[The Bride's Dream]
[3:1] On my bed by night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not.
[2] I will rise now and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but found him not.
[3] The watchmen found me
as they went about in the city.
“Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”
[4] Scarcely had I passed them
when I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go
until I had brought him into my mother's house,
and into the chamber of her who conceived me.
[5] I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles or the does of the field,
that you not stir up or awaken love
until it pleases.
(Song of Solomon 3:1-5 ESV)
And now, for something completely different. Like starting this post with sentence fragments.
We're finally on Song of Solomon 3! With this post, the pace will pick up significantly. This post is a bit on the longish side, but since I'll be traveling Thursday and won't be able to post, I'll just let this serve as both the Monday and Thursday post for this week.
This post provides a fascinating insight into the woman's heart, showing a season of this marriage through her eyes. Men, if you've ever wanted to get inside the heart of a woman and see how she views love, give this post a read! Women, if you want to see what the Scriptures have to say about what your heart feels during romance, give this one a read!
This passage is a dream, a nightmare.
"On my bed by night" - This woman is sleeping, dreaming. It could be the kind of half-asleep, half-awake situation where the terrors of a dream carry over into real life. In this section, it is somewhat difficult to say whether she is dreaming for the entirety of verses 1-5, or whether she is dreaming only in verse 1, then rises from bed and goes to search in real life in verses 2-5.
In some senses, it doesn't matter whether this is a dream or reality. This passage is expressing a fear deep in the heart of this woman. The fear is still real, whether it is expressed in a dream or in reality. I'm going to guess that she was dreaming in verse 1, and was physically awake and searching in verses 2-5, primarily because of verse 5. Previously, she has attached this warning when she is experiencing marital intimacy, and she wants to warn her single friends to avoid trying to enjoy physical intimacy outside of marriage. The warning seems to make more sense if this is a real moment of intimacy with her husband, rather than a figment of her imagination. Still, it could apply either way, and I'm not saying it's a slam-dunk argument. The passage makes sense either way, and its meaning doesn't change depending on which view you take, since the entire point of the passage is to deal with the woman's fear, which comes out clearly whether it's a dream or reality.
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| http://www.buzzle.com/articles/fear-of-abandonment-in-relationships.html |
"I sought him who my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not." This is her fear, that she will wake up in the night and find her beloved husband missing.
Think of all the different thoughts that could give rise to panic, for this woman, in this situation. Her husband is the king. Perhaps he was summoned away to a war council, and will soon be risking his life. Perhaps an enemy sent assassins to kill him, here. Perhaps a disgruntled servant or citizen acted out on their rage against him. Or perhaps he's been at work all night, and will be every night, and she'll lose him slowly to his job, never getting to enjoy the true intimacy with him that she wants. Or perhaps he has some secret grievance against her and he's punishing her with loneliness. Or, worst of all, perhaps he has gone to another woman, with his body or his heart. Perhaps he had enough of her flaws and sought out a woman more perfect than her.
Men, you need to know that these fears are very powerful in a great many women. Women are better mental multi-taskers than the average man; a woman can easily think over a dozen thoughts simultaneously, while the guy sitting next to her is only thinking, "I'm hungry." Often times, many of these thoughts will be fears and worries. If the woman cares deeply about something that's out of her control, such as whether her husband will be with her every night, she may well end up worrying about it constantly. This comes naturally to nearly every woman.
These fears will inevitably come into every relationship, in some form. In a sense, this is almost a good sign; if you didn't fear losing it, you probably didn't care much for it in the first place. So the fact that the relationship is at a level where you could fear to lose it can be a positive sign. Despite this, the fear itself is not a good thing, and needs to be addressed.
