Beloved 10: The Wedding Night
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Song 4:1-5:1
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Bye, kids!
Good morning, everyone!
It's good to see you this morning. Whether you're a longtime member of the Eastern Hills family, a first-time guest, or joining us online, thank you for being here as we gather to worship the Lord together.
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Before we turn our attention to the message, I'd like to recognize a group of people who make a tremendous difference in the life of our church: our Student Ministry volunteers. Ministry to teenagers takes patience, consistency, and a willingness to show up week after week, and these adults do exactly that. They invest in students, listen to them, encourage them, pray for them, and point them to Christ. Some lifelong friendships and some life-changing conversations begin because faithful adults are willing to spend time with teenagers. So to all of our Student Ministry volunteers, thank you for the way you serve and for the impact you're making.
Announcements
Announcements
If you lead one of our Bible studies, whether on Sundays or during the week, you (and your spouse, if applicable) are invited to the Bible Study Leaders Appreciation Banquet on Sunday night, September 12 from 6 to 8 pm in Miller Hall. If you serve in another administrative capacity in your Bible Study class, such as attendance or managing fellowships or greeting visitors, then you are invited as well. We will be finishing up any conversation we need to have about Connect Groups, and celebrating the launch of this shift in how we strive to deepen relationships in the church and to the church. Please let us know you’re coming by emailing Riley, Shanna, Rebecca, or me that you’re going to be there. Thanks!
Every September and October, we take up the New Mexico State Mission Offering to support some of the ministries of the Baptist Convention of New Mexico. We’ll talk more about those throughout these next two months. Our goal for this offering is $15K. Start praying now about how God would have you give to support the work of the BCNM in a special way this year.
Opening
Opening
Last week in our series Beloved, we arrived at the wedding day.
We watched as the Beloved was escorted to Jerusalem in Solomon's royal palanquin, protected by his mighty men. She was honored by his preparations, valued by his generosity, and welcomed by a bridegroom whose heart overflowed with joy. We saw that the wedding day wasn't merely a celebration of what their love had been up to that point. It was a declaration of what that love would continue to be in the years ahead: a love that approaches, that protects, that values, and that publicizes itself.
And now the story naturally moves from the wedding day to the wedding night.
Now, I'll just acknowledge right up front that whenever the church comes to a passage like this, people tend to respond in one of two ways. Some people become a little uncomfortable because they aren't quite sure how openly the Bible speaks about this subject. Other people are mostly curious to see how in the world the pastor is going to handle it.
The truth is that Song of Songs chapter 4 contains some of the most intimate poetry anywhere in Scripture. And because of that, Christians throughout history have sometimes been tempted to skip over it, explain it away, or turn it entirely into an allegory.
But God put this book in His Word for a reason.
This chapter reminds us that marriage was God's idea. Romance was God's idea. Physical intimacy within marriage was God's idea. These things are not embarrassing accidents of human existence. They are good gifts from a good Creator who designed husband and wife to enjoy deep, joyful, covenantal oneness together.
At the same time, as we've seen throughout this series, every good gift points beyond itself to something even greater. Marriage isn't ultimate. It is designed to reflect a greater reality. The love between husband and wife is intended to give us a glimpse, however imperfect, of the covenant love between Christ and His church.
So please open your Bibles or your Bible apps to Song of Songs chapter 4, and stand as you are able in honor of the reading of God's Word as I read our focal passage this morning: Song of Songs 4:1 through 5:1.
1 How beautiful you are, my darling. How very beautiful! Behind your veil, your eyes are doves. Your hair is like a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead. 2 Your teeth are like a flock of newly shorn sheep coming up from washing, each one bearing twins, and none has lost its young. 3 Your lips are like a scarlet cord, and your mouth is lovely. Behind your veil, your brow is like a slice of pomegranate. 4 Your neck is like the tower of David, constructed in layers. A thousand shields are hung on it— all of them shields of warriors. 5 Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies. 6 Until the day breaks and the shadows flee, I will make my way to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. 7 You are absolutely beautiful, my darling; there is no imperfection in you. 8 Come with me from Lebanon, my bride; come with me from Lebanon! Descend from the peak of Amana, from the summit of Senir and Hermon, from the dens of the lions, from the mountains of the leopards. 9 You have captured my heart, my sister, my bride. You have captured my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace. 10 How delightful your caresses are, my sister, my bride. Your caresses are much better than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume than any balsam. 11 Your lips drip sweetness like the honeycomb, my bride. Honey and milk are under your tongue. The fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon. 12 My sister, my bride, you are a locked garden— a locked garden and a sealed spring. 13 Your branches are a paradise of pomegranates with choicest fruits; henna with nard, 14 nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all the trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all the best spices. 15 You are a garden spring, a well of flowing water streaming from Lebanon. 16 Awaken, north wind; come, south wind. Blow on my garden, and spread the fragrance of its spices. Let my love come to his garden and eat its choicest fruits. 1 I have come to my garden—my sister, my bride. I gather my myrrh with my spices. I eat my honeycomb with my honey. I drink my wine with my milk. Eat, friends! Drink, be intoxicated with caresses!
