The Shulammite Becomes a Bride

1Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is as a flock of goats, that descend from Mount Gilead. 2Your teeth are like a newly shorn flock, which have come up from the washing, where every one of them has twins. None is bereaved among them. 3Your lips are like scarlet thread. Your mouth is lovely. Your temples are like a piece of a pomegranate behind your veil. 4Your neck is like David’s tower built for an armory, whereon a thousand shields hang, all the shields of the mighty men. 5Your two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a roe, which feed among the lilies. 6Until the day is cool, and the shadows flee away, I will go to the mountain of myrrh, to the hill of frankincense.

A few days ago so much snow fell that it covered the whole world white. The snow made no distinction between one place and another; it covered everything. Watching those large flakes cover everything dirty and ugly in white, I wondered whether the love of a husband and wife ought not to be like this.

Husbands and wives quarrel because, while each thinks they did give love, that love was not full enough to cover the other person’s strengths and weaknesses the way heavy snow does. That is to say, the love given was as thin and grudging as sleet. Husbands and wives are unwilling to sacrifice for each other and will not take the lower place and serve, so each looks at a husband or a wife who shows them no love and each is left frustrated. The love the other person wants is a love that covers every fault without conditions, like heavy snow.

The love God has given believers is exactly that kind of love. He poured it out on filthy, ugly sinners stained with sin until the sin was covered, and inside it believers feel rest and warmth, and the thirst is gone. God is teaching us that if a husband and wife are to make a whole home, love has to be poured out without stopping. I covered every fault of yours and asked nothing for it, he says — so pour out a love like heavy snow, and the one you love will find rest and warmth inside it. This is the love Solomon gave the Shulammite. He poured a love like heavy snow over a poor and weak Shulammite without conditions, and that is how, in his arms, she was able to enjoy happiness without complaint.

Song of Solomon 4:1

1Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is as a flock of goats, that descend from Mount Gilead.

When you meet a winter field, you can dig into the deep-piled snow and get inside it, and there you are out of the biting wind. Solomon’s love safely protected a Shulammite who had met poverty and mockery and contempt like a bitter winter wind. Now Solomon and the Shulammite have become a couple who can serve each other with a love like heavy snow.

On the wedding day the Shulammite was wearing a veil, so only her husband Solomon could see her broadly smiling face. She looked at him from inside that veil and she was so lovely to him that he sang of every feature of her face as though he were praising it. Her eyes, shining inside the veil, were beautiful as a dove’s. She had come through many hardships, and the thanks and the love she felt toward the husband who had protected her to the end were surely held in those eyes. The eyes with which believers look at Christ will shine like this too. The eyes of believers looking at the Lord who lifted them out of death shine with gentleness, humility and fullness. Like a bride who looks at no one but the bridegroom, believers look at Christ, hold the hope of heaven, and work to live a life that agrees with the will of God.

She saw the world through the veil, so the world far off was not clearly visible, while the face of the bridegroom in front of her was perfectly clear. Believers ought to do the same: keep the world at a distance and see clearly the face of the Christ who is near. Once Christ is clearly in view, the world seen through Christ is not frightening and there is no need to be afraid of it. The Shulammite relies on the Solomon who is with her and has no need to take an interest in any of the world’s problems, because in his arms neither the little foxes that tormented her nor the women who envied and were jealous of her can be her enemies.

In verse 1 Solomon says that her hair is dark and beautiful, like a flock of goats lying along the slopes of Mount Gilead. He is comparing it to a flock of goats grown healthy through the shepherd’s labor. Believers, too, when Christ the shepherd leads them into the pasture of the word, must eat the food of the spirit well with an obedient heart and grow; only then can they become warriors of the kingdom of God and carry out fully the commission God gave. The church and you in it must eat the word of Christ so eagerly that you are wise to the point of shining, and you must all become one, a single flock loving each other and working together as members of the Lord’s body.

A sheep that has lost the shepherd and become separated from the flock can only die. That is why we must stay alert always and listen to the shepherd’s voice; only by obeying will we not fall away from the flock, and only so can we keep a healthy life.

Song of Solomon 4:2

2Your teeth are like a newly shorn flock, which have come up from the washing, where every one of them has twins. None is bereaved among them.

Solomon praised the Shulammite’s teeth, saying they were clean and smooth like a shorn ewe that has come up from the washing, like a ewe that has borne twins and raised them all in good health. Sheep are washed after being shorn, so the wool is white as snow and beautiful, all the same length. Sheep whose long dirty wool has all been cut away, showing clean skin underneath, are lovely to look at. Just as the wool of every sheep is clean and even, the word of truth held by a believer who has cut the world away is always holy and always the same word. It is not that one person receives only words of rebuke and another only words of praise. Salvation is accomplished by the same word, and rebuke and reward are given according to a believer’s faith.

The work of teeth is to cut food to a suitable size so that it can be eaten easily; in the same way, if a believer does not grasp for more but preaches the gospel according to the talents and abilities and gifts they were given, in the measure they received, then they will preach nothing but the truth. If someone who does not properly know or understand the word preaches it proudly, opening it up however they please, those words can never bring anyone to salvation. God will not forgive a person who mixes human thinking and the world’s common sense and reasoning into the word and opens it up that way.

If we preach the word with everything we have, inside the grace we received and in the measure of the talents God entrusted to us, then the people who receive the gospel will take their place in the ranks of the saved through a word that was cut up and handed to them in a form good to eat. Bad teeth weaken the whole body, and the church becomes healthy when all its believers are healthy through the word, through prayer and through praise.

