Love Stories

The book of the Bible called Song of Songs is...confusing. It uses all kinds of metaphors and imagery that make no sense to us twenty-first-century readers. And, to make it more confusing, scholars have argued about how we should read Song of Songs for centuries. Is it a love song between husband and wife? Is it all a metaphor for God and Israel? Or Christ and the church? Most scholars agree that on some level it’s all three, but it’s primarily a love song between a husband and wife, celebrating the goodness of sexual love, marriage, and desire. So, if it’s primarily a love song, what’s it doing in the Bible? Song of Songs belongs in the Bible because sexual love, marriage, and desire are all good gifts from God. They are an innate part of the way He designed us. We are wired for intimacy. Sexual love is a powerful thing. It drives the husband and wife in Song of Songs to run all over town, searching for each other. They describe one another’s beauty in a long series of metaphors that don’t make a lot of sense to most modern-day readers. But these metaphors, mostly mentioning gardens, precious jewels, and expensive perfumes, point to the bounty found in Eden in Genesis 1-2, where the goodness of God’s creation was unmarred and in full bloom. And these good gifts point us back to God’s goodness, which is revealed in Jesus. The strong desire demonstrated by the husband and wife in Song of Songs echoes Jesus’s strong desire to live in union with His people, the church. He loved the church so much that He became human to live a perfect life on our behalf and take our sin upon Himself on the cross. Then, He rose again to defeat sin and death so we can live in union with Him forever when He returns. And in the meantime He sends His Holy Spirit, who lives inside every believer and constantly reminds us of God’s pursuing, never-ending, ridiculous love for us. So, while Song of Songs is primarily a human love story, it points to God in the same way that every love story does. Sexual love in marriage is a beautiful gi