Exposure with God
Sycamore Creek Church
Song of Songs
Tom Arthur
February 27, 2011
Peace, Friends!
Today we wrap up our series on sex and the Song of Songs. We’ve been reading the Song of Songs with a different exposure each week. It’s like a photographic image. You expose the same picture three different ways and you get three different images. In the same way, we’ve been exposing Song of Songs in three different ways. First, we exposed it literally and saw that sex in the Song is faithful, equal, emotional, physical, spiritual. Last week we exposed Song of Songs ethically. We saw how peace with creation, both the land and people, can be seen in this image of the Song of Songs. Today we’ll expose the Song of Songs spiritually and explore what this book has to do with God.
Each of these three ways of exposing Song of Songs connects back to The Fall in Genesis. This is the moment where Adam and Eve disobey God and eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In that moment three things are broken. First, there is a brokenness between husband and wife. Second, there is a brokenness between humanity and creation. Third, there is a brokenness between humanity and God. Song of Songs exposes us to a new image of each of these three relationships.
When we read the Song of Songs spiritually, we get this basic idea: that healthy sex gives us a model for what intimacy with God can look like. What?! Yes, you heard me right. Sex can be a model for our relationship with God. Of course, some of us have experienced the abuse of sex, when someone took advantage of us. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about healthy sex. The kind of sex that Song of Songs describes where sex is faithful, equal, emotional, physical, and spiritual.
Surely I jest! Nope. When you read the Christian mystics, much of the way that they speak about God has a kind of sexual and/or sensual sound to it. Consider Mechthild of Magdeburg who in the 13th century from the age of twelve received daily “greetings” from the Holy Spirit for the next thirty-one years. She writes about God, “You are my softest pillow, my most lovely bed, my most intimate repose, my deepest longing, my most sublime glory. You are an allurement to my Godhead. A thirst for my humanity, a stream for my burning.” Wow!
Let me bring this a little closer to home. I remember one day when I was a kid sitting in the car with my mom listening to the radio. We were listening to some love song. Of course, when you actually pay attention to most love songs, you realize that there’s no way that any one person could ever live up to what is being said about them in that song. If you listen closely you notice that there is a kind of worship in these songs, a worship of love or a worship of the person you’re in love with. Well, my mom looked at me and said, “Sometimes I feel like these love songs aren’t singing about someone else but about Jesus.” She’s probably right. We idolize love and romance to the point that only God could fulfill those deep longings, not someone we’re jumping into bed with.
Or consider for a moment that in Ephesians Paul refers to the church as the Bride of Christ. Haven’t we just been reading about a bride and groom? Oh, yes. The Song of Songs. There is a kind of healthy romantic love that helps us understand what it means to have true intimacy with God.
Consider this verse from the beginning of the Song of Songs:
Ah, you are beautiful, my love;
Ah, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves.
Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly lovely.
Song 1:15-16 (NRSV)
Does that sound familiar? It should. We sing it all the time to God in a song by Tim Hughes called Beautiful One. The chorus of that song goes like this:
Beautiful one I love,
Beautiful one I adore,
Beautiful one my soul must sing.
So let’s look more closely and see what happens when we expose the Song of Songs spiritually as a book about our relationship with God.
Spiritual Exposure
The first question that should come to mind if you’ve read the Song of Songs is that nowhere in the book is God even mentioned. Yikes! Isn’t God at least mentioned in every book of the Bible? Well, no. There are actually two books in the Bible where God is not mentioned: Song of Songs and Esther. So Song of Songs isn’t unique here. Well, if God isn’t mentioned, how can we even begin to think that this book has anything to do with our relationship to God? Surely it’s just about sex and sex alone. So where is God?
First, let’s look at the title. In the first verse of the book we read that this is the Song of Songs which is Solomon’s. Sometimes this book is called the Song of Solomon. Although as I showed in the first week, the book doesn’t seem to be by or even about Solomon. In fact, the groom in the book doesn’t necessarily have a very high opinion of Solomon (8:12). So it is probably better to call this book the Song of Songs rather than the Song of Solomon. So why does that matter?
