Dennis Tuuri

# Psalm 45 — “Enthralled by Your Beauty”

And to that end, we turn to Psalm 45 as the sermon text today. There is a handout that structures the text the way that I’ll be discussing it. Our topic today is enthralled by your beauty, which is right at the center as it turns out of Psalm 45. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. And I’m going to read the ESV title rather than the King James version. It is a much better translation. So Psalm 45 to the choir master according to Lilies, a Maskil of the sons of Kora, a love song.

My heart is overflowing with a good theme. I recite my composition concerning the king. My tongue is the pen of a ready writer. You are fairer than the sons of men. Grace is poured upon your lips. Therefore, God has blessed you forever. Gird your sword upon your thigh, oh mighty one, with your glory and your majesty. And in your majesty ride prosperously because of truth, humility, and righteousness.

And your right hand shall teach you awesome things. Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king’s enemies. The peoples fall under you. Your throne, oh God, is forever and ever. A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your kingdom. You loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore, God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness more than your companions. All your garments are scented with myrrh and aloes and cassia.

Out of the ivory palaces by which they have made you glad. King’s daughters are among your honorable women. At your right hand stands the queen in gold from Ophir. Listen, O daughter, consider and incline your ear. Forget your own people also and your father’s house. So the king will greatly desire your beauty because he is your Lord. Worship him. And the daughter of Tyre will come with a gift. The rich among the people will seek your favor.

The royal daughter is all glorious within her palace. Her clothing is woven with gold. She shall be brought to the king in robes of many colors. The virgins, her companions who follow her, shall be brought to you with gladness and rejoicing. They shall be brought. They shall enter the king’s palace. Instead of your fathers shall be your sons, whom you shall make princes in all the earth. I will make your name to be remembered in all generations.

Therefore, the people shall praise you forever and ever.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you and delight in this wonderful psalm that from one perspective describes what we’re doing here today. Coming before your presence, coming into the king’s palace. Corporately, the church is indeed the bride of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for this wonderful love song, this depiction of a royal wedding and ultimately picturing the coming of Messiah for his bride, the church.

Bless us today as a church. May this blessing reach out from this place as the king’s power does to transform the world. And may this also begin this week in our homes and in our relationships with each other. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

I sort of backed into this text. This is my last sermon on the seventh word, and I wanted to kind of end accentuating the positive. On your handouts, there’s—I put you on page two—there’s a recitation of the responsibilities: what things are forbidden and what duties are required by the seventh commandment.

The Westminster Larger Catechism always has these nice descriptions of the Ten Words, and I think they’re quite accurate. In the duties required, I bolded this for you: the duties required are marriage by those that have not the gift of continency, and then conjugal relationships, etc. So the idea is that the seventh word prohibits certain things, but the context for that is the goodness of sexual relations in the context of marriage.

We’ve talked about that. So I kind of wanted to focus on that.

Last night a small group of us were at the Screwtape Letters stage production at the Arlington Schnitzer in Portland. And one of the quotes that was done in the play—it was a one-act play basically—the book of course is about Screwtape, who’s writing to his nephew, a demon who is supposed to go and keep a guy from becoming a Christian or make him apostatize, or whatever it is. So it’s a series of advice letters from a head devil to some demons who are trying—a demon who’s supposed to keep a guy from doing what’s right. And so there’s lots of very interesting insight in it.

This quote from C.S. Lewis’s book, I think, is germane to what I’m talking about here in terms of the seventh word. Screwtape tells his nephew: “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure, in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are in a sense on the enemy’s ground.” Now, the enemy to Screwtape, of course, is God. So he’s going to talk about temptation and how to tempt the guy in different ways, but he says, “You got to remember that when we talk about pleasure in its normal state, we’re on the enemy’s ground.” Excellent observation.

He goes on to say: “I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is his invention, not ours. He made the pleasures. All our research so far has not enabled us to produce one pleasure. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our enemy has produced at times or in ways or in degrees which he has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its maker, and least pleasurable. An ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure is the formula. It’s the more certain, and it’s better style to get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return. That is what really gladdens our father’s heart.” Of course, it’s the devil.

“And the thoughts and troughs rather are the time for beginning the process. And he’s saying that when men get in troughs of despair and kind of despondency, this is really when you want to tempt them with pleasure.”

But Lewis’s observation is right on target. Pleasure is the Heavenly Father’s invention. All the opposition to God can do is to twist it and get us to do things seeking pleasure which are against what the Lord wants us to do and forbidden by him. And then, you know, the end result of that is really not pleasurable. So you keep running after it and it doesn’t work.

So as much as we want to talk about the seventh word and what it prohibits us from doing, we want to remember that the proper obedience to the seventh word includes for most people—by far the majority of the human race—are going to get married and should get married, and enjoy that kind of pleasure in the context of its normal properties that the Lord God has given to us.

This is not a sermon about that. So I’m getting this uncomfortable stuff out of the way at the first. It’s a sermon about being enthralled by beauty. And I’ll get back to why I chose this psalm in a minute. But one last thing on this part: I’ve also included on your handouts today on the second page a prayer.

There’s a man named Steve Stevens who’s a psychologist counselor here in Portland, and we’ve referred people to him for certain things and will in the future. I’ve met with him a week or so ago. He’s got a book out, a small book on twenty things you can do that are real simple to help your marriage. And one of the things he talks about is to have regular sexual relations. And he’s got a prayer here at the end. Each of these twenty things has a little prayer, some scripture verses, and he’s got a prayer here. And I’ve emphasized the three G’s that Dr. Stevens talks about: that marital sexual relationships are good.

