Ryken The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6256-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

We live in a world where sexuality is ruined by sin, its beauty obscured by our brokenness. We need a divine vision for the way love was meant to be, with a gospel that offers forgiveness for sin and grace to live in the way that God has made us to be. In the Song of Songs, we encounter a love story that is part of the greatest love story ever told. Philip Ryken walks through this biblical love poem verse by verse, reflecting on what the Bible says about God's design for love, intimacy, and sexuality and offering insights into not only human relationships but also our relationship to God himself-learning more about the One who has loved us with an everlasting love.

Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ryken, Philip Graham

Leseproben

Prologue

I Love You Always, Forever

The woman slipped into the pew in front of me and sat down, alone, just a few minutes before the worship service began. I had never seen her before, although at College Church in Wheaton it is common to see people with Down syndrome. She stood up for the opening hymn and so together we sang, “Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of all nature, Son of God and Son of Man! Thee will I cherish, thee will I honor, thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown.”

What the woman did next caught me by surprise. She put down her worship folder, a little impatiently, as if somehow it was in the way. Then she sang the rest of the hymn from memory and at the same time used her hands to express its words in American Sign Language. She wanted to praise God with her whole person, body as well as soul.

As I watched, the woman’s gestures made the words of the hymn come alive. I found myself walking through fair meadows and spring woodlands, or looking up at “the twinkling, starry host.” Most of all, I could see the face of my beautiful Savior, Jesus Christ, whose hands were pierced for my transgressions.

As my spiritual sister gave glory and honor to the “Lord of all nations,” her face was radiant, her visible words had a graceful beauty, and I had the unmistakable impression that she was deeply in love. Jesus Christ was the predominant passion of this woman’s life. She was not “disabled,” as some would say, but divinely empowered to worship. Nor was she single, as I had assumed from the absence of a ring on her finger. Rather, she was engaged to be married, for the beauty of her worship came from a heart that was betrothed to the Son of God.

This is the relationship that God wants to have with every one of us, male or female, married or single. He wants us to have an exclusive relationship, like the intense affection a bride has for the man she is preparing to marry, with the abiding security that comes from a groom who promises to be faithful unto death.

Introducing the Song of Songs

One of the best places to see a passionate, permanent love relationship is in the Bible’s most famous love song—the ideal romance that we read about in the Song of Songs.

Admittedly, most books are easier to write about than the Song of Songs. To begin with, it is hard to know exactly how to connect the book’s message with the life of King Solomon, who may or may not have been its author but is clearly mentioned in the first verse. Also, the Song of Songs is unashamed to talk about human sexuality, which some people find a little embarrassing. The book is “naked” in ways that some Christians wish they could cover up. Then there is the vexing question of how to relate the book’s human relationship to the love that God wants to share with his people.

In spite of these difficulties, I have wanted to teach this book for a long time. One of the first sermons I ever preached came from chapter 2, with its thrilling exclamations: “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (v. 16); “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love” (v. 4). I got more serious about studying the Song of Songs when I visited the famous Bodmer Library on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The Bodmer boasts one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of ancient religious texts, biblical manuscripts, and other famous books. It is perhaps the best place in the world to see the religious and intellectual history of humanity.

There I saw a stunning manuscript of the Song of Songs from the early Middle Ages—the seventh century, as I recall. The colorful hand lettering was beautiful, but what really captured my attention was the expansive white space around the text. Obviously, the text had been copied by someone who knew how to read poetry. The words were not crammed onto the page the way they are in a two-column Bible but allowed to breathe. The scribe wanted each line of love poetry to be savored before moving on to the next. Seeing the book written out as a beautiful love poem awakened my desire to study it and then to preach it.

Not long afterward, I read the manuscript for a commentary on the Song of Songs by my friend Iain Duguid, who studied Old Testament at Cambridge before becoming my pastor when I was a theology student at Oxford. Professor Duguid has an exceptional ability to understand the Old Testament in connection to Christ and then apply its gospel message for everyday Christianity. The more I read his commentary—to which this little book is deeply indebted—the more I wanted to share the love of loves that we encounter in the Song of Songs.

Our culture needs this book. As a college president, I often hear students ask for more guidance in understanding human sexuality. They are not just looking for a list of biblical do’s and don’t’s (although such a list may have its place); what they want to understand is the stunning beauty of God’s design and his higher purpose for our romantic relationships. We live in a world where sexuality is ruined by sin, its beauty obscured by our brokenness. We need a divine vision for the way sex was meant to be, with a gospel that offers forgiveness for sexual sin and an empowering grace to live into the sexuality that God wants to give us. We also need a deeper understanding of the intimacy that God wants to have with each one of us and how that intimacy relates to our singleness or to our status as husbands and wives, as the case may be.

The best way to capture God’s vision for anything is simply to work through some relevant part of the Bible, letting God’s Spirit set the agenda through Scripture. When we turn to the Song of Songs, we encounter a love story told in the form of a love song that is part of the greatest love story ever told.

The Way We Were and Were Meant to Be

A good place to begin is by setting the Song of Songs in its wider context. I do not intend to treat the book like an allegory, in which everything in the book stands for something else, and in which we start coming up with meanings that the author never intended. But I do want to be faithful to God’s purposes for marriage and romance, which the Bible consistently regards as mysteries that point beyond themselves to God’s everlasting love. Whenever we talk about the way that a husband loves his wife, we are never simply talking about marriage; we are always talking about Christ’s great love for the church (see Eph. 5:25–32). The sexual union of man and wife is not an allegory, strictly speaking, but it is analogous to the spiritual union that God shares with his people.

Thus the Bible repeatedly uses marriage as a metaphor for the divine-human love relationship. The Song of Songs becomes an important part of this pattern by putting the romance of our redemption into poetry and song. We might think of this book as the soundtrack for our love relationship with the living God.

The love story begins with the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve. It was not good for the man to be alone. In order to fulfill God’s purpose in the world—and for his own well-being—Adam needed an equal partner and complementary companion. So God made a woman. And then, as the father of the bride, he presented her to the man. When he saw her, Adam suddenly became a lyrical poet:

This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man. (Gen. 2:23)

The first human words in recorded history were expressed in the form of a love song, which the Bible immediately places in the wider context of marriage: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Forsaking all other human relationships—including the precious parental bond that first brought them into the world—a husband and wife are bound together in an exclusive union that is secured by promises of abiding love.

We are so familiar with this passage that sometimes we fail to see how astonishing it is. The Bible begins with the story of creation. God has been at work making a universe. Light shines in the darkness. Stars are scattered across immensities of space. Galaxies spin into place. Then, against the vast backdrop of a cosmos that is consecrated for the worship of God, we are introduced to one man and one woman who are joined in one marriage.

Adam and Eve are so small and insignificant that they are beneath anyone’s notice—unless somehow their mutual love relationship is at the very heart of what God is doing in the entire universe. Ray Ortlund writes:

The attention of the text shifts from the heavens and the earth coming together in cosmic order to a man and a woman coming together in earthly marriage. . . . There it is, this peculiar thing we call marriage, tenderly portrayed in its humble reality and delicate innocence against the enormous backdrop of the creation.1

In some mysterious way, with the union of this man and this woman, the curtain rises on the redemptive purposes of God.

What we discover as the story unfolds is that the one-flesh relationship of Adam and Eve is the divinely ordained pattern for marriage and...