Song of Songs is a kind of strange way to phrase the title, isn’t it? What does it mean? It means essentially the best song. The bestest of the best song. Referring to something in this manner only happens in one other way in the Bible. Consider these phrases: the Lord of lords, the King of kings, the God of gods, the Heaven of heavens, the Holy of holies. Each one of these has to do with God. Could it be that the Song of Songs is a veiled reference to God? Many Rabbis have thought so over the centuries. Rabbi Akiba says, “All the scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” What is the Holy of Holies? It’s the innermost part of the temple. It’s the most sacred space, the most mysterious. It was only entered once a year and when the priest went in they tied bells to his robe and a rope to his ankle so that if he died and fell over, they would hear that the bells weren’t ringing anymore and they could drag him out by the rope around his ankle. The Song of Songs is then the Holy of Holies of the Bible. It is the most sacred, intimate, mysterious space that God inhabits. Sex is spiritual and we see that the Song of Songs itself is a spiritual reference to God.
Sensual (Physical) Exposure
Sex is also physical or sensual. Think back again to Mechthild. She’s talking about a kind of union with God. It is very sensual and physical in the way that she talks about it. In fact, if you read many of the mystics they often talk about their relationship and love with God in a way that makes us kind of blush. This same kind of desire for God is seen in the Song of Songs.
At the beginning of chapter three, the bride refers to searching for the one “whom my soul loves.” She says this four times:
Song of Songs 3:1-4 (NRSV)
Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. “I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.” I sought him, but found him not. The sentinels found me, as they went about in the city. “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?” Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go until I brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
Who exactly is this one “whom my soul loves”? On the surface she’s talking about her groom. But when we read Deuteronomy which says, “And if you search for [God] with all your heart and soul, you will find him” (Deut 4:29, NLT), you see that we also seek God with our soul. We begin to see that perhaps she is talking about her lover on one level, but also about God on another level.
This desire for God is very physical. She says, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Song 1:2, NRSV). Ummm…are we still talking about God here? As I mentioned in the first week, kisses of the mouth are a reference to words of affection. And when we read a very literal translation of Numbers we see that God says, “With Moses I [God] speak mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:8, My Own Literal Translation). What is God speaking to Moses “mouth to mouth”? The Torah, the law. The teachings of God in the Bible are God’s words of affection to us in a very physical way. But God gets even more physical in the incarnation, that is when God takes on flesh in Jesus Christ. God’s love for us is a physical love, a love that is mouth to mouth.
Once again we sing about this kind of love all the time in worship. Consider the song How He Loves Us by John Mark McMillan. The first verse is very physical in nature:
He is jealous for me,
Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden,
I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.
Our love for God and God’s love for us is physical and sensual in nature.
Emotional Exposure
Our love for God and God’s love for us is also emotional. We seek God out. We have a deep emotional bond with God. We desire a deep intimacy with God. It is very similar to the intimacy we desire with others. Every healthy person desires that kind of intimacy. For some that may play out in friendship and for others it may play out in more romantic ways. I remember being single and being a teenager and having an ache to love someone and be loved, to be intimate not just physically but also emotionally. To be vulnerable and open and honest and transparent and still be accepted and loved. In the same way we desire that kind of intimacy and emotional bonding with God. One writer says, “Longing for intimacy with God is a necessary desire for a healthy soul” (Ellen Davis).
Song of Songs knows this kind of emotional exposure with God. We read, “One night as I lay in bed, I yearned deeply for my lover, but he did not come” (Song 3:1, NLT). We seek God out. We yearn for God. This kind of yearning often happens in bed. We want to feel the touch of another person. In the same way when we lay in bed we yearn to feel the closeness of God. The bed is often described in the Bible as a place of prayer. In Psalm 6 we read, “I am worn out from sobbing [in prayer]. Every night tears drench my bed” (6:6, NLT). Everyone goes to bed at night and yearns to be connected to something bigger than themselves, yearns to be connected to God. We are hungry for it.
Once again we sing about this quite often in worship. Consider the song Hungry by Kathryn Scott:
Hungry, I come to you
For I know You satisfy
I am empty, but I know
Your love does not run dry
So I wait for you
So I wait for You
I’m falling on my knees
Offering all of me
Jesus, You’re all this heart is living for
Song of Songs exposes our emotional desire for intimacy with God.
Faithful Exposure
Song of Songs also exposes our need to be faithful with God. Healthy sex is faithful sex. We covenant with one person and we disclose the secrets of our body with that person and that person alone. This kind of healthy sex shows us that our relationship with God is at its best when it too is faithful. It is faithful for two reasons.
