Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Song of Songs 3:6–5:1
## Reformation Covenant Church
### Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Beginning at verse 6 of chapter 3 and I’ll read through verse one of chapter 5 believing this to be a unit. So, Song of Songs chapter 3 verse 6 to 5:1. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. I believe that this is the description of the marriage of Solomon and his wife depicted for us in this section.

Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant? Behold his bed, which is Solomon’s. Three score valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel. They all hold swords, being expert in war. Every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night. King Solomon made himself a chariot of the wood of Lebanon. He made the pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with love for the daughters of Jerusalem.

Go forth, oh ye daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon with the crown, wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousal, and in the day of the gladness of his heart. Behold, thou art fair, my love. Behold, thou art fair. Thou hast dove’s eyes within thy locks. Thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that even shorn, which come up from the washing, whereof everyone bear twins, and none is barren among them.

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely. Thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks. Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armory, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers and shields of mighty men. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away. I will get me to the mountains of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense.

Thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee. Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon. Look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lion’s dens, from the mountains of the leopards. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse. Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes with one chain of thy neck. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse.

How much better is thy love than wine, and the smell of thine ointments than all spices. Thy lips, oh my spouse, drop as the honeycomb. Honey and milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits, camphire with spikenard, spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes with all the chief spices.

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind, come thou south, blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits. I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse. I have gathered myrrh with my spices. I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey. I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, O friends. Drink, yea, drink abundantly, oh beloved.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the Song of Songs, the best song apparently, we can look at it this way at least, ever written. We thank you that of all 1005 songs that Solomon wrote, this one is specified as the Song of Songs, the most worthy song included in your holy scriptures to us. We thank you, Father, for this week in which many churches, many people across America are celebrating marriage and focusing on marriage.

This week of the celebration of marriage. We thank you for Christian marriages. We pray now that your spirit would take this text and the rest of the Song of Solomon. Help us to understand, no, help us to obey, Lord God, our responsibilities as husbands and wives to delight in them and to recognize that therein we find our joy in life in Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, today’s sermon is due in part to our development of a vision statement of Reformation Covenant Church and the strategy map that you’ve heard so much about. Our vision is to love the triune God and transform the fallen world. And one of the specific initiatives that we’ve written to meet the objective of engaging in word, prayer, and sacraments that drives mission, discipleship, and community is to annually at least have one sermon on the subject of Christian marriage. And so, it seemed to me that coming up to Valentine’s Day, it’d be a good time to preach such a sermon.

And as I said, I’ve gotten literature from other parts of the country where various churches are trying to set apart this week actually February 7th through the 14th as marriage week and have a whole bunch of activities associated with that in various Christian communities and neighborhoods around the country.

Valentine’s Day is a Christian holiday having her outlined that Valentine’s Day really sort of is a celebration of St. Valentine who died on February 14th in the year 270. And at this particular time in Rome’s history, marriages had been outlawed because they were seen as negative influences on the army. And Valentine at least so the tale goes—it’s very difficult to get accurate history of this period of time—but apparently Valentine would marry young couples secretly as a priest in the church and for this he was beaten to death and beheaded. He was martyred and so his martyrdom is sort of a martyrdom for the sake of Christian marriage, marriages that he would perform in the context of his ministry there’s discussion about the jailer who kept him until his martyrdom, her daughter and Valentine having a relationship and him sending notes to her.

And maybe there’s some relationship between that and Valentine’s Day cards. Maybe not. There’s various events that surrounded this.

Around this same time of year, there was a Roman pagan celebration where couples would be matched up for anywhere between a week and a year. And so that happened in the same period of time. And that was because so this tale goes of love birds. The idea was that in mid February, the birds would begin to mate and develop nests, etc. And so the expression “love birds” probably relates back to this ancient Roman pagan festival where they would try to match up love birds the way the birds were being matched up. It was a cue from nature to establish relationships.

Now, so that’s kind of some of the relationship of this. It’s a holiday that has always has memories for me in terms of the family that I married into. My wife is a Waller, a long line of Wallers going back to England. One of them was the poet laureate of England during the time of Cromwell. And the reason why he was raised the way he was is because they knew that many centuries, several centuries before in 1415, there had been another Waller who had given himself great distinction by capturing the Duke of Orleans at the Battle of Agincourt and for that the Waller family has a crest given by the king at that time.

Many of you have seen the modern-day Kenneth Branagh version of this Shakespeare play on the Battle of Agincourt—excellent movie. Well, the Duke of Orleans was then imprisoned by this relative of my wife from way back when. And from his imprisonment, he sent what at least some people think are the first extant Valentines to his wife a long way away. He was being imprisoned. I think the Waller that held him held him for several years and got a whole bunch of money from it, finally get him back. It’s the way they used to do things. That’s how they built castles apparently.

Well, so that kind of is related to Valentine’s Day as well. But the reason I bring it up is it sort of is a picture of what modern romance has become because the Duke of Orleans was here, his wife was there, they couldn’t really have the kind of relationship they wanted. And this is kind of the modern basis of romance.

Romance in our day and age, the last 100 or 200 years is really focused on unrequited love. Love that for whatever reason can’t find its fulfillment. You can’t have the relationship. The woman’s married to somebody else. The husband’s married to somebody else. Circumstances of war separate them. Some problem exists. And this is the height of romanticism is this love that cannot be fulfilled. It cannot be brought to consummation and a unity of relationship.

And that of course is exactly the opposite of what our text talks about in the Song of Songs. And maybe what we should say is the most romantic, the most, you know, the great demonstration of love. The Song of Solomon is about consummated love. It’s about a relationship that’s going to endure, you know, for the rest of their lifetime. That’s biblical love. And it’s real easy to get sucked into this view of romantic love and think that somehow that’s really the best kind of love.

And then to pine away for the rest of our years over some supposed fault in our relationship with our wives, some past person that we can no longer marry, all that stuff we should self-consciously put behind us, confess as sin, and say that the Lord God his view of romance and true relationship is being brought into a relationship with the one that God has chosen from all time to be our wife or to be our husband and to rejoice in that relationship.

You know, it’s interesting how last week when we installed Cory Sariah, we I talked about how really Corey was there to do three things every Lord’s day to the people. And this is what my job is as well and the rest of the elders here at RCC, those that preach, those that officiate. You need to hear the voice of Jesus every Lord’s day assuring you of your forgiveness of sins. We don’t have a confession of sin primarily to make you think about all the bad things you did this last week.

