Sunday Worship Good Morning!!! Let your worship show forth your devotional love and heart felt gratitude… He is worthy! /
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Let the Love Songs begin!
Now before we get started tonight, I want you to remember a few of the things we covered in our overview of this book.
First off, there are 5 players on the field:
• The Beloved who we believe to be Solomon
• The Shulamite who is his lover/bride
• The maidens/bride’s maids
• The family, friends and valiant men of Solomon and
• The brothers of the Shulamite bride.
There will be shifts in the dialogue from one speaker to another throughout. These will be announced. These lead-ins are NOT original to the text and are therefore not inspired NOR authoritative. A good 90%+ of them are, however, agreed upon by most people. This is because the content makes it rather clear.
This book is NOT for the faint of heart. It uses very blatant and clear sexual references in which both lovers express their longings and desires without shame.
As we read, it will be important – imperative really – that we do not lose sight of what this love story is illustrative of. This is inspired by God to reveal through human marital love, what Jesus desires with His bride.
The narrative in this book is characterized by a conversational style that alternates between dialogues and poetic reflections.
Also remember that this book is NOT in chronological order which will become immediately apparent in the first 7 verses alone.
Finally, the development of the Song of Solomon follows the Chiastic structure I explained last week.
As the curtain opens on this book, we begin with the couple already married and therefore the setting is Solomon’s palace – as it is throughout the entire book.
By the time we reach verse 5, the Shulamite woman is remembering a particularly frustrating portion of her courtship to Solomon when she still did not know his
true identity as king. She was overly tanned due to working the family vineyard and is talking about this to her maidens.
The Bricks in our House of Hope
One of the BIG lessons from last week is that all of our little expressions of hope in God need to be linked to our GREAT hope in God.
Our great hope is “Christ in us” according to Colossians 1:27.
So if the house of hope which faith is supporting as a foundation IS our maturation into Christ’s image, then all the bricks of hope which make up that structure must in SOME way be connected to the final product of Christ in us.
Let’s see how this works!
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Intro to… Solomon’s Love Song
Tonight we are taking a somewhat “deep dive”introduction into the Song of Solomon.
The Song of Solomon is among those books of scripture classified as wisdom – poetic literature. Its structure is complex and unique in all of scripture. The development of the story is NOT linear and unless you understand the literary structure you are likely to miss a great deal of what is going on in this book.
There are only 8 chapters and 5 characters. There is of course the shepherd/king who we assume to be Solomon himself. There is the object of his affections known formally only as “the shulammite”. Then there are three theatrical “choruses” who interact with the main characters throughout the narrative. These are the “daughters of Jerusalem” (the bride’s maids), Solomon’s friends (or attendants), and the Shulammite’s brothers.
Nearly the entire story actually takes place in Solomon’s Palace where “flashbacks” to their time of courtship leading to marriage takes place.
Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of the story is written from the 1st person perspective of “the Shulammite” woman, rather than from the main protagonist whom we assume is King Solomon.
All together this is a very interesting book in terms of layout, story telling, story development and spiritual imagery.
Of course, being an inspired book, the main person being revealed is actually Jesus and the Shulammite represents the church – His bride. The choruses represent the church, the angels and the ministers of the New Covenant whose job is to present the church as a chaste bride to her Bridegroom.
Other than the book of Job, this is the most detailed book introduction in our entire trek ‘Thru the Bible’ so far, but I believe it was both necessary and beneficial.
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The Type of Hope, Faith will support
For WEEKS I have pressed the need for Hope in order for Faith to have something to support.
I have pressed the fact that our Hope MUST be based upon what we can RIGHTLY expect of God.
There are 3 primary sources of Hope:
God’s inspired, written word.
The inward witness, leading, counsel and teaching of the Holy Spirit.
What we have come to experience of God ourselves.
The 2nd and 3rd in this list NEVER go beyond what the written Word has already revealed!
But the most powerful of all three is our experience because it is relational and we see this and the basis for faith among many of those set forth as our examples in scripture!
TODAY however, I wanted to play the other side of the field a bit regarding hope from experience. All REALLY hope cannot go beyond God’s personal self-disclosure in scripture and it cannot go against Hope’s primary purpose in the life of the believer – which is producing the Image of Christ!
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