First, we are faithful to God because we are in a marriage-like covenant with God. We read, “I am my lover’s, and my lover is mine” (Song 6:3, NLT). Is this just about sex? Probably not when we compare it to one of the many times in the Bible when we read, “I will take you as my people, and I will be your God” (Exodus 6:7, NRSV). God has made a covenant with us so that we are God’s and God is ours.
This is just under the surface of the Song of Songs when we read something like this: “We will extol [remember] your love more than wine” (Song 1:4, NRSV). That word translated “extol” literally means “to remember.” Compare that to one of the many places where we are told to “Remember the wonderful works he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he uttered…” (1 Chronicles 16:12, NRSV). Remember God’s love for us because we are in a covenant with God.
The Song of Songs exposes us to a second reason to be faithful to God: God’s beauty. We read in chapter five:
My lover is dark and dazzling, better than ten thousand others! His head is the finest gold, and his hair is wavy and black. His eyes are like doves beside brooks of water; they are set like jewels. His cheeks are like sweetly scented beds of spices. His lips are like perfumed lilies. His breath is like myrrh. His arms are like round bars of gold, set with chrysolite. His body is like bright ivory, aglow with sapphires. His legs are like pillars of marble set in sockets of the finest gold, strong as the cedars of Lebanon. None can rival him. His mouth is altogether sweet; he is lovely in every way. Such, O women of Jerusalem, is my lover, my friend.
Song 5:9-16 (NLT)
God is beautiful beyond anything else that we could ever imagine. Like the bride and the groom singing praises to one another about how beautiful they are, we too sing to God about how beautiful God is and why we should remain faithful to God. Hillsong sings in their song, Better than Life:
Better than the riches of this world
Better than the sound of my friend’s voices
Better than the biggest dreams of my heart
And that’s just the start
Better than getting what I say I need
Better than living the life that I want to
Better than the love anyone could give
Your love is
Song of Songs exposes us to a love of God that is faithful.
Equal Exposure
So far we’ve seen that Song of Songs exposes us to an image of love of God that is spiritual, physical, emotional, and faithful. But it also exposes us to a love of God that is equal. Equal? Surely God is not equal in any way to us. Well, not equal in that way, but equal in this way. In the same way that we seek God out because of our desire to have an emotional connection with God, God seeks us out too!
We read in the Song of Songs:
One night as I was sleeping, my heart awakened in a dream. I heard the voice of my lover. He was knocking at my bedroom door. ‘Open to me, my darling, my treasure, my lovely dove,’ he said, ‘for I have been out in the night. My head is soaked with dew, my hair with the wetness of the night.’
Song 5:2 (NLT)
God, like the groom, comes looking for his bride. This sounds very similar to another well known passage in the Bible: “Look! Here I stand at the door and knock. If you hear me calling and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal as friends” (Revelation 3:20, NLT). God comes to the door of our heart, mind, and soul and knocks, seeking us out! Seeking us out for what? To share a meal as friends! Wow.
Sometimes we are very sluggish to respond to this knocking. We hear God knocking on our door but we ignore it. I find that too often God has to do more than just knock. God has to hit me over the head with a two-by-four to get my attention and wake me from my numb stupor. The prophet Isaiah takes this all a step further when God says, “I [God] was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that did not call on my name” (Isaiah 65:1, NRSV). You can almost hear the emotional pain in God’s voice. God longs for intimacy with us and we turn the other way.
It seems incredible, even impossible, that God would want to be connected to us. One writer says, “When we come before God in true worship, God sees us, not as dutiful, but rather as beautiful, even irresistible, like a bride perfumed for her husband. It is almost too bold to say: when we worship God truly, God’s desire for us grows” (Ellen Davis).
The 16th century Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross, put it this way:
It is indeed credible that a bird of lowly flight
Can capture the royal eagle of the heights,
If this eagle descends
With the desire of being captured.
John of the Cross (16th Century Mystic)
God desires to be captured by us. We not only seek out God, but even more importantly, God seeks us out. God’s love for us runs deep. We have not sung this song before, but Stuart Townsend’s “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” says,
How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That He should give His only Son,
To make a wretch His treasure.
Song of Songs exposes us to a kind of love of God that is spiritual, physical, emotional, faithful, and equal. Just like the kind of healthy love that a bride and groom share in the intimacy of sex, so too can we share that kind of love with God. We can share that kind of love with God because God has first loved us. Thank you, God!
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.