If you’re a Christian and have the spirit of God in your midst, you know that he brings conviction. The reason why we have confession of sin is to assure you of God’s forgiveness. Ultimately, relationships flounder. Marriages flounder. One reason is because a lack of assurance of the other person’s love and forgiveness. And so this worship service here, the model of the gospel also instructs us every Lord’s day in our marriages as we receive the assurance of God’s love and forgiveness, we should be reminded to assure those that we’re in relationship with, particularly our mates, of our own love.

We’ll see that in the text today. The next thing a pastor does is to preach the word to you. And our marriages need to be formed in the context not of some romantic ideals, but of the revealed word of God. And we need to hear the specific commandments and responsibilities God gives us for a great relationship. You know, our relationship with Christ is first and foremost a covenant of promise. We hear these wonderful promises from God’s word.

And then as we get those, we also know that it brings responsibility. Most of us, you know, when we get married, we don’t understand what we’re doing. It is a gift from God to men and women. Marriage and we get that gift. But with it, as we mature in it, we understand there comes responsibilities along with it as well. And so the word is preached every lord’s day. The commandments of the king to make us disciples.

And in our own marriages, our marriages have to be informed by the commands of the king. This is joy. Walk in it because that’s the third phase of worship. As we move further into assurance of love and the discipleship that Christ give us, we move to community at the table which is a joyful rejoicing. We want I my goal my prayer all week long this week particularly in a focused way for each and every married couple at RCC is what we do here.

It’s joyous community in your home. And I think as we assure one another of our love for each other and forgiveness of sins, as we see our relationship formed on the basis of God’s word, that’s the way God brings us to joyous community in our families. That’s the goal. That’s the movement of our worship service. That’s the movement of God’s calling for marriage. It’s the movement of our Christian life. And we want to talk today from this Song of Songs about this.

Now, love is exceedingly important. Let me let in Song of Songs chapter 8 verses 5-7, it talks about the great importance of love and basically it says that, you know, if a man was to give all that he had for love, he’d be getting a bad deal out of that relationship. We read in verse 7, “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. If a man would give all his substance of his house for love, it would utterly be condemned.”

So, we must begin by saying that the kind of love being talked about in the Song of Solomon, which is marital love, picturing something else, no doubt, but marital love has tremendous value. It should be seen as, you know, kind of the most important thing we’ve got going on apart from our relationship with Christ. It has this tremendous value to it. And as we bring an understanding of that value to our hearing of the sermon today, Lord, Lord, we pray the Lord would bring us to a further joy in our relationships as we see the great value of love and the great blessing contained therein.

Now there are various approaches to the Song of Songs and on your outline on your handouts I’ve given you an outline of the entire book. You know if you—it’s one of the reasons why we sang the song we did today in terms of song a song that is normally sung at marriages is there are very few songs that I know of at least that speak of marital love which is a little odd. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right hymnal.

But it’s a little odd and a little frustrating to me. We have this fairly substantive book, Song of Songs in the scriptures that talks certainly about marital love maybe other things and yet there are very few songs based upon that don’t relate ultimately to our relationship to Christ. One of the reasons we sang the particular processional today is again this picture of the marriage supper of the Lamb.

The Song of Songs is certainly about something more than just marriage, but at the same time it is about marriage. Okay, the approaches to the Song of Songs primarily for the last 2,000 years have been allegorical. That really what’s going on here is not a marriage at all. It’s not a man and a woman. The whole thing is talking about Jesus and the church. And while we can make applications to Jesus and the church, I think that it is really eisegesis reading into the text something to not clearly see the kind of relationship that’s talked about between a man and a woman.

Now, to accomplish this analogy, we have this other idea that there’s a third party. We don’t just have Solomon and Mrs. Solomon. You know, you hear the Shulamite is who this woman is. Well, it’s the feminine form of Solomon. So, it’s Solomon is Shlomo in the Hebrew. So, really, the Song of Songs is about Shlomo and Mrs. Shlomo, Solomon and Mrs. Solomon. And instead, we call it the Shulamite for some reason.

But really, it’s about a wedding between Solomon and a probably a historic person. At least the song is about marriage relationship. Now, it certainly pictures something broader than that. In modern commentaries, we’ve kind of gone to the other ditch. So, the old ditch was it’s spiritual. It’s not physical. The physical embarrasses us. And to read the word “breast” and the public reading of the word is an embarrassment.

So, we don’t want to, you know, think of it that way. It’s got to be something else going on. You know, God is not as shy as we are about these things. But the other ditch on the road, I’ve seen a couple of commentaries in my studies when I taught this to the high schoolers last year. I had other couple of other commentaries that took a totally sexual approach to this text or nearly totally sexual approach.

And all kinds of sexual imagery is read into this song that I just don’t think is there. And I think that men particularly have to self-consciously grab a hold of their thoughts, not let them wander off to what could this mean in terms of sexuality. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Now, some of that is clearly going on. There is this marriage scene at the middle of the book. Each section of this book except the last begins with them apart and it ends each section with them coming together.

And so that’s certainly true that marriage and sexuality is in there. But that is not at all, I don’t think, what most of the imagery is about. And I mean how sexy is it to say that your wife’s nose looks like the Tower of Lebanon or something, you know, or her hair looks like a bunch of goats, you know? It’s just not that sexy. The imagery is not, I don’t think, intended to be like that.

It’s interesting and I may read this text as we get along depending on how much time I have. But when the woman describes the man’s body in the text, it’s interesting because the man describes the woman’s body and then she describes his body. And when she describes his body, some of the imagery is temple imagery, marble, brass legs, sapphire belly or something, some kind of precious jewels going on. And it seems like that is imagery that we then later see for instance in the Book of Revelation describing Christ and also imagery that was taken from the temple.

So one line of approach to the Song of Solomon is to see in this that the man is representational of heavenly truths and realities. The woman is representational of the earth and God comes to the earth and makes her productive. And you know we’ve seen this in other psalms. You know there psalms that talk about that we usually sing at the end of the year about how God walks through a valley and everything springs up and grows.

Well that’s kind of some of the imagery here although in a more extended fashion. The imagery about the woman seems to be more earthy sort of stuff, plants and animals and things more to do with the earth. Now, the man has some of that going on in his imagery, too, but he has this other temple-like imagery. So, it seems like that’s kind of behind this as well.

