Killing Me Softly (Part 1)

My lover spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, and come with me.
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”
—Song of Songs 2:10–13

In the Song of Songs, Shulamite the bride cries out, “Oh, that he would kiss me.” Is this not the thing for which our souls hunger as well—to be gathered in, to be smothered by the loving “kisses” of God?2

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “O happy kiss, and wonder of amazing self-humbling which is not a mere meeting of lips, but the union of God with man.” Bernard urges us to call out to God with the words of the bride: “Take me away with you—let us hurry!”

Though human lovers can sing the Song of Songs to each other, here we find it employed as a means of worship to God. This is a way the Song can be read and has been read for centuries. Thus, on one level it is a description of the purest human love we can imagine, but on a deeper level it reflects our love for God and His unfathomable love for us.

C. I. Scofield wrote, “Nowhere in Scripture does the unspiritual mind tread upon ground so mysterious and incomprehensible as in this book, while the saintliest men and women of the ages have found it a source of pure and exquisite delight. That the love of the divine Bridegroom should follow all the analogies of the marriage relation seems evil only to minds so ascetic that marital desire itself seems to them unholy.”

Here is the synthesis, I believe, between modern writers who interpret the Song literally and traditionalists who interpret the Song as merely symbolic. We can cut across these either/or positions and rightly interpret it both/and, because all human love is a symbol and sign of a deeper human hunger for eternal love. We may deny that it exists, but in our quieter moments we know it is true.

Everything is about love, or the lack of it, or so we say; but human love is not the ultimate end that we seek. It is but the means to that end, the stimulus that triggers in us a deep thirst for God’s absolute and consuming love. We are never satisfied with the affection we’re given here on earth, no matter how intense and enduring it may be. We seek something more than one another.

“Love is a journey to another land,” said Anglo-Irish writer Rebecca West. She was wiser than she knew, for, put another way, romantic love and natural affections are meant to set us on a journey to find infinite love. As though we’re following a river upstream, we pursue love’s meandering course to its headwaters. There, at its source (God’s effervescent love), we find the spring from which all human loves flow. There we find “a spring of water welling up to  eternal life” (John 4:14) from which we can slack our thirst forever. This “is the end of the heart’s quest and the beginning of its fullness,” Aquinas said.

This, I believe, is why human love and sexual passion permeate and dominate our lives. It is God’s gift to us to draw us to His everlasting love. Our passion is more than physical impulse or instinct; it is a God-designed reflection, however pale, of our passion to know Him and to be known by Him. It is no coincidence that sexual intercourse in the Bible is described as “knowing,” for human sexual passion is a small representation of  the chief end of man to “know God and enjoy Him forever.”

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2. All souls are feminine. Not female but feminine. (The word for “soul” is feminine in Hebrew.) In the Song of Songs it is the groom and not the bride who symbolizes God, the bride and not the groom who symbolizes the soul. The reason for this is not that males are in any way superior and more “godlike,” but that God, by His nature, is the husband of my soul, and I, by nature, am His bride. This is symbolic language, of course.

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 49501. All rights reserved.