The long night of a weeping soul will one day be met with a joyful sunrise. This message of hope is the message of Christianity. We believe our God will make every wrong right. We don’t believe this simply because we want to believe this; we believe this because God has revealed himself as the God in whom we hope and trust, as the God who is all-sufficient.
The Christian hopes in a person. Hope has a name. In him is life. In him, the fulness of God is pleased to dwell. He has come and met us in the night to guide our way as the light of the world. His coming has guaranteed healing that will rise like the morning sun.
C.S. Lewis, commenting on the arrival of Christ at Christmas said,
“The birth of Christ is the arrival of the great warrior and the great king. Also of the Lover, the Bridegroom, whose beauty surpasses that of man. But not only the Bridegroom, as the lover, the desired; the Bridegroom also as he makes fruitful, the father of children still to be begotten and born. (Certainly the image of a Child in a manger by no means suggests to us a king, giant-killer, bridegroom, and father. But it would not suggest the eternal Word either – if we didn’t know. All alike are aspects of the same central paradox.)[1]
In Psalm 45 we encounter the coming of the King. The King comes through the darkness of Psalms 43-44 and comes as the fulfilling desire of our souls. The song that carries us through the night, the song of God’s steadfast love (42:5, 8, 11; 43:5) now has a special occasion to be sung. We learn from Psalm 45 the song of God’s steadfast love is a wedding song. In Psalm 45, the King, who is God comes to take his bride from a people who were not a people and through his union with this foreign bride, he makes one new person from what was separated.
[1] C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 130.