So when I talked to him, he said, “We’re trying to get rid of the Greek influence where the body is bad and there’s this body-spirituality dichotomy.” We’ve talked about that in this church for twenty-some years—that Greek philosophy. We’re trying to drive it out of the church and look at a more Hebraic model, etc. So sexuality is good in the context of marriage. It’s what that pleasure was designed and invented to do.

Secondly, he says it’s glue. And so if married couples don’t have regular relationships, they’re going to start to drift apart. It is intended to bring you together. I would say the same thing’s true about worship. People think, you know, they have this relationship with Jesus, but worship is what bonds us together in a particular way every Lord’s day. And so it’s glue. And in marriage relationships, physical pleasures are part of the glue that God uses to bring people together.

And finally, he says it’s a gift. And so it’s important that—we’ve talked about this before—but the scriptures tell us Paul tells us that we don’t belong to ourselves; we belong to our spouses. Our bodies do. And so relationships are to be gifts to each other, right? The idea is to gift somebody else. It’s not to be selfish. And what you find is in gift-giving you find the most pleasure.

So that, you know, I wanted to talk about that just very briefly, but it’s important.

And so I wanted to end this series of sermons on the seventh commandment—don’t commit adultery—by stressing the positive. And I remembered somewhere in my head a phrase in the Bible that God is enthralled, or a man is enthralled, by someone’s love. Well, it’s found in Psalm 45, but it’s only found in the NIV translation. I don’t know how it got stuck in my head because I never used the NIV. But when we just read “the king will desire your beauty,” in the New International Version it says “the king is enthralled by your beauty.”

And it’s a pretty good word. We’ll talk in a little bit about this word “desire.” Enthral means to become a servant to somebody, right? A thrall was a slave or a servant. And so someone who is enthralled by the beauty of another person is a servant to that person. I thought of the old Brian Eno song “Slave to Love,” and there’s hundreds, thousands of songs about this—the relationship with men and women and how much we enjoy one another as Christian marriage progresses onward.

There is this sense of, you know, requiring each other. Leonard Cohen in one of his songs says, “I’ve got you like a habit.” Well, there’s a truth to that. Again, in Screwtape last night, he said one of the best ways to recommend—to get them married—because there are these voice characteristics and facial characteristics they’ll come to hate in each other over the years. And without the grace of God and without the proper attitude, that’s right.

But with the grace of God and our proper attitude, our spouses’ idiosyncrasies actually become endearment items to us. So, you know, this “enthralled by your love” led me to Psalm 45. And I had no idea when I looked at Psalm 45 to preach this sermon from it that actually this very center—that phrase—is the center of the psalm in terms of the structure of it, and we’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

Don’t worry about desire and beauty. When we get there, we’ll see some interesting things that I think put you at rest about what that might mean and what it doesn’t mean. So don’t worry about that.

We want to look at the psalm as a whole first, and we want to talk about it in terms of several layers. So far this is a Valentine’s Day sermon that’s been primarily speaking to married couples, but of course Psalm 45 is much broader in what it’s talking about, right?

There may have been a literal marriage. Some people think the marriage of Solomon. This is a psalm of the sons of Kora. This is not a Davidic psalm. David didn’t write this. It’s in the second book of the psalter. And by the way, it’s interesting. It’s the fourth in a series of Sons of Kora Psalms. And the fourth in a sequence frequently is related to the fourth day of creation, with the sun, moon, and stars reigning over things. And so we have a kingly psalm here.

What this psalm tells us about a king is, you know, in the Bible the bride isn’t just the woman he marries. There’s a real sense in which you marry your people. The Song of Solomon, I think, is at one hand a personal thing about a marriage and has the same kind of structure that this one does. On the other hand, it’s wisdom literature, and it tells us about the king. This psalm tells us the same thing: that the king is supposed to love his wife, her beauty, and the people are supposed to love their king. That’s a good relationship between a ruler and the people that he rules.

We saw just the opposite of that, of course, in the current events of the last couple of weeks. We saw a king who has ruled as a brutal dictator in many respects over his people, and they grew to hate him. So the antitype of what Psalm 45 is talking about in terms of politics or nation-states would be Egypt and Mubarak.

And so from one level, this psalm probably describes a literal marriage, but beyond that, this is imagery taken in the scriptures to relate to how a nation is governed—by a king who loves his people and the people love him.

Of course, the ultimate picture of what’s happening here is revealed to us in the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is clearly a messianic psalm, and it is quoted in Hebrews. The oil of gladness being poured upon him because he loves righteousness. In Hebrews 1:9, we read this: “Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore, God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.” That’s a quote from this psalm and directly talking about the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ in the book of Hebrews.

So clearly this psalm is not just talking about married couples, and it is talking about countries, but it’s talking about more than that. It’s really talking about the coming of Jesus Christ and his marriage to the church. And of course in Ephesians 5:32, the mystery is profound. He’s speaking of marriage, but he’s saying it refers to Christ and his church. “However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”

So, you know, ultimately this is depicting the coming of Jesus. So it’s talking about all of us.

At the center of this psalm, the king is enthralled by the beauty of his queen. And the queen is told to leave her household, leave her father and mother, and cleave to him, and then to worship him. So this is what we’ve done, right? And symbolically we do it every week. But this is what being a Christian is. It’s a change of allegiance from the old Adam to the second Adam. It’s talking about us.

