Good Evening. Please turn with me in your bibles to Song of Solomon chapter 6. Song of Solomon 6. We’re continuing in our journey through this book of lyrical poetry. The Poetry of all poetry. The song of all songs.
This poetry, as we have seen, is a series of songs describing two lovers. A bride, and her now husband. A woman and her shepherd king. Solomon, as I have tried to show, is writing this selection of poetry, not as an historical account of his own life. Instead he is writing about a somewhat idealized marriage.
In this marriage, the king is pictured in his splendor, as singularly devoted to his beloved bride. Something that the historical Solomon never lived up to. And the king and his marriage is described in terms that are biblically-significant. The marriage union is pictured in garden language, reminiscent of the first marriage in the Garden of Eden.
But it is also pictured in terms of God’s people being united with their king in the promised land. A land flowing with milk and honey, a land of fruitfulness and peace and rest. The promised land imagery permeates this book, and reminds us that Solomon is using the picture of earthly marriage to remind Israel of their covenant marriage with Yahweh.
However, most recently in chapter 5, we recounted a different scene. A scene that is a little jarring at first. We saw in 5:2 that the woman is asleep, and her husband comes in the night desirous of communion, of intimacy with his wife. And the wife rejects his advances. But he doesn’t huff and puff and stomp off. He graciously accepts her preferences as more important than his own, and he leaves her a gift of myrrh on the door knob.
She later changes her mind, gets up, and searches for the king. She goes throughout the city seeking him, and unable to find him. She encounters the night watchmen who leave her bruised and beaten.
Then she’s asked a question, by those around her: what is your king? Why is he so special? Why is he better than all the rest?
And she answers with verses 10-16 of chapter 5, which contain a glorious description of the king, as if he was a statue. She describes her king in language that is used elsewhere to describe the temple, the place of God’s special presence. She uses language reminiscent of the divine, of divinity to describe her king.
The whole scene is like a picture of God’s relationship with Yahweh in the old Covenant. The Lord desires for his bride, Israel, to be faithful and have communion with Him. But Israel wouldn’t do it. She would reject the call of her king.
And so God sent the preaching of the prophets, and eventually the foreign nations, like the night watchmen, to discipline his unfaithful bride, so that she would again seek after the king. It’s only after the invading nations come, that Israel again longs for the true Lord.
Our text tonight begins again with another question. The bride has not yet found her king, but the people around her pose another inquiry. Where is your beloved? If he is so great, where is he?
And to get an answer, Let’s read our text, Song of Solomon chapter 6:
Where has your beloved gone,
O most beautiful among women?
Where has your beloved turned,
that we may seek him with you?
She
2 My beloved has gone down to his garden
to the beds of spices,
to graze[a] in the gardens
and to gather lilies.
3 I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine;
he grazes among the lilies.
He
4 You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love,
lovely as Jerusalem,
awesome as an army with banners.
5 Turn away your eyes from me,
for they overwhelm me—
Your hair is like a flock of goats
leaping down the slopes of Gilead.
6 Your teeth are like a flock of ewes
that have come up from the washing;
all of them bear twins;
not one among them has lost its young.
7 Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate
behind your veil.
8 There are sixty queens and eighty concubines,
and virgins without number.
9 My dove, my perfect one, is the only one,
the only one of her mother,
pure to her who bore her.
The young women saw her and called her blessed;
the queens and concubines also, and they praised her.10 “Who is this who looks down like the dawn,
beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun,
awesome as an army with banners?”She
11 I went down to the nut orchard
to look at the blossoms of the valley,
to see whether the vines had budded,
whether the pomegranates were in bloom.
12 Before I was aware, my desire set me
among the chariots of my kinsman, a prince.[b]Others
13 [c] Return, return, O Shulammite,
return, return, that we may look upon you.He
Why should you look upon the Shulammite,
as upon a dance before two armies?
As we’ve made our way through this book, I’ve tried to show us that this text must be read at three levels. We might say, there are three horizons on which we might understand the poetry. Like all good poetry, there are layers to the meaning.
There is the surface level reading, where we can read the poetry and try to discern surface level principles immediately applicable to earthly marriage. Like the two lovers are desirous of each other, and so too should a husband and wife desire the company of their spouse.
