Psalm 72 is a prayer for political power, and it does not flinch about it. May his dominion run from sea to sea. May all nations fall down before him. This is not a prayer for a seat among the nations; it is a prayer to be the dominant nation. Scripture hands a Christian who was taught that ambition is a vice a model prayer that asks God, in plain words, for power.
Two things make the prayer holy rather than grasping. The first is where it goes for power. Whoever prays Psalm 72 — David for his son Solomon, or Solomon himself — asks God, because power comes from God and from nowhere else. Pilate believed he held Jesus’ life in his hands; Jesus told him he would have no authority unless it had been given from above. Daniel says God removes kings and sets up kings. To go to God for power is to go to the right place.
The second is the order of the requests. The prayer asks for character before it asks for power, and asks for power on the strength of that character. “Give the king your justice, O God. May he defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the children of the needy, and crush the oppressor.” Only then: may his dominion stretch to the ends of the earth, may his kingdom endure forever. The logic runs one direction. Make me the kind of king you bless — and the king you bless is the one who defends the defenseless — and then extend my reign. Power is requested as the reward of a particular use of power.
This is the Bible’s settled account of what political authority is for. King Lemuel’s mother tells him a king must open his mouth for the mute and defend the rights of the destitute — the same charge Romans 13 and 1 Peter give the magistrate: punish evil, protect the good. Strip away the campaign promises, and the purpose of political power reduces to a single sentence: to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. Nearly everything else a politician offers is outside the job description.
Solomon shows both halves of the pattern. He begins by asking God not for long life or riches or the death of his enemies, but for wisdom to govern God’s people — and God, pleased, grants the wisdom and the riches and the expansion besides. The early reign is the Psalm coming true: nations arrive to seek his wisdom. Then power does to Solomon what power does. He turns it inward — heavy taxes, forced labor, daughters taken for his harem — until the man who trembled and asked only for wisdom to serve has become a yoke his people beg his son to lift. The throne that defends the weak endures. The throne that feeds on them does not.
Which is why the Psalm finally points past Solomon. In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus opens the scroll to Isaiah and reads that the Spirit has anointed him to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to set the oppressed free — the kingly function of Psalm 72 in another key — and says, today this is fulfilled. He is the king who lays down his life for the weak, and his kingdom is the one with no end. “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” That is not a rebuke of the desire for greatness but the path to it.
A warning belongs here. If the work of power is to protect the weak, then whoever gets to define who counts as weak quietly becomes the one who directs policy. The Christian West already agrees that the vulnerable must be defended, so the live question is no longer whether to protect the weak but who gets named weak — and that naming is itself an exercise of power. Jesus took that center deliberately. The religious leaders located the real oppression in Rome, which kept their hands clean and their authority intact; Jesus told them the deeper oppressor was sin, and named the oppressed himself. So a Christian doing politics stays skeptical of anyone who unilaterally declares who the victims are. I will care for the oppressed all day long, but I will not hand a stranger the power to tell me who they are. I reason it out from the word myself — which is how I have come to believe that the most defenseless person in America is the child in the womb, whatever the prevailing definitions say.
One more freedom is in this Psalm, the one I most want you to have. When Christ is not the hero of history, some other thing has to be, and we are built to hero-worship — the philosophers all had their man, the Übermensch, the Leviathan. So we take an ordinary thing — a marriage, a career, a candidate, a movement — and load it with a weight it was never built to carry. Expectations rise, the thing is briefly idolized, and then it cracks, as idols do, and we crash into disillusionment and back away in disgust. Politics runs that cycle as reliably as anything — it could fix everything, then fixes nothing, then we want nothing to do with it. The man whose hero is Christ is released from the loop. He has one place where the object never disappoints, and that fixed point lets everything else fall into proportion. He does not have to purity-spiral over an election. He can hold a politician to a low and human standard precisely because he holds Jesus to an infinite one. Politics becomes what it was meant to be — a flawed, pragmatic instrument for protecting the weak — and stops having to be a savior. We already have one of those.