The King of Glory
I. TEXT:
Psalm 24 (CSB)
1 The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants, belong to the Lord; 2 for he laid its foundation on the seas and established it on the rivers. 3 Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? 4 The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not appealed to what is false, and who has not sworn deceitfully. 5 He will receive blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. 6 Such is the generation of those who inquire of him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. Selah 7 Lift up your heads, you gates! Rise up, ancient doors! Then the King of glory will come in. 8 Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle. 9 Lift up your heads, you gates! Rise up, ancient doors! Then the King of glory will come in. 10 Who is he, this King of glory? The Lord of Armies, he is the King of glory. Selah
II. INTRODUCTION:
The Talmud suggests that our text should be read on the day after the Sabbath due to its emphasis on the creation of the world. And here we are on the first day of the week, reading it.
In 1 Corinthians 10:26, the Apostle Paul uses Psalm 24:1 to argue that even food dedicated to idols belongs to the LORD (1 Corinthians 10:26). God created and owns everything.
Early Christian writers connected the last stanza of Psalm 24 to the Ascension of Jesus because of its beautiful description of the "King of glory" ascending the hill of God.
Some scholars have suggested that this psalm was sung during an annual autumnal enthronement festival in ancient Israel. During the festival, they acted out the procession of the LORD towards Jerusalem and into the temple where He was symbolically enthroned.
Others see a direct connection with 2 Samuel 6:12-19, where David brought the Ark to Jerusalem.
One theme that underlies the psalm is the theme of mutual advent, the King of Glory entering human space, and humans entering the presence of God.
The psalm has a three-part structure:
Declaration of the Lord as Creator (vv. 1–2)
Liturgy of human entrance into God’s sphere (vv. 3–6)
Liturgy of the Lord’s entrance into human space (vv. 7–10)
1. Declaration of the Lord as Creator (vv. 1–2)
1 The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants, belong to the Lord; 2 for he laid its foundation on the seas and established it on the rivers.
The psalm begins with a hymnic praise of the LORD as Creator: a reminder that ancient Israel's military victories were a result of the reality that the LORD is not only God in Israel but throughout the entirety of all that we can see and cannot see. Everything and everyone belongs to the LORD because he made it all.
David was a successful king, but Israel was a tiny kingdom compared to the surrounding nations like Egypt and Assyria. Someone might have imagined that the gods of these nations were greater. But, as Paul says even that which is offered to idols belongs to the LORD.
“The ‘fulness’ of the earth may mean its harvests, its wealth, its life, or its worship; in all these senses the Most High God is Possessor of all. The earth is full of God; he made it full and he keeps it full.” (Spurgeon)
"all it contains" Lit. "its fulness"
In Ancient Near Eastern mythology, the sea was chaos personified. The gods demonstrated their power by conquering the Sea. In Genesis 1, the waters of chaos are not gods themselves, but a part of God's good creation that God shapes and builds upon. Even those things which we fear because we cannot control are under the control of the LORD.
On the one hand, chaos remains an active element in creation. God has limited the reach of chaos (“thus far shall you come, and no farther,” Job 38:11), but chaos and randomness remain present. On the other hand, creation is secure, because of the Lord’s ongoing providence and stewardship of creation.14 Thus, the creation into which God is entering in the psalm needs God’s presence, because only God can hold chaos at bay and secure the environment for life. (NICOT)
Upon the chaos of your life, He can build something solid and lasting.
Colossians 1:15-17 CSB
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things hold together.
The truth that the LORD is the Creator of all things holds us together. It is on this foundation that every bit of service, worship, and battle must be built. If we do not start here we are destined to be frustrated and constantly wrestling with condemnation and a sense of inadequacy.
2. Liturgy of human entrance into God’s sphere (vv. 3–6)
3 Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? 4 The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not appealed to what is false, and who has not sworn deceitfully. 5 He will receive blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. 6 Such is the generation of those who inquire of him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. Selah
This section is liturgical. The question is sung by those approaching the temple, or their representative. What is required to live in the Presence of the Creator?
