Immanuel Sermon Audio
Song of Songs (22:66)
All right, so different in that we're not singing tonight and also different in that we're looking at Song of Solomon tonight, which is unlike Any other book in the Bible and so find the song right after Ecclesiastes It's right before Isaiah Song of Solomon Okay, the song falls into that category and there are five books of the bible that fall into the category of wisdom literature and those books are Job Psalms Proverbs Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon and Job gives you reflective wisdom. So does Ecclesiastes we've talked about those books The book of Psalms is a book about wisdom for how to worship And the book of Proverbs is instructive wisdom and then song of Solomon is marriage wisdom And so if you look at these five books of the bible, they cover In the broad category of wisdom, they cover a lot of ground, right? Psalms tells you here's wisdom in your relationship with God The book of Proverbs gives you wisdom in Tons of different areas of life saying this is how life generally works Not promises not ironclad rules, but generally this is how you can expect things to work in life Job and Ecclesiastes give you sort of the exception not quite as easy to understand You got to step back and you got to think about it or you have to reflect on it To really understand what what those books are teaching us they give you The counter examples to the book of Proverbs and then Fitting that God would give us a book in the bible that gives us wisdom about marriage So that's where we're headed tonight in the song of Solomon Look at chapter one verse one. It says the very beginning the song of songs Which is psalamens Texturally that could mean one of two things where it says which is Solomon's Or according to Solomon that could mean that Solomon wrote it Or that could mean grammatically that someone wrote it in honor of Solomon or they wrote it because they learned these things from Solomon But either way Solomon is connected with the book And it's an interesting thing to think about Solomon and his connection to this book because when you read about Solomon in the bible He starts off really good And he ends up really bad And so you look at this book and you say either he wrote it in the really good days before the really bad days Or maybe there was a brief period of time at the end of the really bad days where he realized these were really bad days and bad decisions And I was on the right track to begin with and somewhere I went off base and here's what i've learned and maybe he He wrote these things down at that time But either way Solomon is connected with the book. So we're going to jump in and i'm going to be honest with you um, there's two issues And they're serious that Christians have with this book in the bible. The first issue is this it appears to be love poetry And we'll talk about this more in a minute It appears to be at times very erotic love poetry not just like you're my sweetheart but Serious love poetry and so that is a problem for some people And then the second problem is in the book. There's no direct mention of god. You can jot down out beside that song eight chapter eight verse six and chapter eight verse six There's a uh, an allusion to god or a passing reference to god, but it's only Using god sort of as a comparison. It's not directly saying anything theological or anything directly about god and his character His nature is just sort of this passing reference And so some people say, you know, it's it's weird that this is love poetry and Very at times graphic love poetry and it's weird that god really doesn't seem to have anything to do with the book And so people kind of wrestle with this so full disclosure If you go back before the time of jesus and you look at the jewish community around the time of People coming back from exile Okay If you're if you're following the storyline of the old testament, you know that there were books being written up until Enduring the people are coming back from exile And so at that point they're Putting the old testament together so to speak They're trying to recognize which books are inspired by god and belong in the canon of scripture In the one book that they debated More than any other book is the song a song They debated a little bit the book of ester Only because god is never mentioned in the book of ester But at the end of the day, they said it's clear. God is on every page in ester He's behind the scenes pulling all the strings putting everything in place Clearly he's involved They debated the song because they said it seems like love poetry one and It doesn't really seem to mention god in the end they put it in right? There was really no group of jews who said well We believe in all the books of the bible except song a solemn and in the end they did put it in But i'm telling you they debated it they talked about it And the same thing happened in the Protestant Reformation when martin luther goes and he tacks the 95 theses on the church door and Protestant Reformation explodes and the Protestants say one of the things they say is look All of these apocryphal books that the catholic church has accepted. We don't believe our biblical books So I have catholic