Psalm 72:12-14 “For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help. He will take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from death. He will rescue them from oppression and violence, for precious is their blood in his sight.”

Our King, Solomon says, delivers the needy– those who have no one to help. If that doesn’t lead us to give up on our self-made plans of salvation, we need to think about these words some more. Preacher Charles Spurgeon once commented, “The proverb says, ‘God helps those that help themselves,’ but it is yet more true that Jesus helps those who cannot help themselves, nor find help in others. All helpless ones are under the especial care of Zion’s compassionate King.”

Evangelist Watchman Nee illustrates this another way. He tells the story of standing on a dock with a friend who was a strong swimmer. They were watching a man swimming a long way from shore, when this man got into trouble. Pretty soon the man was going under, coming up gasping for air, and crying for help. “Aren’t you going to help him?” Nee asked his friend. “Not yet,” his friend replied. Only after the swimmer became unconscious and stopped struggling did Nee’s friend rescue him. When Nee asked him why he waited so long to rescue the man, his friend replied, “If I would have gone out to him immediately, he would have panicked and pulled me down with him. I had to wait until he stopped kicking. Then I could save him.”

We don’t pose any danger to our King. But only after we have stopped kicking, stopped trying to save ourselves, does Jesus step in and rescue his people. Spiritually, at least, we are only struggling against him when we are trying to do it ourselves. Our King isn’t looking for our help when it comes to delivering  us. He is looking to give us his.

Why does the King take notice of such helpless people and deliver them? “…for precious is their blood in his sight.” There are some things that you or I may consider precious because they are valuable all by themselves. A rare antique or a piece of fine jewelry have value no matter where you take them. The value is in the thing itself.

The dried corsage you saved from your high school prom, or the little clay imprint your child made of his hands in kindergarten, probably isn’t going to get you much at the pawn shop. They may be precious to us because of a value we invest in them. They are precious because of their associations and the memories they give, but their value is given to them by us.

How often doesn’t Scripture remind us that we are nothing but creatively arranged particles of dust. “For dust you are and to dust you shall return.” We have even given our God a daily dose of bad memories by our sins. But the King has given us value by giving us the spark of life. He has given us value by redeeming with his own life. He has loved us because he has chosen to love us, and he considers us precious in his sight.

Our need is just another opportunity to receive his love.

Psalm 72:4-7 “He will defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; he will crush the oppressor. He will endure as long as the sun, as long as the moon, through all generations. He will be like rain falling on a mown field, like showers watering the earth. In his days the righteous will flourish; prosperity will abound till the moon is no more. ”

Because it is all too easy for us to feel sorry for ourselves, to blame others for problems of our own making, we need to be careful not to be too quick to declare ourselves the victims .

But honesty, and Scripture, demands that we recognize that sometimes God’s people are the victims. People do wrongfully take advantage of us. We are the targets of unjust slanders and accusations. It isn’t wrong to recognize this and ask God to give us justice. We shouldn’t take matters into our own hands. God tells us not to seek our own vengeance. But the enemies of Christ’s people are the enemies of Christ himself. “He will defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; he will crush the oppressor.” If the matter isn’t resolved now, we can be sure that we will be vindicated on the Last Day. There are no ifs or maybes here. Our King will see to it.

Our King’s justice would do us no good if we were to find ourselves outside of his jurisdiction, however, or if his reign were to end. Solomon was writing 3000 years ago on the other side of the planet. But that’s not a problem for us. Our King is unlimited by time or space. “He will endure as long as the sun, as long as the moon, through all generations. He will be like rain falling on a mown field, like showers watering the earth. In his days the righteous will flourish; prosperity will abound till the moon is no more.”

Solomon points us to the moon and the sun to help us get our arms around the truth that Jesus is not limited by time. The scene on the ground is changing around us all the time. Just think of the changes the place where you are sitting right now has gone through in the last hundred years. Around the world the forces of nature and the ingenuity of man are constantly changing the landscape.

But the heavenly bodies stay the same. Look up at the sun sometime later today. Step outside your door after it is dark, and look up at the moon and the stars. While the scene around your yard has changed, what you see in the sky looks the same as it did for an American Indian looking up at the sky from that spot 1000 years ago, or for Solomon looking up at the sky at night 2000 years before that. Even the sun and the moon don’t last forever, but they are the closest things to never changing and never ending we can see with our eyes.

Jesus’ reign as King is even more consistent and more enduring. What he considered good or evil in Solomon’s day is no different for us. More important, he loves us no less than he loved Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, John, the church fathers, or our own grandparents. His control of world events, or the details of our personal lives, has not slipped even a little from creation until now. As the author of Hebrews says so succinctly: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

So too, his justice is unlimited by time or space.

Psalm 72:1-2 “Endow the king with your justice, O God, the royal son with your righteousness. He will judge your people in righteousness, your afflicted ones with justice.”

How does the justice and righteousness of this King make you feel? Does it make you want to go rushing to him for help? Or does it make you want to shy away from him instead? We have reason to fear his justice when we realize that he makes his judgments based on absolute, and not relative, standards. What do I mean by that? By nature, we are lawbreakers at heart. Since we break the law, we don’t want to be judged by whether or not we have kept the law, but by how we compare to everyone else.

When parents confront their children for fighting, how often doesn’t one of them protest, “But he started it.” In other words, don’t judge me for whether or not I am pounding on my brother. Judge me for having the restraint and good sense to let my sibling take the first swing. That’s a relative standard. I heard a talk radio host describing his first appearance before a judge for speeding. He protested that he wasn’t the only one driving over the speed limit. Other cars had even been passing him. Relative to the other drivers, he thought he was doing pretty well. The judge told him, “When you look way over in the right lane, and you see the little Honda putting along at 55 m.p.h., that will be me going the speed limit.” That judge insisted on an absolute, not a relative, standard of right and wrong for handing down justice.

So it is that when I stand before our Lord, the King, for judgment, it is just he and I. He isn’t interested in how we compare to everyone else. He has been endowed with justice. “He will judge your people in righteousness.” He has an absolute standard, a standard that says, “Whoever keeps the whole law, yet stumbles at just one point, is guilty of breaking all of it.” “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to everything written in the book of the law.” Not most of it. Not more than other people. “Everything written in the book of the law.” If Christ our King is just, we have reason to be afraid.

But wait a minute. Is that how Solomon sounds in these verses? Doesn’t he rather seem to be celebrating the King’s justice? We can welcome his justice because it is accompanied by his mercy. Jesus’ mercy doesn’t lead him to lay his justice aside. He doesn’t change his standards. But he did provide another way for those standards to be satisfied. The King traded his crown and royal robes for servants clothes and kept the whole law for us. Then he added ropes and chains and the trappings of a prisoner, and he took our place on death row at the cross. Justice was served on him instead of us. The prison door was opened for us to go free. We were declared just and righteous by the One who is just. No wonder we call him our King!