Song of Songs 8:5-14
Michael Lawrence
June 30, 2024
Hinson Baptist Church Sermons
Love Songs - Love’s Strength
Many of you will remember the story of Timothy Treadwell. That name may not ring a bell, but if I tell you it's the story of Grizzly Man, he might ring a bell. Timothy Treadwell loved bears. I mean, he loved them. He loved them so much that his love led him, I believe it was up to Alaska to actually live with grizzly bears, to try to get as close to them as he could. He loved them so much. Sadly, his love was unrequited, as the objects of his love killed him and his girlfriend. Fewer of you will be familiar with the story of David Windsor. David was born to a life of incredible privilege. But his love for a twice-divorced woman named Wallace led the man publicly known as King Edward the Eighth to abdicate the British throne, to marry the love of his life. Two very different stories that at the heart of each was a great love. And this is how strong love is. Love will lead us to do crazy things, like try to live with grizzly bears. It led at least one man to do an extraordinarily costly thing, like give up the throne of Britain. We've come this morning to the end of our study of Song of Songs, a book of Hebrew love songs written sometime between 500 and 300 BC after Israel had returned from exile. The book, as if you've been following along with us, you've noticed the book has explored the love between a man and a woman, the power of love, the delight of love, and therefore the caution that we should bring to matters of the heart. Love is not a hobby. Love is not just a toy that we play with. These poems, as we've gone through the book, have been actually quite realistic about the perils of love. But throughout, they've held out the promise that love really can lead us to the intimacy that we all long for, intimacy with the spouse, perhaps, but certainly intimacy with God. So as we come to the conclusion of our study in Song of Songs, I want you to consider your love. I want you to consider where your love is leading you and whether it's strong enough to get you where you desire to go. Turn with me, if you would, to Song of Songs, Chapter 8. It's the last chapter of Song of Songs. Verse 5 is where we're going to be this morning. We're going to begin with Verse 5 and go all the way to the end of the chapter. If you're using one of the Bibles we've provided, this is found on page 599, 599, Song of Songs, Chapter 8. We're going to look at verses 5 to 14. But I want to start by reading the last verse that we looked at last week, verse 4 of Chapter 8. So this is Chapter 8, verse 4. "Young women of Jerusalem, I charge you. Do not stir up or awaken love until the appropriate time." The main body of the book of Song of Songs ends with the third and final repetition of the verse that I just read, the reframe that we've seen again and again cautioning us against stirring up love until the appropriate time, until it's ready, until we're ready for it. Now the reason for that warning, thrice repeated, has been implied throughout this book and I've tried to point it out. But in the conclusion, we're finally told why, explicitly. And it's this, love is the strongest force in the universe. So don't play around with it. Don't wake it up until it's ready. Love is the strongest force in the universe. It leads us and it binds us to the object of our desire for better or worse, whether that object is worthy or unworthy. Here's what I want to convince you of this morning. Only God's love is strong enough to deliver love's desire. Only God's love is strong enough to deliver love's desire. Why do I say that? Because ultimately love's desire is to know the source of love. And the source of love is God himself. Our text is going to break out into three sections and the longest is going to be the first. So don't get nervous. The first point is a long one, but the next two will not be. So just like relax. All right? Well, let's look at this passage. First, let's consider love's strength. Love's strength. Look there in verse five. Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning on the one she loves? I awakened you under the apricot tree. There your mother conceived you there. She conceived and gave you birth. Set me as a seal on your heart. As a seal on your arm, for love is as strong as death. Jealousy is as unrelenting as she all. Love's flames are fiery flames and almighty flame. A huge torrent cannot extinguish love. Rivers cannot sweep it away. If a man were to give all his wealth for love, it would be utterly scorned. So the poem, this last poem in the book, opens with the chorus of the young women who we've seen before asking this question in verse five. Who is this coming up from the wilderness? Now, that question is actually a callback to chapter three, verse six. It's been asked before. The time it was asked before, who's this coming up from the wilderness? It turns out it was Solomon's bed coming up from the wilderness. It was kind of gross. And it was surrounded by warriors, grosser still, because it was