I think the way that we want to resolve or kind of bring together these approaches is to say that the Song of Songs is about marriage, a real marriage, real man and wife, and it does inform us about romantic love, but it’s something far grander than that. That’s being described the union of Christ and his bride and the coming of Christ, you know, 2,000 years ago now to cause the earth to flourish. This is a big theme of the Old Testament. When Christ comes and Messiah comes, everything will change and the world will be brought to productivity. And I think that’s being pictured here.

Now, we don’t need to throw out the marriage imagery for the sake of that imagery that is here in the Song of Songs. And I think it’d be a real shame to do it. You know, I think when Paul talks about the mystery of human sexuality, man and woman becoming one flesh in Christ coming together in Christian marriage. You know, I think he knows that it is a picture of some wonderful gigantic truths about reality being played out in the context of our marriages. And this doesn’t demean marriage or say it’s just an illustration for something that’s really important.

It rather takes our marriages and puts them on kind of a there’s a cosmic purposefulness to them. It’s linked in some way to this wonderful picture of God coming and visiting his earth and causing it to bud forth and bring forth fruit for him. And so I think that it kind of heightens our sense again of the importance of our marriages, the importance of marital love. And in a very real sense, out of the home comes all these blessings to the world.

We just sang about God will bless you out of Zion. The idea today is to push out God’s word. Your homes are transformed. Your marriages become a little better this week, Lord willing, as we grow in sanctification and those marriages then provide the foundation for work in the context of your neighborhoods, your places of work, etc. And the world blossoms and buds in a sense flowing out of these marriage relationships that are touched by God’s word today.

Okay. So that’s kind of the big picture sort of stuff. One last comment before we get into overviewing the actual Song of Songs and then the section we want to look at and that is that it’s a difficult book. There are particular words in the book that are difficult to translate. Even it’s not easy sometimes to know who’s saying what, the guy or the girl or somebody else, the daughters of Jerusalem. It’s a little difficult.

And it seems that some of the imagery might be reflecting dreamlike states of mind. Now, this is definitely true. Right after the section we’re reading today, ending in verse one of chapter 5, in chapter 5, verse two, the woman talks about how she was awake, but she slept. And it’s most commentators believe at least that section that begins in chapter 5:2 is a dreamlike state. That’s the one where she looks for her husband’s coming then he goes away cuz she’s not ready and she looks around the city and gets beaten up by the guards.

Not couldn’t really happen to Solomon’s wife. His guards are not going to beat up his wife. It’s a dream and that one’s fairly clear, but it’s possible that much of this book exists in the context of a dream. Bob Dylan had of course a major song several years back “Lovesick” or “Sick of Love.” I don’t remember what the title was, but it won a Grammy award for that album and it’s really based upon the Song of Solomon and he I think he understood this idea.

Let me read the first couple of lines from his song. “I’m walking through streets that are dead. Walking with you in my head. My feet are so tired. My brain is so wired and the clouds are weeping.” See, it’s a dreamlike imagery and it kind of connects to what the woman experiences as she goes around the streets in her dream in chapter 5 looking for her husband. “Did I hear someone tell a lie? Did I hear someone’s distant cry?

I spoke like a child. You destroyed me with a smile while I was sleeping.” Dylan Song understands—Dylan being raised Jewish, understanding the Old Testament. Certainly, I mean, any poet, any songwriter worth his salt is going to spend a lot of time analyzing the Song of Songs, whether they think it’s inspired by God or not, this tremendous song is going to understand it. And Dylan understood the dreamlike quality of the Song of Songs, and as a result made a lot of money because his song kind of comported with the truth of God’s word.

And it resonates. God’s word resonates with his people. So that song, “Sick of Love,” it was kind of a love play on words. You know, “I’m sick of love. I’m lovesick.” And the King James translation, you know, they the parties say that they’re lovesick. And so when things don’t go well, don’t go well in our marriages, we become sick of love. “I wish I never met you.” But then when we understand that we can’t get away from the covenantal commitments we have and our joy is to be found in our marriages, and then we say, “I’m so you know, I’m so anxious to be with you.”

And so, that’s what we want to do. Some of you in your relationships may be sick of love today. And what I want you to understand is that God is in the business of resurrection. He’s in the business of redemption. He’s in the business of forgiveness and transformation. And we want to get to the point where we celebrate this week as those that are lovesick. That’s sick of love. Okay.

Briefly, the structure of the Song of Songs on the outline before you. This comes from David Dorsey’s book, “Literary Structure of the Old Testament,” which is an excellent book goes through every book of the Old Testament and does literary structures—most of them chiastic—and Dorsey spent a lot of time on the Song of Songs before he wrote his book that was one he’d already had articles written on so it’s a little, it’s a more extended section of his book than some of the other ones he deals with and he’s done a lot of work in this particular section and I think that I think that he’s right in how he outlines this.

So the idea just to give you kind of where we’re at in our discussion here in the middle of this book talk. There’s an opening dialogue between the young man and the young woman. They expressed their mutual admiration and desire. “Oh, that he would kiss me at the kisses of his mouth.” That’s verse two after the introductory line “Song of Songs from Solomon.” So she immediately begins by expressing desire for the man. And there’s these statements back and forth in the first section that’s marked off here.

And then the second section, the young man then invites the young woman to join him in the country. He says, “Let’s go away together. My wife and I are going away together to Florida, are taking charity with us, but we’re going away together. You know, it’s the man invites the wife to go with him into the countryside. And then the next major section, the young woman has a nighttime search for the young man, not the one I was just describing. This is before the marriage, which happens at the center of the book.

And in this other one, she doesn’t get beaten up. It’s not as bad as her later nighttime search. She’s looking for her husband in chapter 3:1-5. And then the section we read for the sermon text, the wedding day itself, and then immediately after the wedding day, we have another nighttime search for the young man and there and they have speeches of mutual praise in the context of that and then she invites him to join her in the country.

You see it’s coming the thing builds into the center when they get married and then the relationship is described and then finally the last section are closing words of love and desire. And as I said in the first six of these seven sections they begin apart with yearning and desire for one another. And by the end of each section they’re brought together. They’re in the presence of each other except the last section.

The last section begins with them together and ends with them together. So the book moves towards separation to completion through the context of marriage and then it climaxes off in the last section where there is no separation anymore in their relationship. So that’s kind of how the Song of Songs moves along as a way to sort of understand where we’re at.