And so we just sang in one of the songs we sang, “Let all who come to him in worship be in his steadfast love secure.” Well, at one level, at the center of this psalm, there’s a statement of assurance to each and every one of us: the king desires your beauty.

Now, it has implications for what beauty is, which we’ll talk about, but at the heart of it, you know, is not really the obligations upon the bride. At the center is what this wonderful king will do. He’ll desire your beauty. And so it’s about the Lord Jesus Christ.

And if nothing else, this psalm is meant to cause us to go away from it sure of his steadfast love—that this is the center of the depiction, the messianic depiction of who the Lord Jesus Christ is in relationship to his people.

You know, we can be in his steadfast love secure because at the center of this psalm, the beating heart, the central theme, God’s primary focus is the assurance that the king is enthralled by you—by the church and by you individually as well. He’s enthralled by your beauty. I mean, he came to serve, right? To be enthralled. And so that’s who he is. That’s what he’s done. And the text of scripture, this psalm, is first and foremost about that. So it informs all of us in our relationship to Jesus Christ.

It’s interesting because in the psalm it says, “The queen of Ophir sits at the right hand of the king.” Well, we know that Ephesians tells us we’re seated in the heavenly places with Christ. We’re ruling with him. Revelation says the queen is not at home waiting for the king to come home from his duties. She, in the text of this psalm, is sitting at the right hand of the king. She is involved in matters of state. And so the church—we come together to sit at the right hand of the king to worship and praise him forever because of his love for us, and he’s made us beautiful. And we come to leave all other allegiances, to cleave to him, and, because he is our Lord, to worship him.

That’s what we’re doing here today, right? The very center of this psalm is what we’re actually doing and accomplishing here. And as a result of that, we’re also at his right hand, and our prayers and our work are being transformed so that we can rule in the context of the world. The church is the ruler for the Lord Jesus Christ in the world. The queen sits at his right hand and she’s been given—she sits in the heavenly places and has been given rule and authority. So that his rod of iron in Psalm 2 and in Revelation is talked about as the church exercising the rod of iron over the nations.

The queen sits at the right hand of the king in gold of Ophir. So this text talks about that. It talks about our relationship to Christ.

Now it also talks about particular marriages. It is a Valentine’s Day sermon. He is your Lord, and in a very real sense, your husband is your Lord. Sarah referred to her husband as “Lord” in the book of Genesis. And she’s commended for that in the New Testament. And so we have models here that, while ultimately speaking of Jesus and the church, are applied directly to civil politics in terms of the king and his people. And we can make very direct application to marriages as well. And so it’s a fitting Valentine’s Day psalm.

Additionally, the bride is brought to the king, right? It says that she’s brought along. These other daughters are with her, and she’s brought into the palace of the king. And you know, this is like a wedding, and a lot of our weddings look this very way, right? So you’ve got the king sitting here waiting for his bride, and the bride is ushered in. Her wedding party comes along first, and then she enters, right?

And I remember on my wedding day, I was enthralled by the beauty of my wife when I saw her coming up the aisle. It was just one of those surreal sort of moments when I saw her. And so we are in the same way. Paul says that he’s preparing the church of Jesus Christ. He says in 2 Corinthians 11:2, “I’m jealous over you with a godly jealousy. I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.” And Ephesians 5:27, “That he might present to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but he should be holy without blemish.”

So there’s a sense in which our whole history is preparation for being ushered into the eternal King’s temple when he returns and manifests his presence on earth and renews us. And so there’s this procession that we’re kind of always involved with in this life, and God is preparing us for him.

All right, so that’s some general ties between this psalm and specific themes in the New Testament. Let’s look now at the specifics of the psalm.

So take your handout if you have one. If you don’t, get one someplace. I’m going to really use that for a few minutes here. What you’ll see is that this psalm is not that difficult to outline. I mean, if you get into a lot of detail it can get a little more, but the basic themes seem pretty obvious the way the thing is laid out.

Now, before we get into the structure though, we do have to deal just a little bit with this title that I read—the ESV translation of it, right? And this reminds us of last week’s sermon where we didn’t know what some of the terms meant. Not exactly sure what the assembly of the Lord was. Not exactly sure what misbegotten meant in Deuteronomy 23. Well, it’s the same thing. It says this tune is “according to Lilies.” What does that mean? Well, we don’t know. It comes right down to it. We just don’t know.

Lilies are a marriage picture in the temple. The top of the columns of Boaz had lilies around them. Lilies were decorated—the bronze sea. I mean, lilies were associated, you know, with beautiful smell, beautiful big flowers. They were associated with marriage. And so it seems nice that this is set to lilies, whatever that means. But there are other psalms set to lilies, and it’s not about marriage at all. It’s about persecution. So we don’t know what lilies meant.

Some people think it was a tune, a particular tune. But it’s hard to imagine the same tune being used for this beautiful wedding psalm and then another psalm that talks about persecution and praying for God to deliver them. Possible. Another alternative that may be better is that lilies is a musical instrument—that somehow a musical instrument was referred to as lilies. The point is we just don’t know.

We can draw associations with lilies. Lilies is a big theme in the Song of Songs, right? “His lips are like lilies.” “She looks like lilies.” I mean, lilies are everywhere in the Song of Songs as well. And this is referred to specifically in the title as a love song, just like the Song of Songs is the ultimate love song. And so there are these connections. There are lots of connections between what happens in Psalm 45 and the Song of Songs, as one might expect. And lilies is one of them.