family members if you've ever been to a catholic church and you open a catholic bible They got some extra stuff in there that we don't have in luther and his buddies said look We don't those are not biblical books the jews have never recognized those the earliest christians didn't recognize Get rid of those things and They did also talk about the song of solemn and they said what do you think? Should it stay or should it go? Do we leave it in do we take it out and in the end they left it in but again i'm telling you that they they debated it So jews and christians both decided after debate it belongs in the bible And jews and christians also have something in common when it comes to song a solemn and is what uh also in common is that They have interpreted it differently More than any other book that they've interpreted in the bible does that make sense Maybe the only exception for christians would be the book of revelation You can find 8 million interpretations of the book of revelation. You can find Seven million nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine of the song of solemn Okay, you find people and we're going to talk about some of them you'll love them That they're just crazy and so all kinds of interpretations about the book so historically you need to know this Historically most interpreters have said you need to interpret this book as an allegory Okay an allegorical interpretation the vast vast majority Of people who have tried to make sense of this book come down and say it's an allegory and here's their thought pattern Okay, they read the book And they say hmm This seems like graphic love poems That's strange. I'm not sure that belongs in the bible And then they come over here and they say and it really doesn't talk about god It really doesn't seem to have anything to do with god that's strange And so then their third landing point in light of those two things is to say maybe it's really not a love poem Maybe it's like disguised as a love poem But it's really about something else Okay, that's an allegory. Let me give you a couple of examples of allegory so you understand what i'm saying Okay, anybody know who that guy is? Anybody? Plato There he is If you guess zu she or you are in the right era kind of Okay play toe Plato told one of the most famous allegories ever okay philosophers love this story Okay, so play toe teach in his people and here's the story he tells and you can see the picture here That kind of illustrates the story. He says once upon a time there were prisoners Sitting in a dark cave staring at a wall. Do you see him up there? Sitting on the bottom left all in a row and he said these prisoners are chained to the wall They cannot leave the cave And all they can do is stare straight ahead at the the wall in front of them the blank wall That's all they can do ever and on the wall they see shadows That's all they know they cannot look left or right they're chained they're stuck They just watch these shadows all day long and the shadows move and they do all this stuff All these people know is the shadows One day somehow a prisoner gets free And he runs starts leaving the cave He just ditches all his buddies He's leaving the cave and he says whoa. Look at this right behind us. There are people with puppets And there's a fire behind them and and the light comes in from the edge of the cave and the fire And these puppets are throwing shadows up on the wall and he looks down and he sees his buddies and he says look That's we thought the shadows were real But what's real is what's behind us and we never could see it and so he leaves the cave and he looks out at the world There's a sun. There's trees. There's all sorts of interesting things out there And then he comes back into the cave and he comes to his buddies and he says hey, guess what? I have figured out something really important the shadows the stuff We thought that was reality. They're just shadows Reality is behind you Reality is there's people back there moving stuff around and there's a fire and you can leave the cave and you can do all this stuff And his buddies look at him and say you're an idiot We see the shadows How can you deny the shadows they're right in front of us Okay, it's an allegory you understand that is not a story about people chained in a cave Staring at shadows and one guy escapes. Okay. Everything in that story represents something in Plato's mind The prisoners sitting down at the bottom are us just ignorant regular people The guy who escapes the cave and runs out is not a guy who escapes out of a cave. He's a philosopher Right the philosopher figures out the truth about reality and the truth about life And then he comes back to the ignorant people like you and me and he says ah, I figured it all out Here's the meaning of life and he philosophize or whatever they do And the people like you and me are most of the time are too dumb to get it and we just say I don't understand that all I see is shadows and that makes sense to me Okay, it's an allegory. It's really not about people in a cave. It's about Learning and knowledge and philosophy and trying to teach ignorant people about reality. Okay. Here's some other examples You ever heard of john bunion pilgrim's