coming to take another woman for his harem. But this time is different. This question is being asked, who is this coming up from the wilderness? It's the woman herself. And she is leaning on the arm of her lover. Verse five is setting up like a homecoming scene for us. That sense of coming home is actually strengthened by the imagery that she uses in the second half of verse five, as she talks about waking the man up in the place where he was conceived. That also is another callback. She first introduces the idea of this going to the place where someone was conceived in chapter three, verse four. This whole section, and I won't be able to call them all out, but this entire section from verse five to the end is filled with callbacks. It's kind of letting us know we've reached the conclusion as the author picks up various images and themes introduced earlier and begins to tie it all together. She invokes the image of the apricot tree, which comes from chapter two, verse three. She references a mother and the place where the mother conceived someone. And this time it's his mother, not hers. So there's all this reference going on, but the key thing is to recognize that first thing that I mentioned. The first time we heard the question, who is this coming up? It was Solomon, but now it's her. A contrast is being drawn. He came to take someone with force, if necessary. Now the woman is coming, and she's not coming to take anything. She's come to ask for something. And what she asks for is a commitment from her lover. This is the language of chapter eight, verse six. The first part of verse six. Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm. Now in our culture, the seal of romantic love is a wedding ring. That's what you exchange in a wedding. What does a wedding ring do? I'm wearing one. A lot of you here are wearing one. Well, it takes your commitment public. Everybody can see your wedding ring. And it reminds you of the commitment that you've made in this relationship, because, I mean, how many times a day do you look at your hands? Probably a thousand, right? So you're constantly reminded, even after you stop feeling the ring, you continue to see the ring and are reminded of the commitments that you made. She, in verse six, is asking for a wedding ring, and the commitment that comes with it. And she's doing it using the language of Deuteronomy chapter six, verses four to nine. Let me just read that to you. Deuteronomy six, verses four to nine, one of the most famous passages in the Old Testament, we think of it as the Shema that begins here, O Israel, right? So Deuteronomy six, beginning verse four, listen, Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words that I'm giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up, bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates. So in Deuteronomy six, after confessing that the Lord is one, which actually means not only there's not three gods or ten gods or a hundred gods, there's only one God. But it also means he's their one and only. They have no other God. So they've confessed that he is one and we saw that illusion last week in chapter seven. Then Israel is called to love the Lord with all their heart and to bind his word on their bodies as a symbol, as a seal of their commitment to him and his commitment to them. The woman is asking for a wedding ring and she's using the language of the wedding ceremony as it were between God and his Old Testament people. Friends, the commitment of marriage is modeled on the commitment of God to his people. The love of a husband and a wife is actually modeled on an original and the original is Christ's love for the church and the church's love for Christ. We heard that read earlier in the service by Parker in Ephesians chapter five verses 22 to 33. This is really important. It is marriage that is modeled on God's love for his people. It is not the other way around. This is important for those of us who are married. This is important for those of us who are not married but would like to be. We don't learn something about God by looking at marriage. So we learn what marriage is supposed to be by looking at God and his relationship with his people in Jesus Christ. So that means husbands, Jesus is your model of loving commitment. A commitment that we heard as Parker read in Ephesians five, a commitment that leads sacrificially husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. Husbands, is that what your love looks like? Wives, the church is your model of loving commitment. A commitment that submits and follows trustingly. As Paul said in Ephesians five, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives. Wives, does your love for your husband look like the church's trust and submission to Christ? You know, the reality is none of our marriages look as much like that as they ought to. And the reason is because, well, we're all fallen sinners, right? This picture that Paul gives of marriage, husbands, loving the wives as Christ loved the church, wives, loving and submitting to their husbands