Your Cheatin Heart,” “What Part of No Don’t You Understand,” “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares,” “Before He Cheats,” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “You’ll Think of Me,” “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am,” “Friends in Low Places,” “Kiss This,” “How Do You Like Me Now”—These are the top 10 country anti-love songs. This is the poetry that has been shaped by modern emotions and expectations regarding love.
In the modern era, 60% of songs are about love. Most are about love gone wrong. As time progresses, love songs are becoming more and more pessimistic and pornographic. Love in the culture at large is obscene.
What kind of cultural phenomena produces this kind of art? 95% of the population will at some point get married. 59% of the population is currently married. More than 60% of those who marry live together first. 50% percent of marriages end in divorce. 60-70% of those who remarry get divorced. The average length of a marriage is less than 8 years. We need to think of our marriages in term of decades. Most people quit before they get there. The average length of a second marriage is about the same. Almost 50% of all children are born to single mothers. Our art is simply a reflection of and commentary on our culture.
Though it does not mention God, its canonicity has not been seriously disputed. Interestingly, those in history who have denied its canonicity held that the Song was a love poem while those in history who affirmed its canonicity denied the Song’s literal meaning. Can you believe this book is in the Bible? If an ancient manuscript of this book had been found in isolation from the biblical tradition, it would have been viewed, more than likely, as secular (EBC, 1201).
The historical, global disaster of human sexual expression is a result of turning to the culture for norms rather than the Word of God. God made the man and the woman complimentary, sexual beings and joined them in the covenant of one flesh union. It is inconceivable that He would do all of that and then be at a loss for how that union is to be lived out.
The taboo nature of the topic has given the devil opportunity to sell his own brand sexuality not only in culture but also in the church. Human sexuality can be spoken of publicly in appropriate and inappropriate ways. The Song pushes the envelope a bit.
Sex is good because the God who created sex is good. To deny the goodness of sex is to deny the goodness of God. God is glorified when we receive His gift with thanksgiving and enjoy it the way He meant for it to be enjoyed. The reason we like sex so much is because it is a little bit like the God who created it. (Ben Patterson, Sex and Supremacy).
When read in the context of Scripture, the Song teaches us about the redemption of human sexuality in the covenant context of marriage between a man and a woman. Marriage is a metaphor of Christ’s covenant love for His church. Christ’s love for His people is the reality to which marriage points. You are married for a purpose much greater than you. This is why Satan hates and attacks marriage.
The Song should be read as poetry. It intends to evoke and instruct the emotions of love. It is not a narrative of boy meets girl, falls in love, gets married, and lives happily ever after. Such a chronological narrative cannot be imposed on the Song because of the intimacy of the couple from the opening line. The Song is a celebration of marital love. The writer desires to communicate that the Song is God’s desire for every marriage.
Marriage is at the center of the Song. The center section of the Song (3:5-5:1) is a wedding scene. This argues that the book is about redeemed human sexuality in the context of marriage. When considered as a whole the very center of the Song is 4:16 and 5:1. Their wedding culminates in the garden. The point is the relationship between a redeemed man and his wife recalls Eden before the fall not after the fall.
What does Edenic love look like? It doesn’t look like the top 10 anti-love songs. In Eden the man and his wife were both “naked and felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). In a fallen world, such a relationship is not a given. People bring hang-ups into their marriage. They fall into sinful patterns of thinking and behavior. The Song shows us how to fight for Biblical, marital love.
That is why the Song asserts itself to be the best song of all (1:1). Our marriages need to be the best song. You have to care for such love—the culture, your own fallen-ness, the fallen-ness of your mate, and the devil fight against it. Your marriage isn’t just going to happen. You must fight for it.
How then do we fan the flames of love?
The Song opens with a love that is already in progress. It allows us come into the Garden and observe a couple in love. Poetry allows us to the feel the emotions of love and assume the place of the characters. The Song is you and your wife. It is a poem about what your marriage is to be.
