8 Reasons to Rethink the Song of Songs
Written by J.A. Medders |
Saturday, December 10, 2022
In the first chapter of the Song, we learn this song is King Solomon’s and that he is also a shepherd. There is a bounty of biblical theology in Solomon. Who else do we know that is a Son of David, who is a King and a Shepherd? Solomon is a shadow of the one who says he is greater than Solomon—a greater king, a greater sage, and a greater lover of his people.
The Song of Songs is the most lukewarmly debated book in the Bible. There’s some engagement, but not enough. While the arguments and interpretations of Revelation run red-hot, Song of Songs tends to be entrenched in assumptions. I want you to rethink what you might think about the Song of Songs.
Since I’m doing my Ph.D. work on C.H. Spurgeon and the spiritual sense of the Song, I frequently find myself talking to friends and anyone with ears about the Song of Songs, and I preach from the Song whenever I get the chance. I’m not surprised that most of the people I talk to think the Song is only about romance in marriage—some even believe there is no way the book has anything to say about Christ and the Church or Christ and the Christian.
When I tell people that Spurgeon did nearly 70 sermons from the Song of Songs and that they are all about Christ and the Church, they are baffled. In one sermon, Spurgeon gives seven ways Jesus is like a “bundle of myrrh.” He also gave eight sermons on “I am my beloved’s, and he is mine” (Song 2:16). Spurgeon said about the Song:
“That Song of Solomon is the central Book of the Bible; it is the innermost shrine of divine revelation, the holy of holies of Scripture; and if you are living in communion with God, you will love that Book, you will catch its spirit, and you will be inclined to cry with the spouse, ‘Make haste, my beloved.’”
So how can we catch the spirit of this book? Most of us have probably heard that the Song is only about romance, and for years, that’s what I believed too.
Here are eight reasons we should also embrace the spiritual, Christ-centered interpretation of the Song of Songs.
1.Jesus’s View of the Old Testament. Jesus said the whole Bible is about him (John 5:39, Luke 24:27). Our belief that the entire canon bears witness to the Messiah, to Jesus of Nazareth, must include the Song of Songs—if not, then we don’t have a thoroughly Christian reading of the Old Testament.
2.Illumination of the Spirit. If there is no spiritual interpretation, spiritual significance, or Christological meaning in the book, then the Song of Songs is the only book of the Bible that you don’t need the Holy Spirit’s illuminating power; all you need is an understanding of ancient near-eastern poetry.
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Where Does Sin Come From?
Written by Guy M. Richard |
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Sin is not something that needed to be created in order to exist. It became a possibility when God created the angels who were capable of choosing godliness or ungodliness, and it was actualized when one of those angels chose the latter over the former. This angel, along with his army of demons who joined him in rebelling against God, are responsible for promoting and proliferating sin in every generation. And, under their influence, sin has become the natural bent of every human being’s heart, mind, will, and affections.Sin exists. That much should be obvious. We see it manifested in the world all around us; we see evidence of it within ourselves as well. Violence and hatred go virtually unchecked. Selfishness and pride run amok in so much of what we do and in so many of the decisions we make. Anger and frustration so often lurk beneath the surface, just waiting for the right circumstances to call them up. And storms and diseases frequently wreak havoc on our lives and our livelihoods. These things we all know to be part and parcel of the world in which we live. The question is, why? Why are they part of our reality? Where did they come from? Better yet, if these things are all manifestations of sin, the real question we must answer is, where did sin come from?
The problem gets more complicated, however. If God created everything in the universe and declared it to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31), and if sin is, at its root, not good—i.e., it is unrighteousness and ungodliness, as I argued in my last article—then God couldn’t have created it. But if God didn’t create it, then where did sin come from? Has it always existed? Is it some kind of cosmic opposite to God? Or is there some “sinful” being that is responsible for bringing it into the world and sustaining its influence in every generation down through the ages? And, if that is true, then where did this being come from? These are just some of the things that we will be exploring in this article. Let’s start “in the beginning” with what happened at creation.
Sin Didn’t Need to Be Created
If, as I argued in my last article, sin is ungodliness or unrighteousness or, even, lawlessness, then this means that sin is not a substance that needs to be created in order for it to exist. It is an attitude or a posture—an anti-God attitude or posture—that leads in turn to anti-God thoughts, words, and deeds. Sin is the privation or absence of godliness or righteousness or lawfulness, much in the same way that darkness is the privation or absence of light. God didn’t need to create ungodliness; it already existed as an “opposite” to His own character and will.
