Song of Songs 6:4-8:4
Michael Lawrence
June 23, 2024
Hinson Baptist Church Sermons
Love Songs — Love’s Desire
There's a feature column in the New York Times. It's one of its most popular features. It's called "Modern Love." It began as a column. It's now become a book. It's a podcast. What it does is it explores relationships of all kinds and every stripe. The stories are always well told. There's usually some sort of striking revelation or turn in the story that keeps your attention. But if there's a theme to these weekly stories that comes out, it's probably this. Love is bigger, more varied than your parents told you. It turns out, according to this column anyway, that Ward and June Cleaver, of Leave It to Be For Fame, are not the only option when it comes to intimacy. I don't know that I've yet read a column that explored positively a traditional view of marriage. In many ways, what the column seems to be suggesting is, hey, there's a lot more variation out there. There are a lot of options out there, but it's all still love. Isn't that what matters? That should be all that matters. Love is love. It's the attitude of our culture today. We've been studying the Song of Songs, a book of Hebrew love songs that was not written in the culture of our day. It was written sometime between 500 and 300 BC, so a long, long time ago. Back then, the traditional form of marriage was not what we experience here today. It certainly isn't what the New York Times Modern Love column is putting forward. Back then, the traditional understanding of marriage was polygamy. If you're a man, you could have as many wives as you could afford to support. I wonder if people back then would have said the same as people today. It's all still love. Love is love, and isn't that what matters? I think this raises a question for us. It's a question that our culture is definitely asking and answering badly. Is there an ideal form of love? Is there a right place and structure for love to express itself, particularly romantic love? Or in love's desire -- that's the title of the sermon today -- in love's desire for intimacy, is it just a matter of figuring out what works for you? What works for one person will be different than what works for another person, but as long as you're pursuing loving intimacy? Is that okay? Well the Song of Songs, as I said, written in a context in which the main form of marriage was polygamy, has something to say about that to us today. So turn with me, if you would, to Song of Songs, chapter 6 verse 4. Chapter 6 verse 4. If you're using one of the Bibles we've provided, this is found on page 597. We're going to look all the way from chapter 6 verse 4 to chapter 8 verse 4. We've come to the final section of the main body of Song of Songs. Next week we will get to a separate section that is just the conclusion. And in this final section, there are two descriptions. Not one, two descriptions of this beautiful woman by her lover. And then there's her response to those two descriptions. And it's an invitation, as she responds to him describing her not once but twice in such flowing terms, her response is to invite him into intimacy. Here's the question that I want to start with. What sets biblical marriage apart? What sets biblical marriage apart? What is it that's going on in this passage that is challenging the culture that it came from? And it's challenging our culture. I want to start with this first description. So look at verse 4 of chapter 6. You are as beautiful as Tearza, my darling, lovely as Jerusalem, all inspiring as an army with banners. Turn your eyes away from me, for they captivate me. Your hair is like a flock of goats, streaming down from Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of views, coming up from washing each one, having a twin and not one missing. Behind your veil, your brow is like a slice of pomegranate. There are 60 queens and 80 concubines and young women without number. But my dove, my virtuous one, is unique. She is the favorite of her mother, perfect to the one who gave her birth. And see her and declare her fortunate queens and concubines also and they sing for praises. Who is this who shines like the dawn as beautiful as the moon bright as the sun awe inspiring as an army with banners? I came down to the walnut grove, to see the blossoms of the valley, to see if the vines were budding and the pomegranate blooming, I didn't know what was happening to me. I felt like I was in a chariot with a nobleman. We'll stop there. This is the third wasth, the third description by one person of another person's physical features. It's the second time the man is describing the woman. You notice there that the main stanza is bounded by that phrase awe inspiring as an army with banners. You see that there in verse four and then again in verse ten. So that's the main section of this particular part of the poem and then it's followed by the woman's response to him in verses 11 and 12. Now much of this we've seen before, we heard a lot of these descriptions back the first time he described her in chapter four verses one to seven. She is still beautiful. She is still lovely. Her hair continues