The Song of Songs, because it is Scripture, intends to bring us to this saving knowledge of God. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was treated as a book of theological and spiritual knowledge pointing us to God. In fact, one writer calls it a sacramental word that uses visible and tangible things to point us to things that are invisible and immaterial.

Editorial Note: On July 16, 2018, Dr. Liam Goligher, Senior Minster of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, delivered the inaugural Paideia Center Summer Lecture at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. We are pleased to publish a transcript of his address.

It’s a joy for me to be here at RTS Orlando, and a particular pleasure for me this evening to talk about the Song of Solomon which has fascinated me since childhood. In fact, as a sixteen-year old, I had the temerity to speak to our youth fellowship on a verse from Song of Solomon which provoked some animated discussion I seem to remember!

We actually are influenced by the Song of Songs in a whole variety of ways which we don’t recognize. References to it are being gently edited, for example, out of our hymns. We sang a hymn this morning in chapel and one of the verses from that hymn goes like this, “Jesus my Shepherd, Brother, Friend, my Prophet, Priest, and King.” The original by John Newton reads, “Jesus my Shepherd, Husband, Friend.” “Husband” has been changed to “brother” for some obscure reason. But the hymnbooks we used when I was a boy, had the original version.[1]

And then there is its influence in the works of Samuel Rutherford:

The bride eyes not her garment,
But her dear Bridegroom’s face;
I shall not gaze on glory
But on my king of grace.
Not on the crown He gives me,
But on his pierced hand;
The Lamb is all the glory
of Emmanuel’s land.[2]

That is a very long hymn and we don’t sing all the verses. If you read the whole thing, it is saturated, as were Rutherford’s letters, with the language of the Song of Songs.

My third example is the great C. H. Spurgeon. He was a great Baptist preacher and he preached 54 sermons on the Song of Songs. He was a textual preacher, so you have to sift through his work to discover them. It was evangelistic preaching; it was pastoral preaching; and it was preaching that made the heart soar as you considered the themes that were introduced.

So why preach on the Song of Solomon? My answer is quite simply: to know God. At one level we know so little about God. Paul says that the heavens – the universe that God has made – shout to us of something of his eternal power and his divine nature. But we still know so little about God. Yet the God who knows himself has graciously revealed to us, using creaturely language, the language of analogy to communicate something of who he is. God is incomprehensible and ultimately unknowable apart from revelation. Scripture uses the language of analogy chastened and corrected by special revelation to speak truly if not exhaustively about God. That’s one of the things that we are rediscovering, as it where, as we come to look at the whole way in which we interpret the Bible today. God has given us two books by which we might know him: the book of nature and the book of Scripture. And he has given us two gifts by which we might know him: he has given us his Son and he has given us his Spirit. The whole point of the Christian life is that we might know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (John 17:3).

So how may we know God? Throughout Scripture God is concerned to communicate to us theological knowledge, which by extension means Christological knowledge. In other words, the point of the Bible is that we might know God. In the book of nature, God teaches us all kinds of things that are available to people whether they are Christians or not, whether they are God-fearing or not. The book of nature teaches us not just about God, but about how to live as human beings in the world that God has made. From the book of nature, we learn how to farm and how to have interrelationships with other human beings. But the special revelation we find in Holy Scripture is given to us that we might know God and that we might know God particularly as he has revealed himself in Christ.

The Song of Songs, because it is Scripture, intends to bring us to this saving knowledge of God. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was treated as a book of theological and spiritual knowledge pointing us to God. In fact, one writer calls it a sacramental word that uses visible and tangible things to point us to things that are invisible and immaterial.

What happened in the middle of the nineteenth century? German higher criticism, which was the fruit of the so-called Enlightenment, reordered the focus of our handling of the Bible to a starkly literal reading of the text, on the principle that the text has only one meaning and that is the kind of surface meaning, one which the original author was aware of or would have testified to. Instead of asking the question, what was in the divine author’s mind in the writing of Scripture, the question focused on what the human author was thinking. This was a naturalistic approach: what does it mean at the natural level? At the natural level, what do you read in the Song of Songs, what do you have? Keil and Delitzch say that you have a love song, period. It has nothing to do with a relationship with God or anything about our relationship with God. Can we not read the Song as a series of lyrics about love and desire? Paul Griffiths responds, “well, of course, that is possible. But to do that would not be to read the Song as a Scriptural book; neither would it be to take seriously the weight of the Song’s readings by Jews and Christians over two thousand years.”[3]

The Christian church through most of its history has seen the Song of Songs as a Christian book. D.M. Carr writes this, “The increasingly exclusive focus of the literal sense of the song has corresponded with the functional decanonization of the Song in those sections of the church and synagogue which have been most deeply influenced by the historical and critical method.”[4] In other words, you don’t preach on it. You don’t want to preach on sex, don’t preach on the Song of Songs (unless you are someone like Mark Driscoll!). You don’t go anywhere near it. But in the history of interpretation, both in Jewish circles as well as Christian circles, it has been understood to be about God and his relationship to his people Israel and the Church.