And then I’ve got a little outline for you of the wedding day section itself, chapter 3:6-5:1 first there’s the approach of the woman in the wedding procession you heard me read about that you know “oh who’s this coming up from the wilderness”—up from the wilderness you see marriage brings us out of the wilderness into the promised land we move from the wilderness into a garden so the imagery is that ultimately this is the world being brought to redemption in Christ but it’s also true that we move out of the wilderness of isolation at least those who are not called to singleness.

Those who are called to singleness, of course, it’s not wilderness for them. But those who are called to marriage, there’s this half-person thing we’ve talked about before, and they are brought up out of that wilderness. So, the picture seems to be the woman Solomon has sent his chariot to draw the woman to the city to marry her. And so, she is coming in this procession, this beautiful procession with Solomon’s men guarding her with swords on their right, on their thigh, etc. And bringing up the wife to meet the husband in this procession.

And there are fragrances in this section that we read. Myrrh, frankincense, wood, Lebanon is mentioned and that’s this wife coming up in the wedding procession. And then in verses 1 to 5, the man spoke his speeches of admiration for the wife. Solomon speaks to who’s going to be Mrs. Solomon and he gives a lengthy speech of admiration five verses and he reviews seven specific aspects of her body. Her eyes, her hair, her teeth, her lips, her cheeks, her neck, and her breasts.

Notice that five or six of those involve the face. Okay, so the face is really the dominant imagery used by the man. Then he has a short speech. Then he moves to wanting to go to the mountain of myrrh to the hill of frankincense. So chariot brings her in. He speaks beautiful words to her. Let’s go to the mountain of Lebanon. Third thing that happens. And then in the very middle of the speech is verse 7, which we’ll read in the context here.

Let me just pull out the specific text in verse 7. Then, okay, so verse six of chapter 4, “Until the daybreak and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountains of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense. Then verse 7, Thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee. And then verse eight, Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon, from these places.”

So first he talks about going to some place. Then he gives a very short verse of praise of who his wife is. And then he says, “Now let’s go from this place.” Now it’s not as obvious in the English translation how those two aspects of his short speeches of desire for combined. But understand that the word for frankincense in verse 6 is lebonah. Lebonah is frankincense. So “let’s go to the mountain of myrrh to the hill of lebonah.” And then he asks her to “come with me from the mountain” Har, same Hebrew word. And from Lebanon, Lebanon in the Hebrew. And so you see there’s a word association here between the word for frankincense and Lebanon. They’re not same word, but they sound alike. And in poetry, we know the importance of words sounding alike, and Hebrew poetry is the same. So again, it’s a way to balance off the bookends of this central statement of her his speech to her of who she is and how he perceives her.

After then this short speech of desire, wanting her to go away with him, he then has another lengthy description of admiration for her in the next three verses and again he reviews seven aspects of her body in this section. Eyes, neck, breast, oils, lips, and garments. And so again, that balances off his sevenfold description of her beauty. He says it again after talking about going to the mountain. And then finally, they’re brought together in unity in verses 12-5:1.

And again, here we’re back to the original imagery of the beginning of the text. There are wafting fragrances again, myrrh, frankincense, word Lebanon. All of these are referred to again. So in the opening description, she’s coming with all these specific terms being used to describe her couch and what he sent to bring her up. And then he talks about how beautiful she is. Then he says, “Let’s go away together. Let’s go to the mountain.” Then he gives a very short speech right at the middle of how he perceives her. Then he says, “Let’s go from Lebanon or the mountain.” Then he describes her again, her beauty. And then finally, the wedding itself is now brought to completion. And again, there’s references to all the things that were in the wedding processional are now found in the context of the wedding. So, at the heart of the Song of Solomon is this beautiful picture of this wedding between Solomon and his wife and the way that happens in the context of his desire for her, his bringing her to himself and then establishing marriage in the context of it.

Now, this structure that I’ve given you on the outline, if we were to count the number of Hebrew words that each section, you know, it diminishes down to the middle. The middle line, that single verse only has six Hebrew words in it. The middle, the very heart of the text. The invitation to both go and then come from the mountain has 12 and 16 words respectively. His description of her body and her beauty have 56 words and 34 words respectively.

And the description of the marriage procession and then the actual consummation of the marriage have 67 and 74 words. The point is the story begins long here in the middle, gets shorter and shorter and that’s a device again to draw our attention to what is in the middle. What moves her out of the wilderness into being a fruitful garden. It’s the center speech of just six Hebrew words, this very short verse that the husband speaks.

Okay, so that’s by way of overview of the Song of Solomon and the text we’re dealing with. And I want to make a few brief comments based not just on our text but upon the entire book of the Song of Solomon.

Now, I first I want to talk to singles—to the young people here or older people who are single—and the first thing I want to give you is in terms of instruction is to be careful. The purpose of sexuality is marriage. Three times in the Song of Solomon and I have them listed on your outline 2:7, 3:5 and 8:4 we read “do not awaken love until it pleases.” Now, this is translated different ways. As I said, some of the Hebrew in the Song of Songs is hard to translate. But I think the best way to translate that is based on my studies that I did last year when I taught this to the high schoolers is not “don’t awaken my love until he’s ready to get up.” It means “don’t awaken love until it pleases, until it’s timely.”

Young people, you have a way of awakening love in each other before it pleases, before you’re ready to move toward what marriage and sexual relationships are supposed to move toward, which is consummation. The point of this is the Song of Songs is about a man and a woman who then begin to have relationship together and the end result of that is this consummation of the marriage in the middle of the song.

You know what you don’t want to awaken those kind of passions and desires in another person or in yourself until it pleases until it is ready until you’re moving toward the goal. This is my problem with you know dating. This is my problem with young men and young women engaging in dating at young ages when they have no intention of marrying in the next year or two. I don’t understand it. And I think the Bible says you got to be very careful because what you’re doing by focusing on a particular guy or by focusing on a particular girl is you are in the context of perhaps awakening love before it pleases.

And there’s going to be two results of that. One, sexual sin and the results of all that which are not good. Or two, sexual tension and frustration. You see, either way, it’s not good. Whether you try to control yourself and think you’re stronger than Samson, wiser than Solomon, or more devoted to God than David, cuz all three of those guys messed up in this area. Do you think you can get do all that stronger than Samson, wiser than Solomon, and more devoted than David?

