As Monty Python used to say, “and now for something totally different.” Let’s talk about the SONG OF SOLOMON.
THE SONG OF SOLOMON? YES, THE SONG OF SOLOMON. THAT ONE.
First off, I wonder if we might have just broken the website. People who have never clicked on the newsletter blog link in their life might have just clicked through due to pure curiosity. Welcome. I’m glad you are here. But I’ll give you a heads up—this post is not about marriage and sex.
I was sitting at my daughter’s orthodontist appointment this past week reading a peer-reviewed theological journal article about the Song of Solomon. If that sounds weird, I agree. My personal reading jumps around a lot, and on this day, I found myself thinking about a question I had explored many years back in seminary: what in the world is Song of Solomon doing in the Bible?
Now…. I’m not about to exegete and unpack the book in a 930-word blog post. I have to chuckle at biblical Scholar Christopher Mitchell who, upon publishing his 1300-page commentary on the Song of Solomon in 2003, wrote that he now finally hoped to “delve more deeply into this most difficult book of sacred scripture.” Christopher, if you are reading this—let us know how it’s going. We are rooting for you.
It can be a head-scratcher...your Bible reading plan is cruising along when suddenly you get to a book of sexually charged love songs. Is it speaking to marriage? Is it speaking to sex? Is it a metaphor for God and Israel? Is it a metaphor for Christ and His church? There are several views of how to approach the book, and I’m not here to pick one or several. But related to that, I love what Douglas O’Donnell writes about the meaning when he says, “This is not a Hebrew poem scribbled on the walls of the New York City subway...this is a song about human love set in the context of marriage that is found in the Bible.” That means layer upon layer of meaning and significance discovered. Imagine reading The Chronicles of Narnia having no idea that C.S. Lewis is a Christian. You may think it a really fantastical story with interesting characters….but once you know he is a Christian, a whole new world of intended symbolism is unlocked.
The title of the book is actually Song of Songs. It means literally “the greatest song” and is generally agreed upon to have been written by Solomon. So, think about that. The greatest song written about love, marriage, and sex—written by perhaps the most famous polygamist of all time whose idolatrous relationships led his heart away from the Lord. No matter your view of Song of Solomon, that’s certainly a tension. But it was one sentence offered up in this journal article that really stirred a thought in me. The author proposed the idea that Solomon writes this song in a self-deprecating tone to say to his first readers and to us, “Listen, on this matter of marriage, do as I say, not as I did.”
Was Solomon singing the North Star so to speak? Maybe he was writing about the destination….eyes set on the shore he strove to sail to, not the rocks he had run aground on.
That was an interesting thought to me…. because that’s what we do every Sunday. As AW Tozer once said, “Christians don’t tell lies, they just go to church and sing them.” That’s a bit snarky by AW, but I think I get it.
We sing the ideal. We sing the hope of glory. We sing a compass needle over how the Spirit is growing us in a life of faith. We sing lyrics that are often more a hope and guide to our heart than a description:
I surrender all…
Lord I live for You alone…
I’ll praise you in the valley…
I’ve still got joy in chaos…
Forever free I’m not the same…
I want those things to be absolutely true of me…but they often aren’t. Not fully. Not yet. Furthermore, we sing what we want more and more to know to the depth of our bones about God:
I know there is peace within Your presence…
All my life you have been so, so good…
You turn mourning to dancing…
All I have needed Your hand hath provided…
In Christ alone my hope is found…
I know all that. And yet still functionally doubt it at times. I believe. Help my unbelief.
Does that mean we are fakes? No, not necessarily…but that is always a danger as Jesus warned. We aren’t who we once were, and we aren’t yet who we will be. We are a constant renovation project, and the blueprint is Jesus. Here in the gaps of the already and the not yet, we sing Jesus.
There’s an old saying about how you can teach all the skills to sail the sea, but a sailor won’t endure without a vision and longing for the distant shore. I think that’s part of what our songs are doing as we sing them over one another. We sing the hope of a distant shore we’ll one day arrive at. Our destination just beyond the horizon of the current sea is no port though… it’s a person. When we see him, maybe at some point I’ll ask about the Song of Solomon. Maybe I won’t care because I’ll be realizing how even our best songs about Him fell way short.