The Song of songs
is about marital love. Love longed for
and love just begun. Love in waiting
and love that has come. The Song says to us, "Behold,
your beloved approaches. Seek him out, and be with him one." The Song is made up of multiple songs placed
together to become more than the sum of their parts. For yes, individually they
speak intimately about a bride’s love for her groom
and a groom’s love for his bride. They speak intricately of sexual
attraction both longed for and supplied. But when combined together
we find repeated themes which emphasize the overarching message
this greatest of songs was written to provide. The first theme is found in this repeated
line, “I adjure you daughters of Jerusalem. Don’t awaken love until its proper time.” This line always follows an
intense moment of intimacy experienced between
the husband and the bride. In each of these moments we experience the
height of affection, the pinnacle of passion. And it is in these contexts
that we also get a caution. “Don’t awaken love until its proper time.” Which means, in some of the most
intimate moments of the Song you can get, the Daughters of Jerusalem, the unmarried,
the unwed, hear a loud and clear, “Not yet.” Nevertheless, after every “I adjure you,” after every
“Not yet,” the Daughters also hear a promise. In the midst of love longed
for, love in waiting, and all its corresponding emotions, the Daughters
hear, “Behold your beloved approaches.” Whether leaping over mountains or returning
through the wilderness, the Daughters can have hope that a Beloved
will also come for them. The second repeated line is
“I am my beloved’s, and he is mine.” This is a sentence of marital
intimacy, a poetic reflection on the original marriage
of Adam and Eve. The divine joining when two entities become
enmeshed where two become one flesh. But in the midst of the most intimate statements
of union where the two seem to finally become one, when it seems like their love has just begun,
the bride looks up, and her husband is gone. This second repeated line,
“I am my beloved’s, and he is mine,” is always followed by an
intense experience of absence, a sorrowful moment where
the bride looks for her husband. She searches but cannot find. She searches everywhere for him -
in her house, outside, in the streets, anywhere she thinks her
beloved might be sought. But in each of these
we see the same lament. We hear the same thought,
“I sought him but found him not.” Even here in the greatest of
songs about the greatest of lovers, the bride herself becomes a victim
of longing like Jerusalem’s daughters. For her groom has left her
presence and has drawn away farther leaving her alone sick with
love and dreading his departure. But the bride never loses sight
of her bridegroom’s love for her. Even when he is absent
she trusts he will return. Which is what we hear as the song ends
and the bride’s singing is almost done. We hear her final words,
“Make haste my beloved.” The poem ends not with the husband
near but with the bride left alone. Her song ends not with immediate
fulfillment but ultimately, with hope. When we leave her song, and when its
pages are closed, the longing with which the bride longed, the passion that filled every
line of her song, instantly becomes our own. The desire that belonged to the wife is poetically
shown to be the longing all of us have always known. The longing to be longed for perfectly.
The desire to be desired fervently. The want to be wanted intimately.
The craving to be craved earnestly. But no love has ever filled
this longing permanently. No relationship could
ever still this passion totally. In fact, many of us have only ever
experienced love as a perversity. We feel like we have
been irreversibly damaged, personally unchosen, externally
ruined, and internally broken. But it is to you that this greatest
love song has eternally been spoken. For whether you feel like the bride having
love present but always seeing its absence, too. Or maybe you feel like the daughters always
waiting for perfect love to finally come and visit you. There is good news. For there has been one final bridegroom who can
take all our longings and finally make them true. For Jesus is the eternal
groom of the eternal bride. His love for us is what all love and
marriage is meant to point to and symbolize. So, when we read the greatest Song we
must realize that however beautiful the love and however deep the passion we find
inside, it is only a shadow compared to the love Jesus showed us when
he came for us and died. As the Song says, love
is as strong as death. But in Jesus, we found a
love that is even stronger. For he rose from the
dead to save his bride and to heal the broken hearts
of all God’s sons and daughters. But for now, we wait
like Jerusalem’s daughters. We wait for the return of our lover. With longing and love we
wait until the proper time when our beloved will return to
eternally be with his eternal bride. And like the Song’s wife, we will spend that
waiting time praising the beauty of Jesus divine. In this world we will seek him. And though the depths of his
presence we may not always find, we will hold fast to this fact:
“I am my beloved’s, and he is mine.” Hey everyone, I'm David with Spoken Gospel. Thank you so much for watching
our introduction to the Song of Songs. This is our last video introducing
the wisdom books of the Bible. Next up, we're going back
into the New Testament. And we're going to go through the letters
of Paul starting with the book of Romans. We can't wait to share that with you. We are a nonprofit ministry, and we are making introduction videos to every single book of the Bible showing that book's main theme and
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see you in the Pauline epistles.
