Bible Devotion Week 18

This week we finished reading “The Song of Solomon” or “Song of Songs.” Earlier this week I slipped a note into Amanda’s lunch, “Your hair is like a flock of goats…your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate…your neck is like the tower of David…” Now I did not simply decide to do that. One morning after listening to the reading plan she chastised me, “Why don’t you ever tell me my hair is like a flock of goats?” 

It was a joke but it helps demonstrate this book's interpretive problems. Is this an intimacy guide for married couples? Did Solomon write it? Is it about Christ and the Church? All good questions to ask of this difficult text. Now that you have read through it, I want to help you try and understand what you just read. 

There have been several different interpretations offered. Allegoricalists are able to say that this book is not about intimacy between a husband and wife. Instead it is about the relationship between Christ and the Church. Typologists, similar to the allegoricalist, are able to say this all points to Christ and connect several other passages to support this view. Then there is the realist who says it is exclusively a celebration of love and sex between husband and wife. Whole courses and books have been written using the Song of Songs as a Christian sex book. Which is the best approach, balance is the best approach. It is possible to see this book as referring to genuine physical intimacy between a husband and a wife. When I was growing up in church, sex was often presented poorly. I was told not to have it until marriage, it was sinful, it was dirty, it was only for procreation, and that if you waited until marriage it was always going to be the best. The messages were mixed and my view of sexual intimacy suffered as a result of it. Song of Songs, at a basic plain reading, presents the joy, intimacy, love, and union a husband and wife may have. We can get caught up with some of the words and innuendos and chuckle like adolescents, or we can read it as a reflection of our own marriages and see the great devotion the bride and groom have for one another. They are one flesh, “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (2:16), “I held him, and would not let him go” (3:4), “You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride” (4:9). In our sexually confused culture, we would do well to return to the Song of Solomon for a refreshing vision of the love between a man and a woman. 

We also can read the Song of Solomon through the lens of redemptive history and proclaim with Paul, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). This way we read passages of the love the groom has for the bride through the lens of the New Covenant and see what great love Christ has for his church. We read of the experience of being lost and separated from her beloved as our own experience of losing sight of our first love, Christ.