and adoration and affection. And friends, this is something that all of creation cannot do, but you can. You individually can. You can accomplish more through your praise and your blessing of Yahweh for his goodness and his reign than all of creation can, even though it testifies day after day, night after night of his greatness. Because we can speak of his greatness and desire blessedness upon him because he is great and because he is good. So it is our duty to praise. It is our joy to praise. We have adequate reason to praise, for we are redeemed. We share in his holiness. We have been declared righteous and accepted by him, and he is lavished upon his infinite goodness and greatness. And so we are called to praise. And in doing so, we praise the greatness of our king, both his rule and his reign in his kingdom. So that is the call to praise. Now I want you to look at the description of this universal kingdom in verses 11 through 13. Verse 11, they shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and talk of your might to make known to the sons of men his mighty deeds and the glory of the majesty of his kingdom. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and your dominion endures from generation to generation. Now before we look at the details of that, I want to point out something that is interesting that you, that I doubt is lying there on the surface of the text for you to notice, because I didn't notice this until it was pointed out in a commentary. I mentioned at the beginning of our study of Psalm 145, that this is an acrostic psalm, which if you have the LSB, you will notice that it has Elephant Bet, and it goes through the Hebrew alphabet as each successive verse begins with the next letter or a sequential letter in the Hebrew alphabet from the beginning of the alphabet to the end. Well, verse 11 begins with the Hebrew letter Kaf. Verse 12 begins with the Hebrew letter Lamed. And verse 13 begins with the Hebrew letter Mem, which is K, L, and M. And you'll notice that the word kingdom appears in each one of those verses. Notice that? K-L-M. What you may not know, and I didn't know, is that M-L-K, the reverse, melech, is the Hebrew word for king.

The kingdom of God is at the very center of this psalm. And the three verses that describe this kingdom begin with letters that, when reversed, spell out the word king. What do we make of that? I don't know. It's interesting. Is it coincidental? Did David intend that? We don't know if David intended that or not, but it sure is a remarkable observation, is it not? That of all the three verses, it's the three verses that have the three letters for the word king in it. And we note in these verses three characteristics that David highlights here, and I just give them to you simply. They are the pomp of the kingdom, the power of the kingdom, and the perpetuity of the kingdom. And if you think that sounds too clever for me, it is. I got that from Matthew Henry. The pomp of the kingdom. That word pomp, by the way, is kind of an old English word. It doesn't carry the same meaning in our day as it did back then, but it does describe the glory and the majesty of the kingdom. You'll notice in verse 11 that they, that is the sons of men, the holy ones, shall speak of the glory of your kingdom. Notice in verse 12, the reference to the glory of the majesty. Here, David is piling on these superlative descriptions of God's majesty, his glory, and his greatness. The word pomp is an older word that suggests sort of, in our day, it suggests an unnecessary, showy, ostentatious, shallow, superficial display without any real substance. Like we would say, there's just a lot of pomp and circumstance around that or pomp and show. And by that, we mean there's nothing of real substance there. It's just all a superficial show of pompousness. We call somebody pompous, meaning there's nothing real substantive there. There's just a superficial show. But pomp is a good word to describe what David has in mind here with glory and with majesty. God's eternal universal kingdom is marked by glory and majesty because he is its king. Our king gives the kingdom its character. Now this is the opposite of worldly kingdoms. I want you to imagine for a moment that you were made the king over some ancient empire like Babylon or Egypt or Persia or Greece or some fallen empire like that. You were made the king over that empire. The empire itself would have a degree of glory and majesty and power and prestige and aura that when you ascend the throne and take over that kingdom, the kingdom would be bestowing upon you a measure of its glory and its majesty. That's how earthly kingdoms work. The president of the United States becomes the president of the United States, and by virtue of that office, the country itself and all that it means and all that it has been and all that it has stood for sort of lends its credibility and its pomp and circumstance to that king. But with our king and his eternal kingdom, it is the exact opposite. God's kingdom is a kingdom of glory and majesty and splendor and greatness because its king is glorious and majestic and splendorous, if that's a word, and infinite. In other words, our king gives the kingdom its glory. And because he rules it, it is that kind of a kingdom. Our God has never stepped into his role. He has never received his throne from some previous potentate. He has never been elected to it. He has always possessed it. He has always ruled over all that is, all that was, and all that ever will be. Notice, second, the power of the kingdom. Verse 11 speaks of his might. Verse 12, his mighty deeds. Psalm 145, verse 5 says, or verse 4, it says, one generation shall laud your works to another and shall declare your mighty deeds. Verse 6 of this psalm speaks of God's fearsome acts, the strength of his fearsome acts and his greatness. This is a mighty kingdom that is being described here because its king is a mighty king. Unsearchable greatness, abundant goodness. His power is indescribable. No kingdom on earth compares to it. And all the kingdoms of the earth piled one upon another upon another are just dust upon the scales of history. And God does with them as he pleases. He does not use power like we do or like the kings of the earth do. We spend energy. We deplete our resources. We expend effort. But God does. And he expends no energy in doing it. He exhausts no power. In the kingdoms of this world, we evaluate them according to their power. We think of the great kingdoms of history. We rate them in terms of their strength, their military might, their ability to use their strength or their power to impose their will upon other nations. So think of Rome, Babylon, again, Greece, Persia. These were military powers of their time, and their kings were considered.

Gods by the people. They were considered great kingdoms because of their great power and their great ability to use that power to advance their own purposes, even across the wishes and desires of other kingdoms and other nations. So we evaluate them in terms of their power. Well, how do you evaluate a kingdom whose king is infinite in power? How do you rate a kingdom whose king speaks worlds into existence and upholds all things that exist by the word of his power and holds together everything to accomplish all of his good pleasure and all of his will. Even the greatest kingdoms of this world who reigned over the even the greatest kings of this world who reigned over the greatest kingdoms of this world could never accomplish all that they desired to do. But our king is able to do whatever he pleases. Psalm 135, 136, verse 5, sorry, 135, verse 6. Whatever Yahweh pleases, he does in heaven and on earth and in the sea and in all the deeps. And Psalm 115, 3 says, our God is in the heavens and he does whatever he pleases. That is his power. It is a kingdom of pomp, glory, and majesty. It is a kingdom of power, it's might. And third, it is a kingdom of perpetuity. It always exists. Verse 13, your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures from generation to generation. Notice that verses 10, 11, and 12 go from describing this kingdom in third-person pronouns to now it has become very personal for David. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and your dominion endures from generation to generation. Literally, the word kingdom here could be translated kingdom of ages. An everlasting kingdom is a kingdom of ages. This universal kingdom is an eternal and everlasting kingdom, and that is the sphere over which God rules. And because he is everlasting and his days do not come to an end, he has no beginning and he will have no end. Therefore, his rule, his dominion, and his reign and the kingdom over which he sits and reigns itself has no beginning and itself will have no end. Psalm 93 verses 1 and 2, Yahweh reigns. He is clothed with majesty. Yahweh has clothed and girded himself with strength. Indeed, the world is established. It will not be shaken. Your throne is established from of old. You are from everlasting. Psalm 146, verse 10, Yahweh will reign forever, your God, O Zion, from generation to generation. 1 Timothy 1:17 describes God as the king of the ages. And the language here in verse 13 is similar to what we find in the book of Daniel. Daniel chapter 4, verse 3: How great are his signs and how strong are his wonders? His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and his dominion is from generation to generation. And that theme appears repeatedly in the book of Daniel, which traces the history of the nations prior to Daniel's time and after Daniel's time, all the way up and through the coming of the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, listen to Nebuchadnezzar's conclusion, his confession. Nebuchadnezzar learned this lesson the hard way. He said, I lifted up my eyes toward heaven and my knowledge returned to me and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored him who lives forever. For his dominion is an everlasting dominion and his kingdom endures from generation to generation. In Daniel chapter 7, because Yahweh's dominion is everlasting and because his kingdom endures from generation to generation, Daniel chapter 7 foretells of a time when Yahweh, the ancient of days, will give to the Son of Man an everlasting and eternal kingdom. To him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that all the peoples, nations, and men of every tongue might serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not be taken away, and his kingdom is one which will not be destroyed. And that messianic kingdom will be an expression of this universal kingdom that is described here. From generation to generation, his kingdom endures forever. And this, by the way, is why we speak to future generations about this king. Remember in verse 4 what we talked about, one generation shall laud your works to the next? We want to pass on to the next generation the greatness of this king. Because my greatest desire in all of life is that my children, that my grandchildren, that my great-grandchildren, that my great-great-grandchildren, to the hundredth generation, if the Lord should tarry, would be subjects to this king. Because he is the best king. And therefore we laud his greatness to the next generation, passing on what it means to be a subject of this king. Our God has in every generation those who are faithful to him. Nebuchadnezzar had subjects in this world, but none of them are alive today to sing his praise. And yet our God has in every generation from the beginning until today and until the arrival of this king.

For his second coming, our God has in every generation people who gladly bless him and wish him well. And to be clear, this kingdom that's described here in verses 11 through 13 is not the mediatorial kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not an earthly kingdom that is ruled over by a person. So it is not the kingdom of David that's being described here. It's not the millennium of Revelation 20 that is being described here. This is God's universal kingdom. This kingdom includes all the things that are under his control. That is the citizens of this county and of this state. It is also the hydrogen molecules of the Andromeda Galaxy. It is kings, it is peasants, it is slaves, it is rulers, it's the weather, it's natural disasters, it's all of the physical elements, it's everything that works toward the accomplishment of his purposes. It's holy angels and fallen angels, it's everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist. That is all part of his universal kingdom. And he rules over it all. Psalm 103, verse 19: Yahweh has established his throne in the heavens and his kingdom rules over all. 1 Chronicles 29, David said, Yours, O Yahweh, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory, the majesty. Indeed, everything that is in the heavens and earth. Yours is the kingdom, O Yahweh, and you exalt yourself as head over all. And to be clear, even right now, the rule of this universal kingdom has been committed and is committed to the second person of the Godhead, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is seated at the Father's right hand even right now, having made purification for sins. He who upholds all things by the word of his power sits at his father's right hand. He has taken the throne of his father. He has not taken David's throne. He has not taken an earthly throne, but he sits in heaven right now and he rules all of creation. This is what Hebrews 1:3 says: that he upholds all things by the word of his power. By just speaking his word, by a matter of his will, he holds everything that exists together and he is carrying it all to its appointed end. Perfectly so, sovereignly so, and powerfully so. He has dominion over all things. And there is no corner of the universe that he does not exercise absolute control and power over. Spurgeon said, the Lord's kingdom is without beginning, without break, without bound, and without end. He never abdicates his throne. Neither does he call in a second to share his empire. None can overthrow his power or break away from his rule. Neither this age nor the age to come, nor ages of ages shall cause his sovereignty to fail. And herein is rest for our faith. Men come and go like shadows on the wall, but God reigneth eternally. And this is the rest for your heart, beloved. This is what we rest in. On Tuesday, hopefully, you will go into a voting booth and you will look at a ballot and you will see a bunch of names on that ballot. Be reminded that every name on that ballot will pass away and someday their names will be forgotten. Every last one of them. And every office represented on that ballot will pass away and be no more. But our God rules eternally. He reigns everlastingly. From generation to generation, he accomplishes all his good pleasure. The kings of this world are shaken and they will fall. They come and they go. Nations rise and fall. Elections happen. God sets up kings. He removes kings. He rules in the heavens and sets over the kingdoms of this world the lowliest of men. Daniel says that. His purposes are unchanged. His power is unchallenged. And he will do all that he pleases. And he will accomplish all that concerns you. And he will fulfill his every promise to you. And no purpose of his can be thwarted. And as Daniel said, there is nobody who can say to him, What have you done? or direct his hand. No purpose of his can be thwarted, even by wicked men, by wicked nations. And if all the nations should gather together and rage against him, and if all the nations should war against God's anointed, his answer remains the same: I have installed my king upon Zion, my holy hill, and he will reign and he will rule. And all the nations will eventually serve the Lord Jesus Christ. Currently, God has seen fit to tolerate the presence of sin and evil and wicked men. And though it does not please him to destroy all the evil works of sinners just yet, and though it does not please him to judge the wicked just yet, he will. Look at verse 20 of this psalm.

forget it. Yahweh keeps all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy. Let us remember that. Let us rest in that. And let us be warned by that. And let us remember what our king has done. Our king, who is mighty, majestic, sovereign, and glorious, condescended and took upon himself human flesh. He lived in our world. He died in our world. And he rose again in our world, humbled to the grave, in order to purchase the redemption of an innumerable multitude of people who will sing his praise and bless his holy name forever and ever. To make us sons in his kingdom. We who are blood-bought heirs to the kingdom. Remember, Jesus said, it pleases the Father to give you the kingdom. You will enter that kingdom, the expression of that. He who rules from heaven now will reign on this earth for a thousand years, and he will reign into the new creation in the new heavens and the new earth. He will do all of that because he is the immortal, everlasting potentate, the king of the ages. That very king came to give his life in our place so that we may have eternal life to purchase our redemption at the cost of his own life, his own blood, and his own death. He is, by that one sacrifice for sin, able to purchase the redemption of an untold multitude of people who will repent and place their faith in him.