How beautiful and how pleasing you are, my love, with your delights. Song of Songs 7:6 NIV
Have you ever asked yourself what the Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) is doing in the Bible? If you have, you are certainly not alone. The book has created problems for interpreters for about as far back as we can go. The answer that people have come to again and again is that it is an allegory for God’s love – for his people if you are a Jew, or for the church if you are a Christian.
The big problem with the allegorical interpretation is not that it is necessarily a wrong reading, but that the language of the book is so explicitly sexual. The book uses really, really sexual language when it is talking about the expression of love. It seems as though if the purpose is to talk about God’s love for his creatures, it would not need to be so intimately physical. For that reason, many modern interpreters say that the book is just love poetry, nothing more nor less.
But there lies the problem. What is a book of love poetry doing in the canon, the measuring rod for authentic faith in Yahweh? The Israelite community evidently recognized that there was something about faith, something of divine intent, in the book. What is it?
I want to suggest that it is a testimony to the fact that sexual differentiation was of great importance to God in creation. Paganism, ancient and modern, believes that sex is the energy of the cosmos, the power by which all things came to be. That’s not true; sexuality is an aspect of creation, but it has nothing to do with the Creator. If that’s true, why did the Creator do this to us? Why did he make it so that men want women’s bodies, and women want men’s bodies? Why is pornography so addictive? It is because he made us to find ourselves in another, another who is like us, but not us. He made us to know that true ecstasy is not to be found in ourselves. Sexual desire is thus an avenue to a kind of self-understanding that makes it possible to surrender to divine love. This is so because in God’s world there is no divide between the physical and the spiritual. So it is, that when a man, wholly and unreservedly committed to a likewise committed woman, takes her hand and says, “Come away, my darling, my love,” God smiles.
Called To Be Transformed 