So you can think about it and meditate about it, but we really don’t know what it is.

And the same is true of Maskil. This is a Maskil. What does that mean? Again, most psalms that have the word Maskil—they’re thinking through a difficult topic when God has kind of hidden himself. “Where is God?” That’s what Maskils typically are. And so you might think it means to think through, to think about, to meditate, to ponder something deep that’s difficult and seems one way, but it’s actually another.

But of course, that doesn’t really fit this psalm. This psalm is straight-up joy, right? No difficulties going on. It’s all good news. So we don’t know.

And again, this is the inspired text of scripture. And this is what God has done so far in the history of his church. There are certain things about the Bible we just don’t know. That’s our station. You know, like the Egyptian who couldn’t get into the third generation to office in Israel. It’s okay. It’s our station. We don’t got to worry about it. We can rest in it.

So we come to these texts. There are a couple of other places in Psalm 45 where we’re just not sure of things. So we come hopefully humbly to the text. That’s the point I’m trying to make. We come humbly, figuring out what we can know and not worrying too much about all the stuff that we don’t know. And we know a lot about this text. There’s a lot of things that are quite clear, including, I think, the basic structure of the text.

So, if you look at your handouts, you know, it begins and closes with personal pronouns, right? You notice that, you should, because I bolded it in your text, in your handout. “My heart is overflowing with a good thing. I recite my composition concerning the king. My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”

Now, it’s personal pronouns, and these are matched at the end. You go through the whole psalm, there’s no more of those things until the very concluding verse: “I will make your name to be remembered in all generations. Therefore, the people shall praise you forever and ever.”

So that matches up. That tells us that there’s a structure here with bookends, okay?

Now, the verses are interesting because what they say is: I’m going to write, and then at the end of it, I’m causing to be remembered. Right? So the writing of this psalm produced a remembrance of the truths of the coming Messiah and the king and all that stuff that produced people worshiping and praising him forever and ever. So there it is—bookends, but it’s bookends that have a movement, right?

Remember, we said last week that thinking Hebraically is thinking not statically. It’s not just thinking about redemption for us individually or now; it’s thinking about conquest and dominion. These—the very structure of these psalms like this, the text of scripture—they have an eschatology to them. They begin with the joyful composition, a little window into inspiration maybe in verse one, and what that looks like at least sometimes. And the end result of that inspired word going forth is the king’s name will be remembered to all generations. The people shall praise you forever and ever.

The word of God is his chosen method to bring all the world throughout history. Then history is the unfolding of people coming to praise God forever and ever. Wonderful picture, wonderful movement.

Now let’s just think one little thing here. So what’s at the center? What’s the content? The content is marriage. Yeah, it’s talking about Jesus—Jesus and the church. And yeah, it’s talking about Israel and her king, but it’s talking about marriage. And as Paul says, we’re supposed to think of that marriage in terms of our marriages.

Now, if marriage is the center of this psalm, that moves the psalm along to this victorious postmillennial ending—and of course it’s throughout the psalm, right? He’s riding forth victoriously, right on in majesty. We may sing on Palm Sunday, and that’s taken from this text. So it’s got that theme to it. And the end conclusion is this praising of Yahweh forever and ever, the king Jesus.

Well, what it tells us is, I think we can infer—we can make application—that our marriages: we don’t work for good marriages just because it’s pleasurable or a good thing and we don’t like fighting. It says that marriage is central to the movement of history. When you celebrate Valentine’s Day tomorrow, when you transform your marriage and when you work at it, I believe that we can make legitimate application that’s a big part of God’s method for transforming the world.

Now, I think that’s what it says. It’s interesting to me. I’ve known, you know, lots of people over the years, and there’s been some people that have stood out that I can think of who were guys who were just convinced they had the right thing to change the world. “This is it. And this is where we’re going to stake our lives.” And it’s funny to me how several of those men who wanted to really achieve the concluding verse of this psalm—that people will praise God—they can’t. They want to spend a ton more time talking politics and researching this, that, and the other thing rather than wanting to care for their wife and kids.

This psalm, I think, tells us that’s wrongheaded. Oh, it’s good to study, don’t get me wrong, and it’s good to apply ourselves, but if somehow you think that’s the primary way transformation is going to happen in the world, you got it all wrong. You’re thinking like them now. That’s the gods of the Canaanites, the gods of political power. God is not like that.

He said—now he wants us involved in that stuff—but he says the primary power for the transformation of the world are godly people entering into godly marriages, delighting in those marriages, being enthralled by your wife and her seeing you as Lord and serving you in a proper sense, new allegiances to you. And as a result of that, you know, you have families that then change the world. That’s God’s method.

So just the little bookends front and after, the recognition of what’s in between them, helps us to see the movement, the arc of this psalm. It begins with inspiration and a recording of something, and it ends with Christ being remembered forever and ever. And the way it gets there is through marriage. So that’s the opening and closing bookends.

The next section is found in verse 2: “You’re fairer than the sons of men. Grace is poured upon your lips.”

Now I’m kind of getting old, so I might forget about this. I’m going to say something about this that I probably should wait till later. I’m going to say it now. But anyway, this is matched in verse 16, B-prime: “Instead of your fathers shall be your sons, right? So there are sons in verse 2: ‘You’re fairer than the sons of men.’ And then there are sons in verse 16. That’s the key, the link that tells us these kind of match up. ‘And you shall make princes in all the earth.’