The gatekeeper answers with things that are not mere rituals or religious formalities but moral issues:
He cries out, the one who:
Has clean hands — integrity in action and justice towards neighbors.
Has a pure heart — undivided devotion to God, free from idolatry in all its forms. A pure heart is not a perfect heart, but a heart whose motive is led by humility and love. David recognized his need of God the Creator “creating in him a clean heart and renewing a right spirit” within Him. The writer of Proverbs tells us to guard our hearts because all that we become in life flows from the heart. Jesus said blessed are the pure in heart for theirs is the kingdom of heaven...
One who does not "lift up" his heart to idols. Idols are more that images carved of wood and stone. Idols can be things like the promises of our culture that wealth, power, or sexuality outside the boundaries of Christian marriage hold the promise of ultra mate satisfaction. To lift up the heart is a posture that seeks to find fulfilment in something.
Has not sworn deceitfully — carrying God’s life and name properly among the people matters. We often think of the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain as an admonition not to use God’s names as swear words, but it’s more than this. To “take the name of the Lord” is to bear his name. Ancient Israel had the name of Yahweh pronounced over them by the priest. We have the name of Jesus pronounced over us in Christian baptism. We have taken his name. But, when we live a life unworthy of his name, we are taking it in vain. We should be honest.
This sounds like Psalm 15 & Isaiah 33:14-16.
The person who lives his life this way will be able to enter the Presence of the Lord and receive both:
a blessing from the LORD
righteousness from the God of his salvation
If entering into God’s sphere requires one to leave something at the altar, as it were, one also leaves the altar with something sacred: a blessing from the LORD. The connection between what one leaves behind and what one leaves with is reinforced by the verb nasa?, which is used in both halves of the second stanza. One does not take (nasa?) up my life falsely, and when one leaves one will take (nasa?) a blessing from the LORD. Thus, there is a promise to balance the law. And like the law, the blessing is bestowed not for the sake of the individual per se, but for the sake of the neighbor. The stanza ends with the assertion that this way of life, taking up law and taking away gospel, both for the sake of the neighbor, is the way of God’s people — the way of the generation of those who seek him, of those seeking the face of the God of Jacob. As Kraus notes, “The ‘true Israel’ consists of human beings who subordinate daily life to the demands of the [tôrâ].”16 7-10 If the second stanza maps the coming of mortals into God’s sphere, the final stanza returns the favor by heralding the coming of the King of Glory into the human realm.(NICOT)
This is not a call to complete perfection. The Bible is emphatic that “there is no one who does not sin” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus shows us that sin is deeper than our actions and Jeremiah tells us that the heart can be so tricky that we don’t always understand our own motivations (Jeremiah 17:9).
These pilgrims like us are trying to live for God and enter His Presence. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. You showed up today like those pilgrims so long ago seeking the Presence of God.
So the question remains, with all of our flaws, who can enter? The next part of the verse begins to answer as the pilgrims respond:
“This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy Face (Presence), O Jacob...”
Most translations try to smooth out the text here by adding “the God of” before the name Jacob.
But, in the Hebrew Bible as it has been preserved, the name Jacob is dangling at the end of the text. It doesn’t seem to make sense, it almost sounds like the generation who has just heard what it takes to enter the Presence of God are seeking the face of Jacob.
I think the Holy Spirit left it ambiguous on purpose. The words in this verse echo Genesis 32 where it is Jacob who seeks and finds the Presence of God and wrestles with a God that he sees face-to-face. Jacob was a deceiver. He conspired with his mother to deceive his father and his older brother. He had the tendency to be an idolater. He thought that having Rachel would be the fulfillment of all his deepest desires. Yet there was a place where the blessing of the LORD and the righteousness of God came to mean more to him than anything.
I think that in our text the answer of the pilgrims is a realization that if perfection is the key to entering in, they will never arrive and so they wrestle for the blessing, They wrestle with themselves and they wrestle with God. They refuse to let go!I want access into your Presence!
He clung, struggled, bore the marks of God’s presence, yet left with blessing and a new identity.
