Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3292
“Gird Your sword upon Your thigh, O Most Mighty One, with Your Glory and Your Majesty. And in Your Majesty ride prosperously because of truth and meekness and righteousness: and Your right hand shall teach You terrible things. Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king’s enemies; whereby the people fall under You.” Psalm 45:3-5.
[Another Sermon by Mr. Spurgeon, upon verse five, is #3039, Volume 53—THE KING’S SHARP ARROWS.]
THIS Psalm has been thought by some to be a marriage song for Solomon on the occasion of his wedding with the daughter of Pharaoh. It may be so, though I should be very loath to believe it. But even if that should be true, we will find in the Psalm a distinct reference to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to His marriage union with His Church. Under the Mosaic dispensation, when a man had married a wife, he was not to go out to war for a year, but when the Lord Jesus Christ entered into a marriage union with His people, that very union made it necessary that He should wage war on their behalf. He had to meet all their spiritual foes in terrible conflict—the Prince of Darkness and all the powers of evil set themselves in array against Him—and we know how He fought with them, overcame them and trampled them beneath His feet as the treader of grapes crushes the purple clusters in the winepress. And now, even though in Heaven, He is in a state of rest. Yet here, as the Head of the Church Militant, His mystical body, He is still warring against sin, struggling most strenuously to drive sin out of the world and to make the earth His own dominion wherein He shall reign in righteousness and peace.
The prayer of the Psalmist, as we have it in our text, is also a most suitable petition for us to present. We desire to stir up our almighty Champion to go forth to the war against evil. How gloriously He went forth with His first disciples in the brave days of old! They rode forth to battle and to death under His leadership, but it was to victory, too, in those glorious times of conflict and conquest. But we seem to have fallen upon days of peace—that false peace which arises from stagnation, lethargy and death. Brothers and Sisters in Christ, we have need to cry mightily to the great Captain of our salvation to gird His sword upon His thigh, to order His great war chariot to be brought to the front, again—that He may again ride forth to battle with all His attendant hosts—that His enemies may know that His power is as great as ever it was in the ages that are gone! While I am speaking upon the text, I trust that all Believers here will turn it into a prayer and that while you are praying, God will give you the answer and bless the message to the salvation of sinners— which will be a true victory for Christ!
I am going to invite your attention, first, to the armed Warrior Secondly, to His filled chariot And thirdly, to His victory won.
I. So, first, I ask you to think of THE ARMED WARRIOR—“Gird Your sword upon Your thigh, O Most Mighty One, with Your Glory and Your Majesty.”
Then Christ has a sword. What is it? Certainly not the sword of which soldiers and princes are proud, for it was concerning that kind of sword that Jesus said to Peter, “Put up again your sword into its place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” It was concerning that sort of weapon that Jesus said to Pilate, “My Kingdom is not of this world. If My Kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight.” Christ could truly say that the weapons of His warfare were not carnal, but that they were mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. His was not
the kind of fighting that needs sword and spear and shield and buckler such as the world’s warriors use. His wrestling was “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wilderness in high places.” The main weapon which Christ wielded was “the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.”
The Psalmist prayed, “Gird Your sword upon Your thigh.” But in the Book of the Revelation we read concerning Christ, “out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword.” You know how constantly Jesus quoted the Scriptures in resisting Satan’s temptations or the assaults of His human adversaries. “It is written,” was His unanswerable argument at all times. This sword, which Christ wields, is not made of steel to cut heads, or arms, or legs—it is the sword of the Truth of God to pierce the hearts and consciousness of sinners. It is said to be sharp—“sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” No other sword wounds as the Sword of the Spirit does! It wounds so that none but God can heal. You may bring it down upon a heart that is harder than a millstone, but its edge will never be turned and it will cut the stone in two. It is a sharp, wounding sword—and it is a killing sword. Wherever it goes, it kills sin, cuts iniquity in pieces, slays self-righteousness and destroys the infirmities of the flesh! This sword is also “two-edged.” A sword with only one edge to it has a blunt back, but there is no blunt back to the Sword of the Spirit—it has a front stroke and a back stroke—in fact, it cuts all ways and every part of it is keen as a razor’s edge! Promises, precepts, Doctrines, threats are all sharp and penetrating—there is no part of the Word of God that is ineffective to produce the result for which it was given.