Ps. 61.6-8 (the forever-king)

Add to the days / of the king
let his years / span the generations.
May he sit enthroned / in God’s presence forever
assign loyal-love / and Truth / to safeguard him.
Then / I will always sing / the praise of your name
fulfilling my vows / day by day. 

Here we move to the concluding petition of the king and that which summarizes all of our themes. We find here the ‘extension of life’ in the Temple, the king’s return to the Temple, the Temple as co-extensive with the king’s longevity by and through its protection, and, in an addition, the king liturgically fulfilling his vows. It goes without saying, but notice how all of this reverses the exile the king is now experiencing: The “ends of the earth” are here met with the enthronement of the king at the “navel of the earth” (the Temple) and the “feinting” (dying) heart is contrasted with an enthronement that lasts “forever”.  The exiled king has come home (both to his home of power and the ‘home’ of God).  Important to note too, is that this is not a prayer for an ‘everyman’, but specifically for the king. A congregation could certainly have prayed this, but it would have been that God bring back from exile their king so that he might “live forever” in God’s presence in the Temple (or, Zion). This is crucial, I believe, because it reinforces the fact that this psalm looks forward to an event, and not a ‘state of being’ or a ‘spirituality’. It is very historically (and objectively, and geographically) oriented. And it is so because this psalm so effectively shows us the marriage of king and temple—the king is most effective (most ‘kingly’) when he sits enthroned in God’s Temple forever. The Temple on earth is ordered to provide this source of power to the king in the same way that the God-forever rules as High King from and in his heavenly Temple (or, we might say, they work to channel the heavenly and united power to earth). And, just as the High King (God) is surrounded by a heavenly council, so too is this king to be surrounded by “loyal-love” and “truth” (twin covenantal powers). Indeed, his enthronement is in the very “presence of God”.  This, as we said yesterday, is the Adam-power of the king, as he re-enters the power of Eden (the Temple) and, “in God’s presence” lives forever as an “image of God” in the world—assigned to ‘subdue the earth’. The centrality of longevity should not be made into a metaphor—there is, here, a real sense and desire that the kingly mediation of God’s power remain unbroken; that there be a perpetual and enduring person/king. This may partake of typical ‘courtly exaggeration’, but to dismiss it through such descriptions is to utterly miss the import and power of these concluding lines (and the close bond sensed between king and Temple). This is not a king who possesses immortality, but a king who, in God’s presence, moves into God’s ‘forever’, for the purpose of him being enabled to mediate God’s justice to the world. (Psalm 2 is another excellent example of this.) The king’s eternity is not an individual eternity (‘personal immortality/eternity’), but a missioned, political, kingly eternity. It is that that this psalmist wants to see made eternal.  Because it is that which would, Second-Adam-like, ‘subdue’ and bring peace to the world. Again, can we help but hear the echoes of Hebrews with its constant emphasis on Christ’s destruction of death, with his (re?)entering the Temple, with its constant refrain that Christ is a new Melchizadek (a (the only) priest-king in all of Scripture), with its sense that Christ’s priestly-kingly mediation is now “forever”? And, does that not mean that a Christian can still pray this words for Christ’s eternity just as fervently, regardless of its already-accomplishment in the Ascension?