Ps. 61.4 (David, Adam and Eden)

O that I might sojourn / in your tent forever
and take refuge / under the shelter / of your wings.
For you / have heard my voice / O God; 
You have given me / the heritage / of those who fear your name. S

omething we left out of our reflections yesterday was the importance than kingship and Temple are created at the same time and what that says about the nation. We have emphasized over-and-over in those psalms that emerge from the king that they are not purely private pleas, but they are pleas of public persona who carries in himself the flock/people of God. His deliverance is their deliverance; his concern for his safety is his concern that they not be made susceptible to wolves. They reside in him. With that in mind, the kingship and the Temple function in a very similar manner—they are vessels for the people. They are places through whom (or which) the people commune with God. In other words, they are not purely private entities: as the Temple exists to be a place of sacrifice, so the king exists to be the guardian of the people and the dispenser of justice. For the king to be in exile, is for the people to be in exile—and, for the king to enter the Temple, is for the people to enter the Temple. In this manner, the king is a type of Adam. He is an everyman because everyman is in and represented through him. And, for him to enter the Temple, is for Adam to enter Eden (which is modeled after the Temple). Once this is grasped something shocking emerges—for the king to enter the Temple, like Adam (re)entering Eden, is for the king to move into the ‘forever’ of God, that place where he ‘lives forever’. This is (another reason) why the Temple and kingship emerged simultaneously: David, in the Temple, was undoing the fall of Adam and re-entering Eden (and, just like Adam, his Temple-building son will immediately ‘fall’ through the seduction of a woman…). The Temple became the ‘space of covenant’ and, with it, the power of God’s forever. David would become almost like Melchizadek: the priest-king of (Jeru)salem. And his ‘life perpetual’ (Adam-like) would be the covenantal power that would “build his house”—the promise of God that a descendant of his would always rule Israel. All of this sheds a magnificent light on these lines: the king, in the Temple, carries with his all of God’s people, and enters into the sojourning forever-time of God’s presence; a forever-time marked by the protective refuge of the cherubim wings of the arc of covenant. The ‘heritage’ he has is, as confirmed later, that he “sits enthroned forever” (in and through his forever-descendants). Can one avoid thinking of the book of Hebrews at this point?