Ps. 68.11-12 (sending messengers)

 When the Lord / gives the word
a great host of messengers / give the good news!
Kings of hosts flee; / they flee!
And the beauty of the house / will share / the spoil. 

Everything in the previous verses related, entirely, to God’s action and his possession: “you spread abroad a good rain…”; “your domain is wear, you sustain it…”; “your community dwells in your domain – which you prepare…”. We saw, there, that this centering on God was a type of (re)creation on his part as he settled the land for his people. As the opening verses made clear, that ‘settling’ involved an act of battle, the dispersing of the enemy-haters. Here, with the battle complete, the act focuses again on God. It is up to him to proclaim the victory (to pronounce things ‘good’) and to send out the messengers. It is a poignant image for victory cannot be declared too early and yet, until the King declares it, his subjects cannot rest secure. The declaration is, in many ways, the final act of the battle and the beginning of the celebration. We might even say that this is the ‘sabbath’ of the battle, the moment when completion and security can spread; when ‘rest’ is achieved. And the message that is manifest by the doves (I take here the ‘messengers’ to be doves that a king would release to be the indication of victory), is that “Kings of hosts, flee! They flee!”. The downfall of the ‘kings of hosts’ is proclaimed by ‘a great host of messengers’. Once this message is delivered the women can now begin to become the emblems of victory by and through their wearing of the ‘spoils’ of victory. The women are the “beauty of the house”. In this we see another mode of God’s creative provision for his people: through the scattering of the kings, they leave behind them ‘houses Israel did not build’ and every other form of abandoned property caused by their fear (vs. 1). This ‘sharing of the spoil’ is the beginning of the victory celebration. And yet, what is clear, is that just as God gave the land “good rain” so too has he know provided the spoils; his ‘community’ did not win it. Just as with creation, the victory over chaos is God’s. He was always “before them”. They only move “before him” in celebration.  We are now shifting from the God of Sinai (the one who moved ‘before them’) to the God of Zion, the one who brings them into his ‘domain’ and dwells with them.