Additionally, women may suffer from these fears more than men, in some cases. Despite our culture at large tending towards egalitarianism, men are still generally expected to ask girls out, to pay for the first date, to take the lead. Given this situation, if a man suddenly finds himself single, he can just ask another girl out. Women usually aren't this quickly able to turn things around. Especially in Christian circles, women are usually expected to wait until the man initiates something. This can lead to a woman feeling trapped if she isn't getting any romantic attention. Thus, if she loses a man she's seeing romantically, she could be relegated back to an almost helpless state where she's unsure whether she'll be pursued by another man any time soon. Further, given that there are about 20 million more Christian women than men in this country, a woman can legitimately fear that if she loses the guy she's with now, she could be single for a long while before finding another good Christian guy who isn't already taken. Add on to this the fact that the woman's reproductive cycle has a time limit, while the man's generally last much longer through life. These reasons are all practical; this doesn't even begin to deal with the emotional pain of ending a relationship. Yet even when you consider only the practical reasons, you can begin to see why a woman often has more to lose from a break-up than a man.
In the Song of Solomon, this woman fears the loss of her man partly because he is the king. He's well-loved, and she's already mentioned how all the women love him. In other words, he has options. He could likely be with any woman he wanted to be with. Additionally, this woman is well aware of her flaws. She knows she doesn't meet the standard of beauty for the day. Solomon has repeatedly told her that she is his standard of beauty, but even with his constant re-affirmation, she no doubt sees other women as "more beautiful" than her.
Thus, we can see that there are a lot of things feeding this fear. In her mind, at least, she has good reasons to be afraid.
Yet fear must never be given this kind of power in our lives. Fear might have its reasons, but fear itself is rarely ever rational. If left unchecked, fear will absolutely destroy romantic relationships.
Let's keep this in mind as we explore the rest of this section.
"I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but found him not." Her fear leads her to wander through the entire city of Jerusalem, whether in her dreams or in real life.
This woman is not passive. She is active, and may be a bit of a control-freak. When her man is missing, she doesn't get in a closet and pray. She goes out and takes action, trying to find him, desperately searching. Was this the right course of action, or not? Keep reading to find out.
"The watchmen found me as they went about in the city. 'Have you seen him whom my soul loves?'" She's not just wandering around and looking. Now she's enlisting help. She's trying to get the help of anyone who can show her where Solomon has gone. Are you starting to get the picture of how desperate this woman is? She's panicking. That's how terrified she is that Solomon is gone.
But then, verse 4: "Scarcely had I passed them when I found him whom my soul loves." Finally, she sees him. She doesn't say what he was doing, which pretty clearly says that it doesn't matter. It wasn't anything incriminating or fear-inducing, or else she would have mentioned it in despair; further, if he was doing something unfaithful, it likely wouldn't lead to the intimacy of the rest of this verse.
So she finds him. He wasn't doing anything bad. He was just out and about while she was sleeping. And yet she tore up the entire city looking for him.
"I held him, and would not let him go until I had brought him into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her who conceived me." Now that she has him, she won't let go of him, much less let him out of her sight. But she doesn't lead him back to the palace, where anything can distract him or pull him away. Instead she leads him to her mother's house. And she doesn't just lead him to the house; she goes into her parents' bedroom. Her intentions are clear; she wants to be alone, private, and intimate with her husband, this man whom she loves so dearly that she can't bear to be apart from him.
So there's good and bad, here. The good is clear: this woman is so in love with this man that she needs to be with him. She loves him so passionately that when she wakes up and he's not right next to her, she is not all right. If she were to lose him, she would lose it. As soon as she finds him, she desperately wants to be intimate with him. She's an angsty woman who wants this man! Women, let me tell you a little secret: men absolutely love it when their woman wants to be with them this badly! Feel free to intiate these kinds of actions. Men absolutely love it!
But there's also bad. She has very little trust. She doesn't seem to trust Solomon. When she sees him gone, rather than trust that he's got it covered and he'll come back to her soon enough, she panics and runs out to find him herself. She has to be in control; she has to know that everything is okay.
As you can imagine, this can lead to significant problems in a relationship. This next part is a bit of speculation on my part, but I wonder if this had any part in eventually pushing her and Solomon apart. It's one thing for a woman to desperately desire her man; that is wonderful and beautiful and a heck of a lot of fun! But it's another thing entirely for her to need to know exactly what he's doing at every moment.