to cascade like a flock of goats there in verse five. Her teeth are still being compared to white sheep and none are missing. We talked about that last time. There's not good dentistry back then. This is a big deal to not have missing teeth, right? Her veiled brow or probably cheeks are still rosy like a pomegranate there in verse seven. So we've heard a lot of this before. She is still just as beautiful to him, but there's a slightly different emphasis in his description this time. You notice that her beauty is not just pastoral, it's actually taken on like majestic proportions. He compares her to Jerusalem and Tirzah, which are the capital cities of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel, both renowned for their beauty, for their beauty. Twice, at the beginning and the end, he compares her to an army with banners, absolutely awe-inspiring he says. And so I think it's no wonder that right there at the beginning, he asks her to turn her eyes away from me. Did you see that there in verse five? Turn your eyes away from me, for they captivate me. Maybe even a better way of describing that particular word is they overwhelm me. You know, some of you have been tourists, you've gone to some of the great cities of the world, like DC or Rome, and you've seen the architecture, right? And that amazing architecture of an extraordinary city, it can really take your breath away, can't it? Well, that's a little bit what's going on here with him. He is overwhelmed by her beauty. He feels as she looks at him that he's left exposed and defenseless before her gaze. But it's not just that her beauty is overwhelming, it is something about her gaze that is causing him to feel so unsettled that he cannot bear it any longer. You know, before sin entered the world, we're told that the man and the woman were naked and yet felt no shame, there was nothing to hide. They were quite happy to have each look upon the other. Sin changed that. You know, Adam and Eve, after their sin, they tried to cover themselves, they tried to make clothes for themselves by sewing fig leaves together, that didn't work so well. God comes along at the end of chapter three and he covers them with proper clothing. That takes care of the shame of our bodies being seen. Oh, but what about the eyes? Staring into someone's eyes openly and unguardedly can feel as vulnerable as being undressed in front of somebody, right? The eyes reveal, they, at least we feel like they expose our thoughts, our emotions. It can be hard to look into someone's eyes because the reality is all of us have things inside us that we want to hide. You know, I think this is one way, not the only way, but one way to think about sin. Not rule-breaking, but what we want to hide about ourselves. And yet, as this passage makes so clear, he doesn't want her to look at him and yet, we want to see and be seen because this is what intimacy is, intimacy is the fulfillment of love's desire to be seen and to be accepted, to not feel shame in being seen. Love's greatest desire, the intimacy of being seen and known in a fallen world, it also loves greatest fear, to be seen, to be known. And so this man, so in love with this woman, finds her gaze overwhelming, overwhelming because of her beauty but also overwhelming because it exposes him and he needs her to turn her eyes away. If that's true with another human being, how much more is it true of God? We want to be seen and accepted by God more than anything else. This is what we were made for and yet we know that when God looks at us, he sees not just our bodies, not just our thoughts, not just our emotions, he sees all the way in, he sees our hearts, he sees the core of who we are, he sees all those things that we're trying to hide, not just from other people, but trying to hide from ourselves. I think it raises a question then for us. So much of our culture and I think so many of us in this room in our lives, we have sought an intimacy with others because we were made for intimacy, we want to see and be seen. We have sought an intimacy that is merely skin intimacy, surface intimacy. And we've hoped that that might provide what we were looking for. But skin intimacy is no substitute for soul intimacy, of being known all the way down deep and accepted and loved. I just want to suggest to you this morning some of you who may even be feeling a certain amount of shame about the way you've pursued intimacy in your life. You were made for so much more, you were made for a much deeper and more profound intimacy than the intimacy that skin on skin can give. Now, I think the lover here must sense the irony of his request, right? He tells her turn your gaze away from me, it is overwhelming even as he gazes at her. There's some irony there. And so in verse 8 he does something surprising, he introduces other women. Did you notice that? Verse 8, "There are 60 queens and 80 concubines and young women without number." And you wonder what's about to happen as a reader, is he about to compare her to them? Dude, that would be a mistake, right? Talk about making your woman feel insecure. Guys, she doesn't want to hear about previous girlfriends. I don't care