And the next level is the historical level. We remember where this book is placed within scripture, as a book of the old covenant, a covenant between the Lord and the nation of Israel. So, there we see that the marriage between the king and his bride is a picture of the nation of Israel and Yahweh. The poetry in many places mirrors God’s own relationship with Israel, his bride.
And the third level, we might say is the canonical level, is reading this book and remembering its placement within the whole bible. We read it in light of the fullness of revelation we get in the New Testament, wherein we learn that marriage is ultimately a picture of Christ and the church, the true and faithful Solomon, and his perfected bride, which is the church, those effectually called and united to him by faith.
With these three levels, we can really begin to understand the book in its fullness.
So back to our text, we start with a question.
Where has your beloved gone,
O most beautiful among women?
Where has your beloved turned,
that we may seek him with you?
I want us to first note the importance of speech in this book. The importance of speech.
The bride has just come off of a wonderful section wherein she described her king in glorious language. She praises him for his appearance. He’s distinguished among ten thousand, she says, he’s one in a million.
He strong and pure. He’s unshakable. His foundations cannot be moved. He’s speaks words that our most sweet. And he is altogether desirable. I won’t preach the whole section again, but the point is clear: when speaking to others about her husband, she’s positive, complementary, laudatory, to use an older word.
And I think a very simple application for us is for us to think about the speech that we use about our spouse. How do I speak about my husband? How do I speak about my wife to others?
It is so easy for us to be frustrated with our marriage, frustrated with our spouse, even frustrated with any kind relationship that we might be in, even friendships, and we can be tempted to speak in ungodly ways about them when they are not around.
When you talk to your friends, when you’re posed with an opportunity to answer the question, “what is your beloved?” how do you answer?
Within our relationships, our speech can often be the thing that either sweetens the entire enterprise, or undermines it. Speech can heal, or speech can hurt. It can develop, or it can divide. Speech can atrophy a relationship, or speech can advance it.
Death and life are in the power of the tongue, Proverbs says, and so often we can let a bitter or discouraging tongue undermine the relationship. Many marriages languish on the vine because one or both of the parties use their tongue in ways that hurt, rather than heal.
For a lack of love and a lack of encouragement, many marriages suffer. We can complain to others. We can gossip. We can grumble against the Lord for the spouse that he has given to us.
Scripture makes clear that such behavior us not only unbecoming of a child of God, but it is also sinful.
Rather, we should be like the woman in Proverbs 31, who does her husband good, and not harm, all the days of her life. The text says,
“She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.”
But it’s not merely the woman who uses her tongue in a godly way. Husbands, what does the text say?
“Her children rise up and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
29 “Many women have done excellently,
but you surpass them all.””
The husband praises her, and does so publicly. Mutual kindness, mutual respect. Mutual praise and encouragement. This is what ought to characterize the speech within our marriages.
Does that mark your speech? Are you an encourager, or a disparager? Do your words heal and brighten the eyes of your beloved, or does your speech suck the life out of them?
I’m so thankful that Christ doesn’t speak words of death to his bride. Christ’s words are a healing balm to his bride. He speaks words of life, even now to his beloved. Even though Christ’s bride was unfaithful, was unkind to him, was disparaging to him, even though his people rejected him and spurned his desire for communion, Christ pursued her.
Like Hosea going after Gomer, Christ sought out his bride. He came down from heaven and bore the stripes that she had earned for herself. He died in her place on Calvary, was buried in the grave, and defeated the sentence of death that hung over her.
And he washed her, like a faithful husband. And even now he speaks to his bride, invites her to come back to him. He doesn’t hold a grudge for our distance from him. He isn’t reluctant to invite us back into communion, as we will see later in this passage.
Come back to Jesus, and embrace him in faith. Don’t let your past rejection of him keep you from returning. Trust in this Jesus, and enjoy his presence again.
But before we leave this point, I think there is another application too. The people around the woman ask what makes him so special? What is your king like? And the bride speaks sweetly of her king.
There is an image here of the world, those outside of the marriage, asking about the king. And as the church, as the bride of Christ, we can take a lesson here about how we speak about our king.
