Beautiful? Beloved?

To begin, I should admit that I don’t under­stand hardly any of Song of Solomon, even after lis­ten­ing to Mark Driscoll’s rather con­tro­ver­sial series on it. Because of its rather… descrip­tive descrip­tions of mar­riage, many com­men­ta­tors have decided to call it an alle­gory. They’ll say that the lan­guage doesn’t refer to Solomon and his wife; it is instead an alle­gory of Christ and the church, God and Israel, or Israel and Torah.¹ Frankly, that’s awful hermeneu­tics: “It can’t mean what it looks like because I’m uncom­fort­able with that, so it must mean some­thing else.”

Song of Solomon is about mar­riage. It’s the only way that any of it really makes any sense if you read it. It’s a series of exchanges between Song of Solomon and his wife. The pre­cise event details and chronol­ogy in each sec­tion are often debat­able, but the gen­eral topic is pretty obvi­ous. It’s about the rela­tion­ship between a hus­band and a wife.

That being said, mar­riage itself is a giant pic­ture of Christ and the church. Paul says this explic­itly in Ephesians 5:32. That means we can’t say that Song of Solomon is about Christ and the church. That which it describes, how­ever, is a pic­ture of Christ and the church. This is how I think we’re to read Song of Solomon. It’s about mar­riage, and mar­riage is about Jesus and His bride, the church.

There’s this odd lit­tle exchange in Song of Solomon 1 that, if you read it as just being between a cou­ple, is rather endear­ing. In verse 5, the Shu­lamite woman (Solomon’s wife) goes on about how Solomon ought not pur­sue her because she’s not very pretty.² Appar­ently, body-image wasn’t just an issue for women in the 21^st cen­tury. Any­way, she goes on for three verses and basi­cally asks why on earth Solomon would want any­thing to do with her.³

Solomon responds by going on for three verses—in very strong, clear words—about how beau­ti­ful she is to him. He doesn’t just say things like “You’re pretty enough for me,” or “None of that mat­ters,” or “but you’ve got a great per­son­al­ity.” He goes on in detail about how, despite her descrip­tion of her­self, he thought she was the “most beau­ti­ful among women.”

And right now, if you have any soul at all, you’ve been emo­tion­ally stirred by this exchange enough to at least think “Awww, that’s so sweet.” Actu­ally, there’s a good chance you’ve shed a tear. It’s a delight­ful story. But there’s some­thing big­ger going on when we remem­ber all of redemp­tive his­tory and the rela­tion­ship to which mar­riage points.

Jesus is the hus­band. We’re the bride. When He comes look­ing for us, we tell Him that we’re not good enough. We tell Him about all the bad things that we’ve done and why we don’t deserve His love. For Jesus, it wasn’t a sim­ple mat­ter of ignor­ing our faults. He loved us more than that. He died to burry and kill every­thing that is wrong with us,⁴ then He rose again, and now He’s clean­ing us. He’s actu­ally mak­ing us beau­ti­ful, even holy.⁵

Now, lest we should ever say to Him “I’m not wor­thy. Why would you ever want me?” He responds by point­ing to His own blood that He shed to pur­chase,⁶ jus­tify,⁷ and cleanse us.⁸ Jesus is the true and bet­ter husband.