how funny this story is, right? We actually tell this to pastors, you know, when they come to hear for one of our weekenders or when we send guys out from here, like, "Hey, your church, like a marriage, they don't want to hear about your earlier churches." It causes the same sort of insecurity in your church that it's going to cause in your girlfriend or your wife. They just really don't want to hear about it. And so you're worried that maybe that's what he's about to do. He's going to compare her to all of these other women, but that's not what he does. No, he does something profound and powerful. He actually says there is no comparison. There's no comparison at all. In effect there, in verses eight and nine, he's kind of saying, "Look, the king may have lots of women." Everybody knows about all of his queens and all of his concubines and all of the young women he has access to, but my love, my love is my one and only, and there is no other. That's really the force of what's going on in verses eight and nine, that the numbers, it doesn't come through quite the same as powerfully in the English, but in the Hebrew, the numbers are all up front. So a kind of literal translation would be, "60 are the queens, 80 are the concubines, the girl's beyond number, but one is she who is my love, my virtuous one. One is she to her mother, perfect to the one who gave her birth." She's not the best out of many. She's singular. She is his one and only, and friends, this is finally what sets biblical marriage apart from every other kind of arrangement of relationships out there. The biblical ideal for marriage is that it is an exclusive, monogamous relationship. She's not just next, she's not just like one in a line, no, she is one and only. Even as the poem goes on, even the other women have to admit it there at the end of verse nine, she is incomparable. Like the sun, like the moon, they're not other moons coming around the earth, they're not other sons that we wrote, no, singular, no comparison. And like an army with its banners snapping in the wind, she overwhelms them. There is no other. And then what's interesting, when you look at her response in verses 11 and 12, the feeling is mutual, she in verse 11 approaches the orchard, which is that metaphor we've seen before of intimacy with her beloved, she finds herself overwhelmed with emotion, which seems to be the point of verse 12, though I've got to be honest with you, nobody actually knows what verse 12 means. Nobody quite knows how to translate it. But this seems to be the gist of it. She is just overwhelmed with the similar kind of feelings for her one and only her lover. Friends, the biblical picture of love is an exclusive love, a monogamous love. Our culture would like to think that open marriage, polyamory, non-jealousy is the pinnacle of love. If you can love someone but let somebody else love them too and not be jealous about it, boy, you have reached the height of love. That's what our culture says. And the Bible says, and I say, and your heart says hogwash. Love, raised to its height, at its pinnacle, at its best and purest form, is love that is captivated and exclusive, devoted and overwhelming, and we know this in our bones. I mean, I give you a trivial example. If you walk up to me after the service and say, I love the Yankees and the Red Sox, I know you're a liar. I know you know nothing about love of a team. I know you were at best like a casual fan of baseball sometimes. But you know nothing about love because it is not possible to love the Yankees and the Red Sox. You must choose. It is an exclusive love. Okay, that's true in trivial matters. It is true in the most important of matters. And we know this whether we want to admit it or not. The opening line of the most recent modern love column was telling. It goes, "When my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger. I said it would make us divorce." We were both right. That's exactly right. Monogamy is not just an idea that religious people are into. Monogamy is this profoundly human idea that we feel even when we try to deny. It is hardwired into us in the New Testament. The Pharisees wanted to justify a kind of serial polygamy. So I'm not going to have four wives at once, but I want to be able to have them one after the other through no fault divorce. And when they wanted to justify that, Jesus takes them back to Genesis 2 and the ideal that God established. So in Matthew 19, this is what Jesus says, verse 4, "Haven't you read?" He replied, "That he who created them in the beginning made them male and female." And he also said, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." Why then? They asked him, "Did Moses command us to give divorce papers and to send her away?" And he told them, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts." But it was not like that from the beginning. This is deep in us, this understanding that love at its highest and its most ideal form must be exclusive, which speaks to the ethical nature of love. Did you notice that in verse 9 he called her "my virtuous one"? But my dove, my virtuous one is unique. Again, if you and I were writing love poetry, probably