Ps. 61.3 (the genesis of Temple and king)

For you / have been a refuge / for me;
a tower of strength / against my enemy.

Before we begin to look at these two verse more closely, there are a few preliminary reflections on the King and Temple that, I think, might help deepen our reflections. The origin of these thoughts comes from this: that David (or, his son) built God’s house, and God built David’s house (inherited kingship). In this we see that the king’s genesis and the Temple’s are utterly intertwined. And they come, in this way, to mirror heaven, where the High King sits enthroned in the heavenly Temple. The point is this: that in some manner the Temple and the king are ‘made for each other’. The king mediates the power of the Temple through his ruling, and the Temple, perhaps, finds some type of necessary corollary in the king. If we can say that the Temple is a type of portal between heaven and earth, then we might say the king is that person through whom the power of heaven is mediated. If this is the case, then a king in exile from the Temple is not merely a problem for the king but also, in some way, a problem for the Temple. (Why else would their origins me married so absolutely?). This is clearly not to assert that the Temple is the king’s home; it is God’s. Rather, it is to point out that God’s allowance of a home to be built for himself was understood as being simultaneous with his covenantal power being given over to David and his family. With this in mind we can turn back to our psalm. The immediately preceding verse was this: “…lead me to a rock that is higher than I.” There, we saw that the ‘rock’ was likely a reference to the founding rock of the Temple. David’s geographic goal was to return to Zion and, particularly, the Temple. Here, an interesting shift takes place, for David immediately says not that the Temple has been a refuge for me, but that “you” have been a refuge. He then says he has been a “tower of strength”. God has become a military fortress. This ‘rock’ of the Temple has become “our God”. This same shift takes place in Psalm 48 where the psalmist tells the people to “walk around its ramparts” so that they can tell the next generation “that thus is our God”. The ‘house of God’ is, sacramentally, the presence of God.  We must recall that, as spoken by the king, and in light of what we said above, these words take on a very deep resonance---the king, in returning to the Temple, would be, more than anyone, returning to his ‘source’, his ‘place of power’, that twin “home” that establishes, securely, his home. And this is precisely where the psalm will head in the following verses. Here, though, we can point out something crucial—that God’s power of establishing the king is understood to be his military power of being a ‘refuge’ and a ‘tower of strength’. When God, therefore, covenants to establish David’s house (his line) ‘forever’, he is not speaking merely biologically (his wives will not be barren), but militarily (they will not be wiped out). And—it is the bestowal of the Temple as the “refuge” and the “tower of strength” which is that security, not a free-floating promise but a literal, physical abode of God.