When we talk to those outside of the marriage, outside of the church, when we engage the world and unbelievers, how to we speak? Are we using our tongue to speak sweetly of our king, warmly inviting them to experience such a relationship?
Sometimes the nature of our speech can become an impediment in these conversations. Sometimes we can spend our time disparaging the church, grumbling about all the problems that we see, rather than praising our king.
Or perhaps our speech isn’t sweet because we’re only preaching the law, and doing it in such a way that neglects the sweetness of the gospel itself. Harshly condemning sinners, rather than inviting them to meet the king.
For example, when we talk to our children, do we sweetly invite them to consider the glorious king? Or do we simply use the rod of the law to try and get them to change their behavior, as if their main problem is that they don’t behave.
When we talk to sinners, it’s not the law that can change their hearts. It’s the sweetness of the gospel that can change hearts. And so again, we should consider how we use our speech, how we speak of our king, in order to invite others into the same sweetness of communion that we experience with our king, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, let’s keep going. Where is your beloved? She is asked. Where has he gone. Verse 2:
She
2 My beloved has gone down to his garden
to the beds of spices,
to graze[a] in the gardens
and to gather lilies.
3 I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine;
he grazes among the lilies.
There is some debate here about exactly what’s happening in the text. Some think that when the bride says that her beloved has gone down to his garden, that means that she has found him, and that “the garden” is imagery of them sharing marital communion again.
And while it is true that the image of going down to the garden is used elsewhere in this book to describe their coming together, like at the end of chapter 4 and the first verse of chapter 5, I am not convinced that that is the meaning here.
There is nothing here to indicate that the bride has already found her king. She was searching for him in chapter 5, and here is questioned by others. But nothing in this sceneyet that says that she has found him.[1]
I think in this scene the king has actually gone down to a garden. He accepted her rejection of his advance in chapter 5, and she knows him well enough to know where he’d go next. He goes where he always goes. The king delights to dwell in his garden. That’s why she goes to the garden in 6:11, which for some reason is rendered “orchard” there in the ESV, even though it is the same word for garden used in verse 2.
The bride seems to be reflecting on her own answer to the question, reflecting upon the character and behavior of her king, and reversing her own refusal of him in 5:3. That’s what gets her to change her tune in verse 3:
3 I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine;
he grazes among the lilies.
It’s as if in answering the question posed by the onlookers, that she reflects upon her status, her relationship, and reflects upon her king, and that reflection compels her then to eventually go down to him.
So often that’s how our marriages can work too. When we have some rift, some coldness in the marriage, some relational distance, either in marriage or even in a friendship, it is often helpful to reflect upon the relationship, the status, the big picture, and that can help soften our hearts.
Think about the good things that your spouse does. The way they serve you and the family. The ways they have done well. The ways they speak and act, helping with the chores around the house, working hard in their various ways. Certainly, they are not perfect, but reflecting on the ways that they do try, can help soften our hearts.
So often we can just let our hearts simmer with ingratitude, always fixating on the negative and the ways that they fail, that we can find it impossible to ever warm up to them again.
So, consider yourself: where does your heart go when you feel coldness? Coldness in the marriage or coldness in a relationship? Do you linger on their failings, letting that stir up within you bitterness, disdain, or frustration? It’s difficult to ever get to reconciliation if you remain there, lingering on the failings of the other.
Of course, I’m not trying to minimize anybody’s sin against you. It does need to be handled. But I’m mainly talking about where our minds and hearts tend to gravitate. Do I tend to retaliate and withdraw, stewing on the wrong while neglecting to be thankful for the good that the other person tries to do?
Here the woman reminds herself of her relationship, as the bride of the king, that they belong to one another: I am my beloved, and my beloved is mine, and that moves her to reflect.
And that reflection is, I think, what is pictured in the following description in verses 4-10. I think we have here her recounting past words that the king has said to her, praising her.
I’ll walk through these past words from the king fairly quickly, since the language is similar to what we’ve covered in previous chapters. Verse 4:
4 You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love,
lovely as Jerusalem,
Tirzah, which literally means beautiful, was the former capital of the North before it was moved to Samaria, and Jerusalem, the city of peace. His admiration is again couched in terms of the promised Land and the Kingdom of God itself. The king is saying that from top to bottom she’s beautiful. Lovely in his eyes.