not what we'd stick in there. But I think it's really important that Hebrew word that's translated virtuous here in the Christian Standard Bible, it conveys the idea of completeness, wholeness. So it could be that he's just saying that you are complete in beauty, you're perfect in beauty. But I think the word mainly and normally gets at the idea of integrity. It's the word that God uses to describe Job in Job chapter 1, verse 8, "A man of perfect integrity." You know, the virtue of love is its relational integrity. It's exclusive faithfulness. It's what gives love its power and it's what makes it so painful when love is betrayed. So just speaking to the married here for a moment, if you're married, do not take the exclusivity of your relationship for granted. Do not take your monogamy for granted. Now I know no one here is thinking about like taking a second wife or a second husband. We're not old school Mormons. That's just not done. I get that. And yet there are so many ways in which we allow the exclusivity of our love in our marriages to be undermined. So brothers and sisters, guard the exclusivity of your love. Take practical steps. So for me, one of the things that that means, even though I'm the pastor of this church, I don't relate to women, typically one-on-one. I just don't do that. The women in this church, I'm your pastor and I want to be your pastor. But it will have to be particularly controlled settings in which I'm going to be one-on-one with you. You're going to be in my office for a scheduled appointment in which everybody knows about it and there's glass all over my office and everybody can see it. I will be really careful. As a married man, I don't have independent relationships with women apart from my wife. Now my wife and I have relationships with all sorts of people, single and married. And in that context, I have relationships with women, but as a married man, and if we're always in the context of my wife, so I just want to encourage you, take practical steps to guard your heart, to guard the exclusivity of your love. It's not just, though, maybe how you're relating to people. It's maybe how you're spending your time. Does your spouse feel like you never have time for her? You never have time for him? What do you get angry at your spouse about? What does your spouse do that can cause your anger to flare up quickly? I would suggest to you that whatever that thing is, is something that is competing for your affection, competing for your loyalty. But don't just guard the exclusivity of your relationship. Cultivate it. I would suggest all of us could learn a few things from the man in Song of Songs, right? Husbands cultivate an awe at the beauty of your wife. How do you do that? Maybe the way he does it, use words, magnify her beauty verbally, describe her beauty, write it down, celebrate it. It's not enough to just guard against something going wrong. We actually need to cultivate this exclusive love that characterizes a biblical understanding of marriage. Friends is not an accident. The marriage is the main analogy that the Old Testament uses to describe God's relationship with his people. I actually think there in verse 9 there are echoes of the Shema, the great confession that Israel makes of their God in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 4 and 5. What did they say? God, the Lord is one, therefore love the Lord your God. God is monogamous in his love for us. He could have loved any of the peoples on earth, but he told Israel that I set my affections particularly on you. I chose you out of all the others. It's why their idolatry, their love and worship of other gods was throughout the Old Testament described again and again as adultery, spiritual adultery. That's not just an Old Testament idea, right? Jesus comes and he says, "Hey, people, you cannot love God and money." Money is an example there. He's not only thinking about money. You cannot love God and something else. You will love one and hate the other or love the other and hate the one. This is the nature of love. We were made to love God exclusively and our failure to do so is spiritual adultery. Most people find it hard to understand why God is so upset about sin, this is why. Because it's not rule-breaking, it's adultery. It's letting another love come in where it should never have been in the first place. What sets biblical marriage apart is monogamy, exclusivity. That leads to a second question. Why does monogamy matter? Why does this exclusivity matter so much? Well, let's look at the second description of the woman by her lover. We'll pick it up in verse 13 of chapter 6. Come back. Come back, Shulamite. Come back. Come back. That we may look at you. How you gaze at the Shulamite as you look at the dance of the two camps. How beautiful are your sandaled feet, Princess? The curves of your thighs are like jewelry. The handiwork of a master. Your navel is a rounded bowl. It never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is a mound of wheat surrounded by lilies. Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like a tower of ivory. Your eyes like pools and hedgepawn by Bathrebeams gate. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus. Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel, the hair of your head like purple cloth. A king can be held captive in your tresses. How beautiful you are and how pleasant my love with such delights. Your stature is like a palm tree. Your breasts are clusters of fruit. I said, I will climb the palm tree and take hold of its fruit. May your breasts be like clusters of grapes and the fragrance of your breath like apricots. Your mouth is like fine wine flowing smoothly for my love, gliding past my lips and teeth. I am my loves and his desire is for me. So as this next section of the poem opens up, all of a sudden, the young women, the same young women that she has periodically talked to, the young women are calling to her and they are telling her, come back, literally they are telling her, turn around. Basically they want to get a better look at her. And they call her Shulomite. It is the only time this name shows up. It is actually the feminine form or it is from the feminine form of Solomon. So it is like a female Solomon at this point. And that name means peace, the one who experiences peace, the one who brings peace. Now we have already seen Solomon in this book, he shows up as a foil, he is not the good guy, he is the bad guy, he shows us what love degraded and corrupted looks like by polygamy and as we are going to see later by financial interests. But it seems like right here in this moment, this nickname for the woman, Shulomite, suggests that maybe we are to see her as the true Solomon, the one that is going to show us what love actually looks like, the one who actually experiences peace in love. Of course that is not what we hear at first, what we hear first is her anxiety. Some of your translations will say that the second half of verse 13 is the man speaking, I actually think it is the woman speaking. I think she is saying basically, why do you want to look at me? Why do you want to look at me while I dance? You can almost hear the insecurity in her. And right away, chapter 7 verse 1, the man has an answer for her. He knows why they want to look at her, she is gorgeous. He begins the fourth and final wasseth, the fourth and final description of her. And since she is dancing, he does something different this time instead of starting it ahead, he starts at her feet because that is what is moving. So he starts with their beautiful feet and their sandals and then he moves up to her thighs or maybe we should translate that hips which are so gracefully curved there in verse 1. His eyes then move on to her navel which is not her navel filled with sweet moisture and then to her belly which is literally her womb covered in metaphorical flowers in verse 2. His eyes continue to travel up her body to her breasts in verse 3, her elegant neck and her limpid eyes in verse 4, her noble nose, her regal head, crowned with tresses in verse 5. The description begins and ends with him saying how beautiful you are as he travels up her body from foot to head. And then all of a sudden the image changes and he is comparing her to a palm tree. Just go with it, right? You got to work with it, they are in verse 7 and he wants to climb that tree, he wants to grasp the fruit, he wants to smell the fragrance of her breath in verse 8. He wants to taste her like fine wine as he kisses her deeply in verse 9. And so you see this movement, right? She is dancing and there is the movement of his eyes as he moves up her body but then by the end there is the movement of his body towards her in intimacy. And then all of a sudden the direction of movement is reversed. She interrupts, she is returning, the passionate kiss there in verse 10 before she exclaims, "I am my loves and his desire is for me." Now we've heard that phrase or versions of that phrase before, several times, "I am his and he is mine, he is mine and I am his." We've seen that several times but this one you notice is different. "I am my loves and his desire is for me." Do you see the contrast? The insecurity of why would anybody want to look at me is gone. She is confident. She is secure and this is why exclusive love matters. This is why monogamy matters. It gives love security. It gives love security. She is assured of his desire for her and so she is not anxious but at peace in his love for her. And all of that flows from the exclusivity of his love and exclusivity that is actually being pictured for us by movement. His movement toward her and her alone and in the security of his love, his exclusive love, she is set free to give herself to him without fear, without reserve, without insecurity or even a hint of self-protection. And that's striking right because we all live in the insecurity of love. Does he really love me after the way he spoke to me this morning? Does she really find me attractive now, 15, 20 years into marriage? Should I be sure he won't leave me? Can I rest secure in her affection for me despite all the things that I've done? Our experience of love is not security, it's insecurity. We live in that insecurity because we know way too much about ourselves. We know that there's so much about