Ps. 45.6-7 (the fountain of God's power)

“The eternal / and everlasting God / has enthroned you – the scepter / of your kingship / is a scepter of uprightness.” The verse following this one will be included in this reflection but will be quoted later. This verse, arguably, represents the pinnacle of this portion of the psalm dedicated to the glory of the king. If the king has seemed to dwell in the almost ‘liminal’ or angelic strata before (these verses, were they to apply to a god would have been entirely appropriate) is, in these verses, shown to derive his overwhelming power from the enthronement performed on him by God. This is the only action in the psalm that is performed to the king (that is passively accepted); everything else is his activity. This has important theological implications—that the stunning power, the heightened rhetoric, the ‘lips of grace’, the ‘noble theme’, all seemingly originate from this primal enthronement of the king by God. In other words, as much as God has been, and will continue in the remainder of the psalm to be ‘in the background’, it is here that come to see how that hiddenness on his part is actually the font from which the ‘activity’ of the king flows. It is as if the king himself becomes the fountain, with the impulse of water hidden within it (the ‘enthronement’ by the ‘eternal and everlasting God’). Within the context of the psalm, of course, this is almost required: as a wedding psalm, rather than a psalm of deliverance or the contemplation of the king’s destruction of his enemies, the focus is, precisely, on this ‘fountain’, this well-spring of God’s ordering power in the nation. This man is God’s image to the world. “You / have loved righteousness / and hated wickedness – therefore / God, / your God / has anointed you, - rather than / your companions / with the oil / of exultation.” This verse functions as a type of parallel to verse 2. They both employ the image of anointing and they both single the king out from the midst of others (vs.: the most beautiful of human beings; vs. 7: anointed you rather than your companions). Likewise, the lips of the king in verse 2 was likely a reference to the judgments that issued from the kings mouth—those judgments that established justice within the world. Here, the king is understood to harbor a “love of righteousness and hatred of wickedness.” In other words, his own heart is that which mimics the order of righteousness of God over the forces of chaos and wickedness. It is, as in verse 2, an establishment of order—that perennial force of creation (and redemption) itself. It is also, as in verse 2, clear that this love and hatred of the king’s is his own property, as the ‘lips of grace’ were the kings (in vs. 2). It is on account of these two qualities that he finds himself ‘anointed’ in not merely a confirmation but an empowering of this quality by and through God’s blessing/anointing; it strengthens and perpetuates that which is already found in the king (much as in David). We see here, then, that the king himself is an object of beauty and delight and that those qualities are, in his anointing and especially in his enthronement, moved into the sphere and power of God himself, elevated to become the very beauty and glory of God—which is why the king is described as inhabiting God’s “splendor and majesty” (vs. 3).