Last week,
in my reading, I came to the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon. It is a very
short book but it is accompanied by tons of commentary in the HCSB Study Bible.
But still, I
dug into it and came away with a revelation I had not noticed
before when reading through the book. God is so good and I’ll get to that part
of the story in just a moment.
As many of
you probably know, the Song is a love poem between Solomon and the Shulamite
maiden, who was believed to have been Solomon’s first wife. The Song is a
celebration of romantic love, as God intended it to be. Much later the writer
of Hebrews, in chapter 13, verse 4, would pen these words: “Marriage is
honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God
will judge.”
Also, from the New
Testament, the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your
wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her”, NKJV. In
the same vein, the Song of Solomon is thought by many to be an allegory of God’s
love for Israel and/or Christ’s love for the church. The HCSB Study Bible
comments in the introduction of the book say that it “reflects God’s desire to form
within us a pure and a devoted love…that there is a bliss in married love that
is reflective of the greater love believers experience as the bride of Christ”.
Reading all this
has given me a new appreciation for the Song of Solomon. However, what touched
me greatly when reading through the book this time that I had never noticed
before was the revelation that the Shulamite maiden who married the great King
Solomon, was a commoner, an obscure nobody. The maiden worked in the vineyard for
her brothers who had rented the vineyard from Solomon (1:6 and 8:11).
Why is this
so exciting and beautiful to me? You think I’ve lost my mind don’t you? But
dear friends, this is a reflection of us—Christ reaches out to us in divine,
perfect love. We are nobody! We have nothing with which to recommend ourselves to the
King of Heaven! Yet in His grace and mercy and love, He seeks us out; He
reaches down to us in the muck and the mire; our own righteousness as filthy rags
(Isaiah 64:6).
Who am I
that Christ would notice me and love me? Who am I that God would love “the world in this way: (that) He gave His One and Only Son, so that
everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life”, John 3:16,
HCSB.
Dear
friends, I am nobody but somebody that God loves and furthermore, “We love Him
because He first loved us,” 1 John 4:19. Is that not beautiful? Now can you get
excited with me about that? I am nobody but somebody that Christ loves and so
are you! If you haven’t already done so, open your heart to Christ today. Confess your belief in Christ; repent of your sins; invite Him into your heart to live forever and
become a child of the King.
If you do
know Christ as Lord and Savior, then celebrate with me that, “He chose us in
Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without
blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus
Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of
the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved,” Ephesians
5:4-6, NKJV.
God bless!
