Readings for today: Song of Solomon 1:1-5:1
The Song of Solomon is one of the most difficult and least understood books in all of Scripture. It’s one we tend to avoid in our sex-saturated culture. The language is far too intimate. The imagery too graphic. We won’t allow ourselves to even picture it much less reflect on how the Spirit might speak to us through it. We flip through the pages as fast as we can to get to the end so we can avoid any embarrassment. We’re not alone, of course. Our Orthodox Jewish friends have a tradition that men should not read this book until they are at least 30 years old. The early church fathers advised a similar practice. Both traditions speak to a healthy respect for the power of sexual desire and want to make sure it is not stirred up before the appropriate time.
So what is this book all about? The love for a man and a woman? The love of God for His church? Perhaps both? Are we comfortable thinking about our relationship with God in sexually intimate terms? Is that a bridge too far? For my part, I believe this book invites us to approach God in the most intimate of ways. The language of the Song is designed to arouse. It’s meant to touch the deepest places of our hearts. It’s breathed out by God in order to draw us into His intimate embrace.
Our inability to embrace this book reveals how corrupt our understanding of human sexuality has become. Generally speaking, we see sex as dirty yet pleasurable. Something to be enjoyed and yet something to be feared. Our culture boasts of sexual freedom and yet is shocked when such freedom leads to abuse and violence. If there’s anything the #MeToo movement taught us is that our sexual appetites are almost impossible to satisfy. Sexuality without restraint is incredibly destructive and traumatic to all parties involved. There simply is no way to reduce it to a biological act or a simple exchange of fluids. Sex just doesn’t work that way.
Sex is God’s creation. Sexual desire is something He instilled within each of us. Now I am fully aware there are those who do not experience sexual desire just as I am aware there are those who experience an addiction to sexual desire. Both of these conditions - along with many others - are products of the Fall when the sexual desires of human beings became disordered and God’s original design for sex became corrupt. Originally, God designed sex to be the ultimate experience of “knowing.” A way for us to express our deepest affections. Our deepest emotions. Our deepest vulnerabilities. When the Bible talks about “knowing” another person, it often uses the most sexually intimate of terms. The same is true for “knowing” God. And such knowledge is designed to be experienced within the safety of a covenant relationship. A covenant relationship with Jesus or a covenant relationship of marriage between a man and a woman.
Viewed from this angle, is it possible to read this song as a prayer? A way to express the deepest desires of our hearts to God? A way for us to ask for deeper intimacy with Him? Or, does the brokenness of the human experience of sexuality warp our thinking? Does it corrupt how we understand this most powerful and primal of drives? Does it poison this well and thus prevent us from fully grasping the depth of relationship God desires to have with us? There’s a reason Christ calls the church His “bride.” There’s a reason God so often refers to Himself in the Old Testament as a “husband” and Israel as his “wife.” Marriage is the place where a man and a woman become “one flesh” before the Lord and it is designed to point beyond itself to something even greater...the “oneness” God desires to have with His people for all eternity.
Readings for tomorrow: None