You have to have a license to participate in the love of the Song. The Song warns that the hope for redeemed sexuality is the covenant context of marriage. The adulterer, the fornicator, the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender all share one thing in common. They don’t think the God who created human sexuality knows how it should be expressed to be holy, helpful, and not harmful.
Don’t let the world, the culture, movies, pornography, and love songs determine your expectation for what love ought to be. Think for a moment about Adam and Eve in the Garden. In the context of marriage, God intends that you and your wife find each other’s rhythm of what is pleasing and pleasurable and gives you joy in each other. If you need to change to get there, change.
Throughout the Song, we will see the power of love. The first chapter shows how intoxicating love is (2:5c “sick with love”). Because of the power of love, an arena is needed in which to experience it. Love unleashed at the wrong time in the wrong way can be destructive. Love rejected and unanswered can be devastating. This is why the beloved charges the “daughters of Jerusalem by the gazelles and does” (2:7). The gazelles and does are seasonal, and they are powerless to resist.
On July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project came to an explosive end. The atomic bomb was ready to be tested. So, they built a tower to set the bomb on and detonate it. They discovered that an above ground platform is not the best place to detonate as bomb. There is a reason we say that things “blow-up.” Love is the atom bomb of the soul. The power of it needs to be unleashed in the context of covenant commitment.
The power of love is seen in the cross. “God demonstrated his love us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). His love established an eternal, unchangeable covenant. Love requires covenant commitment. I am not sure a God who had no covenant declaration of His love could be trusted. Such a God is what people want who reject the covenant commitment cut in the blood of Christ.
The pleasure of love intensifies its power. Not only are there physical pleasures, there are pleasures that remain unidentified that come to us when we love and are loved. The Song exalts the pleasure of love. In the Song, not one mention of the cultural mandate to be fruitful and multiply occurs. There are no children in the Song.
We need to learn this about God. He made pleasure. No pleasure exists that He did not make. The pleasure we experience in love is a foretaste of the eternal pleasure that we will have in him. In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letter, the devil, Screwtape, bemoans to his nephew apprentice, Wormwood, “God is a hedonist because at His right hand are pleasures forever more. He has filled the world full of pleasures.” He continues, “He made pleasures. It is His invention, not ours. All our research has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is encourage the humans to take pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees which He has forbidden.” (Quoted from Ben Patterson, Sex and Supremacy)
Realize that your marriage is the arena that God has set for the pleasure of love. Work on it. Move your marriage to where it needs to be. You won’t find pleasurable love anywhere else.
If marriage is the context, how do we keep the flame alive? We must cultivate desire for our mate. Letting life happen has a way for diminishing our desire for our mate. We get busy with careers and children. These become barriers to intimacy. We start to replace intimacy with things—shopping, hobbies, friends, affairs, pornography. We don’t have to have a relationship with things.
We fall into patterns of behavior that prevent intimacy. We busy ourselves with other things so that we don’t have to do the hard work of having a relationship. Your kids will grow up one day. What are you going to do then? Busyness is avoidance. As married couples, we know what sets each other off. It is easy to push the buttons that create friction to avoid intimacy. Making sure our children have all of the attention that we think they need can simply be avoiding intimacy. You are not married to your children. Inconvenience them, not your mate.
In this section, the female is cultivating the desire for intimacy with her husband. Would you expect this from a piece of literature that is almost 3000 years old? The female, not the male, is the dominate character in the Song. Can a woman be the initiator of marital intimacy? Yes. Is it Biblical? Yes (1 Cor.7:3-5). Is it contrary to submission and headship? No. Isn’t the man supposed to be the initiator and take the lead? He did when he proposed. Now you have a license to initiate intimacy. His headship is to love his wife and meet her needs. Her submission is anticipating and encouraging his love.
Pursue your man. Is he not pursuing you? Pursue him. Is he pursuing you? Pursue him back. The pursuit starts in your own mind. Maybe things aren’t good in your relationship. Perhaps you think, “Until things get better between us, there will be no intimacy.” How are things going to get better? You don’t fix one sin by committing another.
In the rhythm of live our bodies do weird and crazy things. Sometimes we have to simply hang on to our sanity and force ourselves to function. Our bodies respond to behavior. Intimacy begets intimacy.