Men tend to chafe under an overly-clingy woman. It's a tragic cycle for women. They fear losing their man, so they cling tighter, but then this very act of clinging tightly makes their man want to put some distance between them. This is still speculation; I don't know if this really happened or not. But I wonder if she began to cling to Solomon so tightly that he began to resent it, and he began to put some distance between them.
Fundamentally, being so clingy shows a lack of respect, a lack of trust. Women, if you want a quick and easy way to get a guy to run away from you, show him no respect. Women, I know it seems strange to you, but most men would rather be well-respected than well-liked or well-loved. So if you love your man, but you cling to him and show that you don't trust him to come back to you, this lack of respect may be the very thing that drives him away from you.
Conversely, if you want a man to grow even more fond of you, show him how much you respect and trust him. Let him spend a night out with the guys without checking in on him once. When you ask him questions about his day, or about anything he did when you weren't present, ask him as a friend who's genuinely curious, rather than channeling the spirit of a suspicious parent in your interrogation of him. I'm not saying you should let him get away with anything; if he comes home at 3 AM with lipstick on his collar and he's so drunk that he can barely walk straight, you're right to be suspicious. But if he's doing normal guy stuff and there are no relationship red flags, leave off with the nagging. If he knows that you trust him, his fondness for you will only grow.
Additionally, women, I want you to see that this woman had no reason to panic. Remember in chapter 2, when they were safe in each other's arms, completely free from anxiety and worry? She rested in his shade because she knew he loved her, because he told her repeatedly that she was a beautiful lily, and compared to her, all other women were only brambles, thorns and thistles.
That hasn't changed since then. Solomon still loves this woman dearly. Given that Solomon is a master of romance, we can assume that he's been telling this woman how much he loves her regularly since then.
Yet when she wakes up without him, she panics. Fear often does this. There is no rational reason for fear; every detail of their relationship points to how captivated he is by her. She has no reason to worry, despite all the possibilities we mentioned above. She should be able still to rest in his love, to trust that his heart is pointed only to her.
Instead, she lets fear consume her. And it may just have been the thing that eventually pushed him away from her.
This illustrates the deeper issue, the problem that exists beneath her lack of trust in him. She doesn't trust God. This woman, as wonderful as she is, has a problem with trusting God with her relationship. When her man is gone in the middle of the night, she doesn't pray. She doesn't seek God. Instead, she takes action herself, and doesn't even think of God, as far as we can tell.
This is critically dangerous, because only by trusting in God can we ever truly abolish fear. As this passage proves, a man can be the most romantic and charming man on earth, and his wife can still fear that his heart will stray from her. If Solomon, who literally wrote the textbook on romance, can't abolish his wife's fear with his romance, no man should think that he alone can say enough words or do enough things to put his wife at ease.
The only way to abolish fear is to trust God. He is the only thing that is absolutely certain in life. Absolutely everything in our lives will change and fluctuate, except for Him. He will always be on the Throne, high and lifted up, absolutely sovereign over all creation, perfectly wise, aware of everything, seeing the full future as well as the entire past. And to top it all off, He is perfectly good, and He is the very definition of love. We can trust Him to be the God of our lives. After all, we deserve nothing. For our lives of sin, we deserve nothing but hellfire. Yet God pours out continual grace to us, giving us lives filled with good things we don't deserve. As the Bible says, every good and perfect gift is from God; everything good in your life comes only because God gave it to you. While we keep sinning and destroying our lives as a result, He keeps loving us and showering us with good things we don't deserve. How can we not trust Him?
And yet, for a great many people, trusting God with their romantic relationship is the one thing they cannot or will not do. I know this well; I used to be one of them. I could not trust God with my romantic pursuits, because I had been burned too many times. Each time I was interested in a girl, I prayed about it feverishly. Then I asked her out, and whether it lasted one conversation or two months, I would inevitably get shot down. Usually it was quite painful, particularly because I had trusted God with it, and I felt like He kept failing me. The desire to be married has been one of the strongest desires throughout my entire life; it's one of the things I've prayed for daily for over a decade. So when I trusted God with this deep desire, and He gave me nothing but heartbreak, I lost my trust in Him.
