“Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever.
Your royal scepter is a scepter of equity;
you love righteousness and hate wickedness;
Therefore God, your God, has anointed you
with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.”
~Psalm 45:6-7 (NRSV).
Weddings are momentous enough, a royal wedding has the world stopping at the mystique and pomp and ceremony of it all. Perhaps this is because conjecture must have its completion in the facts of the day.
This psalm shares the same buzz, but it’s not about any royal wedding. It’s about the Royal Wedding — Christ the Bridegroom marrying his heavenly betrothed: the Church.
The psalmist is a spectator; windswept with expectant awe.
A Moral Consummation – “Ride Victoriously”
Verses 6-7 are used in Hebrews 1:8-9 to describe this wedding as a Christian Wedding of moral consummation connecting the Son with actual Redemption — together with the circumstance of the consummation of creation, replaced with the New Heaven and New Earth (Revelation 21), preceding these nuptials between Jesus and Church. (Equally, it is seen that Christ wedded his Bride, by giving himself for her, on the cross of
But just as poignant is the virtue connected to such Royal office; a thing that only one with ‘royal blood’ can occupy. This is a blood enshrined in the Divinity of holiness; only God qualifies. Only Jesus could be worthy.
The usual suspects of virtuosity are present: most applicably truth, equity and righteousness. These are present in the Bridegroom.
We expect our human sovereigns to exemplify such Jesus-like virtue.
Husband & Monarch – Wife & Subject
Forever subject are we — the Church — to the Lord, Jesus.
Marriage or not, some things will never change. The Lord will be praised evermore by his Bride, and all humankind.
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And enter the Palace (verse 15) they will — the King and his new Bride. We hope for this day, as if it were a day, indeed, to hope for.
This, as an event and eternal ‘existence’, will be forever worth waiting for.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
Post Script: An earlier article on Psalm 45.
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