Go ahead, play the game for a couple years before you’re ready to get married. But probably it’s going to end up kind of messing up your rel—your relationship. You know, we talk about how we want get young guys and girls together frequently. A lot of good dating going on to prepare them for marriage. No, it’s the reverse. Now, there’s it’s good, of course, to have friendships with girls and guys of the opposite sex. Very important to do things socially.

A bunch of our teens are off to the ball in Moscow. That’s a good thing. But to begin to really focus on somebody and start to spend a lot of time with them, it’s dangerous. Be careful. Don’t awaken love until it pleases.

This is also true not just in terms of, you know, avoiding that kind of activity, but girls should dress modestly. You do not want to awaken love until it pleases. You do not want to dress in such a way as to tempt a man to fall into sexual sin about you.

I remember years several years ago, we bought our car, went to the bank, woman dressed there, young girl, very provocatively. And I thought, boy, has nobody told her that what guys think. Just read some of these commentaries, these modern commentaries on the Song of Songs, and you’ll know what guys can make out of all kinds of imagery. You know, you know what that I won’t go into all what they tell you because it’s not good to think that way.

But it is interesting to watch men deal with these descriptions that are not at all overtly sexual and these descriptions of the beauty of the wife and the man and make sexual things out of them. Why do guys do that? Well, I don’t know. But that’s what guys do. And young girls need to understand that. And if you dress in such a way, you have to think about what is the guy going to make out of this. If he makes sexual imagery out of you know, a cornfield or something. What’s he going to do with me when I dress this way?

Now, it’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you girls. But I’m saying, you know, live with understanding here in the context of the community. Don’t awaken love in yourself until you’re ready to move toward that. And be careful of what you do toward the members of the opposite sex to not awaken love in them.

I’ve seen articles on modesty and girls that I’ve seen one that tried to blame Bathsheba for David’s sin. I’m not trying to do that. I don’t think it was Bathsheba’s fault in any way. I think it was David’s fault. Text clearly makes that the focal point of what happens in that account. But I do think it’s important, you know, for girls to dress in a way that does not awaken thoughts in members of the opposite sex.

On the other hand, it’s it’s men’s obligation, young men who are single, all young men, all men, to control their eyes, to not awaken passion for the wrong woman or for a woman before you’ve moved to marry with her. Job said he made a covenant with his eyes not to look upon a maiden. So David’s fault was letting his eyes look at something he shouldn’t have looked at. We don’t know she was naked, by the way. He should—we don’t know that at all in the Hebrew, but he looked at her. You know, it doesn’t have to be a woman doing something improper. Men can do this thing. So we need to make covenants with our eyes to be very careful and not to awaken love before it pleases.

Our clothes, our eyes, our words. What we’re going to see in the text here is the importance of our words one to the other to speak words of love to each other before you’re moving towards solid commitment toward marriage. You know, that is dangerous stuff. It has the capability of awakening love in yourself and toward the other person. Physical contact, old song, you’ve heard me talk about it by Tony Basil, I think, or some woman. “You take me by the heart when you take me by the hand” was one of the lines in it.

Men don’t understand that. But, but I think that physical response of handholding, for instance, can produce an awakening of love before it pleases. So many ways, many applications your parents and others can help you think through, but I think it’s very important to be careful.

Secondly, be inoffensive. If you are in a relationship that’s good and proper, moving toward marriage, be inoffensive. Live in community.

In chapter 8 verse one, we read this. Oh, this is the woman speaking. “Oh, that thou art my brother that suck the breast of my mother, then I should find thee without I could kiss thee. Yes, I should not be despised.” Now, this is in chapter 8. They get married in chapter four. So what I read from this text is that this woman is married to this guy, but still she doesn’t want to give offense to the community by embracing him and kissing him in public.

Now if you were my brother, then I could, you know, give you a hug, give you a kiss on the cheek or something, but I can’t do that because you’re not my brother. We have to go in private to do that. Now, I don’t know, maybe it’s a cultural deal going on here. We know that it was. We know that at this ter time of the writing of this beautiful song, this was true. There was a modesty in public relationships and I just think it’s time to call for that again.

I think I’m embarrassed. I go to places and, you know, guys, girls are sitting on guys’ laps and it embarrasses me. Maybe I’m just hung up. I don’t know. But I think this text says that there’s a proper way to live in community. And even people that are engaged, even married people, should be careful about the way they embrace each other in public. I think that’s right. Based on this text. Don’t you know it at least was true in the context of the original setting for this and I think God puts it in here for a reason for us.

Third, be instructed. Take notes. You know, I hope some of you young men were taking notes when Lydia spoke at the reception a week ago. You know, you want to find a girl, right? Girl, well, she gave you some clues as to how what things you could do to impress a girl. Opening her door, I think, was one of them, right? Take notes. You want to be on Peter Leithart’s short list of the guys when you go over to Idaho, right?

I can say that my son’s going to Idaho this fall, but he’s not here today. You know, you should want to be on some older man that women are going to respect their list of eligible bachelors to be, you know, given to young girls who ask. Should young girls ask? We’ll talk about that in a minute, but be on Leithart’s short list by taking notes. Understand some things as we go through this. When I talk about men and what they should be doing, husbands and wives, you young women and young men, take notes and try to get on a short list of somebody.

Understand that delight is the goal of all of this, you know, and if you engage, if you’re not careful, and if you engage in sexual sin, the end result is that your delight in marriage is somehow affected by that as well. The goal of abstinence is not abstinence. The goal of abstinence is proper Christian sexuality with all its attendant joys and delights. And that’s what we want for the young people of our church that are called to marry and most of you are.

We want you happy in your marital relationships. And the reason we give you the sort of warnings we do is because when you sin sexually either in your thoughts or in your deeds, you bring that blight that that defilement as it were into the marriage bed. That God forgives. He cleanses. He erases thoughts and those kind of memories. But you know it’s not like he cut off your arm. He’s not grown a new one back for you.

I mean, he can. Usually doesn’t. And so, engaging in sexual sin will usually have some kind of impact in lessening your delight of Christian marriage. And we don’t want that for you.

All right. Now, let’s have specific instructions for husbands.

A. Live with understanding of your wives’ insecurities. First, appearance. I’ll read these verses. “I am black, but comely, oh you daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, the curtains of Solomon, look not upon me because I am black because the sun has looked upon me and my mother’s children were angry with me. They may be the keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard have I not kept.”