It made a twisted sort of sense; God didn't come through for me, so I had to do it all myself. Yet I shot myself in the foot. Trying to be the one in control of a romantic relationship leads to panic. I was just as anxious as this woman at many times, and it never helped. All it ever did was push people away and spoil any time I could otherwise have enjoyed. I felt exhausted, because I was expending so much energy worrying and trying to be safe emotionally by being in control of the relationship. It ruined me, and it ruined a number of potential relationships.
At the core of it all, I didn't believe that following God's will would result in my happiness. I thought if I wanted to be happy, I had to make it happen, myself.
If you believe anything similar, I beg of you: repent of this demonic lie immediately! Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. The great truth of Scripture is that following God's will for your life will be the surest path to the greatest joy you could ever experience!
To be clear, I'm not saying that God will always give you what you want. The truth is the opposite, but beautifully so: God will often deny you what you want, for the simple reason that there is more joy for you in His plan than in yours!
Notice that I didn't say there will be more happiness in His plan. His plan may involve a great deal of pain, such as making Abraham wait almost 100 years for his son. Yet this was for Abraham's great benefit, to develop his soul, such that when he finally had a son, he wouldn't idolize him. Further, Abraham's attempts to solve his own problem by siring a child with a woman he wasn't married to, led to more pain than he could possibly have endured by waiting 10 more years. When Abraham finally experienced God's provision in God's timing, he had so much joy with his son that the wait was well worth it.
For me, this means that even though marriage is still a huge desire for me, it's not a pressing, crushing need that I have to chase with reckless abandon. I can walk at the pace God dictates, and enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
There may well be pain in pursuing God's will. Yet it's the pain of a surgeon, and it's pain we can trust. It's pain that will lead to joy, if we let Jesus work in us what He wants to accomplish.
Yet Jesus is not a God of pain. He is a God of joy, of pleasure, of laughter, of happiness. Furthermore, He is a God who absolutely loves romance and marriage! God designed marriage and was absolutely delighted to bring the first man to the first woman and unite them in marriage, before the Fall. He is not opposed to marriage and relationships in any way. The heart of God is supremely pleased by a marriage in which the husband and wife love each other with the unconditional, self-giving, other-pleasing, God-glorifying love of Jesus!
You can trust God with your relationships. Yes, He might end it, but if He does, then it should be ended; He knows better than you, and if He knows that there is more joy for you elsewhere, you need to humbly submit to that. Alternatively, instead of ending it, He may take a relationship down a different path than one you chose, possibly longer, possible involving a lot more complications, possibly requiring a lot more trust on your part. But again, if God says this path is better than the straight shot to the altar you envisioned, you need to trust Him. And of course, if He blesses your relationship and brings you two together, you can trust Him completely in pursuing this relationship, and you can relax in the knowledge that He is your greatest ally. After all, if God is for you, who can possibly be against you?
This is the only way to abolish the fear of your partner leaving, of the relationship ending. You can't control the other person, and you'll only harm the relationship if you try. You have to trust that God, and God alone, can make this thing work. If you doubt, you must first of all pray, and keep praying until God answers. If your partner is doing sketchy stuff, the only way to change their heart is to ask God to change it. Nothing you can do will work. The only path to redeeming the relationship is trusting Him, since He alone has power to change the human heart. The only way out of fear is trusting the One who can do all things.
If this woman had followed the path of trusting God, who is to say how much longer their relationship would have lasted? As it is, she panicked, and spent an entire night frantically searching for Solomon.