as the church submits to Christ. Yeah, our marriages don't look like that because we live on this side of the fall. We live on this side of the curse. In Genesis three, what do we see? We see Adam not leading, but being passive, letting his wife Eve take the lead, listening to the serpent and trying to deal with the serpent on her own. And at first you think, well, Adam's not there, maybe he's busy working in the garden somewhere else. But no, at the end of the passage there in Genesis three, we find out, you've been standing there the whole time. You idiot? Why didn't you speak up? Why didn't you man up? And then of course, when we read about the curse as a result of Adam and Eve's sin, what do we see, the curse that follows, we're told that husbands are going to rule harshly over their wives, even as their wives grasp for control. For others and sisters, I don't know what the specific issues in your marriage are. But I know what the characteristic ones are because the Bible tells us what they are. The Bible tells us what our characteristic sins and failings are going to be. As men, it's going to be passivity, like we saw in Genesis three, until probably we snap and then respond harshly. As women, as wives, it's going to be not trusting, trying to control, maybe trying to manipulate them from behind the scenes, or maybe just going out and saying, "Look, I'm in charge here." I mean, the Bible tells us what our sin is going to look like. So we shouldn't be surprised when it shows up in our homes and causes all sorts of havoc. But the good news is that the Bible also gives us a picture, a redemptive model of what our marriages can be and should be. And in the gospel, we're promised the Holy Spirit and God's grace to be a picture of Christ's love for the church and the church's loving trust in Christ in response. This is where Paul is driving in that passage in Ephesians five that we heard read earlier. Verse 31, "For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church. To sum up, each of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband. For those of you that are married, your hope that your marriage can actually look like that is not found in you. It is found in Christ." Now, many in our culture today reject this idea. They reject the idea that there should be a public commitment of marriage that is characterized by this kind of leadership and trust. People say, "Why do I need a piece of paper? Why do I need this legal formal ceremony in order to make my love for this other person legitimate?" What's wrong with enjoying the intimacy of love and sex without making the marriage, without the relationship formal and public? Well, the woman tells us why in the rest of verse 6. Look there at the second half of verse 6, "For love is as strong as death, jealousy is as unrelenting as she all. Love's flames are fiery flames, and almighty flame, a huge torrent cannot extinguish love. Rivers cannot sweep it away. If a man were to give all his wealth for love, it would be utterly scorned." The public accountable commitment is necessary, not just optional, not just like the best thing you could do. It is necessary because of the nature of love itself. She says, "Their love is as strong as death." What she's saying is there's nothing more powerful than love. It is the strongest force in the universe. It's stronger than gravity. It's stronger than the biggest black hole you can think of. It's more powerful than the largest hydrogen bomb you can imagine. How do I know this? Well, because no one defeats death. Death always wins. However long human history has been going, so far, the score is humanity zero. Death everything, right? No one defeats death. What she's saying here is, "Look, once love has been awakened, no one defeats love." That could sound like sort of sappy romanticism, but pay attention to what she's saying here because she makes it clear in the parallel. In Hebrew poetry, you'll get one line that says it, and then you'll get a second line that says it in a slightly different way. What's going on in that parallel is helping us understand what was said in the first one. She says love is strong as death, and then she says, by way of explanation, "Jealousy is as unrelenting as Sheol. Sheol is the place of the dead." Love and jealousy are being paralleled, even as death and Sheol are being paralleled. Essentially what she's saying is, "Look, just as Sheol does not give up its inhabitants – it doesn't give up its claim on somebody – once it's got them. So jealousy does not give up its claim on the beloved." Love is jealous for the beloved, jealous for the exclusivity, jealous for the sanctity of the relationship. Love does not share with rival lovers. I mean, just think about it for a moment, right? You that are married, how would you respond if your spouse came home with a +1, except now it's a +2? Yeah, you're not going to stand for it. If you're not married, but you're stating, how would you feel if you show up for a date and your date says, "Oh yeah, but I want to bring this other one along, too." I