Song of Songs (Song of Solomon): What’s it ‘Really’ About?

“I am the rose of Sharon,
The lily of the valleys.”

“He has brought me to his banquet hall,
And his banner over me is love.”

~Song 2:1 & 4 (NASB)

Remember the old Certs commercial? “It’s a candy mint. It’s a breath mint. No, it’s two, two, two mints in one.”  Do we apply this logic to the book of Song of Solomon? Can it be about the love relationship between a man and a woman and be about the relationship between Christ and his bride, the church?

I’ve always leaned toward the latter view. The best explanation is that within the Godhead we have a relational model — God is three in one — and we see dynamics of that relationship in various parts of both the old covenant and new covenant scriptures.

But lately, it seems like every radio, TV, internet and megachurch speaker is doing a sermon about sex.  Someone has observed that the church needs to talk more about sex, but pastors need to talk about it less.  Suddenly a host of subjects that would never be mentioned in the church gym on a Thursday night are getting addressed from the pulpit on Sunday morning; and books that Christian bookstores might not have carried a few years ago are being displayed front and center. The sex pendulum is currently swinging away from the place of balance, leaving people asking, “Why can’t the pastor just speak about Galatians like he used to?”

So how do we interpret this book which our forebears chose to include in the canon of scripture?   I was glad to see Dave Bish address this a few days ago…

Six reasons for a Christological reading of the Song of Songs

I’m persuaded that The Song of Songs has a BOTH-AND meaning. It has much to say about marriage and also much to say about the True and Greatest Marriage, the Typical Marriage, the Real that all marriages echo and shadow – the marriage of Christ and his people. Because:

#1 Marriage is really about Christ.
This is Paul’s argument in Ephesians 5. Really, he’s talking about Christ and the church, though he’s talking about marriage. That doesn’t mean husband’s and wives don’t apply Ephesians 5 to their marriages, but that they’re meant to finally look to Christ and his church. The greater and eternal marriage sets the stage for our smaller and temporal human marriages.

#2 History
By far the dominant reading of this book historically is to take it Typologically, pointing to Christ. This is to say we’ve got really got to it’s meaning, intention or application if we’ve not heard it speak of Christ’s love for his people. We might draw a true word for human relationships but the road goes further. Sometimes Typological commentators slip into fanciful allegory – but those who leave the song in the human bedroom do the same! To say it’s *just* about human marriage a popular view today, but is the minority view in the story of the church. The Reformers, Puritans and Church Fathers, Edwards and Spurgeon were not bad handlers of the Bible. They were persuaded that Christ casts his shadow over all of it.

#3 The Language of The Song
This isn’t just love poetry it’s love poetry about a Shepherd King and the one he loves, with wilderness and myrrh, about ‘the lover of my soul’ and love that’s strong as death. The Song is written in the language of the Pentateuch, the language of the LORD’s relationship with his people.  It’s not just any old poetic language and imagery, it’s gospel-laden.

#4 The Beauty of Christ
Christ is beautiful and we need the wasfs of The Song, the love poems that call us to dwell upon the beauty of Christ, to let our hearts sing of him. Human marriage needs the intense contemplation of poetry too, but so does the church’s relationship with her Saviour.

#5 He loves us
Some are reluctant to speak of this, suggesting it’s not substantial enough or is subjective etc. The Love of Christ for his people, demonstrated at the cross, won at the cross, flowing from the eternal love of the Trinity is unmatched and has to be sung of forever. The Song gives words for this relationship – and we do sing it even when we might not realise it. “For I am his and he is mine”, “Altogether lovely”. The Song serves, in this, as an antidote for individualism because it invites our first thought to be of Christ and the church, though Galatians 2:20 tells us he also loves ME, leading careful exegetes to say that The Song does speak of the church but also of each of her members.

#6 The Divine Romance
Martin Luther lifts his language for the gospel from the genre of The Song, Hosea and Ezekiel to speak of the King who marries a prostitute. Why should divine romance OK from Hosea, Ezekiel and Psalm 45 but then not The Song? Jesus is the husband to the church, who has a divine jealousy for us – whose love burns when we’re seduced away, whose love laid down his life for us, whose love is our hope. Human marriage has union between husband and wife because there is union with Christ through the gospel…

~Dave Bish

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*Note, the word wasfs in Dave’s 4th point is not a typo, see here and here.  It refers to an enumeration of the physical traits of a bride and groom. 

Looking for more of this type of article?  Here’s six approaches to the story of Joseph; there are more “six” articles at Dave’s blog.

The Unity of Scripture (2)

This is the second half of Alex Motyer’s attempt to offer understanding of how the two major sections of our Bibles fit together, which we began yesterday.  He says,

The division of the Bible into two books… is not really helpful towards a proper understanding. Once a “whole” as been “fractured” it is not always a simple thing to restore the lost wholeness.  But centuries of tradition, along with our own education from childhood have drilled into our minds a two-testament, instead of a holistic model for the Bible.