progress? Anybody read this book? I've started it I'll be honest. I've never finished it. I think it's kind of boring But I have started it and it's an allegory and it's about a guy named At the beginning pilgrim and then he gets his name changed to christian and he meets all kinds of different people As he's traveling on this road You can see all the towns he visits in the places and every place in person He meets has a particular name and it represents Not a person or a place but something that you face in life So he meets a person named despair or he meets a person named loneliness or he visits a village called anger Whatever and it's an allegory. It's really not about a guy on a road. It's about you and the things that you experience in life Okay, here's an allegory. Maybe you read in high school. Anybody read animal farm. You remember reading that? Okay Now i'm talking your language You understand at this point that it's really not about walking talking pigs Right. It's a book that is about a revolution in russia and he's writing it about pigs So that he thinks nobody back home will figure out what he's writing about and then he loses his head So he writes an allegory to make his point. Okay, so all these people for years and years and years centuries say Song of songs I know it looks like a love poem, but it's really not It's really an allegory and it represents other things which begs the question What does it represent? So here's some possible explanations, okay, one of the most common Jewish explanations is that it is really about the history of israel from abraham to isek to jacob to the 12 tribes to egypt to the exodus to coming out to wandering in the wilderness to uh going in and fighting in jereco to the period of the judges to saw to david to salomon raya balm jerebom rebellion in the kingdoms exiled then they come back they say that's what the song is about It's not a love poem. It's they have all their little look you look in this verse That's not about how beautiful the lady is that's about israel Being granted their wish for a king or whatever they're trying to identify they say it's about the history of israel You got another guy. This one is one of my favorites. You got a jewish guy named gersham And he says it's not a love poem. It's an allegory about knowledge and learning Okay, so take your bible and i'll give you one example of what gersham would like you to believe Look at song of songs chapter four verse five song of salomon four five says Your two breasts are like two fawns twins of a gazelle that graze among the lilies To us that sounds like graphic love poetry Gersham says no no no no no no no you missed it you stupid people ignorant people missed it He says look uh fawns And a gazelle fawns in a gazelle gazelle are pretty quick They're pretty fast and I'm a mathematician And I know that if you're a good mathematician your mind is quick It's fast It's not talking about the anatomy of a woman That's talking about how fast and how quick your mind needs to be if you want to be a good mathematician There you go, and he does it through the whole book Everything in there he says it's really not about that. It's really about this It's a book about knowledge and learning. Okay, another explanation There's a guy named origin in the early church. He's a christian guy There's a guy named gerome and origin was a bishop in alexandria egypt gerome is the guy that wrote the latin volgate latin translation of the bible and these guys They thought it was much more spiritual if you never got married If you remained celibate all your life So you can imagine when guys who think you should not get married come to the song of solomon They say It can't be about that We're not supposed to do that That's not really what god made us to do so they put their minds together and they say it's about spiritual marriage and It's it's just a weird thing that both of these guys had lots of Women who like to listen to them teach and they were not married to any of them But they sort of taught this spiritual marriage idea of like I don't know dating or best friends or I don't know Understand it it's weird to me, but they say look it's not about Love poetry like you think it is it's about a spiritual form of marriage where you don't touch anybody you don't get married You don't have sex anything like that. So origin and Jerome there you go spiritual marriage Bernard of clairvoy says It is about the love that the christian has for god It's not about the physical stuff. It seems like it's about the love of christian has for god get this bernard preached 86 sermons On the first two chapters of the song of solomon Look at that just look at the first two chapters 17 verses in the first chapter 17 verses in the second chapter and bernard preached 86 sermons You think we're going slow in luke You can't believe we're only in luke 9 The guy preached for a year and a half on 34 verses And what he told people is it's not love poetry It's really about the love that you ought to have for god I know it sounds like love poetry, but it's not You got to understand what i'm teaching you and i'm i'm giving you the key here. So there's bernard A lot of christian interpretations say it's not about any of that stuff