At the first century Council of Jamnia, Rabbi Avika stated, “no one in Israel ever disputed about the Song of Songs. The whole world is not worth the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel. For all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies” (Yadayim 3:5). The Song affirms two things. It affirms that the intimate elements of human love and marriage are important and significant, but it says it is teaching us that we must see beyond those to a spiritual, higher significance in the text.

Paul Griffiths argues for a figural reading of the text and he says that Scripture “is first and last about more than what the surface of its text says. That more is always and necessarily the triune Lord and, necessarily, that Lord’s incarnation as Jesus Christ.”[5] The New Testament teaches us that the key that unlocks the entire canon of Scripture are the events surrounding the sending of the Son and the Spirit in order to open the door of our understanding to a deeper knowledge of the God who is there.

It is impossible for us to avoid the Song of Songs if we have any grasp of the God that is revealed throughout the rest of Scripture. Here is a God who is passionate in his love for his chosen people Israel. He is a God who desires them for himself, who is jealous at her immorality by playing around with other gods. He is a God who is repeatedly approaching his people, wooing his people, speaking love to his people, drawing them to himself with the cords of love. Great passages such as Hosea 1-3 or Isaiah 50 or 54 or Jeremiah 2-3 and Ezekiel 16 display this passionate love of God for Israel. In the words of God, “for your maker is your husband, the Lord of Hosts is his name, and the Holy one of Israel is your redeemer. For a brief moment I deserted you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you says the Lord your redeemer” (Is 54:5-6). The language of Hosea and Jeremiah is even more intense and passionate on God’s love for his people. He communicates his love for his people through those creaturely realities of which we are aware, particularly, human love. He uses human love at its highest level – that is in marriage – and at the highest level within marriage – the sexual aspects of marriage – to communicate by analogy the intensity, particularity and passion with which he loves his people, his giving of himself to his people.

That is precisely what the New Testament writers recognize. Paul when he is writing to Corinth says, “I feel a divine jealously for you. I betrothed you to one husband. To present you as a pure virgin to Christ” (2 Cor 11:2). Or Revelation 21:9 where it is the church that is “the bride, the wife of the Lamb.”

In Ephesians 5, we read that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Here the apostle addresses Christian marriage and the responsibility of husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, and he quotes from Gen. 2:24: “for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.” That language of leaving and cleaving in the Old Testament is used of the way in which Israel is in a covenant relationship with God. Israel has to leave its idols and cleave to the Lord. This stresses “a radical change, not of domicile, but of one’s pre-eminent loyalty.” In other words, the marriage relationship becomes a template for the spiritual relationship between Israel and the Lord, between Christ and the church. Throughout the Old Testament the Lord’s relationship to Israel is that of between a husband a wife.

When Paul is quoting that in Eph. 5, he says about marriage: that this mystery is great, and he’s talking about Christ and the church. Greg Beale and Benjamin Gladd in their book Hidden But Now Revealed,  emphasize that nowhere else in the New Testament is the word mystery is labeled as “great,” in the way in which it is done here in Ephesians 5. Metaphorically, it applies to God and Israel. Sinai may be viewed as a marriage between the Lord and Israel. It points forward to the consummative marriage of Israel in the end time of which Isaiah speaks in Isaiah 61 and 62. Paul’s move is simply to identify the Lord with Christ and the church as the end time Israel. The word mystery captures the continuity and discontinuity between the two testaments and the fulfillment towards which the OT is moving. So that when Paul says of this mystery of marriage pointing to Christ and the church and says it is great, he is echoing the language of the Song of Songs that says the song about the marriage between the Lord and his people is the Song of Songs. That is, it is a superlative song as we will see in a moment.

I want to several things about the book as a whole. First of all, it is a poem. It is not a collection of poems, but a unified piece of poetry. Now, we see poetry all over the Bible. We see it in the psalms and the prophets. We need to know something about poetry. We need to understand that poetry at its best is evocative speech. Its metaphors, images, and phrases stir the imagination. They heighten our emotions. They are aesthetically pleasing. In poetry the effect of language is primary and uppermost. It elevates our thoughts. It is marked by the noblest of themes. It is meant to stir the purest of emotions and it should deal with the richest of ideas and should connect with the deepest feelings of our hearts. John Milton said, true poetry is “simple, sensuous, and passionate.”[6]

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