Here is the second model, but first, we have to stop at Wikipedia and explain Marcionism:

Marcionism was an Early Christian dualist belief system that originated in the teachings of Marcion of Sinope at Rome around the year 144;^[1] see also Christianity in the 2nd century.

Marcion believed Jesus Christ was the savior sent by God and Paul of Tarsus was his chief apostle, but he rejected the Hebrew Bible and the God of Israel (YHWH Elohim). Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament. This belief was in some ways similar to Gnostic Christian theology; notably, both are dualistic.

Marcionism, similar to Gnosticism, depicted the Hebrew God of the Old Testament as a tyrant or demiurge (see also God as the Devil). Marcion was labeled as gnostic by Eusebius.  Marcion’s canon consisted of eleven books: A gospel consisting of ten chapters from the Gospel of Luke edited by Marcion (the current canonical Gospel of Luke has 24 chapters); and ten of Paul’s epistles. All other epistles and gospels of the 27 book New Testament canon were rejected

Now on to that model:

A TWO-ACT PLAY

John Bright wrestled deeply with ways to understand the place of the Old Testament in the Christian pulpit.  He was determined to resist the concealed Marcionism of much what he called the “liberal” handling of the Old Testament for, as he understood it, “no part of the Bible is without authority” and the Old Testament must be used “as part of normative Scripture ” from which “the church must never part.”

In illustrating of this view of the unity which connects the two Testaments, he offered the analogy of a two-act play, pointing out that

• without either act the play is incomplete;
• that each act has something individual to say; and
• neither act can stand without the other.

The fact that he proposed only two acts is a byproduct of the dominance of the ‘two testament’ model, and it is not altogether satisfactory to make the interval curtain fall between Malachi and Matthew.  None the less, the concept is useful and profound.

As Act One unfolds, tensions begin to appear, for example, in the sacrificial system.  There are sins which it does not explicitly cover and for which, since the Lord is a forgiving God, repentance must avail (i.e. David in Psalm 51); there is the basic inadequacy, discerned by Isaiah, that in the ultimate only a Person can substitute for people (Is. 53).  The Act One awaits the finalé in Act Two. Yet the testimony of Act One is irreplaceably valid, that by the will of God the substitution of the innocent for the guilty is the divine principle for dealing with sin. Act Two sweeps in on the flood-tide of Act One: Here is the human perfection of a willing Substitute; without the realities of Act One even the terminology used in Act Two would be incomprehensible.  But yet Act Two has something distinctive to say: That when the ultimate substitution was made, it was God himself who came and stood in our place.

~Look to the Rock: An Old Testament Background to Our Understanding of Christ by Alex Motyer (Kregel, 1996) p. 20

Maybe All the Letters Should Be in Red Ink

“Red Letter Christians” is a popular term of late. Dan Phillips has a great article at Team Pyro that I want to encourage you to read in its original form. It will take you about 3-4 minutes. Just click here, and then you may skip everything that follows.

Don’t have 3-4 minutes?  Okay, here’s the snapshot:

• The present trend is to put more stock in Jesus’ words than the words of the Epistles, probably because Jesus’ words are more palatable to certain audiences.
• Jesus told the apostles to preach and gave them the freedom to draft their own text. At a literal level, they were not reading off the same page.
• The apostles were promised the Holy Spirit to inspire and supervise their writing.
• The above point goes deeper, the Spirit would “bear witness” with their spirit, John 16: 12-15 promises they would deliver their message with authority; a message than can be trusted.
• The promise in John 16 also suggests that the apostles would receive “new things” which Jesus himself had not yet uttered.
• These things would be “of Him,” in other words, their words would be His words.
• The apostles knew this and realized the weight of their words. Dan phrases this: “”If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 14:37). The apostle, in so many words, equates his writings with a command of Jesus Christ. His writings, Paul says, are (not merely “contain”) the command (not merely general notions) of Jesus.
• Ephesians 2:20 says that the apostles are laying the foundation with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone.  This is God’s design, building for the generations that would follow.
• Attempts to “segregate” the writings of Paul are negated by Peter’s affirmation of Paul’s writings in II Peter 3:15-16
• Here are some concluding thoughts from the article:

..You really could make the legitimate argument that the apostles’ words should also equally be red-letter, in that they are the words of Christ conveyed by the Holy Spirit…

and

…In conclusion, I might come full circle and affirm that Christians should focus on the words and teachings of Jesus Christ.

But then I would hasten to say that those words and teachings are found from Matthew to Revelation.

If you’re reading this sentence, it possibly means you skipped the original, so now that you’re appetite is whetted for this discussion, here’s a second chance to just click here.