Now the blessing of God promised in verse 2—again, the arc is that blessing is seen as children. Okay? As having a generation that precedes them. ‘Instead of your fathers shall be your sons.’ Now this is masculine. This is talking about the king. Not the queen. The deed of your father shall be your sons, whom you shall make princes in all the earth.

Again, the tremendous significance of the church is what’s involved here. Jesus—we’re his sons in one sense. We’re the sons of God, right? And God makes us princes in all the earth. And the blessing that he gives—the Father gives to the son—is to cause the son’s people to be princes in all the earth. So there’s this movement again. The Bible’s postmillennial from beginning to end. And here it is too. And it’s accomplished, you know, by this. Again, at the center is marriage. It’s at the heart of this.

Now the thing I wanted to say that I don’t want to forget to say: this is so important. I know some of you are thinking, “Well, we get to the center. That’s going to be my problem. This beauty thing, you know? You tell somebody, ‘Well, the heart of godly marriage and societal transformation is the king desiring your beauty, husband desiring your beauty.’ And they think, ‘Well, I’m not beautiful. I used to be. Maybe.’ But most women—all of them—are beautiful from one perspective. None of them think they are. That’s just the way it is.”

But the reason I talk about it: because here in B, you are fairer. It’s the same basic word. “You are more beautiful than the sons of men.” Now, this is talking about Jesus, okay? The king. And we’re told in Isaiah that he didn’t have any exterior form by which he was beautiful. So what do we do with that?

Well, we just read the text, and the text tells us what it means. What is the beauty of him that makes him more fair? “Grace is poured upon your lips.” His beauty is in his speech, his gracious speech. Okay? Now, I know that still bothers some of you ladies that your husband won’t desire your fairness of speech either. But you can do something about that, right?

The point is that beauty—and we’ll, as we get to it, we’ll see that this is true—beauty is not a word that just means external appearance. It can mean that, but here within the text itself it defines beauty as the way we speak to each other. And so men, you’re not off the hook, because it’s really describing the groom, right? It’s describing Jesus. His beauty. Our beauty as husbands should be the grace of the speech that we give to one another. Okay? Boy, that’s really significant.

We can just stop right there and just say, well, you know, this week that’s what you want to do. Be beautiful. Have the king enthralled by your beauty by being people whose speech is controlled by the spirit of God. Have the grace poured upon your lips. Demonstrate that in your speech.

So again, what does it mean? We move from the word to dominion in A and A-prime. And then we move from the grace—the beauty of Jesus being his words, again, to then his people are made princes in all the earth. Isn’t that beautiful? These things are beautiful. And if you just read these things kind of linearly, you won’t get those matchups. And the matchups, I think, are beautiful and exciting.

Then the longer sections are the C and the C-prime sections. And here it describes the glory of the groom and then the glory of the bride. And that’s why I put that in there—because these sections are a little tougher to see at a glance what it is. But that’s what it talks about, right? “Guard your sword upon your king, oh mighty one, with your glory and your majesty. And your majesty ride prosperously because of truth, humility, and righteousness.”

Well, these are big topics. We could take a lot of time, but we don’t have time to do that. But it’s beautiful. And notice this: there are only four explicit imperatives, I think, in the text. So, “Do this, do this, do this, do this.” And two of them are for the guy and two of them are for the girl. And the two for the guy are here. “Gird your sword.” That’s an imperative. That’s telling him what to do. And then “In your majesty, ride prosperously.” That’s telling him what to do.

Now, there are other things that’ll happen as he does those things, but I think—and I could be wrong—but I think those are the two, or at least the two primary imperatives, the two imperatives to the king.

So what does it tell us? You know, well, we’re all united to Christ. This isn’t just a guy thing, but it’s—we can focus on the guys in this. What it tells us is to prepare and then engage, right? You get ready. You gird your sword on your side, and then you ride prosperously. Some guys are all riding and no girding. And when they get there, what are they going to do? They’re going to lose. And some guys are all girding and no riding. And you never get into the battle. And the whole girding thing has been pointless.

So it’s talking about preparation and follow-through, right? We have all these teams. That’s what’s going on. Isn’t that tough? Various events. Gird, prepare for them, ride forth, do them. That’s what the two imperatives are here. Describing the beauty and glory of the groom. So this is how he is described.

And you know, it’s interesting because he’s going to prosper. We’re told the reason why he’s going to prosper: truth, humility, and righteousness. And the center of those three is humility. Right? So humility is key to the whole thing.

Now you’ve got this glorious, wonderful depiction of the messianic king—ultimately of Jesus, maybe in the secondary sense of David, Solomon, whoever it was, right? Wonderful depictions of who he is. “Your right hand shall teach you awesome things. Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king’s enemies. The peoples fall under you. Your throne, oh God, is forever and ever. A scepter of righteousness,” etc.

But the heart of the reason why he’ll be prosperous is humility. So: prepare, engage, and do it with humility. And God says the end result’s going to be just what we all want. Arrows in the hearts of the enemies who won’t turn from their sins, repent, and embrace Christ. That’s what we want. I mean, not literal arrows, but we want to transform the world, right? We want to see everybody ushered into the right kind of pleasure of serving Christ.

And so God says, “That’s my plan. That’s how it’s going to work. It’s going to be carried out. The word will go forth. The speech will accompany that word. You’ll end up controlling history and being princes on the earth. And if you prepare yourself correctly and then engage correctly, and you do it with humility, you’re going to be prosperous in battle because righteousness, justice, faithfulness—that is the theme of what you’re doing.”

