Category: Song of Solomon/Songs

Reading

Audio, Visual

SAA Notes

Grape vines budding and pomegranates flowering in the grove of nut trees are two very explicit images that should be immediately understandable (especially if you’ve seen the process of a pomegranate flowering). God’s design for humanity is chastity, not celibacy. All must be chaste, while some might have to be both, as Jesus said of Himself. Matthew 19:12

SJA Notes

* God Above, thank You for Your steadfast love and faithfulness without end.

“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.”

Every part of God’s word is HIS WORD.

Which means this passage, in which we read of the act of sex between husband and wife – these passages are important.

We have a very clear word from God on the beauty that He has ordered and ordained for sex within the bonds of marriage.

Wisdom is heard again,

“… That you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases.”

The world tells us loud and often that we need to express our freedom to be sexual beings, to be overt in our sexuality, not to be held back by archaic regulations.

Here in this song God points us to His creation order. Husband and wife bound up in marriage. Within that faithful covenant we find beauty such as sex.

This order is what is good and beneficial for us. God gave us this order, these rules, they make sense!

Sex does not eclipse everything else that is good and right in marriage, but it has a beautiful place.

* Creator God,

Thank You for this Your word. Please write it on our hearts today.

For those of us who are single, please mark us as faithful servants of Your will.

Help us to practice holiness, listening to You rather than the world.

For those of us who are marriage, please mark us as faithful servants of Your will.

Help us to reflect Your wonderful order for marriage in every aspect, including sex.

Amen.

Reading

Audio, Visual

SAA Notes

The expression of our sexuality in marriage is both good and desirable – “eat … drink your fill, O lovers”. It is good to look for appropriate and modern metaphors in talking with your spouse about their body. Proverbs 5:18,19 has some good advice to husbands in this area.

SJA Notes

* God of Wonders, You are living and true, loving and kind. Teach us from Your word today.

“There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and virgins without number. My dove, my perfect one, is the only one, …”

We continue to plumb the depths of what relational faithfulness looks like here in this book, the Song of Solomon.

The husband’s mind is bent in a singular fashion.

In Jeremiah 29 we read,

“You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”

The love of husband and wife patterns the devotion that we see between God and His people, between the Head (Jesus) and the Body (the Church).

We read of the wife’s singular devotion in seeking for her beloved.

And the eye of the husband remains single.

“My dove, my perfect one, is the only one, …”

* Faithful God,

Please mark us as a faithful people.

Please help those of us who are married to be singularly devoted to our beloved.

And for all of us Your people Lord God, please help us to keep our eyes fixed in You and You alone. No other god, no other power, no earthly means or ideology.

Please Lord, please fix our eyes on Jesus today.

Amen.

Reading

Audio, Visual

SAA Notes

The Apostle Paul when he uses the illustration of the human body to the Church says: And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty. So too in this work, those parts are treated with special modesty. Images such as hills, mountains, gardens, fountains, aromatic plants all were immediately understood 3,000 years ago in terms of human physiology and bodily responses. God wants married couples to be able to talk with each other about this most central subject to their marriage with appropriate delicacy, humour and tact.

SJA Notes

* Creator God, thank You for Your faithfulness without end.

“You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.”

This is an important practice to wrestle with.

Beautiful and breath-taking poetry to the side, this is God’s word.

In the now, husbands must work hard at singular devotion to their wives.

In the now, wives must work hard at singular devotion to their husbands.

We are to love one another with a steadfast faithful love, a love that ascends past our limited frail selves – God’s love first shown to us.

So we can say truer and deeper each day of our beloved,

“You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.”

How much do we look forward to the _not yet_, where as we read of our King Jesus and the church (His bride) – That in the new heavens and the new earth we will have no flaw, perfectly adorned for the marriage supper of the Lamb (see Revelation 19 and 21).

* Loving God,

Thank You for Your faithfulness, without end, steadfast and true.

Thank You for Your love, given in grace, mercy abounding.

Please help us to love one another as You have first loved us.

Amen.