Aug-29-0501-The lasting victory of God
501_The lasting victory of God Psalm 68 God shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered; and those who hate him shall flee before him! 2 As smoke is driven away, so you shall drive them away; as wax melts before fire, so the wicked shall perish before God! 3 But the righteous shall be glad; they shall exult before God; they shall be jubilant with joy! 4 Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides through the deserts; his name is the Lord; exult before him! 5 Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. 6 God settles the solitary in a home; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a parched land. In 1945, World War II officially ended, but for a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda, the news never sank in. Stationed on a remote Philippine island, he continued fighting for 29 more years, hiding in the jungle and carrying out guerrilla missions. Leaflets were dropped, announcements were made, and even his own family tried to reach him—but he dismissed it all as enemy propaganda. When he was finally persuaded to surrender in 1974, he discovered that the war had been over for decades. Yet he had lived as if the battle was still raging. How foolish and yet how tragic his story is. This is what Psalm 68 tells us - that victory belongs to our God. God’s victory over evil is not tentative, not temporary, and certainly not pending—it is complete, decisive, and everlasting. Our calling is to live as people who know and believe that the war is already won. Psalm 68 is a majestic song of triumph, likely composed to celebrate the moment the ark of the covenant was brought into Jerusalem in David’s day (2 Samuel 6). But its reach is far greater than a single historical event. It recalls God’s victories from Israel’s wilderness journey, celebrates His faithfulness in the present, and prophetically points toward Christ’s resurrection and ascension. It is a psalm that opens with the certainty of God’s triumph and closes with the global call to worship Him for it. It starts: “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.” David is quoting Moses’ words from Numbers 10:35, spoken when the ark set out from Mount Sinai. It’s the battle cry of a people who know that their God does not merely participate in the fight—He determines the outcome. His enemies don’t slowly retreat in exhaustion; they vanish like smoke in the wind, like wax melting before fire. The psalm gives us the image of a victory so overwhelming that resistance simply dissolves. Early in the morning of the day when Jesus Christ rose again, the enemies of God thought they had prevailed. The Son of God lay dead, the tomb was sealed, and soldiers stood guard. But when He rose, death itself—the enemy that holds sway over every human life—was undone. In Paul’s words: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” Beyond the fall of