PRAYER
Something that I’ve heard many times throughout this series is this: “I wasn’t looking forward to this series, because… name your reason.” As I said earlier, there are many who just avoid the Song because of its subject matter. We approach the Song thinking that it’s really just about sex, so there’s not a lot of spiritual depth for us to get out of it. But almost universally, folks have followed that up with, “But I’ve really gotten a lot out of it,” and expressing their gratitude for tackling it. I’m glad that it’s been a useful and interesting series. I’ve learned a LOT. Today is our tenth message of fifteen, so we’re about two-thirds done with the series, even though we’re only halfway done with the book. Thank you for sticking with it, and being faithful.
Now, before we start looking at this focal passage in more detail this morning, we need to deal with a couple of things, so I’m going to do so directly:
First: This morning’s passage is, as you will see, about sexual expression in marriage. To be perfectly clear: God created sex to be enjoyed, yes, but as the Creator, it is HIS right to declare its proper use. And He has said in the Scriptures that sex is only righteously engaged in by a husband and a wife in a biblical marriage. That’s it. It wasn’t made for any other context, and every other context is to some extent an abuse or an abomination of this good gift. I say this because as I speak about sex during this message, I don’t want us with any wrong info in our thinking. I’m referring to sex as God intended it, not how we’ve warped it.
Second: We don’t leave our faith at the bedroom door, so to speak. In fact, sexual expression in marriage can actually be used by God to draw us closer to Him. Gary Thomas said this really well in his book Sacred Marriage:
It might sound shocking, but it’s true: God doesn’t turn his eyes when a married couple goes to bed. It only stands to reason that we shouldn’t turn our eyes from God when we share intimate moments with our spouse.
—Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?
And third and lastly: You might be carrying around hurt or guilt or shame because of something sexual in your past: sexual activity, or perhaps even abuse or exploitation. If you’ve got hurt from past experiences, let me just say that I’m sorry for your pain—that is really, really hard. But God sees, knows, and cares for you. You are not alone. He can heal your hurting heart. But also, you might be carrying a lot of guilt about past sexual choices, or even just guilt because of how we’ve talked about sex in the church—I pray that today might help you be set free from that in the power of God’s Spirit. Understand that Paul said:
10 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, but worldly grief produces death.
You can repent of your past choices and turn to righteousness in Christ and live! Worldly grief produces death. Because of this, guilt and fear can sometimes impact our view of sex when we actually get married: We’ve trained ourselves so completely that sex is “bad” that we can’t stop feeling guilty about it or afraid of it when the right time comes.
I decided to say these things up front so I don’t have to address them while we’re looking at the passage.
Remember that this passage is poetic and is about an idealized romantic love using idealized figures. Though we can speak of them as real figures (like we do when speaking of any story), this doesn’t speak about particular people. And in its poetry, it is intentionally two things: mysterious and chaste. Much like the Beloved at the start of this passage, the meaning is veiled through imagery. It’s not explicit, as much as we’d like it to be. And while some studies might get into all of that nitty-gritty, I’m not going to. I’ll be clear about a couple of the metaphors here, but I’m not going to attempt to address all of the word pictures, for two reasons: I can’t, and to some extent, I won’t. This isn’t the context for an in-depth consideration of whether this or that image is about particular body part or whatever.
There are three “movements” toward one another that I see in this passage: the first is the Lover’s admiration of his Beloved’s beauty on their wedding day.