How does she pursue him? How does she feed her desire? It is possible that a man can leave the pursuit as well.
She imagines his kisses and the pleasure of His love (v1). His “name” is his character. He is a man. The virgins are right to love him, but he is her man. She views him as a king, and anticipates the consummation of their love.
What you think about your man is going to control how you feel about him. What you think about your wife is going to impact how you feel about her. Don’t accentuate the negative, but dwell on the positive.
She is insecure in her appearance. Her tanned skin was an indication that she had to do menial labor. On the one hand, she knows that she is lovely, but, on the other hand, her appearance makes her insecure. She is dark like the weathered tents of a Bedouin tribe, but as lovely as Solomon’s tent curtains. She feels the need to explain and excuse her appearance. He brothers made her do their work to the neglect of her own appearance. She was not like the fair skinned daughters of Jerusalem.
What is considered beautiful is culturally determined for the most part. Girl world is a tough world. The French Senate just approved a bill banning kids under 16 from beauty pageants. The aim is to protect girls from being “sexualized.” The idea of beauty a woman has can lead her to destroy her mind, heart, people she loves, and ultimately herself. As a 7th grade teacher, I saw how young girls fall into patterns of behavior that feed poor self-image. Their worth was not only dependent by who was in their group but also by who was left out and who wanted in. Social pressure to achieve a certain body type or look is strong.
Perhaps part of the reluctance a woman can experience in pursuing intimacy comes about because of how she views herself. Tell your wife she is beautiful. Tell her often, not just when she is fixed up. Tell her when she wakes up. We are going see much mutual affirmation is this text.
She knows how to get her man’s attention. Men are simple creatures. It’s not that difficult, but she plays him like “a worn out fiddle.” She wants to know where he is going to be when he has a break at work. This language seems to be playful, enticing, and teasing. What do you think he went to work thinking about? She wants to know where he is going to be, so she doesn’t appear cheap and needy. Does he want her going tent to tent to find out where he is? I don’t think so. She doesn’t want anybody to think that she is available.
He responds with playful but serious words. He will make sure she can track him and position herself where he can find her.
There are seasons of life when we are busy or tired. We have to fight our own laziness in pursuing our mates. I know that after a days’ work or caring for your children and home all day, you are tired. We fall into pattern of living where the only time we have left for each other is time when we have nothing left to give.
A few things you can do. Put the kids to bed early. Turn the TV off. Put the book down. Be together. You may have a job where you can plan lunch when you want to take it. Farm the kids out for a couple hours and plan a late lunch. Food is optional. The point is, find a time to be together when you have some energy left for the most crucial person in your life.
In the context of marriage, we fan the flame of love by pursuing our mates and by affirming them in their pursuit of us. Our hearts are fragile. The world is hostile. We need to know that we are going to be received and loved.
Her pursuit of him has worked. That afternoon tryst idea has made him crazy. While the metaphor may not speak to us, its meaning does. People in the ancient world did not have horses. Even David rode a mule. The horse metaphor is one of exotic, unimaginable wealth. A horse to ancient pastoral folk would be like the first airplane Christine ever saw. She was young girl in Mississippi choppin’ cotton in a field with her family. An airplane flew over the field. None of them had ever seen one. They thought the end of the world had come, and they all got down on their needs in that Mississippi cotton field and started praying.
The horses that pulled chariots were ornately decorated. Chariots were pulled by stallions. The effect she had on him was the same effect a mare in season would have on stallions pulling chariots. They would not be able to stay focused on the task at hand. More than one time in the ancient world this defense was used against advancing armies. He can’t keep his mind on watching sheep for thinking about her.
She is affirmed in her pursuit of him. She can plainly see the impact her advances have made on him. Her lover is again likened to a king. He is to her a fragrance fit for only a king (“nard”). His love is a fragrance to her as well. Engedi is an oasis in the desert, a place where the grass is green and flowers bloom. It was a fragrant paradise of refreshment. An unexplainable, surprising, refreshing comfort comes to us in the presence of our mates.
