“May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble; may the name of the God of Jacob defend you”… —Psalm 20:1
My last blog post that I posted on this blog in June was titled, “Psalm 19.” I’d like to follow that up with Psalm 20. It’s a short psalm–9 verses–and it opens with a blessing. Here is Psalm 20 in NKJV:
May the Lord answer you
in the day of trouble;
May the name of the God of Jacob defend you;
May He send you help from the sanctuary,
And strengthen you out of Zion;
May He remember all your offerings,
And accept your burnt sacrifice.
–Selah
May He grant you
according to your heart’s desire,
And fulfill all your purpose.
We will rejoice in your salvation,
And in the name of our God
We will set up our banners!
May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.
Now I know that the Lord saves His anointed;
He will answer him from His holy heaven
With the saving strength of His right hand.
Some trust in chariots,
And some in horses;
But we will remember
The name of the Lord our God.
They have bowed down and fallen;
But we have risen and stand upright.
Save, Lord!
May the King answer us
When we call.
Bibleref.com provides a short description of the context for this psalm:
Psalm 20 features two main parts, as both the assembled people and King David pray for victory in an impending battle.
First, the people pray that God would bless the king during the fight: “the day of trouble.” They pray that God would provide support for David, both spiritually—“from the sanctuary”—and militarily—“from Zion.” Zion is another name for the city of Jerusalem. Their prayer is that David’s pleas for victory would be granted. The people look forward to celebrating the victory God brings through their king (Psalm 20:1–5).
Next, David prays to describe his confidence in God. He refers to the “might of [God’s] right hand,” implying the full power of the Lord. This is contrasted with the only power available to worldly kingdoms: horses and chariots, common symbols of war. By comparison, David and the people of Israel are trusting in something far more potent, and reliable, than human armies (Psalm 20:6–8).
The psalm ends in the same way it began: with a sincere prayer from the people to give David victory in his battle (Psalm 20:9). (Quote source here.)
I’ll end this brief reflection on Psalm 20 with two verses from Psalm 37:3-4: Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord…
And He shall give you . . .
The desires . . .
Of your heart . . . .
YouTube Video: “Help Is On The Way” by TobyMac:
Photo credit here
Sara's Reflections 
Hi Sara, I appreciate your passion for the subject and you linking to my post, I’m glad you found it helpful! However since you’ve copied and pasted almost the entire post from Be Stirred, Not Shaken, you may not be aware that it will penalize our site and prevent other people from seeing our content. I tried reaching out to you on Twitter but haven’t been able to reach you and you don’t have a Contact page. Please reach out to me ASAP because I really don’t want to have to report your site for plagiarizing content so want to resolve this much more easily and simply. Thank you!
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Hi Jessica. Thanks for sending me your comments. I did check my Twitter account but found no message from you. As you can see from the stats on my blog, I get very little traffic. The blog is mainly a creative outlet for me and I make no money off of it. It is strictly a personal blog. I certainly have no desire to take away any traffic from your site (I did have links to your site/article on the blog post), so I have decided to delete your article off of this blog post, and if you check you will see that it is no longer on the post. I do very much appreciate what you had to say about Psalm 20:4 and I was inspired by it. Sincere regards, Sara
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Hi Sara! Thank you for the response, and so weird on the Twitter message piece! I couldn’t figure out how else to get in touch. I’m so glad you enjoyed the thoughts from our study and definitely believe the copying wasn’t an intentional thing, just one of those weird Google rules. Please feel free to link to the post and including a paragraph or two in your post as excerpt/quote with attribution is completely fine–we just want to avoid having the entire or most of the post being republished elsewhere as we get penalized and then other people can’t find it. Thank you again and I enjoyed reading a few of your different posts!
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