This woman. And now I know that I’m taking a particular case and making some generalities out of it. But I think that’s why this Song of Songs is here to teach us about relationships between men and women and how they’re different. And in this particular song, and I think in general, women are given to insecurities, to worries and anxieties.

And I think one of the worries and anxieties that women are given to is their appearance. It’s why they take longer in the bathroom than we do typically. Now what does it mean she’s black? Well, it’s not like it, you know, today to become beautiful you go to a tanning salon and look dark. Back then, if you look dark, it meant you were a field servant. You were out in the sun all the time and people didn’t like you.

What they wanted was really light skin that hadn’t been affected by the sun because that meant you were a person of leisure. You were inside all the time. Well, now to be a person of leisure, you got to go to Florida and get a tan. So, the values have shifted, but the point is she’s concerned that she’s not of her physical appearance. She’s concerned that she doesn’t look that good.

In chapter 2, she says, “I’m the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.” And everybody thinks she’s bragging. She’s not bragging. Those were common flowers. She was talking about her commonness of her appearance. Notice what the man says in relationship to that. She says, “As a lily among thorns is my love among the daughters.” He immediately moves to meet her insecurity of her commonality. “No, you’re not common,” he says. “Oh, I’m just like any other flower like the rest of these girls.” Maybe in his eyes is one that found favor because of my form and my appearance.

So, she’s brought through insecurity about her looks to a secureness now in her looks by the end of the Song of Songs. And very specifically, it’s the man’s speech that reaches out to her to assure her of that beauty.

Secondly, she has an insecurity of the love of the presence of the husband. And I mean, I’ve done a number of marriage counseling over the last 20 years, and this is almost always in there somewhere. “Where’s my husband?” Maybe not physically in the context of this church. We don’t anticipate infidelity going on. But “why doesn’t he talk to me? Why doesn’t he assure me of his love?” She’s like that. I mentioned that both in chapter 3 and chapter 5, she has these dreams of the husband not being there.

“I looked for my husband, but he was gone. I had to go all over the city looking for him.” Then in chapter 5, it’s interesting in five because he comes to her in his in her dream and she’s not ready. “I’m not dressed. I’m not ready yet.” And But then she gets up, goes to meet him, and he’s gone. And boy, isn’t that played out in home after home. The guy approaches the wife or whatever it’s going to be. She maybe isn’t quite ready. He takes that as rejection. He goes off. She takes that as rejection of her. And now she’s deeply insecure about the relationship.

So insecure in her dream that she dreams, she goes about the city, gets beaten up by the very men that are supposed to guard her. What’s the imagery? The imagery, the husband who is supposed to guard her has actually now left her wife open to beatings by his failure to assure her of his love and presence.

One of the it’s a refrain that begins right in the very “oh that he would kiss me at the kisses of his mouth.” That whole opening statement of desire by the woman builds into this crescendo of this awful dream and the dream comes as I said immediately after the marriage not beforehand. The marriage doesn’t solve this problem and in fact in this case it intensifies her worry and her insecurity. I don’t know why but it does. And man, we should know that our wives frequently can be insecure about their physical appearance and they will almost always have some degree of insecurity about your love and your presence with them.

And then on your outline, guarding. As I said from the dream, she’s concerned that he’s not going to guard her.

In chapter 2, verse four, we had this beautiful little thing that we made a chorus out of. Probably our young people have never heard it sung, but “He brought me into his banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. He brought me to his banqueting table. His banner over me is love.” That’s a beautiful verse and we should sing it in our homes. The banqueting table is really the house of wine is what it means literally.

So it’s what we have here. His banner over me is love though is what I want to focus on a little bit. That word banner as far as I could do my studies is only used in the rest of the Old Testament in the Book of Numbers to talk about the standard or banner over the armies of God. It’s a military term that identifies the army. So it seems to me proper to read into that. But the woman is being assured of the army, the mighty man who is going to protect her.

His banner over her is his love to her. Two of the big things that men do for wives is to guard them. The other is to nurture them. To nurture them in terms of their insecurities, but to guard them as well. And this woman knows that she’s guarded by this man. He sent big warriors with swords on their thighs to come get her. He’s going to protect her. See, now she’s prone to insecurity about that because then she’s sitting around dreaming and she’s in that same city and all those guards now are beating her up instead of helping her.

So she has these insecurities of appearance, presence and guarding and we need to know that.

Secondly, we should understand the link between vocation and marriage. Don’t want to make a big deal of this but and it’s not in our central text that we looked at but in it’s obvious throughout this text that this guy has vocation before the relationship begins. I watched “Unbreakable” again this last week. Excellent movie.

A movie that is profound, I think, in some ways. And it’s a movie that the man’s difficulty in his marriage will not be fixed by marriage counseling. The man’s difficulty in his marriage in that movie will be fixed by vocational counseling. That’s beginning of the movie. He doesn’t know what his job is in life. And at the end, he understands his calling, his vocation, that being a security guard really is what he’s supposed to do in a very intense sort of a way to hunt down evildoers and do away with them.

But as he comes to a sense of vocation, him and his wife that have been sleeping in separate rooms and a little boy that wants to love his dad but feels estranged, when he comes back from his first day of awakened vocation, first night when he’s done a good thing, he comes back and picks her up and carries her across the threshold just like they’re going to be married again. See, so the key to marriage problem sometimes is vocational counseling.

The man can’t feel fulfilled in the marriage if he’s not fulfilled in this sense of vocation. Same thing is true of the father-son relationship. It also improves then in that movie. It’s a it’s a delightful movie I think to cause Christians to reawaken to what our mission is. We go forth with a mission every day. He had no mission when he went to work before he understood who he was. And the men of our church, we need to understand we have a mission that we go into the world with.

And as we understand that mission and as we accept that and delight in it, that makes for healthy marriages.

Third, understand the limits of physicality. This is kind of obvious, I suppose, but You know, I think men are prone more to think in terms of physicality and sexuality and see this stuff that way. And you know, there are so clearly limits to this. Again, don’t read these into the text. Try to let the text expand itself.

And for instance, in chapter 2, verse 14, he’s speaking to his love—he, “Oh my dove, thou art in the cliffs of the rock.” I’m sorry, this is the woman speaking to him, I believe. “Oh my dove that is in the set in the cliffs of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance. Let me hear thy voice for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.” Okay, so it’s a chiastic thing. Countenance, countenance, voice, voice. And again, I said in these lengthy descriptions of each other, the face and the mouth is dominant. That’s not because of kissing. I mean, that’s partly what happens, but it’s because the speech of the party is what awakens this love. It’s the power of our speech.