want him or her to be a part of this. Yeah, that's the last date. You're not going to do that again. Love does not share. And this is why commitment is necessary. You see, love without commitment isn't actually love, it's just promiscuity. Jealousy, on the other hand, is love's righteous response to unfaithfulness. And this is why commitment is the only context in which love can actually reach its goal of intimacy. If you're here this morning as a single person, maybe you're a young person or maybe you're not so young, this is part of why the Bible says, "You should wait for sexual intimacy until marriage." To engage in sexual intimacy, to engage in the intimacy of marriage without the commitment of marriage is to bring fire into your own lap. It is to invite chaos in your life. It is simply to hurt yourself and the other person. Love is too powerful. Love is too unrelenting to be toyed with. Now, I want to be clear, there's a wrong kind of jealousy. There's a jealousy maybe of someone or something to which we have no right, we have no claim on. Oftentimes, this is called envy. That's not the jealousy in view here. There are also times when we are jealous, when we shouldn't be. There are times when we overreact. There are people who are over controlling, who are insecure and they are provoked to jealousy too easily, too quickly and inordinately. This can happen to anyone in any kind of relationship, but particularly for women. I want you to hear me. If you have a husband or a boyfriend who flies off the handle just because he saw you talking to a man, or who is wanting to control every aspect of your life and has to know where you are at every moment and begins to control all the sorts of things about your life. If you have a husband or a boyfriend who ever threatens violence or uses violence against you, that's not just a warning sign. That's a red flag. That means it's time to flee, it is time to leave that relationship. If you find yourself in that place, I want to encourage you to find somebody that you trust that you can talk to. Maybe a wise woman in this congregation, any of the pastors, any of the elders, we would want to help you because that's not the jealousy that's in view here. I want to recommend, actually, I do this occasionally, a book. This is a secular book. It's a book that more conservative Christian congregations like ours should read and it's called No Visible Bruises. It's a book that examines what abusive, controlling relationships look like. That's what the social sciences have looked at and studied and how to recognize it and even to begin to know how to come alongside someone and help. If you want more information about that book, you could see me or I know several of us have read that book and been helped by it. That's not the kind of jealousy that's in view here. The jealousy that's in view that she's talking about is a right and a good jealousy, a concern to protect the sanctity, the exclusivity, the specialness of the relationship. And what we need to understand is that jealousy, that any of us who have been in a relationship have probably experienced, that jealousy is rooted in God. God is a jealous lover. The very first time the word jealous is used in relation to God is in Exodus, chapter 20, verse 5, the Ten Commandments, where we're told, "Do not bow in worship to idols and do not serve them for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God." Jealous for the exclusive affection of his people, jealous for their exclusive worship. So the fiery flame there in verse 6 loves flames or fiery flames. That flame we're told is an almighty flame, literally, and there's probably a footnote in your Bible, can be translated, that flame is the blaze of God himself. Husbands are right, wives are right to be jealous of each other's love, to be jealous of the exclusivity, the boundaries of their relationship, because God is love. And this is what his love is like. I remember, not long after Adrian and I had gotten married, we were a church in North Carolina and my old girlfriend joined the church. That was awkward. Now she had gotten married and we were newly married and the four of us got together, because it seemed like the right thing to do. I guess that's true, looking back on it. I think it was the right thing to do, but that it was awkward, right? Nobody wants to be reminded of previous boyfriends, previous girlfriends. I think my wife and her husband were looking at each other like, "What are we doing here?" No, no, it's right to want to protect the exclusivity, the specialness of the relationship, because this is who God is. Our love is just an echo, it's just derivative of his love, because he is the source of love, and God is jealous for our love. He's jealous for our exclusive worship. He is jealous for our ultimate devotion to him. It's not just these jealous though, look, she goes on in verse 7, "It is the nature of love that it cannot be broken." She imagines this huge torrent of water, and the flame of love just keeps burning, cannot be extinguished, and