In addition to the passages I cited in my last article, Titus 2:11-14 clearly supports this line of reasoning. Significantly, according to the apostle Paul, we are told in these verses that Jesus “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness” (v. 14). Sin is necessarily, therefore, the opposite of law-keeping; it is the privation or absence of lawfulness. And because God’s character and will are the only bases for the law, this means that sin is nothing more or less than ungodliness. Paul confirms this interpretation by placing “lawlessness” in v. 14 in parallel with “ungodliness” in vv. 11-12. The work of Christ not only redeems us from our lawlessness; it also transforms us more and more to reflect God’s character and will over the course of our lives.
This, in turn, confirms that sin didn’t need to be created. It is the privation or absence of God, His character, and His will. All that is needed for it to come into existence is for creatures to exist who have the ability to choose to embrace God/godliness or to reject it. Therefore, when God created the angels with the ability to choose “for God” or “not for Him,” sin—which is simply ungodliness—became a distinct possibility for the first time in the history of the universe.
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Why Is There Beauty in the World?
We are naturally attracted to beauty. It has a fascination, and we wish somehow that we could be one with it or enter into it or enjoy it even more. This attraction is a subtle message reminding us of the attraction of God himself, and the satisfaction and joy that we can find only by knowing God and having communion with him.
Why is there beauty in the world? Why is a flower beautiful? Why is a hummingbird beautiful? Why is light beautiful? And what is beauty? People dispute about it. Herman Bavinck associates beauty with “harmony, proportion, unity in diversity, organization, glow, glory, shining, fullness, perfection revealed.”[1] All of them together make something beautiful—strangely attractive and splendid and wonderful.[2]
Is God beautiful? The Bible indicates that beauty traces back to God. God is supremely beautiful. His beauty is reflected in the world he made and sustains. We find that in searching for the source for beauty, we encounter ultimate reality, the reality of God himself.
Some theologians, as far back as Augustine, have said that God is beautiful.[3] Others have cautioned against ascribing beauty to God, wanting to avoid a confusion between God and things in the world that are beautiful. So which is it? God is distinct from every created thing; in addition, God’s character is displayed in the things that he has made (Rom. 1:20). So the short answer is that created things that are beautiful reflect God but are not identical with God. Beauty in created things relates to God by “analogy, not identity.”[4]
Beauty In the Tabernacle and the Priests, Reflecting God
Psalm 27:4 describes God as beautiful:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORDall the days of my life,to gaze upon the beauty of the LORDand to inquire in his temple.
According to this psalm, the beauty of the Lord is displayed in “the house of the LORD,” “his temple.” We know from other parts of the Bible that the temple is a kind of small-scale version of the big dwelling place of God, which is the whole universe (1 Kings 8:27).[5] The whole universe also displays the beauty of its maker (Pss. 19:1; 104:1-2).
In the same verse in Psalm 27, the psalmist says that he seeks the presence of God; it is the “one thing” that he asks for:
One thing have I asked of the LORD,that will I seek after:that I may dwell in the house of the LORDall the days of my life…(verse 4)
In seeking communion with God, the psalmist is also seeking the beauty of God. We naturally seek beauty, as something attractive. So Psalm 84:1-2 says:
How lovely is your dwelling place,O LORD of hosts!My soul longs, yes, faintsfor the courts of the LORD.
Let us consider the tabernacle of Moses, which was the predecessor for Solomon’s temple. In Exodus 25-27 God instructs Moses about the building of the tabernacle. The tabernacle is supposed to be a tent dwelling with symbolic significance. It symbolizes that God dwells in the midst of his people Israel: “And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Ex. 25:8). The tabernacle displays beauty, because it represents the splendor of God, who is the great king of the universe.
This splendor anticipates and foreshadows the greater splendor that belongs to Christ, as the climactic revelation of God: the Bible speaks of “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). The preceding context in 2 Corinthians 3 explains the analogy and contrast between the glory of God revealed in Moses’s time and the glory of the new covenant:
For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation [through Moses], the ministry of righteousness [given to Paul in the new covenant] must far exceed it in glory. Indeed, in this case, what once had glory has come to have no glory at all, because of the glory that surpasses it. For if what was being brought to an end came with glory, much more will what is permanent have glory.2 Corinthians 3:9-11
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You Reap What You Sow: The PCA’s Internal Difficulties and Membership Losses
Hopefully I am wrong on that point, but to pivot back from the hypothetical to the real, the fact remains that the PCA, like the broader church in America, is not flourishing at the moment and is beset with real problems. If we wish to receive God’s blessing, we shall have to rely on his strength (Jn. 15:5) and submit to his requirements. And that means, as I have said above, that we cannot allow serious public wrongdoing to go unpunished, lest we also incur his wrath
There are many frustrating characteristics about the modern world, one of which is the tendency for people to needlessly complicate things. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation will know what I mean. Suppose that department A has failed to meet its goals because one of its employees has become unreliable and been slack in completing his work. The obvious remedy would be for leadership to pull the slacker aside and tell him that his performance is unacceptable and must promptly improve, or else he will be replaced.