1: Her beauty (4:1-7)
1: Her beauty (4:1-7)
Guys, I open this point with a question for you: Have any of you ever given your wife a compliment that just landed wrong? I started creating some examples, but didn’t want to get any of us in hot water with our wives for something foolish we’ve said in the past. You’re welcome.
Well, I would suggest that you NOT use any of the compliments that the Lover pays to the Beloved as he extols her beauty here, because I don’t think they would land particularly well today.
I’m not going to reread verses 1 through 7 here, because of how I’m going to go through them. These seven verses are framed with bookends that tell us what the section is about: Her beauty. Using his favorite pet name for the Beloved again, “my darling,” the Lover declares twice in verse 1 how beautiful she is.
There’s a key appears twice in verses 1-7 that tells us that where we are in the sequence of things: She still has her veil on. I would suggest that they are actually still in the wedding ceremony as verse 1 starts (I’ll explain why in the next point). In the ancient Near East, respectable women didn’t normally wear veils. Remember back in chapter 1, when she wanted to go and see him in the pasture where he was shepherding his flock of sheep? She didn’t want to wear a veil and be thought a prostitute. But here, she’s veiled because veils were only worn for very special occasions, such as one’s wedding. The veil stayed in place until the couple entered the nuptial chamber later on. Solomon mentions her veil once in verse 1, and again in verse 3.
This is the one section where the imagery isn’t really difficult guesswork. The metaphors sound really strange to our ears, because 1) this is poetry; and 2) not only are we in a different culture in a different land, but a different time and a different language. We just don’t speak like this anymore. We may not be able to say exactly what he means, but we can make pretty reasonable inferences.
"Your eyes are doves.” Her eyes likely make him feel peaceful or tranquil. We saw him pay her this same compliment in 1:15.
“Your hair is like a flock of goats streaming down from Mount Gilead.” This is what you ladies want to hear, right? The goats of Israel were black, and if you can imagine a large flock of goats coming down from a mountain at a distance, they would look like they are flowing down, perhaps like a woman’s long hair as its curls cascade over her shoulder.
Verse 2 was a great compliment at the time, but nowadays would not land particularly well...you guys can try it if you want to: “You know what I love about you, babe?… you have all your teeth, and they’re basically clean and white.” A big deal for a culture and time without our dental technology.
Her lips are red like a “scarlet cord,” possibly bringing up imagery of the cord that marked off Rahab’s house from the destruction of Jericho back in Joshua 2. Regardless, they are noticeable. The mention of her mouth is interesting. In Hebrew, it’s not the usual word for the mouth itself—it’s the word denoting that the mouth is the organ that produces speech. So not only is her mouth visually striking, but the words that come from it are appealing as well, reflecting what Peter said in 1 Peter 3:
3 Don’t let your beauty consist of outward things like elaborate hairstyles and wearing gold jewelry or fine clothes, 4 but rather what is inside the heart—the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.
Her “brow” (CSB) could be her forehead, her temples, or even her cheekbones. Most scholars believe that the reference is to the color of a pomegranate’s skin—that her skin has a healthy pink hue to it—rather than the fruit inside.
In verse 4, her neck is compared to the tower of David. Likely the picture is one of stateliness—she holds her head high in regal fashion, similar to another regal compliment that he gave her in chapter 1, verse 9:
9 I compare you, my darling, to a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots.
She likely had several necklaces on, which likened in appearance with decorative shields on the outside of a tower.
Verses 5 speaks of her breasts as “two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies.” I mentioned the lilies back in 2:16, that the word appears in the Song eight times, but in different ways each time. This image we have to take an true guess at. I don’t think any two commentators agreed on their interpretations. He has considered her face: eyes, hair, mouth, brow, neck, and only now considers her breasts. My opinion is that she’s still fully clothed, and that her wedding gown covers her, and so his consideration is merely of their shape or again, how their appearance makes him feel.
Some think that he still refers to her breasts in verse 6. Notice what he says:
6 Until the day breaks and the shadows flee, I will make my way to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense.
We saw this phrasing back in 2:17. Then, it meant “until the right day, and until the shadow of sin is gone,” he would go back from where he had come. Now, the Lover speaks to his plans for the night. Probably the reference to two hills here related to his earlier reference in verse 5, calling them by the names of the scents that preceded the Beloved on her way up to Jerusalem (3:6, last week), but maybe not.
