You know, you're working your way through the Old Testament and its history and the theology that's there, and you're beginning to get this worldview, and you're beginning to tune into the gospel themes, and then you hit Song of Solomon, and you think, "What? Why is this in here? What is this about? Do I really need these embarrassing details in my Bible? There's too much sex in the Song of Solomon."
Well, I want to call this little song, "God cares about the details." You know, there's a beautiful picture here of the intimacy of pure marital love, it's just gorgeous. And the details are poetic and picturesque and moving. If you are at all interested in love, in what pure, committed, faithful love looks like, what the deepest joys of intimacy feel like, they're there in the Song of Solomon.
And I love that this is in the Bible because it reminds me that the deepest, most intimate details of my life are not outside of God's attention. God cares about even the most intimate details that I wouldn't talk about, that I wouldn't share with somebody else, that are as private as they can be, even the moment when two human beings in marital love are naked next to one another with no protection, God's there!
His presence is there, His love is there, His concern is there. God's present in those moments; there is no place, no situation, no location, no matter how seemingly private and intimate, where God is absent. God is all over the pages of the Song of Solomon, and that picture of His presence is grace to us. It's grace that He would paint a picture for us of something that sin has so terribly broken and so terribly distorted, that we're reminded again of what sexuality is meant to be. That's grace to us that God would paint a picture of intimacy that would be a correction and an encouragement to us,
But there's something else to remember about Song of Solomon. Although it's not an allegory of the Church, know that the highest purpose for marital intimacy is to point a picture to Christ's relationship to His church. We see that in Ephesians 5, that there's no more beautiful marital love, there is no sweeter marital intimacy, there is no better purity of marital faithfulness than the love that Jesus has for His Church. It's faithful and pure and intimate and lovely.
And so Song of Solomon is a finger pointing to a level of love that we will experience with Jesus if we never experience it with another human being. Jesus loves us! He loves us with the depth of purity; He loves us in intimate, personal moments that you can't stretch the human language to its furthest elasticity to capture. He loves us! He loves us! He loves us! And God cares that we would know that we are loved, and we're loved with a pure and faithful love, the love of Jesus. Song of Solomon is a finger pointing to that love!