Imagine how it could have been different. If she woke up with him gone and instead turned to prayer, God could have calmed her spirit and reassured her that He was in control, and Solomon was coming home. She could have waited with joyful expectation for him, and as soon as he came in the bedroom door, he could have seen his wife, eager for him, ready to be intimate with him. The pleasure they could have had then could easily have rivaled the pleasure they had in verse 4, at her mother's house.
Further, if Solomon realized that he had this waiting for him at home, let me tell you something ladies: he would have raced home the next night! If a man knows he will be coming home to an enjoyable wife who's eager to be with him, instead of a clingy and nagging woman, he won't let anything delay him from being with her!
If she had only trusted God, she could have enjoyed the very thing she craved, the very thing she ruined by trying to grasp it with her own hands.
Finally, we have verse 5. "I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the does of the field, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases." Again, she enjoys intimacy with her husband, and again it's so amazing that she has to caution the virgins to wait for marriage to experience it. Any attempts to have similar experiences outside of marriage will be frightfully sub-par, and will likely lead to pain and emotional baggage instead of delight.
God is gracious. This woman freaks out and doesn't trust God or her husband, yet God is still gracious and gives her a delightful time with her beloved.
If you haven't trusted God before in this area, if fear has claimed your life, if fear has lead to ruin in your life, it's never too late to turn around. God is gracious! Even if you have done things poorly, even if you've got a relationship that you pursued in a wrongful state of mind, God can still redeem it and give you the pleasure that you crave.
At the same time, you need to be aware that just because you are experiencing joy and pleasure doesn't mean that God is necessarily satisfied with where you're at. He may just be giving you joys that you don't deserve simply because He still loves you, while you're on the way to self-destructing. If you want to know if God is satisfied with your relationship, see how it matches up to the revelation in this book. He's given you the blueprint of what to do (and what not to do) here. Use this book's wisdom to guide you into true joy, into a lasting relationship, into a life satisfied in God's will, rather than trying to be gods yourself.
Finally, it should be said that if you're experiencing trouble in life, it's not a license to sin. The surest path to peace for this woman was to get on her knees in prayer, not to panic. Just because God gave her what she sought did not mean that God sanctioned her sinful pursuit of it. She recognizes this in some sense; she tells her unmarried friends that marital joy is not worth pursuing through sinful means, even though she herself just pursued it through sinful means, in a different sense. Perhaps this is an act of repentance on her part, or perhaps she simply misses the irony of telling them not to do what she just did.
Either way, let it be clearly said: pleasure pursued by sinful means will never be as sweet and as satisfying as that pursued by Godly means. Pleasure pursued by sinful means might satisfy for a moment. Pleasure pursued by the way God designed things can last for a lifetime.
So don't let your fears master you. Focus your heart on who God is, on how powerful He is, and on how loving He is. Only by focusing on Him and who He is can your heart ever know true peace. And the only way that you will be able to trust Him with what is most dear to you is by knowing that He is worthy of that trust. You can't know that He is trustworthy if you don't spend time in His Word, getting to know Him, seeing just how capable He truly is!
If you want some places to start to help build your trust in God, check out these:
- Genesis 24: God sovereignly provides the perfect bride for Isaac
- The first several chapters of the book of Exodus: It's absolutely amazing how God is able to rescue an entire nation of slaves from the most powerful country on Earth without losing a single Israelite life.
- Read the entire life of Abraham in Genesis, starting around the end of chapter 11. Abraham learns the hard way to trust God, but when he does, all heaven breaks loose. (Forgive the cheesy pastor pun).
- Read the Passion Week stories in all four Gospels, when Jesus is crucified, buried, and Resurrected. Consider it through the eyes of the disciples: Jesus told them beforehand exactly what would happen; He gave them perfect reasons to trust Him. Yet they didn't listen and they panicked, denying Him, abandoning Him, and cowering behind locked doors for fear that they were next to die. If they had only trusted the God who had walked with them for three years, they would have been spared an immense amount of pain and fear.
Our God is phenomenally worthy of our trust. Why should we be afraid? Jesus reigns! Or as I like to say it:
Fear has no place for one whose God is on the Throne!
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