it cannot be bought there in verse 7, right? If a man were to give all his wealth for love, it would be utterly scorned. The man who thinks that he can buy the love of a woman is a fool, and all he's doing is turning her into a prostitute. But does this sound like your love? I think when we're honest, we realize that our love can be broken, our love can be extinguished. Sometimes even our love, or at least our loyalty, can even be bought, which is why it's clear that in the end, the love that the song of songs is talking about must be God's love and not ours. Only God's love is unquenchable. Only God's love is unbreakable. Even the Old Testament, this image of unquenchable fire is only and always associated with God's jealous wrath, and God's love cannot be bought either. What did Jesus say? What can a man give in exchange for his soul? Nothing. Friend, God doesn't want your money, he wants your love. And his response to our spiritual promiscuity is the fire of judgment, for none of us have been faithful to the God who has a righteous claim on our exclusive love. Maybe you don't like to think of God that way, but my goodness, would you fault a husband who was wrathful at his wife's adultery? Would you fault a wife who was wrathful at her husband's adultery? Well, of course you wouldn't. You would understand it. You would understand even though we know that in human marriages, it always takes to to mess up a marriage, and even if one party is way more guilty than the other, none of us come to a broken marriage totally innocent. Oh, but God is. God has never done you wrong. God has never treated you falsely. He's never spoken an untrue word to you, and yet all of us have treated his love, a scorn. We have treated him falsely. The reality is hell, the fiery flames of hell, is holy loves response to unfaithfulness, to spiritual adultery, and we all deserve it. Which brings us and the poet, second, to love's corruption, loves corruption. Look at verse 8. Our sister is young, she has no breasts. What will we do for our sister on the day she has spoken for? If she is a wall, we will build a silver barricade on her. If she is a door, we will enclose her with cedar planks. I am a wall, and my breasts like towers. So in his eyes, I have become like one who finds peace. Solomon owned a vineyard in Baal, Haman. He leased the vineyard to tenants. Each was to bring for his fruit one thousand pieces of silver. I have my own vineyard, the one thousand are for you Solomon, the two hundred for those who take care of its fruits. So the woman has asked her lover to commit. She wants the ring. She wants their love to go public in marriage, and she wants that because of the strength of love's jealousy, and immediately other voices pipe up. We actually get two different groups of men who show up now, who represent the corruption of love in her culture, and she responds to both of them. First, we've got her brothers in verses 8 and 9. We've already seen them. They showed up in chapter 1. They're in charge of her, and they haven't taken good care of her. You can read about that back in chapter 1, verse 6. And now they're trying to figure out what to do with her. When it's time to marry her off, what should we do? That's the question they're asking in verse 8. They are not thinking about her interests. They are thinking about her behavior. They're thinking about the family's honor, and they're thinking about their own self-interest. Now what's interesting is, they don't think she's anywhere close to being married off yet. They don't think she's sexually mature. That's what they're saying there at the beginning of verse 8. What they decide that when the time comes, if she is a wall, that is if she's been virtuous and not let anyone through, then they will reinforce that with this silver barricade. But if she's been a door, that is she's been promiscuous, they're going to put a stop to it, and maybe even try to kind of cover it up with those sweet-smelling cedar planks. The reality is they're clueless. In response, they're in verse 10, she says she is sexually mature, and she has been virtuous. Now those of you that have been reading all the way through Song of Songs, you know that she does not mean that she's a virgin. What she means is that she's been faithful. She's been pure. She has embodied in herself everything that marriage is meant to be exclusive, delighting in the beloved mutual. But all of that, of course, has been corrupted in her culture. She says, "I'm not going to bring shame. I'm going to bring peace, literally shalom, wholeness, completeness to the ones she loves." That word "peace" there, shalom, it's where the name Solomon comes from. And once again, what we see is that the woman is actually representing the true Solomon, the better Solomon, not the Solomon of all the polygamy that we've seen, but what he was always meant to be. It's represented in her. That's the first group of men. The second example is Solomon himself and his guards there in verses 11 and 12. He owns a vineyard. It's an image for his harem, and