As awesome as an army with banners, which sounds a little strange to our ears, but it’s like he’s saying she is glorious, awe inspiring. So much so that it leads him to verse 5:
5 Turn away your eyes from me,
for they overwhelm me—
Your eyes are so beautiful that I can’t even stand it.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
leaping down the slopes of Gilead.
This is similar language to the praise he gives in chapter 4, praising her beauty before the wedding day. And again we have language of fruitfulness and blessing, pictured in the promised Land:
6 Your teeth are like a flock of ewes
that have come up from the washing;
all of them bear twins;
not one among them has lost its young.
7 Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate
behind your veil.
Then we get to a rather puzzling passage:
8 There are sixty queens and eighty concubines,
and virgins without number.
Is this the historical Solomon, who we know from scripture had many wives and concubines, saying to his beloved here that she is her favorite out of all of them? I don’t think so. What woman would like to hear from her king that out of all my hundreds of wives you are my favorite?
No, if we read closely, there is nothing here that says these queens or concubines belong to the king. He’s not describing the harem that the earthly Solomon possessed.
Again, as I have tried to prove along the way, Solomon isn’t writing an historical autobiography. He’s writing poetry about an idealized marriage. And here I believe the king is saying that his beloved bride is distinguished among all the other queens who have married other kings, and all the other concubines that other men have.[2]
It’s like he’s saying this: no other queen in the world compares to you. And if that reading is correct, this passage actually stands as a rebuke of Solomon’s behavior in 1 Kings 11, which describes how his own heart was pulled away from the Lord by his hundreds of other wives and concubines.
Monogamy, not polygamy, is the only fertile ground for lasting faithfulness. To borrow Jesus’s words, From the beginning it was not so, one man and one woman, united in love all their days.
Verse 9:
9 My dove, my perfect one, is the only one,
the only one of her mother,
pure to her who bore her.
The young women saw her and called her blessed;
the queens and concubines also, and they praised her.
Others see her and her beauty, and they praise her, like the virtuous woman is praised and called blessed in Proverbs 31.
10 “Who is this who looks down like the dawn,
beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun,
awesome as an army with banners?”
The bride’s beauty and awesomeness are praised in terms of the glory possessed by the celestial bodies. Beautiful as the moon and bright as the sun. And then the section closes with army banners, the same imagery that began the section, bracketing the praise with awesome militaristic language.
This again confirms the reading of the bride’s beauty being compared to God’s people being blessed in God’s land, just as the king is in this book compared to Yahweh and Yahweh’s messiah.
So, the bride is reflecting upon how the king had praised her in the past. And that moves us to the final section of this chapter, where she is compelled to act.
11 I went down to the nut orchard [or we could translate that “garden”]
to look at the blossoms of the valley,
to see whether the vines had budded,
whether the pomegranates were in bloom.
Upon reflection of the King’s love, she goes to the garden, and goes to look at the blossoms and to see if the vines have budded. It’s like she goes down to see if winter is over.
Is the cold season passed? Is their relationship still on the rocks, or have the cold feelings thawed enough for fruitfulness and intimacy to be experienced again? She’s not quite sure what kind of reception she will receive when she gets there.
Will he still be angry at me? Have you ever experienced that in your marriage? You made a mistake, and now you’re not sure the status.
Is it still winter, or is spring returning? Guys, that’s the poetic version of wondering if you’re still in the doghouse.
Or perhaps you’ve even felt that way in your walk with the Lord. You blew it, you sinned, and you know it. And you don’t feel confident that the Lord will invite you back in. You know you deserve the cold shoulder, and it can make you hesitant to draw near to him again.
But look how the king responds, verse 12,
12 Before I was aware, my desire set me
among the chariots of my kinsman, a prince.[b]
The meaning of the Hebrew in this passage is very difficult to precisely translate, which you will notice if you compare various English translations. But the main point is clear enough. It is as if she resolves to go down to the garden and seek out her beloved, but before she even gets there, the king has picked her up in a chariot, and swept her off her feet.