He ends with another declaration of how beautiful he finds her:
7 You are absolutely beautiful, my darling; there is no imperfection in you.
Granted, these are idealized people in the mind of Solomon. But there’s something to learn here. It’s not just that the Lover thought that she was beautiful. He thought she was perfect. None of us are perfect, I know. But that’s not even the point: She was perfect because in his eyes, her beauty set the standard for what is beautiful. This is an important thing to cultivate in our marriages, because comparison is the enemy of intimacy.
In Daniel Akin’s excellent commentary on the Song, he writes this:
Don’t cohabitate. Don’t fornicate. Don’t look at pornography. Don’t create a standard of beauty that is not your spouse and then compare your spouse to the standard of beauty. Have your spouse be your standard of beauty...If she is his standard of beauty, then there is no flaw in her because she looks like her. He is not comparing her to other women, and the same is true for both husbands and wives. Your standard of beauty is your spouse. There is not a standard of beauty that you evaluate your spouse by...The standard is always your spouse.
—Daniel Akin, Exalting Jesus in the Song of Solomon
We need to understand that our appetites can be cultivated. This is why Solomon wrote in Proverbs 5:
18 Let your fountain be blessed, and take pleasure in the wife of your youth. 19 A loving deer, a graceful doe— let her breasts always satisfy you; be lost in her love forever.
And the delight that the Lover has in his Beloved points us to something even deeper. We know that none of us are perfect. But there is a real Bridegroom who speaks this way over His bride and means it: Jesus. He doesn’t ignore our imperfections or pretend that they don’t exist, church. Instead, He has dealt with them Himself so that we can be seen as perfect because He is.
27 He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless.
This is our hope as believers—that Christ loved us so much that He died in order to present us to Himself in splendor, spotless and blameless… to present His bride to Himself spotless and blameless—HE moved toward US to make us beautiful. And this brings us to the second movement of this poem. The Beloved is no longer merely a beautiful woman. In verses 8 through 11, she is identified by a new and precious title: His bride.
2: His bride (4:8-11)
2: His bride (4:8-11)
Throughout the Song, we’ve seen the Lover refer to his Beloved in epithets of endearment. But this section is the first time he calls her “bride.” This is why I said earlier that I believe the first movement of today’s passage is still the wedding ceremony: her title changes, and he will intentionally use it five more times before we’re done today, having never done so before. Look:
8 Come with me from Lebanon, my bride; come with me from Lebanon! Descend from the peak of Amana, from the summit of Senir and Hermon, from the dens of the lions, from the mountains of the leopards. 9 You have captured my heart, my sister, my bride. You have captured my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace. 10 How delightful your caresses are, my sister, my bride. Your caresses are much better than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume than any balsam. 11 Your lips drip sweetness like the honeycomb, my bride. Honey and milk are under your tongue. The fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.
If we say that the first section the Lover moved toward the Beloved because of her beauty, in this section is the invitation for her to move toward him. There are two things we need to really consider in this part of the passage.
Verse 8 can be confusing. Did they get married, and then go to Lebanon (the northern forested wilderness)? While they were there, did she go climb mountains? And why suddenly is he referring to lions and leopards, symbols of danger and terror, as if she was spending time with them?
I believe that this invitation from the Lover is for her to leave her past behind her, and to join him in their future. He doesn’t say that he is in Lebanon. He invites her to come with him FROM Lebanon—to come down from where she was unreachable, where she was walled in and guarded by strong figures. That past is behind her, and now she can move toward the man who has become her husband. She has become his bride. There is no longer any reason for them to hold back.
As I said earlier, sometimes it’s hard to make such a monumental shift in our thinking. I did a wedding last night. At the moment I pronounced the bride and groom husband and wife, both of their identities changed in relation to each other, and to everyone else. What was previously outside the bounds of propriety changed in an instant to being right and good.
But beyond the physical, a very definitive picture of that identity shift last night is that she took his last name, and they became their own family unit. I wonder if most brides don’t struggle in the days following their wedding to come to grips with how drastically their lives have changed.
I don’t know if our heroine’s life could have changed any more drastically! The Beloved in the Song has gone from being a working girl on a family vineyard to being the bride of the king. And the king gently invites her to leave her past behind, because he is fully and completely hers—she has captured his heart with a single glance.