us that is unlovely and not deserving of love. And we also know way too much about each other. We know the human heart, how thick it is. We live in the age of the infinite scroll. There is always somebody else you could swipe right on. And so the culture comes along and says to us, "Pollyamory, just love lots of people and let them love you, that will allow you to rise above the insecurity that you feel." But we don't, it's a lie because we weren't made to. And so what do we do? Well, in our relationships, we begin to manipulate one another. I try to get you to reassure me that your love is certain. I begin to manipulate you to reassure me. I begin to angle for your love. I try to earn it, which just makes me feel insecure because have I earned it enough. And then once I think maybe I've got it, am I working hard enough to keep it? And as we do all of these things, as we manipulate one another and work hard to try to earn love from one another, all we end up doing is damaging the very relationship, undermining the security that we crave. And what we do to each other, we also do to God. We angle for His love. We try to earn it, we try to manipulate Him through our good deeds or whatever. We need to understand this, assurance in love, security, being secure in love is not the condition for giving exclusive commitment, right? So those of you that are dating, right, you need to understand this. If you're waiting to commit until you're absolutely assured, you're never going to stop waiting. See, assurance isn't the condition for commitment, no, it's the result of commitment. It's the result of commitment, for better or worse, for richer or poorer and sickness and in health, for shaking all others till death us do part. Of course, then we're in marriage, we've made that commitment, and we're still like not getting it. So we undermine our spouse's assurance of love when we make them compete for our attention with the TV or our hobby or our work or whatever, or when we begin to demand that they earn our affection. When we are careless in our relationships with people of the opposite sex, but of course as I've already suggested, it doesn't have to be another person that is that paramour, it could be your work, it could be your schedule, it could be your routines, it could be any number of things. So many things can communicate that your desire is for someone or something else than the person you're married to. And you think, "Oh, I would never do that to my wife or my husband." Well, just ask them, "What are they jealous of? What in your life right now provokes feelings of jealousy in them?" Well, that thing, that's the thing that is trying to push in and destroy the security that exclusive love should give. This is the very thing that Neil confessed to in his letter. Not that he was unfaithful at all, but that too often Whitney found him excelling at church as he put it, but not at home. We need to move toward our spouses. We need, as Mary people, we need to communicate our commitment to this exclusive love. So husbands, I just want to encourage you, move toward your wife, move towards her emotionally, move towards her intellectually, and then move towards her physically. Invite your husband's in. Invite them in emotionally. Invite them in intellectually. Invite them in spiritually before you invite them in physically. That sexual intimacy, that physical intimacy, is just a picture you see of the much larger, much more profound intimacy that you want to be pursuing. There's nothing more reassuring than moving toward someone rather than away from someone. There's nothing more reassuring than inviting someone in rather than shutting someone out. Is this not what Jesus Christ has already done for us? Jesus Christ desires his bride, above all others, to the exclusion of all others, and that is the church. So Christian, we don't need to angle for his affection. We don't need to try to manipulate him, no, no, he desires you. Right before he went to the cross, Jesus told his disciples that he fervently desired to eat the Passover with them before he suffered because he knew that he would not eat that meal again until the kingdom of God comes. This is what we know as the last supper. You'd think he would have dreaded that meal, you'd think he would have put it off as long as possible, but no, he was eager to get to that meal in the same way that a groom is eager for the rehearsal dinner because he can't wait to get to the next day. That's Jesus. Jesus' desire is for his bride, and so he moved toward her, taking on our flesh, giving himself for us. His exclusive commitment to his people was demonstrated at the cross, and it is all the assurance that we need, that we are loved, that we have nothing to fear. And so if you're not a Christian, I want to invite you into that love. I want to invite you into knowing that love. You can know with confidence that God loves you, full stop, by turning from your sin and putting your faith in Jesus, that God loved you best when he loved you on the cross. So what's the result of all this? What's the cash value? Why should we be concerned about this faithful, secure, monogamous love? Look