DELIGHTING IN BEAUTY

SONG OF SONGS 7–8

Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies

(Song of Songs 7:2).

The Song of Songs progresses from Solomon’s courtship of his bride through the early days of their marriage. In chapters 1–2 we find Solomon wooing the Shulamite maiden, and her affectionate response to his advances. In 2:4 and 3:6 we find Solomon taking her to the palace to present her to the court.

Then in chapter 4 Solomon praises her beauty as she stands fully dressed and veiled. He mentions her beautiful eyes, her raven hair, and what he can see of her body as it moves beneath her garments (4:1–5). He even says that she smells good to him (4:10–15—a locked garden is one that captures good scents).

Chapter 5:1 says that the marriage has been consummated. The new wife yearns to be with her husband, but he is about his business (5:2–6:3). Later in the day Solomon remembers her beauty and longs to be with her also (6:1–9). Next we find her public presentation before the people as their queen. They fall in love with her and want to see her more often (6:10–13). In chapter 7 the newly married couple is alone, and Solomon admires her physical beauty in privacy. The language in chapter 7 is naturally more intimate.

What we see throughout the Song is the delight that both the husband and the wife take in each other and in each others’ bodies. There is no hint of comparison here, as if the husband compares his wife’s body to other women he has known. His eyes are for her alone. Happy is the man who has never known another woman intimately, and so has no basis for unwanted comparisons.

The negation and depreciation of the human body, which is still present among some Christians, is characteristic of pagan culture, but not of the Bible. The Bible teaches us that God made human beings in His own image, as the crown of His creation. While God is a Spirit without a physical body, in some ways our physical bodies do reflect His beauty and glory. We should delight in this and in one another within the strict confines of marital privacy. Both clothed and unclothed, adorned and unadorned, scented and unscented, married couples should regard the loveliness of one another.

CORAM DEO

Jeremiah 49–50

Hebrews 4

WEEKEND

Jeremiah 51–52

Hebrews 5–6

The abundance of exposed flesh in our public marketplace today makes it difficult for most wives to believe their husbands only have an eye for them, and vice versa. With Job, covenant with your eyes (Job 31:1) that you will not gaze or long for someone outside of your marriage partner.

For further study: Matthew 5:27–30 • Luke 11:33–36

WEEKEND

Psalm 139: His Understanding Is Infinite

by Derek Kidner

The All-Seeing (vv. 1–6)

Omniscience is too cold a word to do justice to what David is saying here. For it is not just the totality of God’s knowledge but the energy and intimacy of it that has struck home to him, kindling his thoughts and emotions and will. Rather than merely stating that God knows everything, David teaches us to say it to Him, and to relate it, in wonder, to ourselves. He sees it as living knowledge: “You have searched me … You discern (or sift).… You are familiar with all my ways.” If this is daunting—and the next stanza may show signs of it—it is also heartwarming, for it implies the caring, steady perception of a parent or a true friend, not the dismissiveness of a critic. But it does go deep, down to the hidden springs beneath our thoughts and words (vv. 2b, 4), unrecognized even by ourselves. And not only are His eyes upon us but His hand and His encircling presence (v. 5).

Is this restriction or protection? The next stanzas will unfold the answer.

The Ever-Present (vv. 7–12)

This wonderful passage inspired Francis Thompson’s poem, The Hound of Heaven: “I fled Him down the nights and down the days.…” While some interpreters see David’s thoughts of flight as no more than a devise to dramatize the fact of God’s omnipresence, I find the questions, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” too direct and poignant to be hypothetical. Here surely is an impulse we can recognize; one that is as old as Adam. But as David explores that thought to the farthest bounds of height and depth, of east and west, and into the concealing dark, it dawns on him that he is not pursued but awaited. “You are there … there … even there.” in the best and worst of places (v. 8), and Your hand is not an enemy’s to pin me down, but a friend’s to “guide” and “hold me fast” (v. 10). Even our verse 11 may testify to a threat dispelled, rather than a refuge exposed, since the un-“corrected” Hebrew runs: “I said, surely darkness will crush me.…”

But now a new dimension to God’s knowledge and presence awaits us:

The Creator (vv. 13–18)

Here we reach the heart of the matter. This awe-inspiring knowledge and mastery went into the making of us, not the undoing of us. Here, David knows, was no spectator’s passing interest, not even a parent’s understanding, but a Creator’s intimate concern for every detail, every awesome and wonderful process (v. 14) of my fashioning in the womb. And there is more still in verse 16b (as understood by most translators). My life’s history was planned ahead, not merely in broad outline, but down to “all the days ordained for me.”

Small wonder that David could exclaim—and we ourselves when we awake to this—“How precious to me are Your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” Our doubts of His ability to match these thoughts to so many of us, are more than answered by “They are more in number than the sand.” Is this hyperbole, poetic license? Or is it, rather, the proper correction of our small ideas of Him, by whom “the very hairs of [our] head are all numbered?” Further, whether or not David looked ahead to resurrection in his words, “When I awake …” (18b; cf. Psalm 17:15; Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2), we know it to be the climax of “the days ordained” for us.

The All-Holy (vv. 19–24)

To us, the final stanza may be hard to take, bringing us abruptly down to earth. But if we want escapist poems we should look elsewhere. To the psalmists God is too intense a reality to be trifled with without protest. Moreover, David’s “Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!” is not a prig’s distaste but a king’s resolve: a determination to root out evil from his administration (cf. Psalm 101). It could be costly. But by the same token he longs for the day when God will finally and fully purge His kingdom—as indeed He will (cf. Matthew 13:40–43; but meanwhile 2 Corinthians 6:1–2).

Then David opens his own heart to that searching gaze with which his psalm began (vv. 23–24). As we make his prayer our own, we can follow him in laying bare to God our thoughts (especially those that disquiet us, for whatever reason), and in seeing our sins as not only guilt but grief (such is the word David uses, akin to Genesis 6:6 where the pain is God’s). By contrast, His way is perfect: chosen for us from everlasting, leading right on into eternity. No “bypath meadow” can offer that. And it is no empty road: He is just ahead. ■

Derek Kidner, a leading Old Testament scholar and former warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, has written three volumes for The Bible Speaks Today series.

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