So this wonderful depiction of the glory of the groom has all kinds of other things in it—promises of victory, etc. But it has these two imperatives.

Now the matching description, the glory of the bride, don’t have imperatives in it down in the C-prime section. “Royal daughter is all glorious within the palace. Her clothing is woven with gold. She shall be brought to the king in robes of many colors. The virgins, her companions who follow her, shall be brought to you with gladness and rejoicing. They shall be brought. They shall enter the king’s palace.”

So this is the procession thing I talked about earlier. You’ve got the bride. You’ve got her bridesmaids. That’s what that word means there. And she’s going to be brought in. So there’s a gloriousness of her, but it isn’t action-oriented, right? It’s interesting because it’s contrasted. It’s glory. So it compares with the C-section talking about the groom. But the bride, on the other hand, what’s described is her clothing and then her entrance into the king’s palace.

You know, people have said this for a long time. I think it’s basically true. Husbands are primarily oriented outward, right? Exercise dominion outward. Wives are primarily given to support the husband in his task. And some of that is to be pointed inward, to making the homes beautiful and little Edens again. And that’s what wives tend to do. And it’s not as if you can’t have people involved in both. Nobody’s saying that. Don’t read into what I’m saying what I’m not saying. I’m just saying primarily it’s the men who go out to battle. In fact, that’s commanded in the Old Testament. And the women who are support troops for the men doing battle.

So that’s what’s going on here too. The king’s glorious, the queen’s glorious, but it’s different. There’s a difference to it.

One of the points that Steve Stevens makes in having a healthy marriage—one of the twenty things—is to appreciate the differences. And this text, this wonderful marriage victorious text, enthralled by—but he, you know, talks about the differences between the groom and his bride.

Her clothing is emphasized. That doesn’t mean what she wears. I mean, it doesn’t mean—I mean, it certainly means your clothing, and you should look nice. You’ve all tried to look nice as you come before the king today. But of course, we know that the scriptures relate clothing in the book of Revelation, for instance, to the works, the deeds of people. So the church’s beauty has really a relationship to her deeds, what she’s doing.

And so, you know, there’s this distinction. Her deeds aren’t quite the same. Now it’s kind of confusing because we’re united to Christ. The church is both ruling for him, and we follow him on the white horse, etc. But primarily in terms of marriage imagery here, husbands are pointed outward; wives tend to be pointed inward as support roles for what the husband is called to do.

And again, don’t—you know, those are generalizations. And like all generalizations, they’ll fade.

So one other thing before we move on to the center. You know, you have the glory of the king and then you’ve got the glory of the queen. Now Revelation—the book of Revelation—forget all that stuff trying to figure out the details and which millennial position is right. Know this: that the book of Revelation begins by describing the beauty of Christ and his appearance. And then at the end it describes the beauty of the bride, his bride, the city of God, the church. And so what happens is history is a movement toward the establishment of the glory of the church. And you have that same thing here again.

The arc of this psalm is moving from the glory of God to him transforming his people, bringing them into redemption, into relationship with Christ, making them glorious with the glory—the reflected glory of the king, the glory of Jesus. So that’s the movement here.

Now on either side of the very center are these king’s daughters, right? So in verse 9, D: “King’s daughters are among your honorable women. At your right hand stands the queen in gold.” That’s talking about the queen, the one who he’s being married to. It isn’t a separate queen, I don’t think. It’s one of those verses a little hard to describe.

But these, you know, there are these king’s daughters. And then matching that in verse 12, D-prime, “the daughter of Tyre will come with a gift. The rich among the people will seek your favor.” And there we have commercial enterprises. Tyre is a picture of business and commerce. And so at this royal wedding, we have commerce represented by the daughter of Tyre. It doesn’t mean the literal daughter of the king necessarily. It means the people of Tyre. And so, you know, this movement involves the transformation of all the kings of the earth and the people of all the kingdoms, and their wealth is brought to the king’s palace to beautify this wedding.

It happens today too. There’s a sense in which we’re all daughters of Tyre. Most of us are out there in the commercial field. You’re bringing in gifts from Tyre, from the commercial enterprises. You do it with tithes and offerings. You’ve come to the reenactment of the wedding of God with his people, the marriage supper of the Lamb. And you come, and one role you’re playing is as daughters of Tyre, bringing tribute to the king.

All right, let’s get to the center. The center.

In most people, the only outlines I’ve seen show the center as being a doubled center. So in other words, they’ve got, you know, two E’s. They don’t have F broken out. What it says is: “Hear, O daughter, consider and incline your ear.”

Now see, that means we’re at the center now. “Listen,” you know. The structure has brought us to this point. But then there’s this thing telling you: now listen up. I’m at the center of this thing now. That’s how we’re going to get to you being princes in the earth. It’s how we’re going to get to the whole world praising. This is “listen up.”

“Consider, meditate upon it. Listen, incline your ear. Listen hard.” Okay? And I’m going to focus now on the main thing that I want you to understand and listen to. Consider, meditate upon it. Listen.

And here we have the two imperatives for the bride. “Forget your own people, your father’s house. So the king will greatly desire your beauty because he is your Lord. Worship him.”

They’re the two imperatives for the bride. Leave and cleave. You know, “leave your father’s house,” right? That’s an imperative. “Forget your own people.” And the second imperative is to “worship him.”

So really, the imperative for the bride is to leave and cleave. We’re right back to Genesis with the first marriage. Although it’s interesting because in Genesis, who’s doing the leaving and cleaving? Men, right? “Adam, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and become one flesh with his wife.” Cleave to his wife, get glued together. You see, one life, one purpose, one set of activities, unity and planning, etc.

But here, it’s given to the bride. That’s nice to know. You know, some people get a little mixed up about this in terms of who’s leaving what household. And sometimes the idea is the man leaves his household, but he kind of becomes part of the girl’s household. Here it explicitly says, “Forget your parents.” Now it doesn’t mean ultimately, you know, completely, but it means there’s a transfer of covenantal headship. This happens in marriages, right?

Most marriages that we’ve had here, or that I’ve seen done, you know—the girl’s hand is taken from the dad and then placed into the hand of her husband. And so she’s transferring. She’s leaving. Now I mean she’s going to see him still. She’ll hang out with him. May get advice and counsel from him. But her allegiance now has become new.

And this again is a picture of the church. It’s a picture of who we are in Christ. You know, at the center of the transformation that allows postmillennial victory is how faithful we’ve left our old Adamic nature and worshiped our new Lord. Cleave to him, right? I mean, the more we do that, the more blessing and success there is in the context of our lives.

So this heart has these imperatives that tell us kind of the simple things of life. But you know, that’s what’s important in life is the simple stuff done well and consistently.

So you have these—now I break out F—the center—because, you know, a lot of people don’t like the way I kind of make these little things. But you could say the center is the leaving and cleaving of the wife. But to me, it’s significant that in the middle of that there’s this statement: “The king will greatly desire your beauty.”

Now it’s not that he waits to desire your beauty until you do that. And then you have to wait for him to be enthralled by your beauty to acknowledge him as Lord and worship him. This is not a logical or chronological sequence of events. This is life. This is married life. This is life in the context of a king and his people. There is a reciprocation going on all the time where the people are called to acknowledge the covenantal headship of the person, and that person and the ruler is loving his people. The husband’s loving his wife, desiring her beauty and being enthralled by it, etc.—becoming a servant to her, as it were.

You know, that’s it. It’s dynamic and fluid. But I think the center of it is the king, the great promise, the assurance that we’re going to be loved, the putting to rest of all the fears that we have that we’ve been abandoned, right? The center of the text is the assurance that the king will greatly desire your beauty—is greatly desiring your beauty.

Now, beauty—as I said, we can relate to other things other than physical beauty. The word beauty here is used in terms of physical beauty. I pointed out when I preached on this form of beauty, oh, six months ago or something, that one of my favorite verses about beauty is the beautiful fat cows as opposed to the ugly skinny cows in Pharaoh’s dream. I like that. I think it’s interesting that a culture that rejects Christ gets skinnier and skinnier and skinnier.

But the point is that beauty isn’t just the way we think about it here in terms of physical appearance. Tyre is described in Ezekiel as having beauty, and it’s directly related to her wisdom of commerce. Okay. So, you know, it’s not a term that’s referring only to exterior appearances. It can do that, but it’s used in a wide variety of ways in the scriptures. And it refers to wisdom. It refers to applying our lives, making good decisions about our life that are honoring to God. The wisdom and beauty of Tyre becomes spoiled because she becomes prideful.

So the beauty that the king desires is wisdom. It’s a consistency of service. It’s humility. It’s having the grace in our speech that’s talked about earlier. That’s the sort of beauty that the king desires.

The word desire—it isn’t enthralled. It’s really “desire” is probably a better translation. On the other hand, enthralled isn’t bad. In the wilderness, the people craved for meat. It’s the same word for desire. You can desire good things; you can desire bad things. We’re warned against desiring the wrong kind of women in the book of Proverbs. Desiring the wrong beauty gets us way off the track. Okay, it’s sin or leads to death.

So desire is something that’s not uncontrollable. It’s a matter of deciding what you’re going to desire. Number one. And number two, though, it is, in a sense, you know, it can become what we might call addictive, because it does have this strong idea that we’re really taken with something or somebody or some activity or some kind of food. Yeah. You were all getting ready to go to family camp, and the Bible says, “Buy whatever your heart desires.” It’s the same word. So it’s a good thing. We’re supposed to desire certain things. It’s something we control, and then something we do things about.

And so, at the center of this text, Jesus has decided to place his eternal love upon you. He desires you in that proper sense. He’s enthralled. He’s got the whole universe operating in a way to serve you as you are his princes in the earth. This is Jesus’s desire for us. And the result is we’re supposed to respond to that by commitment to him, by calling him Lord, worshiping him, and leaving our old man and taking up the new man in devotion.

And we’re supposed to be beautiful. So when we approach this in terms of marriage, it’s the same thing. Husbands are supposed to desire their wives—not somebody else’s wife or somebody else’s possessions—or to desire their own wife. And wives are to be beautiful as part of what they’re doing. They have to have a commitment to the covenantal headship of their husbands, and they have to, in a sense, serve him as he’s serving them, right?

He’s desiring and serving them. They’re worshiping him, which means to worship, bow down, serve, and he has covenantal headship over them in terms of his title here of Lord.

Beyond that, we as a people, we can be assured of the blessings of God desiring us. But we as a people are also called then to act beautiful, right? And so this word beauty, which is kind of far-ranging, has specific reference to us. We’re supposed to walk away from here with an assurance that the king desires us, but also with a commitment to be beautiful.

