SoS 5:2-5 "How Conflict Can Strengthen Your Relationship"

Okay, okay. I know I said we'd already done the last post on conflict in Song of Solomon. But I couldn't resist posting this; it's too good!

Read this portion again. Solomon does something amazing I missed the first time:

    [2] I slept, but my heart was awake.
    A sound! My beloved is knocking.
    “Open to me, my sister, my love,
        my dove, my perfect one,
    for my head is wet with dew,
        my locks with the drops of the night.”
    [3] I had put off my garment;
        how could I put it on?
    I had bathed my feet;
        how could I soil them?
    [4] My beloved put his hand to the latch,
        and my heart was thrilled within me.
    [5] I arose to open to my beloved,
        and my hands dripped with myrrh,
    my fingers with liquid myrrh,
        on the handles of the bolt.
(Song of Solomon 5:2-5 ESV)

Note what Solomon does, here. He asks to come in to be with his wife; she shoots him down with some bad excuses. Then he sticks his hand in the door, and he anoints the handle with myrrh. When his bride later gets up to open the door, her fingers drip with the liquid myrrh Solomon had placed there.

This might be a bit confusing to us today, but the principle is very simple. In ancient cultures, anointing something with oil was a sign of blessing, of setting something apart, of declaring that it was precious to you. