Our commission is to preach the gospel of salvation by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ throughout the whole world and leave the conquest of the world to Jesus. This is because he alone is king. Indeed he is the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev. 19:16). He is in complete control of all things. He will reign in power. All nations will come to him, and before him every knee will bow, “in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10, 11).
We come, then, to the final stanza, the epilogue, in which the kingdoms of the earth are called upon to praise God (vv. 32-35): “Sing to God, O kingdoms of the earth, sing praise to the Lord, to him who rides the ancient skies above, who thunders with mighty voice. Proclaim the power of God, whose majesty is over Israel, whose power is in the skies. You are awesome, O God, in your sanctuary, the God of Israel gives power and strength to his people.”
The eighth stanza of Psalm 68 (vv. 24-27) describes a procession that is making its way up the steep rising pathways to Jerusalem and its sanctuary. If the psalm was written on the occasion of David's bringing the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, then it is a fuller description of what is recorded less poetically in 2 Samuel 6:5; 1 Chronicles 13:8 and 15:16-28. The first passage says, "David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating with all their might before the LORD, with songs and with harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums and cymbals.”
A major shift in Psalm 68 occurs at verse 19, which is why I divided the study for last week and this week between verses 18 and 19. The shift is marked by the word "daily.” Up to this point the psalm has looked back to what God has done for Israel in the past, in history. At this point it begins to praise God for being the same in the present as he has been in the past, and that basic shift causes the writer to look ahead in time to what God will yet do.
It is true that much of what follows can be explained well by the reign of God in Zion in David's time. But the psalm also looks beyond David's time to a day of future blessing, and that certainly has to do with the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.