I mentioned last week at the communion talk Matthew 20:20-30. My wife talked on this at a recent shower. I think it’s—and as I thought about being enthralled with the beauty of somebody, as my wife sort of explained—then I read the text in Matthew 20 about the mother of the sons of thunder, right, of John and James.

I was sort of enthralled by the woman. Kind of like, wow, this is really interesting what she does here. You know, it says: “The mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him with her sons, kneeling before him, she asked him for something. He says, ‘What do you want?’ She said, ‘Say that these two sons of mine are to sit down in your right hand and one at your left in your kingdom.’ Jesus says, ‘You don’t know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am drinking?’ They—then the sons said to him, ‘Yes, we are able.’ And then Jesus says, ‘Well, it’s not mine to give. It’s the Father’s deal. Who’s going to sit at my right hand and who’s at my left?’”

And people read this text, and like so many texts, Jacob and all kinds of people, we kind of put the person down. But I think that her actions—they’re enthralling to me, at least. They’re interesting to me to reconsider. What is she doing? She’s petitioning the Lord, and she’s doing it in a worshipful state. She’s kneeling down before him and asking if she can ask him a request. Then he says, “Okay.” And she asks the request. Is she asking something selfishly? No, she’s asking for her sons, and she’s asking for nearness to Christ in the context of his kingdom.

Now, I think she’s beautiful. I think what she does here is beautiful. And I think the text also shows us her beauty because you’ve got these two sons of thunder, right? And they’re just presented sitting there mute as their mom asked Jesus for this thing that could be embarrassing to them. And then he says, “Well, can you do it?” And they say, “Yeah, we can do it. We’ll die for you.” They know what’s going on.

So her ability as a beautiful woman, committed disciple of Yahweh, is reflected in the submission of her sons as they go with her and she makes this request. These are grown men, sons of thunder described to us in the text. But this woman, you know, brings them and then asks this request.

More could be said, but you know, being enthralled by the beauty of something—what are we supposed to be like? We’re supposed to be people who worship Christ. But as part of that worship, we’re to ask him for particular things. And there’s nothing wrong with asking for nearness of our children to him in his kingdom, and even for authority—that our children be the sort of people and take up the cross of Christ, could if necessary suffer and die for him.

Yeah, we’ll do that if that’s part of what the thing is here. That’s beauty. That’s beauty.

Another beautiful character that you wouldn’t think of necessarily is John the Baptist. I’ve talked a lot about postmillennialism, but John the Baptist—and I had a man in my office this week who was telling me, you know, John the Baptist is an interesting guy in relationship to the civil magistrate, to Herod. Right now, when we think of John the Baptist, we think, well, he got his head cut off. Didn’t work out too good, you know?

So I do want to tell the story, because sometimes in the short term that’s what happens. As in the long term, we’re becoming princes of the earth. But it’s interesting that the movement of the relationship of John the Baptist and Herod: first, wants to kill him. But then Herod gets perplexed and interested in what he has to say. After he arrests him, he hears him, becomes fearful of John the Baptist. Herod protects John the Baptist from Herodias. And Herod is actually grieved when John the Baptist is executed. When he executes John the Baptist, he’s grieved over the thing.

John the Baptist has had a very interesting influence on Herod. And again, it’s easy just to dismiss it all and not look at the carefulness of the text. But if you read carefully those accounts in Mark 6 particularly, what you see is that John the Baptist was beautiful. I—enthralled by the beauty of that member of the bride, the church of Jesus Christ, in the way he presented himself to a king, a civil ruler, and got the king to move from wanting to kill him to being perplexed, interested, listening to him, trying to protect him, then, and eventually sorrowing over his death. It’s almost Pilate-like what Herod goes through here.

And I don’t know what Herod’s eternal state is, this particular Herod, but I know that this is part of the beauty of the bride of Jesus Christ.

Now, do you know what John the Baptist was talking to Herod about? You probably do. But he wasn’t going down to Portland and just saying, “How can we help you in your city here?” Right? Herod said, “It’s not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” Herod—John the Baptist rather—addressed sexual sin in Herod’s life. And actually, Luke tells us, in other evil things that he was doing. So John the Baptist was able. He had grace poured upon his lips to tell the truth, but apparently in humility so that he actually developed a relationship with Herod and got Herod to move and start to become different in his relationship to John the Baptist.

That enthrals me. I don’t know about you, but that just sort of makes me—that is really interesting. I’m very interested in that.

And there are two pictures of what we’re supposed to be like as a church and a people. We’re to ride forth in glory and all that stuff, but we’re to do so with truth, humility, and righteousness. That’s what John the Baptist does. We’re supposed to be people that worship the Lord Jesus Christ, are committed to him, but have the strength and dominion to ask requests for those that we love and know have particular talents and giftings.

May the Lord God cause us in our homes this week to celebrate marriage tomorrow—those of us that are married—but may he also get us, on Valentine’s Day, to reflect on us as the bride of Christ, being assured that he’s enthralled by our beauty. He loves us. He desires us. But also then wanting to respond by being more beautiful in our speech, in our actions, more committed to Jesus Christ, to leaving our old man, our old Adamic nature, to calling him Lord and worshiping him.

Let’s pray.

Father God, we thank you for this wonderful psalm, this wonderful picture of wedding and marriage. We do pray that our lives be transformed this week through the truths of this text. Help us to have been moved by the words in the text to then a remembrance of them this week and an effectual remembrance. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.