But that is not how most corporations work. Instead of dealing with the troublemaker directly, leadership will call an all-department meeting to discuss the problem, thus taking the productive employees away from their work, dodging the real issue, and putting the department even farther behind. The meeting itself will take any of a variety of forms. Probably it will be suggested that the failure is that of the whole department and everyone will have to hear a lecture about how they need to ‘prioritize’ and work harder to get done what needs accomplished. The people who are working diligently will resent being taken away from their work to get berated about someone else’s wrongdoing, their relations with leadership and the slacker will deteriorate, morale will plummet, and the department will be even farther from accomplishing its goals. The slacker will either a) be oblivious to the fact that all of this talk about working harder is meant for him; or b) realize it is meant for him but not care because he is a selfish, dishonest person who does not care about how his behavior affects others.
Another possibility is that the whole situation will be seized as an ‘opportunity’ for management to lobby for something they want like increased staffing, or else for them to spend much time talking about how department processes need to be improved to increase efficiency. At no point will the attention, authority, and power of leadership be brought to bear on the troublemaker. Anyone who dares to suggest the problem is with a particular person rather than the collective department or its processes, tools, etc. will be promptly silenced and chided for ‘rocking the boat,’ ‘not being a team player,’ or some other trite corporate jargon, and will be solemnly told to ‘be positive.’
That response, so common in the workplace, is essentially that of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) as regards her internal difficulties. For some time now there has been a tendency to normalize and make acceptable the experience of certain unmentionable sexual desires by failing to meaningfully combat them. The matter has been debated, discussed, studied, and investigated for almost five years now with an enormous quantity of words. Missouri Presbytery’s reports on Greg Johnson and Revoice contain about 145,000 words (combined), while the 2021 “Human Sexuality Report” is another 30,000 or so. For comparison, the New Testament is about 138,000 words in Greek.
Now I say that all of this excess of time and words has been in great measure an endeavor in dodging the essential issue. Whatever the merits of its formal content, as a method of responding to something that has unsettled the church it has been as tedious and misdirected as the typical corporate response mentioned above. It carefully skirted the root issue and did not hold the offender to account.
And its results have been the same as in a corporation. In the workplace the strained relationships, bad morale, and culture of no accountability for wrongdoing persist even if the original instigator eventually leaves the company. In our case the original instigator of the church’s severe disruption of peace and purity left voluntarily, but the disruption persists and threatens to fester for the foreseeable future in the form of factions, continued debates and overtures at the General Assembly and presbytery levels, and in a general atmosphere of wide-ranging public disagreement.
In the workplace the result of a persistently bad culture is that many employees tire of carrying more than their share of work and of seeing brazen laziness go unrestrained. Many of them reduce their own productivity in response, and many of them leave the company in search of a more disciplined work environment. Bad employees degrade and drive out good ones, in other words.
We seem to be witnessing a similar result. People are leaving the PCA in significant numbers, both as individuals and as churches. A review of the denomination’s most recent five-year summary shows as much when combined with external demographic data. In the 2018-2021 period the PCA baptized 31,070 people. Assuming, what is admittedly imperfect, that our death rate for those years was the same as the national age-adjusted death rate as reported in the CDC’s annual mortality briefs, we lost about 11,890 members to glory in that period. Thus, while our aggregate membership declined by 6,404 from 2018 to 2021, our actual membership loss was almost triple that, and there were about 19,180 people who theoretically should have been in our fold in 2021 who were not. Absent such a membership loss, our actual membership in 2021 would’ve been about 5.1% higher than it was.
I will not be so churlish as to suggest that all of this loss has been a protest against the PCA’s ineffectiveness in maintaining discipline, since there are obviously other possible causes and since there is no way of knowing for certain how much loss is due to what particular causes. Still, there is reason to think that much of that loss is due to people giving up on the denomination and dismissing it as hopelessly ineffective and compromised by worldliness. I have a fair bit of correspondence from people who have done so, and there are other things, including the denominational grapevine and testimonies published at this site, which indicate the same. Indeed, the top three most read Aquila Report stories of 2020 were about people leaving and the newly-forming, independent Vanguard Presbytery, which shows where the attention of at least one segment of the denomination’s membership is focused.