that vineyard is in Baal-Haman, which is no place, it's a fictional place. We know no place called that, but the point of it is in the name. Baal-Haman means husband of many, or we might translate it, lord of a mob. His harem, it turns out, is so large he can't manage it himself. So he has guards or tenants who lease it from him there in verse 11. You understand what that means? He's making money off of his wives. It just gets grosser. Now we don't know what the details are, but whatever the mechanism of this money-making scheme that he's got with his harem, she replies, essentially there in verse 12, "You and your guards, you can keep your money." The "my vineyard," which is mine, that's literally how it goes, "my vineyard," which is mine. It's before me. It's not for sale. And Solomon is one of those men who would give money for love and is scorned. In ancient Israel, by the time this is written, marriage has been corrupted. It's been corrupted by state-sanctioned polygamy. It's been corrupted by reducing it to a financial transaction. It's been corrupted by being pursued simply for family honor or family advancement. And in the process, the picture that God intended marriage to be, the picture of a mutual, exclusive, intimate love, a picture that was meant to point to God and his love for his people has been corrupted. Several of you have asked me about this. You've noticed as we've been walking through the book of Song of Songs, and it's dawned on you. It seems like they're not married, and that's correct. Again and again, we've been reminded, they're not married, and yet the book holds them up as the picture of what marriage should be, of what marriage was designed to be. Why would the author try to give us this beautiful picture of marriage but paint it using a couple that are not yet formally legally married? I don't know for sure, but it seems like it is the best way to critique what formal legal marriage had become in their day. Do you think you're obeying God by living up to the law, the law standards for marriage? Not a chance, it's so much higher. Which means we've got to ask ourselves, what are the ways that we corrupt love in our day? Well probably many of the ways that they did, right? We still marry for the wrong reasons, people marry for money, they marry for social status, they marry for personal advancement. We allow our decisions to be guided by the wrong motives. That might be our family's honor, it might be social pressure, and too many of us are guilty of reducing marriage to just being good business partners together, in the partnership of raising kids and keeping a household going. Of course we do a lot more than that. In our culture we are eager to rip love and intimacy out of the context of marriage where the Bible clearly says it belongs, for all the reasons that we've already talked about. We reduce love and intimacy to just skin intimacy. We pursue intimacy with the same sex, or we just settle for virtual intimacy. And every time we do any of those things we not only hurt ourselves and hurt the other person, but we corrupt the most profound and compelling picture that God has given us of what His love for us looks like, and what our love should be for Him in return. Young men and women, and particularly young women, I said at the start of this series that this was a book particularly aimed at the daughters of Jerusalem. This is like the book written for teenage girls, but I think this applies to everybody. What are you tempted to sell your vineyard, your love for, in order to get in return? Are you tempted to sell your vineyard for security, in love? Are you tempted to sell your vineyard in return for acceptance, in return for not feeling lonely anymore? Be careful. This is love we're talking about, and once it's aroused, there's nothing more powerful in the universe. Your vineyard is yours, and yours alone, until you place it in the hands of another. And then you can't get it back. Do not awaken love before it's ready, before it's time, and you'll know it's time, because when it's time, you'll be ready to publicly commit to marriage. That I think leads us third and finally to love's desire, love's desire. Look at verse 13. You who dwell in the gardens, companions are listening for your voice. Let me hear you. Run away with me, my love, and be like a gazelle or a young stag on the mountains of spices. You know, I said this last poem began there in verse 5 with a vision of a homecoming, sort of like coming home to their first apartment after the honeymoon. I will never forget that day, after Adrian and I got married, and we came home to our apartment in North Carolina, we were living in Chapel Hill. I had had a roommate, he had moved out while we were away on the honeymoon, and I made it very clear to him he was not allowed to sleep in the bed while we were away. This is going to be a special homecoming. I didn't want anybody else having slept in that bed. But what's so interesting is though that vision of coming home newly married is where the poem begins, it's not where