This brings us to the other thing we need to understand here that sounds very strange to our ears. He calls her “my sister, my bride,” four of the six times bride appears in this passage. He’s not saying that she is his sister. In ancient Israel, husbands often referred to their wives as their sisters as well as a term of endearment. It was a reference to their affection for each other, because the brother-sister bond was the closest bond of friendship that a man and a woman could have between them.
This is one aspect that has been made powerfully real in Christian marriage if we keep the right perspective. Melanie is my bride. But in Christ, she is first and foremost my sister, because our relationships with God are most important. When we got married, we didn’t lose our identities: we gained one. Therefore, we have a responsibility in how we relate to one another that the roles of husband and wife are an addition to. I should treat my wife like the daughter of the King that she is. And she should treat me as His son. For example, Paul wrote in Romans 12:
10 Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters. Take the lead in honoring one another.
Back in our text in the Song, we are actually seeing something from the first chapter come full circle here in verses 10 and 11. Remember that the word for “your caresses” in the Hebrew is literally, “your loves.” Back in verse 2, the Beloved had said:
2 Oh, that he would kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your caresses are more delightful than wine.
Remember how she desired him, and not just physically. Now he returns the sentiment. He’s intoxicated by her. But whereas she could only long for his kisses at the beginning of the Song, here they are able to kiss deeply, passionately, and for as long as they’d like to. He says that “honey and milk” are under her tongue. The imagery here is almost certainly a reference to the Promised Land, and the fruitfulness, desirability, and rest that it means to Israel:
8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will bring us into this land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and give it to us.
She has responded positively to his invitation to come with him into their new life. Their relationship has changed. Their identities have changed. The future is new and bright and exciting!
But again, marriage can be an illustration of profound truth because it points beyond itself. In many ways, what we’re seeing here in the Song is a reflection of God’s invitation to us.
According to Scripture, God calls us—invites us—into relationship with Him. Our loving God made us for relationship with Himself, but we rebel in sin and reject His love. But still He calls, still He invites us to look to Jesus and be saved:
14 “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
Jesus was lifted up on the cross and died, taking our sin and our shame, and rose again from the grave, so that if we believe in Him, we are no longer condemned, but are justified before God and have the promise of eternal life. When we believe in Jesus, we become a part of the church, also called the bride of Christ, united with Him. In a way similar to the Lover’s invitation to the Beloved, we’re invited to leave behind our old life and walk in a new one with our King.
And so we come to the final movement of this passage: where the two become one.
3: Becoming one (4:12-5:1)
3: Becoming one (4:12-5:1)
It would be easy for us to take this last part of our passage today and run with it. After all, the poetic language that we find at the end of chapter 4 and into the beginning of chapter 5 is, well… sensual. But all that really means is that there is an appeal to the physical senses within the language. Look at it:
12 My sister, my bride, you are a locked garden— a locked garden and a sealed spring. 13 Your branches are a paradise of pomegranates with choicest fruits; henna with nard, 14 nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all the trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all the best spices. 15 You are a garden spring, a well of flowing water streaming from Lebanon.
Again, we could make all kinds of interpretive guesses about the imagery here, but this isn’t the right context for that. John Macarthur wrote a great series of articles on the Song of Songs where he speaks to this passage:
Bill: Don’t quote this on screen.
Solomon thus describes his bride as a locked, gated garden. To him, she is a pleasant place full of charming fragrances and soothing substances. The word-picture he paints is beautiful on every level. The details ("choice fruits, henna with nard plants, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon . . . trees of frankincense, myrrh," etc.) may or may not have specific meanings that would have been known to the bride.
All a careful interpreter can say with certainty is that Solomon finds his bride pleasurable to all his sensory perceptions. He therefore likens her to the most pleasant and beautiful imagery he can think of—ointments and fragrances and visual delights—all concentrated together in one well-cultivated spot. A garden. The garden is "locked," which, again, underscores the intimate privacy of pure marital love. Nothing requires the exegete to take it any further than that. Scripture itself doesn't go further than that.
—John Macarthur (1939-2025), The Rape of Solomon’s Song, Part 2 (https://www.gty.org/articles/A397/the-rape-of-solomons-song-part-2, accessed August 30, 2026)
With deference, I think the one thing he fails to mention here is that since she is a locked garden, then there’s a image of purity—there has been no one else who has had access to her, either physically or emotionally. She has waited to give the key to her heart, her body, and her life to this man, her shepherd-king.