What then should be done in response? First, we must recognize that our current problems are attributable to specific people, not defects in our internal organizational arrangements. It will do precisely no good whatever to amend the Book of Church Order if presbyteries and churches can flaunt it with impunity by ‘creatively complying’ with it or appealing to its (imagined) ‘lack of clarity’ and tying any objections to their disobedience up in years of committee debates, studies, and reports, and in painstakingly slow judicial processes.
Wrongdoers must be confronted and exhorted to repentance, and if this fails the matter must be pursued further, including the institution of formal process against them. It is every elder’s sworn duty to combat serious error (BCO 21-5, 24-6) – such a thing is inherent in maintaining the purity and peace of the church. By serious error I do not mean differences of opinion regarding worship style, whether or not a church has a Sunday evening service, etc. I mean wrongdoing like was involved in some of the deeds of Memorial Presbyterian in St. Louis, like giving practical aid to things that promote such a destructive social phenomenon as sexual confusion, as well as things like slander, blasphemy, rebellion, and unholy public speech. Such egregious wrong must be opposed – a little leaven leavens the whole lump (Gal. 5:9) – or the PCA is certain to fall into apostasy. There seems to have been some of this one-on-one confrontation already, but there needs to be more of it, and we must not content ourselves was hoping that people who disagree concerning things like sexual morality will leave the denomination of their own volition.
Lastly, the time is right to slow our ordination of teaching elders. From 2018 to 2021 the denomination’s number of teaching elders, candidates, and licentiates increased by 208 (4.2%), 167 (31.1%), and 30 (15.6%), respectively, while our total number of churches only increased by 21 (1.3%), missions dropped by 37 (-10.4%), and membership decreased 6,404 (-1.7%). Maybe some of that is due to more teaching elders serving out of bounds in domestic or foreign missions, but a review of recent general assembly minutes did not suggest, insofar as they are able, that such a thing is to account for most of the difference. In any event, my correspondence from presbyteries that rejected overtures like 23 and 15 concerning fitness for office tells me that the failure was due to the opposition of teaching elders where many ruling elders were in favor. Should we then create more such officers when our membership is declining, our churches are increasing only slightly, and their seminary education seems to place them pretty reliably to the left of our ruling elders and membership?
If I am right that the inclinations of our leaders are essentially the same as those of leaders in corporate America, they would answer with an unequivocal ‘yes,’ and I suspect that I can anticipate their larger response. The loss of members and slow growth of churches just prove that we need to put all that much more effort into church planting. And as for the losses, they are probably largely due to COVID and will settle out in a year or two. Sure, some people have some exaggerated concerns owing to ‘gossip outlets’ and fundamentalist fear-mongering, and a few people have perhaps left on that account. But such people simply didn’t believe in the vision, had bad attitudes that negatively impacted the rest of us, and have plenty of other places they can go like the Bible Presbyterian Church and whatnot. All these lost people that we are winning with our beautiful orthodoxy and winsome, contextualized, nuanced, and culturally-competent missions will make up for the loss of the naysayers, so we should view all of this as an opportunity to invest more in our denominational agencies and programs, be even more ambitious in our missions goals, accelerate our diversity initiatives, and maybe even consider whether this proves that deaconesses and other practical and constitutional innovations are in order.
Hopefully I am wrong on that point, but to pivot back from the hypothetical to the real, the fact remains that the PCA, like the broader church in America, is not flourishing at the moment and is beset with real problems. If we wish to receive God’s blessing, we shall have to rely on his strength (Jn. 15:5) and submit to his requirements. And that means, as I have said above, that we cannot allow serious public wrongdoing to go unpunished, lest we also incur his wrath (1 Sam. 2:12-27; Rev. 2:14-16, 20-23). Especially is this the case with those who hold office and have sworn to maintain the church’s purity, for this word stands: “If you make a vow to the LORD your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the LORD your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin” (Deut. 23:21). If we will not be true to our vows and maintain our own standards in our own midst, I see no reason to think that he will bless us in our efforts to expand or plant new churches. It takes but a little sin to besmirch much righteousness (Ecc. 9:18). One man sparing what is devoted to destruction brought defeat to the whole nation of Israel (Josh. 7). One man’s census brought calamity on the whole of Israel (2 Sam. 24). And of course, a single act of rebellion plunged our whole race into ruin in Eden. And as I review our denomination’s state and deeds – again, see the last few paragraphs and links here – I think we have more to anger God than a little hidden contraband or an ill-advised census.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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