Song of Solomon 4:3

3Your lips are like scarlet thread. Your mouth is lovely. Your temples are like a piece of a pomegranate behind your veil.

Solomon said that her lips were like a scarlet thread, that her mouth was lovely, and that her cheeks inside the veil were like a pomegranate.

Leviticus 14:4

4then the priest shall command them to take for him who is to be cleansed two living clean birds, and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop.

Scarlet thread was used in the ceremony for cleansing a sick person and in making the tabernacle and the priest’s garments, and that is because it has to do with human sin. When Jericho fell, the people of Israel saw the scarlet thread Rahab had hung at the window of her house and spared her; and at the last of the ten plagues the angel of death passed over when he saw the red blood of the lamb painted on the doorposts.

The scarlet thread speaks of the atoning blood of Christ; human sin has to be washed by his precious blood before anyone can be lifted out of death. When you who have been saved by the Lord’s precious blood pray a prayer of thanks toward God, he will take that prayer in as a beautiful fragrance. Once that prayer is accepted, God will be a fence around you so that the evil people and evil spirits of the world cannot touch you.

Solomon saw that the cheeks of the woman he loved were red as a pomegranate. She would have made herself up carefully to look well to her husband, and her face would have flushed with shyness. When you split the hard skin of a pomegranate, red as her cheeks, the seeds packed inside are like shining jewels. The red juice surrounding the seeds looks like a warm love, like the precious blood of Christ wrapped around a worthless sinner. We are like dead seeds that cannot put down roots, and Christ’s sacrifice, wrapping us in his own blood so that we do not meet God’s anger, is an enormous blessing. It is astonishing that Solomon should be thinking this deeply about the grace of God while looking at the woman he loves. He longs for God, thinks of him and loves him at every moment, and that is why everything in the world becomes an image showing the glory of God.

Song of Solomon 4:4

4Your neck is like David’s tower built for an armory, whereon a thousand shields hang, all the shields of the mighty men.

He is comparing her neck to the tower of David. A tower is a very important place, built high to stop an enemy invasion, used as a lookout and as a store for weapons. That Solomon compares the Shulammite to a tower he considers so important is evidence of how precious she is to him. Every nation keeps its weapons in the tower and, when war comes, all the soldiers take them out and arm themselves; in the same way you must not sleep or doze spiritually, but must watch carefully from the tower for an attacking enemy. And you are supplied with the spiritual weapons kept in that tower by Christ. To you, at war with Satan, Jesus will supply every weapon: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.

Just as he praised the Shulammite as having a perfect beauty, like a tower hung with a thousand shields, the saving power of Christ is perfect. It is a power of heaven that is never defeated in any war with Satan or with the world, so believers who hold that faith are beautiful just as they are. Anyone whose faith is as straight as a tower never falls, whatever the temptation.

So you must be armed with spiritual weapons, ready to fight any enemy Satan sends. You do not know where he will attack, so stay alert and keep watch from the high tower. As long as you live in this world the spiritual war does not end. On the day you take off this body and are held in God’s arms, you will enjoy eternal rest and a peace with no war, no sickness, no poverty, no anxiety and no tension.

Song of Solomon 4:5

5Your two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a roe, which feed among the lilies.

The description of her breasts as two fawns, twins, feeding among the lilies shows how honest the Bible is. The Bible does not record only the glory of God and the good deeds of human beings. It records the filthiest parts of humanity as well — adultery, murder, lies and scheming. That is because a human being is a lump of sin and a slave of Satan. And because *the Song of Solomon* draws the physical love of human beings honestly, reading it literally will make it seem indecent.

But read it having grasped its deep spiritual meaning and you can know through it the delicate, deep love of God. What you must see is Solomon’s faith, which wanted to show in honest words the grace and glory of God appearing through human evil.

A woman’s breasts carry the precious work of raising children, because without them a baby cannot be raised. If a woman gave birth and had no breasts, how could she raise that life? So for a mother who has given birth to abandon her child is a very great evil, lower than an animal.

Some scholars see the two breasts as the Old and New Testaments, and some see them as pastors carrying out the work of a nurse. Every reading of the image brings grace, but we will read it as believers like fawns enjoying rest, like infants, inside the two breasts — that is, inside the love and protection of God.

You must be wise believers who listen only to the voice of Christ and live on the milk the Lord gives, like an infant held in its mother’s arms. And as fawns grow healthy and give birth to many young, you too must give birth to many souls who resemble Christ.

Song of Solomon 4:6

6Until the day is cool, and the shadows flee away, I will go to the mountain of myrrh, to the hill of frankincense.

Solomon said he would go to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense, perhaps to rest quietly now that the wedding was over. The mountain of myrrh is taken to stand for Mount Moriah, where the temple was built; on Mount Moriah he burned the fragrance of frankincense to God and gave him glory. Where God is present, that place is called a temple. The temple is a holy place that cannot be mixed with anything of the world. If the world came into a temple, it could not be called a temple at all.

John 14:20

20In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

“That day” in John 14 is the day the Holy Spirit comes. The word is saying that when the Holy Spirit comes, everything will be understood. Now the Holy Spirit is with you, and he has given you wisdom so that everything can be understood, and he has made you a temple. Because the Holy Spirit walks with you and works, you are able to prepare to be the holy bride of Christ, and you are able to keep from being defiled by the things of the world. When you, who have become a holy temple, keep sending up the fragrance of devotion and service and thanks inside your faith, as a temple should, God will bless you.

May you always live in holiness as the beautiful bride of Christ. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.