The Queen Question

The introduction to Psalm 45 calls it a love song and tells us the Sons of Korah wrote it. The psalm portrays a glorious, conquering king. By verse 5, his enemies, in so many words, have become his footstool. Hmm, now where have I heard that before?

I jest. There’s no difficulty identifying the king as our Lord Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews quotes verses 6 and 7 of this very psalm and plainly tells us they speak of “the Son”, distinguishing him above all created beings, no matter how powerful and glorious.

Locating the Psalm in History

It is not the first advent of Christ about which the psalmists write. Not in the slightest. Isaiah says concerning the incarnation that he had “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him”, whereas in Psalm 45 he is “the most handsome of the sons of men”. We are viewing the glorified Christ at his second coming, here to deliver Israel from all its enemies and to set up his kingdom on earth. No wonder his disciples had difficulty recognizing him after he rose from the dead. No wonder John fell at his feet as though dead at the mere sight of him.

So then, the setting for the psalm is early millennial. In it, we see Christ as king in a context that cannot be anything other than earthly, replete with references to “ivory palaces”, the “gold of Ophir” and even the “daughter of Tyre”. This is manifestly not the eternal state.

My question then: Who is this queen standing at his right hand in verse 9?

Who is the Queen?

The answer of most commentators is “the Church”. Has to be, right? From Augustine all the way down to Barnes, Clarke, Coffman and Smith, all assume the identification without argument or serious discussion. The reasoning for an allegorical interpretation of “queen” is sound enough. To imagine any mere human female as the public companion of one the psalmists call “God” is inconceivable, even blasphemous. No serious theologian or expositor would go there. Those who do not gravitate to the Church interpretation invariably seize on the only plausible alternative, that the psalmists are flipping back and forth between millennial Christ and historical Solomon. The vast majority prefer to picture a corporate entity described in figurative, feminized language, her robes interwoven with gold and her virgin companions following behind. What else than the Church might this refer to?

All the same, the Church interpretation presents its difficulties, for me at least.

Three Problems with the Queen as Church

Problem One: If verse 10 is addressed to the Church, how then do the sons of Korah encourage her, “Forget your people and your father’s house, and the king will desire your beauty”?

If we have our eschatology even remotely correct, the Church has already traveled to heaven post-harpazō. In line with the chronology assembled from comparing 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians and Revelation 19, its members have already received glorified bodies and, we must infer, their rewards at the judgment seat. The Church has already been clothed in “fine linen, bright and pure” (the righteous deeds of the saints), and has already participated in the marriage supper of the Lamb.

How then would a Church in glorified and purified condition, primed and ready for an eternity with the Lord, need the instruction offered to it in Psalm 45? In that moment, our “people” and our “father’s house”, whatever such things might signify if we try to apply them to ourselves, will forever be meaningless relics of a long-forgotten past. They will have no pull on us at all. If the Sons of Korah were to enjoin you or me in that moment to “forget our people”, we would surely respond, “What on earth are you talking about? What people?”

Problem Two: How can Christ’s desire for his bride (verse 11) be conditional on her “considering” and “inclining her ear”? It’s impossible that the Church at this point is in even the slightest danger of looking backward to the temptations of the past after the manner of Lot’s wife staring despairingly at Sodom on fire. Never!

Problem Three: Faithful Israelites wrote the psalm and addressed it to more faithful Israelites, describing an Israelite expectation full of metaphors most comprehensible to Jews. Then they sang it together over and over again for generations, long before the Church was anything more than a mystery, attaching to it their own national hopes. Were they all embarrassingly deceived? I find it genuinely difficult to shoehorn the Church into these “many-colored robes interwoven with gold”. Where did all that white linen go?

Another Suggestion

Let me suggest the remnant of Israel is a much better fit in this context than is the Church. In desperation and deep mourning, Israel’s survivors will recognize and own their Messiah when he appears. Zechariah plainly says so. Messiah will receive back his earthly people when they repent, just as Hosea was to receive back his straying wife. That prophetic picture certainly prefigures something very marriage-like, but quite unrelated to the Church.

Consider this: Israel has always been in danger of looking back to where they came from. After idolatry, sticking to what they know is Israel’s besetting sin. In the wilderness, they looked back to Egypt. In the first century, offered all the blessings of the Church Age, they clung desperately to the Law of Moses and all that came with it. Even saved Jews sought repeatedly to impose the law on the Gentiles.

Nor do we have any indication in the Prophets that millennial Israel will be populated by Jews in glorified bodies with renewed minds, forever immune to the old temptations, desires and affections. These Jews will have come out of the great tribulation in repentance, yet apart from the fact that they will live much longer lives due to millennial conditions, will remain in a physical and spiritual state similar to that in which we find ourselves today: redeemed, but yet to be perfected. So then, even surrounded by the ever-increasing glory of the millennial reign of Messiah, it’s not impossible some among them may be tempted to compare the old wine with the new and say, “The old is good.”

In such a context, the psalmists’ admonition to the queen in verses 10 and 11 makes perfect sense.

The Specious Bigamy Argument

I’m not putting this out there dogmatically. I just don’t like to gloss over obvious difficulties with applying a blatantly Jewish psalm to the Church when the defining temptation of most Church Age commentators has always been to seize and appropriate anything related to the nation of Israel and apply it willy-nilly to themselves. It would be nice if we could stop instinctively doing that.

Some will surely object that in introducing a second and distinct bride, I am making the Lord Jesus a bigamist. Not so. These are not literal women and men in a literal marriage. They are metaphors and figures. The relationship between King and Queen here, like that between the Lord Jesus and his Bride in the New Testament, is intimate and enduring in an entirely non-physical sense, and very much corporate rather than individual.

There is no reason the Holy Spirit might not lead the OT prophets and NT writers to use similar figures of speech to describe similar relationships involving love and submission, even though these relationships will come to prophetic fulfilment in very different times and places.