Unlike the cold rejection that the bride offered the king in the previous chapter, the king here has been waiting for her in the garden. He’s made preparations for her arrival. He welcomes her back with enthusiasm. So much so that the onlookers in the scene celebrate the bride’s return to him:
13 [Return, return, O Shulammite,
return, return, that we may look upon you.
The onlookers celebrate the reunion. And the king himself joins in the rejoicing, with what seems to be a rhetorical question:
Why should you look upon the Shulammite,
as upon a dance before two armies?
The whole book makes clear in multiple places why the king would want to look upon his beloved. He calls her the “most beautiful among women” in 1:8, and 5:9, and 6:1. It is fitting for the king’s subjects to want to see the bride’s beauty, especially when she is enjoying the king’s presence.
Now take note too of the word used to describe the bride twice in this verse: Shulammite. That word is the feminized version of Solomon’s own name. The author is using his own name to give a name, a description to the bride.
The story is reminiscent of another time in scripture when a husband gives a derivative of his name to his bride. In the garden, the Hebrew word for man, is the word ISH, which is the basis of the Hebrew word for woman, ISHAH.
In Genesis 2 Adam, the first husband, again using poetry, responds to the creation of Eve and names her and says, “she shall be called Woman (ishah),
because she was taken out of Man (ish).”
Woman is made and given to man as a helpmate, and her role, her identity, is intimately tied to the husband. Who she is, is connected to who HE is.
Similarly, here in Song of Solomon, the bride is deriving her name, her identity, her status, from her bridegroom.
The same was true of the nation of Israel, the bride of Yahweh in the old covenant. Indeed, the very name Israel, is derived from the patriarch’s connection to Yahweh in Genesis 32.
The covenant between Yahweh and Israel is pictured as a marriage, where Israel’s identity is intimately tied to who her king is. She is holy, because her husband is holy.
And how much more of a glorious picture do we see in light of the fullness of biblical revelation, where the bride of Christ is given a new name, a new identity, a new role and station in life, because of her connection to the faithful bridegroom.
We have in Christ a bridegroom who doesn’t hold a grudge or sit in coldness. He anticipates our return back to him, and embraces us with open arms, even when we have rejected communion with him.
And he reminds us of his love, by recalling to us the truth of what he’s said to us in the past. And like the Shulamite, who derives her loveliness by her connection to this poetic king Solomon, we too are made lovely because we are connected to the true and greater Solomon who has come.
Christ’s perfection, his name, is what makes us lovely. No matter how unlovely we have made ourselves, no matter what sin we’ve defiled ourselves with, no matter how cold we’ve been toward him, simply by faith in Christ, the final bridegroom, we can experience reunion and reconciliation.
We can be remade and lovely. That’s the good news of Jesus Christ, and that’s what presented for us in scripture. Whatever you’ve done, whatever sin you’ve committed, however you have rejected and run from him before, tonight you can be reconciled to him and given a new name, a holy name.
You can be part of Christ’s bride, and commune with him, now and for eternity. Trust in that Christ, and you too can experience the warmth of his embrace.
And that’s part of what is pictured for us in the Lord’s supper. He’s reconciled to us, warmly embraces us, despite the fact that we don’t deserve such communion. Hostilities have ended. Communion is offered. Forgiveness is extended. No more coldness, only the warmth of spring, with the ensuing fruitfulness that comes with it.
If you’re like the saints described in acts 2, devoted to the apostle’s teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer, then you can join us at the table. If you’re not trusting in Christ and united to a biblical church, then scripture forbids to you take with us.
After I pray we will process down the center aisle to receive the elements, returning to our seats down the sides, and then we will take the meal all together at the end. We also will have someone walking around with a tray if you are unable to make it to the front.
PRAYER
BREAD- SOS 4:1- You are altogether beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful
CUP- I am my beloved, and my beloved it mine.
PRAYER
DOXOLOGY
Benediction- The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
[1] Here I am following: James M. Hamilton, Song of Songs: A Biblical-Theological, Allegorical, Christological Interpretation (Fearn, Ross-shire, Scotland, U.K.: Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2015), 113–14.
[2] See: Hamilton, 117.