The imagery is also Edenic: It takes us back to the original Garden. One could never expect to have this broad of an assortment of fruit and flowers in a single garden in reality. This points us back to the fact that the Lover sees her as perfect, complete, without flaw. He is completely and totally delighted by her. In this, the idealized Solomon follows the advice of the actual Solomon in Proverbs:
15 Drink water from your own cistern, water flowing from your own well. 16 Should your springs flow in the streets, streams in the public squares? 17 They should be for you alone and not for you to share with strangers. 18 Let your fountain be blessed, and take pleasure in the wife of your youth.
(we looked at 18 earlier)
The crux, and the exact center of the Song (111 verse before and 111 verses after) is 4:16-5:1, where now she issues her own invitation to her husband, because the time for awakening love has come:
Bill: 5:1a
16 Awaken, north wind; come, south wind. Blow on my garden, and spread the fragrance of its spices. Let my love come to his garden and eat its choicest fruits. 1a I have come to my garden—my sister, my bride. I gather my myrrh with my spices. I eat my honeycomb with my honey. I drink my wine with my milk.
“Awaken” in verse 16 is the positive of the “do not awaken love” instructions that the Beloved has issued to the young women of Jerusalem (2:7, 3:5). The time is right; the day has come. The simple imagery here is that: 1) She was a locked garden; 2) She invites him to come to his garden and partake of its fruit; 3) He does so, but now he also says that the garden and all its delights are his as well. Each reference that he makes in verse 1 of chapter 5 reflects some aspect of the poetic imagery we have read in this passage. The point for us this morning isn’t what the imagery says, but what the movement toward each other means.
This is the consummation: the coming together of the Lover and the Beloved in marital oneness. I can’t honestly say that physical consummation isn’t in view here (which it is), but it’s so much more than that. She’s giving not merely her body to her husband, but all that she is in a pursuit of oneness with him.
Marital sexual expression is so much more than the physical, because spouses are more than lovers, just as the Beloved is more than his bride, but her sister as well. Not only that, but sex is a decidedly spiritual thing. We are not flesh-wrapped souls, where what we do with our bodies has no bearing on us otherwise. We ensouled bodies. Remember that God made Adam from the dust of the earth and then breathed the breath of life into him (Genesis 2:7). Yes, these bodies wear out, and we look forward to our new bodies… but we will still have bodies in heaven. This is why our sexuality is so important. Paul gave a negative example in 1 Corinthians 6:
15 Don’t you know that your bodies are a part of Christ’s body? So should I take a part of Christ’s body and make it part of a prostitute? Absolutely not! 16 Don’t you know that anyone joined to a prostitute is one body with her? For Scripture says, The two will become one flesh. 17 But anyone joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. 18 Flee sexual immorality! Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body. 19 Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought at a price. So glorify God with your body.
And this brings us to the last reflection that this passage of the Song points to: not in a sexual way, but a spiritual way, we are united with Christ when we believe in Him. We become His brothers and sisters through adoption, His body in the church, and His beloved bride together. This is what it means to be a Christian—that Jesus is ours, and we are His.
Closing
Closing
The closing half of verse 1 is the narrator, or the young women of Jerusalem, celebrating the union of the happy couple. It’s not that they are in the room watching. But in a way, we could suppose that though God is not mentioned directly in the Song, He sees everything. He doesn’t turn His head when the Lover and the Beloved go into the bedroom. Perhaps this is an echo of God’s own joy in marital oneness:
Bill: 5:1b
1b Eat, friends! Drink, be intoxicated with caresses!
Something to celebrate.
Salvation
Repentance
Baptism
Church Membership
Prayer
Giving
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Neighboring:
Today while at my work we had a nice older gentleman come in and my coworker and I were all talking about God and how he's the reason we are here and he's our supplier.
Bible reading - in the app or website
No Pastor’s Study tonight: Deacon candidate examinations for Roger Cook and Woody Weed starting at 4:30. Ordained men are invited to come and be a part.
Prayer Meeting
Deacons are receiving nominations for the Educational Ministry Group Leader until next Sunday.
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
25 Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation about Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept silent for long ages 26 but now revealed and made known through the prophetic Scriptures, according to the command of the eternal God to advance the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles—27 to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ—to him be the glory forever! Amen.