it ends. It ends with a man, the lover, doing something that none of the other men did. The brothers didn't do this, Solomon doesn't do this, what does he do? He asks to hear her voice, like he speaks to her, and he says, "What do you think? What do you want?" She's in the garden, he says that, you who dwell in the garden, she's in the garden, but he doesn't force his way in, he doesn't demand her rights, he simply asks us to hear from her, "What do you want, my darling?" And she answers, she answers there in verse 14, "This is what I want, run away with me, my love, and be like a young stag, like a gazelle on the mountains of spices." It's a wistful response, a longing to be together in intimacy, and the poem ends. We don't get any of those descriptions, like we got before, of them having that intimacy. You know, the poem just ends with that longing, that desire. Do they get, they're happily ever after, does the marriage happen? The book ends and we don't know. The challenges are great, the brothers, Solomon, they pose real threats, they are real obstacles. And so as readers, we're left hoping, longing for more, just as the lovers are, and I do think that's the point. As strong and as powerful as our love is, there are limitations to our love. We long for intimacy, we long for intimacy with the spouse, we long for intimacy with God. You know, I'm reminded that like way, way a long time ago, probably a century or more. Young women used to have something called hope chests, those is like a cedar chest or something where they were saving up items for that day that they got married. But we all know that some hope chests never get opened. Hope isn't always fulfilled. And that's where we're left here at the end of the song, hoping, desiring, longing for them and for us, all to aware that our love cannot finally deliver love's desire. We sit here in the bittersweet knowledge that our marriages don't live up to this ideal even though we've been encouraged by it. We sit here longing for marriage, but the longing is unfulfilled. Some of us sit here having given up on marriage, having given up on love because it's been betrayed one too many times and we feel cynical and bitter. We're all too aware as we look at our own hearts of the ways we've corrupted love. We're all too aware of the ways that we have failed at love and the ways we've been failed. But for instance, the purpose of this book is to point us beyond our love. It is to point us not to our love, but to God's faithful, unquenchable, unbreakable love. Israel's reading this book after it's come back from the exile and if you're familiar with Israel's history, immediately they're added again. Mary and lots of women, foreign wives who are leading them into idolatry. This book lands in Israel as part of the wisdom literature calling them to God's faithful love, to give themselves exclusively to it and it does the same for us. This only God's love is strong enough to deliver love's desire for intimacy with God. His love displayed at the cross which looked like incredible weakness is in fact stronger than death itself because Jesus Christ committed himself to us even to the point of dying for us and in his death he conquered death and in his resurrection his love proved that it is strong enough to get us all the way home out of the wilderness of our sin and into the garden of his eternal love, Jonathan Edwards described heaven as a world of love, nothing but love and for instance heaven is the homecoming that Jesus intends to bring his bride to and so today he asks you, he asks all of us, let me hear your voice. What do you want? What do you desire? What do you hope for? Maybe you dearly hope to be loved by a spouse, maybe you dearly hope today to be loved better by the spouse you already have, those are good hopes, those are right hopes but don't forget that those hopes point beyond themselves to a greater and even better hope to be loved by God, to be accepted by God, to be delighted over by God, friends his love is strong enough to overcome every corruption, to overcome every obstacle even the obstacle of your own sin even the obstacle of the coldness of your heart, let him hear your voice today and he will surely come to you without delay and make his home with you today and when the time is right lead you home to be with him forever in the garden of his eternal love, would you pray with me? Take a moment and just confess to God what your hope is, let him hear your voice and trust him to answer. We confess that the desires that we have are often disordered and even the good desires that we have are so often pursued apart from you when we pray that you would give us a desire a hope to be with you, what will we pray that you would help us to see, to taste, the fullness, the riches of Jesus love for us and that we would then give ourselves unreservedly to that love or our desire, not as much as it should be but truly our desire is to be with you and so we trust in your love to get us there and we pray all of this in Christ's name, amen. . . . . [BLANK_AUDIO]