Covenantal Airstrikes: Prayer as Incense and Sacrifice Text: Psalm 141:1-2
Introduction: The Urgency of the Saints
We come now to a psalm of David, penned in a time of great distress. While we cannot be dogmatic about the precise historical setting, the content breathes the air of the wilderness. It feels like a prayer from a man on the run, hunted by Saul, surrounded by traps, and tempted by the dainties of the wicked. It is a prayer offered up from the front lines, where the antithesis between the righteous and the wicked is not a neat theological category but a matter of daily, life-or-death reality.
David is in trouble, and he knows it. This is not a quiet, contemplative prayer from the comfort of a study. This is a battlefield dispatch sent straight to the heavenly command center. And like any soldier under heavy fire, David’s first request is for speed. He wants God to hurry up. This is a holy impatience, born not of petulance, but of desperation and faith. He knows that God is his only help, and the situation is deteriorating rapidly. He is crying out for immediate divine intervention.
But what is most instructive for us is how David frames his desperate plea. He doesn’t simply ask for help; he asks that his very prayer be received and understood by God in a particular way. He reaches into the rich, liturgical vocabulary of Israel’s worship, established by God at Sinai, and asks that his raw, desperate cries be treated as something formal, structured, and profoundly acceptable to God. He asks that his prayer be like incense, and that the lifting of his hands be like the evening sacrifice. This is not a man abandoning the liturgy because he's in a crisis; it is a man clinging to the meaning of the liturgy precisely because he is in a crisis. He understands that the formal worship of God’s people is not a fair-weather luxury. It is the very structure of our covenantal relationship with Him, and it is how we are to understand our lives, especially when the pressure is on.
This psalm teaches us that our personal, desperate prayers are not disconnected from the corporate, formal worship of the saints. Rather, the corporate worship is the paradigm that gives our personal prayers their shape, their meaning, and their power. We are to see our prayers, offered up from the wilderness of our lives, as fragrant smoke ascending to the throne of God, made acceptable not by our own fervor, but by the greater sacrifice they represent.
The Text
O Yahweh, I call upon You; hasten to me!
Give ear to my voice when I call to You!
May my prayer be established as incense before You;
The lifting up of my hands as the evening offering.
(Psalm 141:1-2)
A Cry for Swift Intervention (v. 1)
We begin with the raw urgency of David’s cry in the first verse:
"O Yahweh, I call upon You; hasten to me! Give ear to my voice when I call to You!" (Psalm 141:1)
The prayer begins with the covenant name of God, Yahweh. This is not an impersonal appeal to a distant deity. This is David pulling on the rope of the covenant. He is reminding God of His promises to be Israel’s God, to be their shield and their defender. When he says "I call upon You," he is exercising his covenantal right as a son of Abraham, as the Lord’s anointed.
And the first thing he asks for is haste. "Hasten to me!" This is a bold request. It is the cry of a man who believes God is a God who acts in history, in real time. Our secular age has trained us to think of God, if He exists at all, as a remote, deistic clockmaker who wound the thing up and has since let it run on its own. But the God of the Bible is a God who intervenes. He is a God who parts seas, stops the sun, and raises the dead. David believes this, and so he prays like it. He asks God to hurry. This is not insolence; it is faith in action. God often delights in tarrying, in waiting until the fourth watch of the night, in order to test and strengthen our faith. But He also invites us to be persistent, to knock, to seek, and to ask with urgency. The persistent widow in the parable is commended by our Lord for this very reason. God wants us to pray as though it matters, because it does.
The second request is for attention: "Give ear to my voice." David knows that it is not enough for God to be present; He must be attentive. He desires a hearing. The universe is full of noise, the accusations of the enemy are loud, and the threats of the wicked are bellowing. David wants his voice, the voice of God’s servant, to cut through all that clamor and arrive in the throne room of heaven. He is asking for a personal audience with the King of the cosmos. This is the confidence we have as believers. Through Christ, we have been given direct access to the Father. We do not need to go through any other intermediary. We can come boldly to the throne of grace, and we can ask Him to give ear to our voice.
Liturgical Prayer in the Wilderness (v. 2)
In the second verse, David provides the theological framework for his prayer. He asks that his informal, desperate cry be formally received according to the patterns of tabernacle worship.