Selah.
3. Liturgy of the Lord’s entrance into human space (vv. 7–10)
7 Lift up your heads, you gates! Rise up, ancient doors! Then the King of glory will come in. 8 Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle. 9 Lift up your heads, you gates! Rise up, ancient doors! Then the King of glory will come in. 10 Who is he, this King of glory? The Lord of Armies, he is the King of glory.
Selah
The stanza is a tightly composed antiphon, in which vv. 7 and 9 announce the coming of the King of Glory and vv. 8 and 10 name the identity of the king as the Lord. It is impossible to reconstruct where these processional verses were originally performed or who spoke which lines. Interpreters have to be satisfied with imagining different possible historical settings for the psalm and concentrating on the theological witness of the psalm to the entrance/return of God. The psalm’s key word lift (nasa?), which occurred twice in stanza 2, now appears four more times in stanza 3, in the twice-repeated call of vv. 7 and 9. But how to interpret the metaphor of gates lifting up their heads is a challenge. J. J. M. Roberts notes that “ancient Palestinian gates had no parts that moved up and down” and concludes that the imperative “to lift up their heads . . . is a secondary metaphor, borrowed from another setting.”17 Roberts identifies an Ugaritic parallel as the setting from which the metaphor is borrowed. The council of gods has learned that Yamm (sea) has claimed kingship among the gods. The gods sit with heads hanging in dejection. They lowered their heads onto their knees and onto their royal seats. Baal rebuked them then, “Why do you lower, O gods, your heads?”18 A few lines later, Baal exhorts them, “Lift up, O gods, your heads!” In this case, the idiom “to lift the head” seems to be a call to take courage. The idiom of lifting a part of one’s body can mean anything from expressing pride to demanding recognition to asking for help.19 In Ps. 25:1 nasa? + yhwh is an expression of trust, while in 83:2 nasa? + roš connotes an arrogant assertion of autonomy, and in 121:1 nasa? + ?ayin connotes the need for guidance. In 24:7-10 the metaphor seems to connote an acknowledgement of the Lord’s kingship. Perhaps having returned from victory in battle, the gates of the temple figuratively play the role of creation (including the full mortal and immortal realms) acknowledging the Lord’s claim on universal kingship.20 This reverent and faithful attitude, metaphorically commanded of the temple gates, is the proper stance of all life toward the Lord. As the antiphonal response makes clear, the confession that is required when the Lord enters human space is to acknowledge that the Lord is king. As with all confessions of faith, this confession is simultaneously an anathema: as Roberts notes, to confess the Lord as king is to deny all other claims to sovereignty. “The king of glory is Yahweh. That is, he is not Baal or El as the Canaanites might claim. He is not Dagan as the Philistines say. Or Chemosh of the Moabites or Milcom of the Ammonites. The real king of glory is Yahweh.”21 But this begs another question, who is the LORD? What is this Lord’s nature and character? There are manifold answers regarding this in the Psalter, but in this psalm, the answer is carried by the series of epithets: strong and mighty, mighty in battle, the LORD of hosts, and of course the main title in this stanza, the King of Glory. All together, this series of epithets conjures the image of the Lord as divine warrior-king.22 The sum of this metaphor is of the Holy One who has the power and presence to deliver creation from the threats of chaos and, moreover, of the one who has the power to grant vindication and deliverance to those who seek him (vv. 5-6). The warrior-king king metaphor echoes the claims of vv. 1-2 of the psalm, because throughout the psalms (cf. Psalms 29, 89) the Lord’s kingship is established precisely through the act of creation (i.e., of founding creation on the waters of chaos). Reflections Where God Meets Us Psalm 24 is about who in two senses. It is about who the King of Glory is and about who may stand in this Holy One’s presence. The psalm says that the Lord is the Holy One. It says that only those who have clean hands, pure hearts, who know no falsehood, and who never speak ill or deceitfully may enter the Holy One’s space. Thus, as Psalm 24 plots the mutual vectors of the King of Glory and those who seek him, like a computer-animated projection of an asteroid shooting toward earth, the poem heralds the tidings of an inevitable conflict. We are the