It's about jesus in the church We know that jesus wasn't around when it was written, but it was sort of prophetic and it's about jesus and his love And his relationship for the church Here's something that I think is interesting you all know that a german guy named Gutenberg invented the printing press right okay before that happened If you look at all the handwritten because there's no printing press you look at all the handwritten copies Of the bible or books of the bible or the old testament or the new testament Guess which book was copied by hand more than any other book song of soloments Right song of some more than the book of psalms more than the book of genesis More than all these books more than the book of isiah the song They're writing it over and over and over again because that's what people wanted to read And why did they so interested in it because they were fascinated who's going to give us the next best interpretation We've heard it means this oh no you say it means this oh no you say it means that oh no you say it means this It's the exact same thing you find today at the christian bookstore If you go to the prophecy section and you find 8 000 books about the book of revelation and they all mean something different And you say well All these people writing all these books and none of them agree They're all crazy and it's the exact same thing that people were doing with the song of soloment So here we go two problems with the allegorical approach Okay, two big problems number one It assumes that the plain meaning is somehow inadequate or evil If you're going to interpret it allegorically All of these guys who do that they're saying it would not be Fitting for there to be a book of love poems in the bible There's something missing here. There's something wrong here. They're not happy with that. So that's problem number one Here's problem number two. This is the big one. It's totally arbitrary Who's right? Is it Bernard that's right? Is it origin that's right? Is it Gersham that's right? Is it this Jewish guy that's right? Is it that Catholic guy that's right 8 000 interpretations? How in the world do you know which one could possibly be right? so Last time we met we talked about hermeneutics how to study your bible. Let me just give you a little Example of why hermeneutics matters. Okay, one of the first rules of interpreting the bible is you have to understand what kind of literature it is Is it a story like a parable? Is it history just recounting facts from from the past? Is it some kind of poetry? Is it prophecy? You need to know what kind of writing it is and when you know what kind of writing it is you interpret it differently So here's what I mean in a real world example. Okay, everybody turn around and look at Sean Job. Sean raise your hand Okay, that's Sean Job. If you don't know Sean Sean's wife is Sarah and i'm just picking on you tonight just because okay What's that? Yeah, because you're sitting by yourself just to make it even worse for you Okay, Sean and Sarah Imagine that Sean comes home from work And his wife Sarah is not there, but she has left him a note on the kitchen counter Okay, and the note says Sean You melt my heart Love Sarah Okay, so Sean comes home his wife is not there to explain herself And he picks up this note and he reads it Sean you melt my heart Sarah And he sits down at the kitchen table and he thinks I wonder what that means Melt my heart Things that melt are hot Hot hot things hot things my wife is hot my wife I think my wife is hot but she says she's hot When you have a fever you're hot I think my wife has a fever What do you what do you do when you have a fever? Well, maybe you write a note and you tell somebody but you also ought to take some tiling all So maybe my wife needs some tiling all and I think I figured it out I think what this note means is I'm supposed to go to albertsons and buy some tiling all from my wife I'm going to albertsons And he comes home From albertsons and he's got the tiling all and he says honey I did it Here's your tiling all And she looks at him and says you're an idiot You break my heart you grieve my heart Right That was not the point That was a note expressing my love for you. Okay, the flip side would be equally true Sean comes home note on the counter Sean go to albertsons and buy tiling all Sean sits down and says What do you think that means? Go to albertsons and buy tiling all Why would you need tiling all? Well, you use tiling all when you have a fever Does my wife have a fever? I think my wife has a fever You know when you have a fever you feel hot Just makes you feel hot my my wife is is pretty lady, but I don't think that's what she's talking about it Buy tiling all she has a fever. She's hot When things are hot they melt Something what is melt is my wife melting? No, my wife's not melting Her what if her heart is melting? I know that maybe I I think this is a love note I think my wife just wrote me a love note and left it on the counter It really doesn't mean go to albertsons and buy tiling all what my wife is trying to say to me is that I just melt her heart. She just she just melts Because she loves me so much and so his wife comes home and he says honey The love note was really