Physicality and sexuality only go so far, but really what carries the day is our is our words to one another.

Fourth for instructions for men understand the importance of speech and this has kind of been the point here all along but at the very center of our text is a simple short speech a simple statement from the man “Thou art all fair my love there is no spot in thee” that’s it. At the very center of the book what drives the relationship. What produces heaven on earth? What produces fruitfulness in the context of the marriage?

What produces the driving away of the insecurity of the woman? The last section begins and ends together. What drives away the insecurity of the woman about her physical appearance? At the end, she is assured of her own physical cleanness in his sight. All of that stuff is healed by this very thing in the center. This simple statement of the husband to his wife of her beauty and her fairness in his eyes.

May God grant us grace this week today husbands to speak simple words you don’t have to be a big poet this is six words strung together in the Hebrew and it drives everything else—everything else is an unpacking of that’s one way to look at what happens in the context of marriage in Song of Solomon.

Chapter 8 verse 13 “Now thou that dwellest in the gardens the companions hearken to thy voice caused me to hear it” you hear that can’t your wife you already? They can kind of identify with that. Talking to the guys all the time. “Talk to me. Let me hear your voice.” Communicate to me. Words of desire, words of assurance, words of response.

You know, in Exodus 21 in the case law, the three things that if a man violated this, the woman could divorce him, go free without giving back to him her dowry money, without repayment of money. What did he have to do? He had to give her food, raiment, and her duty of marriage.

Her duty of marriage. Now, we always take that in a sexual sense, and I suppose that’s somewhat there. Children were important to people back then, and that’s what kind of is going on there, I think. But the word is far broader than that. The word is really means response or voice. It does not refer in the first instance to the sexual act—it may hear by way of application and what’s going on in the case law. But, but the immediate term is used for crying out or speaking.

Seems like a husband that won’t speak to his wife is denying her resp—response. He’s denying the most important thing of their relationship, which is the voice that you use to speak to your wife. Song of Songs 2:10. “My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

May every man here this week say to your wives, “Rise up. Let’s go someplace for Valentine’s Day. Let’s take a walk around the block. Let’s go out for dinner. Can’t do it on Valentine’s Day? Let’s do it tomorrow. Let’s do it this evening. Let’s go someplace together and when we go, we’ll be talking.” Understand the tremendous importance of speech.

Practice 1 Corinthians 13 speech. Don’t have time to go over it now, but it’s a way for you to look at whether you’re being patient and kind with very specific applications. We talked about a couple of weeks ago and have a handout for “Am I being loving in my speech?” Patient, kind, reassuring in terms of these basic insecurities, etc. Importance of little speech, just a little things that are said that are important. The very middle of this song, as I’ve said, is the simple speech by the man.

Now, there’s instructions for wives as well. One last thing, there is a handout downstairs in the fellowship hall about ways that a husband may express love to his wife. And I’d encourage each of you to pick that up.

Okay. Now, instructions for women.

This will go quicker. First, the biblical egalitarianism of the Song of Songs and its resultant responsibility. And what I’ve given you here is a series of verses in which the woman in initiates dialogue with the husband. This song compared to songs that were written in other cultures round about the culture in which this one was written by Solomon is absolutely revolutionary because the other cultures were male chauvinist pigs.

They were men who who were stronger than women knew it and assumed that res that represented some sort of ontological truth that men were better than women. That’s the way fallen men are. But this song elevates the role of the woman. She now is initiating dialogue. She starts the whole thing off in verse two of chapter 1. “Oh, did he kiss me at the kisses in my mouth?” I said earlier, is it proper, you know, for a woman to go to Leithart and say, “Well, who are the good guys?” You bet it is.

That’s what the Song of Solomon teaches. Women are on an equal plane with men in terms of their basic essence. And the Song of Solomon reasserts that over and over again. She’s always in a position of being in true dialogue with this man. If you read the speeches out the way they’re properly translated, she initiates a good many of them. He initiates others. And so you have this picture of a communication and an a proper sense of egalitarianism between husband and wife in terms of their relationship.

And I’ve listed some text there that I’ve given you. “By night on my bed, I sought him.” I mean, I think that the implications of that are in marriage as well. I think that this idea that the man has to be the initiator and the woman is always a passive responder does not comport in terms of its application of the marriage relationship does not jive with what the Song of Songs says.

Now there that comes that brings some responsibility as well. That brings the responsibility to you of knowing that you just can’t sit back and wait for the husband to initiate dialogue and when he doesn’t say it’s all his fault. It means that you’ve got to step up. You know, in Ecclesiastes, it says “it’s good if there are two together cuz if one falls down, the other will help him up. And a three cord knot is not easily broken.”

Well, you know, in marriage, it’s it’s always a little frustrating when your mate is down and you’re up, or when you’re down and she’s up. You kind of think, “well, would it be better if we were both up all the time? Maybe we were both down at the same time.” No. God has built it so that when your mate is struggling with depression, insecurity, whatever sin of any type, that he gives you your wife or he gives you your husband to speak to you, to encourage you, to bring what we do every Lord’s day, assurance of love. That’s at the very center of this psalm. And then something from the word of God to help make a better disciple of you in terms of the relationship or what’s going on in your life.

And the end result is joy. So this is what we all have a responsibility to do. Husbands to wives, wives to husbands.

In that way, even the description of the body. It’s interesting because in chapter 5 verse 9-16, the man describes—I’m sorry, the woman praises his body and she begins from the head down and then later in that same section, the man describes her body or actually it’s it’s the daughters of Jerusalem who are describing it, I think, and they describe her from the feet up.

So, there’s this reciprocity, there’s a difference, but there’s full communication back and forth in terms of the communication that goes on in the context of the relationship. So there’s a biblical truth of egalitarianism in substance in essence of who we are and there is a biblical teaching in this song that women can initiate dialogue and sexuality as well and there’s nothing wrong with that.

B. Understand the link between vocation and marriage and you just remember what I said about vocational counseling and marriage counseling and try to encourage your husband in his basic insecurity which is “what am I doing and what difference does it make for the world?” Point of “Unbreakable” is that really he was a security guard in the story. He turns out to be a superhero. That’s kind of the message of it.