immovable object, we cannot meet the requirements to enter God’s presence. And God is the irresistible force, strong and mighty, mighty in battle, the King of Glory. What happens upon the advent of one whose presence cannot be borne but who also cannot be resisted? Every Western movie ever filmed knows the answer. Someone — either the stranger or the townfolk — will have to die. According to the New Testament witness, when the King of Glory came, they tried to kill him. At his birth, King Herod took the first shot. Further on, the good townfolk of Nazareth tried to throw him off a cliff. Still later, some of his coreligionists tried to stone him. And of course in the end, a conspiracy of the ruling elite nailed him. The New Testament maintains that it was necessary that Christ, the Son of God, die. What made it necessary? Because when the King of Glory, who is strong and mighty and thus cannot be resisted and who will not compromise with us, who is not satisfied to remain at a reasonable, rational distance, who will not negotiate with Satan, or Pharaoh, or any other power that would share lordship over us, when this one comes, someone has to die. But the New Testament witness regarding the King of Glory is deeper and more complex than the plot of any Western. According to the New Testament, the One who came from eternity had the power, authority, even sovereignty — and he gave it up. Rather than kill, he chose to be killed. “You who were once estranged and hostile in mind . . . he has now reconciled in the body of his flesh through death” (Col. 1:21-22). And in his death, moreover, death itself dies, so that we need not die in the same way. “We have been buried with him by baptism into death . . . we have been united with him in a death like his, and we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:4-5). Who is the King of Glory? Jesus Christ, who did not count sovereignty or equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself into a manger, being born in human likeness, in human form… (NICOT)
Entrance Liturgy. After talking about the pilgrims seeking access we hear another voice crying out seeking access. It sounds like the Voice who stood and knocked at the door of the church in Laodicea. Behold, I stand at the door and knock and if anyone will hear My Voice and open the door I will come in and have a continual feast with them and they with Me (Revelation 3:20).
“Lift up your heads, you gates! Rise up, ancient doors! Then the King of glory will come in.”
2 Samuel 6:12-19
Now the psalm moves to its antiphonal climax. The command — “Lift up your heads, you gates!” — is not just metaphor; it is a call to acknowledge God’s sovereignty, a public recognition that Yahweh is King. In the ancient council scene, this echoes Baal’s exhortation to the gods to lift their heads. But here, the metaphor is transformed: the gates of heaven, creation, and human hearts are commanded to recognize the Lord.
The King of glory is coming.
In Christ, this command is fulfilled in solidarity with His pilgrims. Philippians 2:6–8 reminds us: Christ, though God, emptied Himself, took human form, and humbled Himself to walk among us. The Voice saying, “Lift up your heads,” is the Voice of Christ Himself, calling the gates open in alliance with His people. He enters our struggle, our pilgrimage, and invites us to ascend the hill together.
Unlike Baal, whose victory isolates him, Christ enters human history as Emmanuel — God with us. The gates do not resist; the King of glory is one of us. He bears our weaknesses, shares our burdens, and leads the procession, making it possible for us to walk with Him.
Application
Lift up your hearts: welcome Christ into your daily life, work, relationships, and community.
Walk with Him: embrace the pilgrimage, knowing we ascend together with the King of Glory.
Participate in the procession: live in moral integrity, seek God’s face, and carry His blessing to your neighbor.
Conclusion and Exhortation
Psalm 24 portrays the mutual advent of God and humanity. The King of glory comes into human space, and humans are invited to enter God’s presence. He is strong and mighty, yet He joins us, shares our pilgrimage, and enables us to climb the hill with Him.
Worship Him. Welcome Him. Walk with Him. Open the doors of your hearts, your homes, your city. The King of glory is in your midst — not distant, not aloof, but Emmanuel, God with us.
Benediction:May the Lord of Armies, the King of glory, bless you and keep you;may He shine His face upon you and give you peace;and may you lift up your heads, for the King has come in. Amen.