great and I've been working on one for you all day and she says that's great. Where's the tiling all? And he says what do you mean? The note about tiling all well, that really wasn't about tiling all was it? Yes, it was about tiling all okay You interpret a love note from your spouse differently than a grocery list And if you treat them like they're not what they are You are acting like a fool And you've got all these people For so many centuries who come to this book and it's clear what it is It's so obvious And they come to it and they say well it can't be that It must be something else and it's just as as silly as what we just talked about Let me talk to you about poetry just for a minute. Okay All of this really becomes clear when you realize that the song of solomon Is Hebrew poetry in the form of a chiasm Chiasm And i'm going to explain to you what that means and why it matters, okay Any of you like to write poetry? Nobody anybody like to read it. Justin does? Uh-huh very nice. So Justin knows all this stuff I'm about to tell you guys the rest of you guys need to pay attention, okay Put the next slide up mr. Lucas. Okay. Just some examples. There is couplet poetry Okay, and for our culture couplet poetry means A and A line one and two go together Right, they probably rhyme A One rhymes with a two and then the third line rhymes with the fourth line Right and it's couples two two two so some poetries like that Some poetry is quatrain poetry and The letters can be in different order, but it's basically four lines that go together And so maybe the first and the third rhyme together and the second and the fourth rhyme together Whatever you get the idea maybe it's a abb but four that all go together in a stanza. Okay, then there's something These are three of many many many but uh terza Rema rhyma. I don't know how you say it, but it's kind of poetry and the way it works is The stanza is three lines and so it goes aba next stanza bcb next stanza cdc next stanza ede next stanza Efe i'm confused, but you get the idea. Okay, it goes on like that over and over and over again And uh, if you have ever heard of dante who wrote the inferno He wrote the whole book like the one on the right the whole thing Goes in those three lines back and forth back and forth you get the idea. Okay, the Hebrews The jewish people they didn't like any of that nonsense Okay, they had Two kinds that were really their favorite one they really liked is when each line They could care less about rhyme by the way. They didn't care if their poems rhymed, but they liked it a whole lot When the first line in a poem started with a the second line started with b The third line started with c and it was acrostic abc. Of course, it's through the heber alphabet you understand Here's the the second kind that they really really liked it's called a chiasm and here's how a chiasm works. Okay Many version of a chiasm you write six lines of poetry Okay The first line in the sixth line are about the same topic They go together The second line and the second to last line Are about the same topic. They go together and you work your way down to the very middle of the chiasm And the very middle is the most important part of the whole chiasm Just as an example, you can look at john chapter one the first section in the gospel of john. It's a chiasm It works just like this and you can work it down right to the very middle, which is about john 1 14, I think so gospel of john does this but the entire book Of the song of solomon does this and I brought my my book in here But you can't see this so I took a picture of it and you can see it a little bit bigger The whole book is a chiasm the very first verse lines up with the very last verse The second verses line up with the second to last verses The third set of verses line up with the third to last verses You see what i'm saying? Fourth to the fourth to last all the way Let's take some work to do this by the way And they get all the way to the very middle and the very middle of the book The very middle of the chiasm is the most important part and here's what it is in the song of solomon look at it song of solomon four 16 to five one. This is the very middle It says awake oh north wind and come oh south wind Blow upon my garden let its spices flow Let my beloved come to his garden and eat its choices fruits I came to my garden my sister my bride I gathered my my myrrh with my spice. I ate my honeycomb with my honey I drank my wine with my milk and here it is the very middle of the chiasm Eat friends drink and be drunk with love Any commentator worth their salt knows that's the very middle of the book The very middle of the chiasm and it all leads up to that and then it all goes backwards after that And being drunk with love in this Hebrew love poem is talking about i'm just going to be very blunt with you the physical act of consummating a marriage Being drunk with love the emotions you feel the the physical things you feel The anticipation all of it leads up to that one climatic moment and that's the very middle of the book Right. This is a love poem Really, I don't think it ought to surprise us that in a section of books about wisdom that god would put something in there about marriage