"May my prayer be established as incense before You; The lifting up of my hands as the evening offering." (Psalm 141:2)
This is a profoundly theological request. David, likely far from the tabernacle, cut off from the formal sacrificial system, asks that his personal devotion be counted as official, liturgical worship. He is, in effect, setting up a spiritual altar in the wilderness.
First, he says, "May my prayer be established as incense before You." In the tabernacle and later the temple, incense was offered on the golden altar every morning and evening (Exodus 30:7-8). The smoke of the incense would rise and fill the holy place with a sweet-smelling aroma, symbolizing the prayers of God's people ascending to His throne. The book of Revelation makes this connection explicit, where the elders before the throne have "golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints" (Revelation 5:8). For prayer to be like incense, it must have certain qualities. The incense had to be crushed before it was burned. Our prayers must come from a contrite, crushed heart. The incense had to be set on fire, fire from the altar. Our prayers must be kindled by the fire of the Holy Spirit. The smoke of the incense ascended. Our prayers must be directed heavenward, setting our minds on things above. And the result was a sweet aroma. Our prayers, when offered in faith, are pleasing to God.
But David’s prayer here is a precursor to a greater reality. All of our prayers, mine and yours, are in themselves a foul stench. They are mixed with selfish motives, wandering thoughts, and imperfect faith. They are not naturally a sweet-smelling aroma. They only become incense because they are mixed with the greater incense of Christ’s perfect intercession. He is our great High Priest, who stands at the heavenly altar and takes our pitiful, smoke-stained prayers and mingles them with His own perfect righteousness. He is the one who was crushed for us, upon whom the fire of God’s wrath fell, who ascended into heaven, and who is Himself the ultimate sweet-smelling aroma to the Father (Ephesians 5:2). When we pray in Jesus’ name, we are asking the Father to receive our prayer, not on its own merits, but because it has been perfumed by the merit of His Son.
Second, David requests that "The lifting up of my hands as the evening offering." The lifting of hands is a natural posture of prayer throughout Scripture. It is a posture of surrender, of petition, and of receiving. But David specifically equates it with the "evening offering." This was the daily burnt offering, a lamb sacrificed every evening as a constant reminder of sin and the need for atonement (Exodus 29:38-42). David, unable to offer a literal lamb, offers himself. He lifts his hands, a gesture of total consecration, and asks God to accept it as the sacrifice. He is anticipating the teaching of the apostle Paul, who urges us to present our bodies as a "living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" (Romans 12:1).
This points us again to Christ. The evening offering, like all the sacrifices, was a shadow. The substance is Christ. He is the Lamb of God, offered once for all "in the evening of the world" to take away our sin. When we lift our hands in prayer, we are identifying with His ultimate sacrifice. We are saying, "I have no lamb to bring. I have nothing in my hands to offer. I come empty-handed, clinging only to the cross. Accept me, my prayer, my life, on the basis of His offering." Our worship, our prayers, our lifted hands are not the sacrifice itself, but our participation in His sacrifice. It is our "Amen" to His finished work.
Conclusion: The Fragrance of the Gospel
These two verses are a dense summary of Christian worship and prayer. We come to God in times of trouble, with urgent, desperate cries. This is right and good. But we do not come in our own name or on our own terms. We come through the established patterns of God’s covenant. Our prayers are not just random shouts into the void; they are liturgical acts, freighted with theological significance.
We learn from David that true prayer is sacrificial. It costs us something. It requires a crushed heart. It requires that we offer up our whole lives, symbolized by the lifting of our hands, as a living sacrifice. But we also learn that our prayers are only made acceptable through a greater sacrifice. Our prayers only become a sweet-smelling incense when they are mingled with the prayers of our High Priest, Jesus Christ. Our self-offering is only accepted because He first offered Himself for us as the true evening sacrifice.
Therefore, when you are in the wilderness, when you are hunted and trapped, do not despair. Do not think that you are cut off from the worship of God. Your heart can be an altar. Your prayer can be incense. Your lifted hands can be an evening offering. Cry out to God with holy impatience. Ask Him to hasten to you. And do so with the full confidence that your voice is heard in the highest heavens, not because of the purity of your cry, but because your cry is carried to the Father by the one whose name makes all our prayers a pleasing aroma to God. Pray in His name, and your prayer will rise like smoke from the golden censer before the throne of grace.