Psalm 45

¹My heart is overflowing with a good theme;
I recite my composition concerning the King;
My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

² You are fairer than the sons of men;
Grace is poured upon Your lips;
Therefore God has blessed You forever.
³ Gird Your sword upon Your thigh, O Mighty One,
With Your glory and Your majesty.
⁴ And in Your majesty ride prosperously because of truth, humility, and righteousness;
And Your right hand shall teach You awesome things.
⁵ Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the King’s enemies;
The peoples fall under You.

⁶ Your throne, O God, is forever and ever;
A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom.
⁷ You love righteousness and hate wickedness;
Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You
With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.
⁸ All Your garments are scented with myrrh and aloes and cassia,
Out of the ivory palaces, by which they have made You glad.
⁹ Kings’ daughters are among Your honorable women;
At Your right hand stands the queen in gold from Ophir.

¹⁰ Listen, O daughter,
Consider and incline your ear;
Forget your own people also, and your father’s house;
¹¹ So the King will greatly desire your beauty;
Because He is your Lord, worship Him.
¹² And the daughter of Tyre will come with a gift;
The rich among the people will seek your favor.

¹³ The royal daughter is all glorious within the palace;
Her clothing is woven with gold.
¹⁴ She shall be brought to the King in robes of many colors;
The virgins, her companions who follow her, shall be brought to You.
¹⁵ With gladness and rejoicing they shall be brought;
They shall enter the King’s palace.

¹⁶ Instead of Your fathers shall be Your sons,
Whom You shall make princes in all the earth.
¹⁷ I will make Your name to be remembered in all generations;
Therefore the people shall praise You forever and ever.

My heart is overflowing with a good theme

I read this first verse, thinking, “This is going to be so great! I’m ready for a song about happy stuff and winning and being successful! Let’s do this!!!!!” I’m reading about all these great things that God is doing, and I know it has to be about God because the editors have very helpfully capitalized all the pronouns for me. No confusion about anything, God (or in this case, I guess, Christ) getting his sword and riding around on a horse doin’ stuff. And he’s got a bow and arrow and a throne and a scepter, and he “loves righteousness and hates wickedness.” I’m so excited. This is awesome! Wait…

Kings’ daughters are among Your honorable women

And this is where it stopped being easy.  From what I gather, we seem to think that this psalm really was written as a wedding song. Then Paul quotes it in Hebrews 1 and lots of early Christians saw the connection to the "bride of Christ" idea. Not that we couldn’t still be talking messianic prophecies at this point, but here is where I think any 1:1 correlation starts to break down.What about these “kings’ daughters” that stand with him? There are no literal kings’ daughters hanging around with Jesus. I thought he wasn’t a respecter of persons anyway. Unless it’s some weird euphemism that I don’t know about. Then some commentary tried to tell me that they are other believers, but if believers collectively are the bride of Christ, then what? And what’s this about having sons? I don’t know, I’m not a professional Bible scholar, but I’ve read other messianic psalms that absolutely could not in a million years be referring to anything else. Still, I suppose that doesn't mean that we can't make the comparison.

Listen, O daughter

Then I started doing some research on the “bride of Christ” and what it means, and opened a whole new can of worms. Apparently, some people feel very strongly about its definition—what it is, what it’s not, why it matters, how it should impact actual marriages, how it can be used to oppress women, and a billion other different things. When people start talking about “wives, submit to your own husbands…for the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church,” I’m like shut up, Paul, you also said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” so make up your mind. (I’m sorry, is my feminist side showing?) So, needless to say, I usually try to avoid any references to brides in the Bible.

Instead, today, I’m trying to understand why a bride is a fitting metaphor to use with Christ. First of all, I want to establish what it isn’t. It isn’t because women are “the weaker sex” (Jael in Judges) or are somehow lower in the evolutionary chain (Galatians 3:28, above). It isn’t that women should never be in positions of authority or can’t be strong and wise leaders (Deborah in Judges) or that they are especially stupid and not at all brave or clever (Esther and Abagail in 1 Samuel 25).

Instead, we need to think about what a bride in particular does. In our modern society, we often forget that other peoples had different ideas of what a marriage was, what it meant, and how to go about doing it. It is something rather different today than it was whenever this psalm was being written, but we still hold onto little pieces of it. When a bride was “given away,” it was literally an exchange of property between her father and her husband-to-be. That meant that her old life was gone to her. She was no longer a part of her old life and her old family, she became a part of her husband’s family instead. She was expected to stop being a girl and to become a woman, to take up a new role and new responsibilities in her life. Sound like anything else? 

When we commit ourselves to Christ, we are giving up our old lives, giving up living in our old habits. We transition into a new family, the family of Christ, and leave behind the world, becoming new people in our relationship with Him.