That's a pretty big part of life That if god didn't give us wisdom on it, you sort of say well The bible I thought the bible is supposed to speak to every aspect of human life It doesn't really have a book devoted to that it does and it's the book of the song of solemn and now here's a disclaimer Okay, it is Hebrew love poetry It was written thousands of years ago on the other side of the world By people whose lives were very very different than ours And so there is imagery and there is symbolic words used And there are words that seem strange to us in love poetry Okay, let me give you some examples and you follow along look at chapter one verse five I Am very dark but lovely That's a contrast. I am very dark But I am lovely And we would read that today in in our culture at least we would say well dark is good We go to the tanning bed to get dark You would we would say I'm very dark and I'm lovely because I'm very dark She said I'm very dark but lovely. Oh daughters of Jerusalem like the tents of keeter like the curtains of solemn and do not gaze at me because I'm dark Because the sun has looked upon me. We're like what in the world We want the sun to look on us so much. We pay money to get fried in a electric tanning bed She's embarrassed that she's so dark. They didn't have tanning beds If your skin was dark, it's because you worked outside doing manual labor You weren't rich enough or privileged enough to live inside and let servants do that kind of stuff What this lady is saying is look i'm a nobody I'm just a low class working class blue collar girl And my skin is dark. It would be like us saying today a lady saying my hands are rough I've worked in the oil patch all my life and I got calluses all over my hands Right and she's almost ashamed of this so different context look at chapter one verse nine How do you think this would go over today? The man says I compare you my love to a mayor among pharaohs chariots You are like a horse Sean Just to be clear in the illustration don't go home and write that love poem for your wife You look like a horse, but you go back and you say okay What is a symbol of power and prestige? What is a symbol of wealth? It's not a lamborghini. It's not a big stack of money. It's not big fancy jewelry necessarily. It's a beautiful animal These beautiful beasts that pharaoh has in his army they're amazing to look at they're the most They don't have a lamborghini to compare it to so they just look at the mayor and they say that is an amazing Beautiful creature and he says you're like that. You're not like the mayor that's out there Munching on grain in the field You're like one of pharaohs Mayors pulling a chariot. You're the real deal. Okay back then it worked chapter two verse 17 This is the the lady talking to her fiance at this point Until the day breathes and the shadows flee turn my beloved be like a gazelle or a young stag on cleft mountains again We don't really think to describe attractive people like stags Or gazelles, but in this culture at that time in their experiences This was one of the ways they could describe beauty. Here's one of my favorites and we could look at tons of them, but look at chapter four verse one and two Behold you are beautiful my love behold you are beautiful. That's a good start, right? Your eyes are like doves. That's a little weird behind your veil Your hair is like a flock of goats Leaping down the slopes of gilliard it gets better your teeth Your teeth are like a flock of shorn use That have come up from washing All of which bear twins and not one among them has lost its young okay Your hair is like goats Probably not going to do it in 2015 but back then For people who were agricultural agricultural people agrarian people and they're looking off at the countryside and maybe the sun setting And there's this green hill and the goats are coming down. It's a beautiful site For us we can use different images But for them that was something that they looked at and was valuable to them was beautiful to them So he throws it in there and then he says your teeth are like Use they just got washed And each of them has a twin. You know what he's saying there? You're not missing any teeth, honey You got all your teeth This one pairs up with that one You got them both and this one with that one And it looks like you just cleaned them that you're coming out of the river all clean and beautiful again You put yourself in that culture in that time and maybe it's not as bad as we think I will tell you this too Okay Sometimes you read through this book. It's obviously love poetry Sometimes you read something in the book and i'll just be honest with you. It doesn't make sense Okay in the english translation and i'm going to just tell you directly why it doesn't make sense There are some things written in there that when they translated this book into english The translators said we can't write that We can't write what that says And so they translate it into something kind of close And when you read it, you think that's really weird And so sometimes you go back to a guy who knows Hebrew and he says okay this first right here It says this let me give you the literal translation and you read the literal translation and you say oh Wow