A man has his own insecurities. She has answered his in subtle ways. He would probably never voice his. She can’t help but voice hers. She has twice called him a “king,” once in the context of character (v 4) and once in the context of his ability to provide (v. 12 ff, esp 17). Even though he is a shepherd, she views him as a Solomon. This is respect. This is what the Bible means when it says to respect your husbands.
Maybe for wisdom such as this, Solomon lent his name to this book. Maybe he understood that every man needs to be a king. Maybe he struggled with the same insecurities.
The king’s “chambers” of verse 4 are a tent or the shade of a tree. The “couch” of verse 12 is the grass where they reclined to rest. The “beams” of their house in verse 17 are the limbs of the trees above their heads (only a king’s house would have wooden rafters).
He goes right to her insecurities. Verse 15 is the chiastic center of this section of the Song. He tells her how beautiful she is. Presumably, he did not hear her lament in verse 5. He may have been a shepherd reclining on a bed of grass, but he understood women and hit a homerun in verse 15. I don’t get the “dove” thing, but it sure ministered to her needs. And that is all that matters.
This allowed her to express her insecurities to him (2:1). The rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley is not Jesus. These metaphors are the insecurities of a woman who needs to feel beautiful. Whatever these flowers are, they are ordinary, everyday flowers, a dime a dozen. This is a way of saying the same thing she said in verse 5.
Homerun number 2: if you are a lily, all the other fair-skinned daughters of Jerusalem are thorn bushes! (2:2)
How insecure would it make a man to never feel that he measures up, even in his home? We live in a competitive world. If the female is competing against the airbrushed, taped, tucked, cut, dyed, tanned, and enhanced image of a camera lens, the male is in a world marked by power, prestige, wealth, and influence. The problem is: When do you get there? How much is enough? When are you beautiful enough? When are you successful enough? When are you desirable enough?
You are beautiful enough when your husband tells you you are. You are powerful and successful enough when your wife tells you you are. In the context of redeemed, marital intimacy the figs leaves are off, and there is no shame.
A home where the wife is never beautiful enough and man is never powerful enough is not Eden. It’s hell.
A problem with males and females is that we think each other’s insecurities are silly. A wife may think, “I can’t believe that he thinks I’m not satisfied with him.” A husband may think, “I can’t believe that she thinks I am not satisfied with her.” Don’t ask him if he thinks he is powerful and successful enough? If you have to ask, the assumption is that you don’t thinks so. Just tell him he is a king! Don’t ask her if she thinks she is the most beautiful woman. If you have to ask, the assumption is she is not. Just tell her she is beautiful. Tell each other often every day.
In the context of marriage, we are to pursue, affirm, and enjoy our mates. The woman’s affirming language continues, but the text turns to the delight that the couple shares in each other.
She describes her love as an apple tree in the forest. In comparison to other men, he is distinctive, surprising, enjoyable, and refreshing. To be in his embrace was delightful and pleasing.
His love for her, his response to her, was intoxicating. The “banqueting house” is literally the “house of wine.” She is intoxicated by him. The idea of a “banner” in the Bible is a military emblem or standard. The standard posted over their relationship was love. Their relationship was public, committed, and covenantal. Some want to reject the military imagery because of the notion of “conquest.” She has been conquered by him in every good sense of the term. She is gladly submitted to his love because he loves her only and completely.
The intimacy is not using, degrading, manipulating, or domineering. It is simply delightful. To fan the flames of love take delight in your mate.
She has become faint with love. She does not have the strength to love him how she desires to. She never wants the moment to end. If his embrace could last forever, she would not complain.
What a picture of the joy of marital intimacy! It’s in the Bible. Do you see how these pastoral scenes reflect Eden? Do you see how redeemed marital intimacy combats the effects of the fall? This couple is together and there is no shame.
How do you come to the Lord’s Table after that? Thankfully. As powerful, as strong, as intoxicating as marital love can be it does not began to compare with Christ’s love for His people. He took our sin upon Himself. The Bible says, “He was made to be sin for us.” Jesus loves sinners.