Within the past week, after celebrating another chronological birthday, I chose to return to a habit I developed years ago; I decided to spend some time each day meditating on the psalm from Scripture whose number coincides with the age I am, which is now 45.\u00a0 And this habit is how I discovered a love song truly worth sharing.\u00a0 Though I’m confident I had read Psalm 45 before, probably many times, I don’t know that I had ever realized it is literally a love psalm, one thought to have been used at many royal weddings throughout the history of beloved Israel.\u00a0\u00a0 As I studied this psalm, I also read some writings of\u00a0 C.S. Lewis in which Lewis refers to this as the “Christmas Psalm,” saying that Psalm 45 can show us more aspects of the Nativity than either carols or even the gospels.\u00a0 Wow, I consider that quite an assertion!<\/p>\n
And yes, in this song\/psalm is the image of a temporal union of two distinct souls in this life down here through holy matrimony as well as the image of an eternal such union in an “other” realm through the vows God made to his people and kept and fulfilled through his Christ.\u00a0 I just don’t think I had the eyes to see and\/or really take in such imagery before.\u00a0 But, now, leaping off the pages of Holy Scripture too are the rich and fragrant oils that were brought to the young child Jesus from those mysterious men of the Orient, the same types of oils that would later be used to anoint his tortured and crucified grown-up body; and there also on these same pages is the luxurious image of the flowing royal robe with which the people of Jesus’ day expected him to come all adorned as their most noble and long-awaited King.\u00a0 Is it any wonder the babe in the trough in the stable did not compute with most who met him in the flesh?<\/p>\n
There in these verses too is the hard charge given to those of us who call him “Love.” Verse 10 says, “Hear, O daughter, and consider, and incline your ear:\u00a0 forget your people and your father’s house, and the king will desire your beauty.”\u00a0 We all have other gods, other kings–things that do “reign” in our lives.\u00a0 And sometimes the greatest other god can be our own personal history.\u00a0 It’s often hard to forget where we come from, what we’ve been through, in the way that I think God means for us to; and I think it might be especially hard if the song we’d write about our birth family, and about ourselves, is much less than a “real” love song.\u00a0 We do not forget for God’s sake; and we choose to remember at God’s expense.<\/p>\n
We can always find hope though in the verses of God’s song.\u00a0 In verse 16, for example, the fruit of God’s hard charge to us is revealed–“In place of your fathers shall be your sons; you will make them princes in all the earth.”\u00a0 This is gloriously great news for those of us who feel that we have had to part far too soon from our earthly fathers or for those of us who never even had an earthly father to begin with or for those of us whose earthly fathers left marks that can only ever be erased supernaturally.\u00a0 And this is also gloriously great news for those of us who have had the privilege of bearing more biological children seemingly snatched from us or for those of us who never even had that privilege in the first place.\u00a0 And it too is most glorious, and hard-to-fathom, news for all of us (which is the majority of us) who have lived lives that are far, far from those of literal royalty, real-life kings and queens, princes and princesses.<\/p>\n
Yes, if only we choose to accept the charge from this most lovely and poignant Psalm 45, if only we choose to take vows to\/with the ultimate Bridegroom, then we are surely promised an eternal King Father and the ability to assist him in bringing many children Home–a most royal and forever Home with a most royal and forever family through One Forever Love that surpasses even the deepest, most tangible loves we’ve ever felt down here in even our happiest of moments.\u00a0 Forty-five really is a song so very worth singing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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