That really is Graphic love poetry and so you just need to be aware that there's some things like that in the book Okay, so all that aside One last serious thing. There's a problem with the song And the problem is That theology plays no role in the book Directly openly right one passing reference to god and that's it Okay Esther i told you Does not mention god, but you can see god in every paragraph in the book of ester No question. No doubt about it You can read through the songs and you get done and you say that's just love poems That's really weird. God doesn't seem to have anything to do with that. How does that tie in to faith and god in our relationship with him Here's how it fits you have to read it in light of the whole bible You can't just take it out by itself you read it in light of the the whole of scriptures and you read it in light of genesis chapter two And when you think about genesis two god creates man and woman and he creates marriage The song of solemn is saying what god did way back there in genesis two in the beginning is a really good thing And yes, sin has twisted it and fouled it up and messed it up in a lot of different ways But it is fundamentally a very good thing so Three ideas here at the very end that you need to to take away reading it in light of genesis two It teaches that the ascetic approach to spirituality I didn't even finish that sentence on the slide that I finished it on the outline The ascetic approach to spirituality is not ideal Okay, it is not ideal ascetic meaning We are going to be monks We're not going to marry so You can trace this back to Bernard and Jerome and and origin and all these guys in the modern day Here's the reality. I have Family members catholic family members who are somewhat proud that they have a pastor in the family But they would be more proud if they had a priest in the family not just because they're catholic But because it's more serious to be a priest than a pastor because you're giving this up To follow god and you give that up to follow god and it's just it's better. It's more spiritual It's more holy. It's more godly and I'll just be honest the book of song of Solomon says bowl No, it's not Did you forget to read genesis two that god made this in the beginning and that it's a good thing and there's nothing Bad about it. There's nothing gross about it. There's nothing immoral about it Marriage as god designed it to be is a good thing It's not like well if you just if you're just not holy enough to go that route It's okay to go this route, but this would be much better Bologna the song of Solomon says that the ascetic approach to spirituality is not Ideal is not better than marrying number two The song teaches that heterosexual monogamy is the only proper place for sexual love And I realized that Solomon really blew this later in life but Solomon Is not our standard the wisdom of god recorded in scripture is the standard And anybody who wrote down scripture any part of the bible blew it and didn't live up to what they wrote Doesn't matter Peter messed up paul messed up doesn't matter The truth is the truth because god inspired these people to write it and that's true of the song And it teaches that heterosexual monogamy is the only proper place for sexual love That's clear and then number three it teaches the value of romance And it stresses The necessity of nurturing love dignifies romance and stresses the necessity of nurturing love And the reality is in this book the the people getting married and then the people who are married they do woo each other and they do Engage in romantic things and they do have to work at it Right, this is something our world needs to hear very very badly Our world sort of thinks that love is just something that happens to you You fall into it and you fall out of it and when you fall out of it, you just sort of Whatever and the song teaches in lots of different ways in the book that no you got to work at it You have to talk to each other you have to nurture this romance is important your relationship is important all of these things Take work. So it makes sense when you read it in light of genesis 2 and it fits in with the theology Of the scriptures. So here's the last thing i'll say just on a personal note if you want to study the book I would do one of two things I would get a really good study bible And it can help you in some of the notes in the translation of things and some of the confusing things the images When you read about goats and why are goats beautiful it can maybe explain some of that stuff or Get a commentary and this is a commentary. This is to me the best one i've read it's by a guy named dwayne garret and uh, dr garret was my old testament professor at seminary and uh, really really good and honest and blunt but very very helpful So if you want to study it, um, there are plenty of resources Uh to help you wrap your your brain around what's going on there. So there you go song a solomon next week We are out of wisdom We have all become wise over the last five wednesday nights And we move on to the major prophets. We'll look at the book of isiah And do our best to summarize a long and important book and our time together. So there you go. We're going to pray