at, that's the third question I want to ask. What's the result of all of this? Look at verse 11, "Come, my love, let's go to the field, let's spend the night among the Hina blossoms, let's go early to the vineyards, let's see if the vine is butted, if the blossom is opened, if the pomegranates are in bloom there, I will give you my caresses, the mandreks give off a fragrance, and at our doors is every delicacy, both new and old. I have treasured them up for you, my love. If only I could treat you like my brother, one who nursed at my mother's breasts, I would find you in public and kiss you, and no one would scorn me. I would lead you, I would take you to the house of my mother who taught me. I would give you spiced wine to drink from the juice of my pomegranate. Only his left hand be under my head and his right arm embrace me, young women of Jerusalem, I charge you, do not stir up or awaken love until the appropriate time." What's the result of monogamy? What's the result of exclusive, faithful love that brings security? The result is intimacy. That's the result. Over in his love, confident of his desire for her, she invites the lover to intimacy. She invites him there to the vineyard in verses 11 and 12, which we've seen as a symbol of her body and her love. She's eager to give him her caresses, all the delicacies of love that she's treasured up for him there in verses 12 and 13. She actually wants to be with him openly and publicly. She wishes. It's a little weird for us that he were her brother so that she could kiss him in public and not be scorned and shamed for it. And then she ends with a wish, a wish that we've seen before to be enfolded in his arms there in verse 3 in the embrace of marriage. This is what exclusive monogamous love is meant to do. It's meant to awaken in us a desire for intimacy because it is provided a space that is safe for that intimacy. Here's the argument. Here's where all of this has been leading. Only exclusive love can give the assurance we need for intimate love. Only exclusive love can give the assurance that we need for intimate love. Money provides the security for intimacy and nothing else will do it. Friends, do you not believe the lie that intimacy can be truly had outside of a monogamous heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman? It cannot. The intimacy of skin without the commitment and exclusivity of marriage is only going to leave you feeling exposed and vulnerable and used. The intimacy of same sex attraction, I think, is equally deceptive. It is an attraction of like to like, which is not the intimacy that we were made for. It's not the intimacy that pictures the intimacy we have with God, which is not like with not like intimacy in a same sex framework really means we're simply using one another rather than being united to each other. She ends with the refrain that we've seen before, do not awaken love until the appropriate time, outside the context of monogamous heterosexual marriage, the intimacy that we desire, the intimacy that we pursue will only break us, and that's because that intimacy, that desire for intimacy pictured in these verses is kind of going away to the garden of love is in We have been loved exclusively by Jesus. His love assures us that it is safe for us to give ourselves wholly to Him. And so what should that be producing in us along to return to the garden with Him? And indeed that is kind of the way the whole Bible set up, right? It begins in a garden with intimacy between a man and a woman in between humanity and God. And then that intimacy at both levels, horizontally and vertically, is broken by our sin, but Christ comes in and restores it and how does He do it by going to the garden of Gethsemane and moving towards us at the cross and then allowing His body to be laid in a garden tomb. But Jesus got up from that tomb and He's gone ahead to prepare a place for us and what is that place? Sometimes it's called the New Jerusalem, but in Revelation 22 it is pictured as a garden city with an orchard running right down the main street and we long to be there, today of all days I long to be there. Where sin and sorrow are no more, but only the fullest intimacy of love between God and His people, between the lamb and his bride. God's desire is for you in Christ. You have nothing to fear in giving yourself to Him. Would you pray with me? Take just a moment to confess those maybe specific ways in which you have been avoiding intimacy with God, avoiding being seen by God, confess that to Him and ask Him to meet you in His love. Heavenly Father, our hearts long for this kind of intimacy to see and be seen and accepted fully and yet we are so deeply aware of all of the ways we are broken, all of the ways we want to hide, the ways we want to hide from each other, the ways we want to hide from you, but we pray that you would assure us of your love. Allow us to see in Jesus the assurance of your exclusive love for your people and to entrust ourselves to that, and we ask this in Christ's name, amen. And now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and forevermore. the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Amen.