So he has all these great powers. But really if he had understood what his calling was all along, even the day-to-day security work is really the extension of his calling. So he doesn’t really get new calling to awaken him to what his vocation is and to fix his marriage. He gets awakened to a sense of what his calling was all along. Now most of the men in this church are engaged in legitimate callings, but maybe they forget. Maybe they doubt the importance of it in the context of the world.

And it’s up to the wife, not up to the wife, but the wife is one of the mechanisms God can bring along to encourage a husband in his vocation to properly suit him up in the morning to gird him up for the mission that he goes forth on and to encourage him in that.

C. Understand the goodness and benefits of physicality. And here I list the way the woman describes the man’s body. You know, interesting quote I came across this week from a guy named John Armstrong put out by Andrew Sandlin. In this quote I think he says “This contemporary evangelicals desperately need to recover the mandate—this mandate to have dominion. It’s an emphasis virtually muted in the present—not in this church but in many churches apparently. Our problem is that our most respected Christian leaders have repeatedly told us that spiritual things are holy and important but physical things are unholy and unimportant. Why then should Christians care about the world? It’s decaying dying and will be eventually destroyed like an old piece of wasted junk. Aren’t we to focus on our inheritance in heaven? Leave this world to the evil men and women who have no hope of heaven?”

Well, no. Not if we’re living a healthy, robust Christian life. And you see, that’s directly tied to this view of modern evangelicalism. This view that spirituality means somehow that not just the world is crummy, but our bodies are crummy and sex is something we have to do to have kids, but it’s really not a good thing.

That drove commentaries on this Song of Songs for nearly 2,000 years because Greek thought got in there. You’ve heard me bang the drum before. But wives, you need to remember. You might have been raised in the church. You might have some of this baggage with you. God says, “Jettison it.” He says that this woman, this happy woman is thinking about her husband’s body. And maybe she’s thinking of it in heavenly terms.

Well, you see, physicality does have a place in the Christian life. And so to exercise dominion properly is to appreciate the world that God gave us to delight in it. And it’s to delight in our mutual submission one to the other as well. Now, And you know, this is not some kind of, you know, wedge for you to drive in there and do things you shouldn’t be doing and just bring your old pagan views of sexuality in the marriage bed.

That would be horrific. I mean, I think it’s good to pray in the context of our romantic relationships in marriage. Why wouldn’t we think that was a good idea? Wouldn’t that bring more joy? Seems like it would to me. And that’s what God wants us to do. He wants us to have delight and joy in this stuff.

Okay. Last piece of instruction. Understand the importance of speech on the part of the woman. Words of desire, assurance, and response. And the same for you, 1 Corinthians 13. And there’s a separate handout downstairs for women in terms of how to express love to your husband that may be helpful to you.

Fourth, instructions for all—the importance of community to the joyful importance of marriage to the joyful community. And here the point is a very simple one. You know, I read that middle section of the Song of Solomon. They get married and he’s rejoicing. He’s eating his fruit and all that stuff. And then he says, “Eat my friends and rejoice.”

See, it’s not talking sexuality because we’re not got an orgy going on here. He’s just describing the delight of Christian marriage. And this marriage happens in the context of community. And it brings joy to the community. We’re going to do this, you know, in April with Sam and Sarah. We’re going to have a wedding celebration, service, then we’re going to have a reception downstairs. We’re going to eat and have a good time. You see, same thing, you know, Jonathan and Joanna in May going to have a reception in another building not too far from here.

That’s what we should do. That’s what they did. And beyond just the fact of it informing what our marriage celebration should be like, it shows us the importance of a rejoicing marriage and household to Christian community. It drives community.

This happens in the context of community. The scriptures give us this wonderful book to tell us what romantic, true romantic love is all about. It helps to drive away some of the sinful thought patterns of our culture and our own upbringing and the baggage that we bring to it. It talks to us about the permanency of the relationship between husband and wife. I’ve given you some verses there about her him saying to her, “My sister, my spouse, my sister, my spouse,” the permanency of the relationship. Men and women, you’ve been married to your sisters and brothers in the Lord.” Now, that is what you are in Christ.

There’s a permanency to your relationship. And then there’s another verse where the woman as she comes to rejoice in the context of the husband. She finally comes to call him “my friend.” “This is my spouse and my friend.” The end result of a careful attention to our marriages, an assurance of love for each other and forgiveness of past sins. A communication through the use of words brings us to the joy of the sort of Christian relationships, the permanent relationships where we’re spouses and friends together that the scriptures have pictured for us.

Now, I know that some of you this is a difficult message for I mean in the context of any church there’s almost always some degree of marital problems going on. It’s a difficult thing to get through because we’re not been raised in a Christian setting for the most part and our sin continues to affect us.

I watched a TV show about John Nash this last week, a documentary, guy who was in “A Beautiful Mind” and it was interesting to me because Nash and his wife they begin their life together as wanting to be great people. He’s upset because he doesn’t win the highest award from mathematics. She wants to be the next Madam Curie. We start out that way as teens. “I want to do something great in the world” and we start off prideful about that.

As that relationship went on and as Nash sked deeper and deeper into psychosis, madness. I think a time came when they decided “all we want for today out of God is to get us through this day without killing somebody, without doing something that’s going to lock us up in prison. You know, we want to raise the best kids we can for the savior.” And there comes times in our raising of those kids, and all we want is for them not to fall away from the faith, any form of Christianity. “Please, Lord God.”

I’ve seen families like this. We start off wanting our marriages to look like the Song of Solomon, and they don’t. And we get to the place where all we want to do is be able not to divorce one another or to fight so openly that everybody knows what’s going on.

Well, Nash, after being brought to that point and broken, then in the providence of God for God’s reasons. I don’t know why. I’m not saying Nash is a believer. He’s not. But for whatever reason, God then builds Nash up again and he becomes useful to the scientific community, the mathematics community over a long period of years. It’s the playing out of course of what 1 Peter 5 says. “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that he may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon him, for he cares for you.”

If your relationship is in the down tick, well, you know, don’t despair over that. Recognize that God is bringing your mate, yourself, maybe both of you together to the point of true humility before him, to a brokenness before him. And then as we’re broken before him by his word, then he builds us back up.

You know, the Lord’s day is about the gospel of Christ. The gospel that assures us of forgiveness, assures us that God is discipling us, assures us that the goal of all of this is unity together in our church and in our homes. That’s the assurance of God’s word that I would bring to you today.

Don’t try to do big huge things for your marriage this week. Do the small things. At the very middle, the very middle of the Song of Songs. The most important thing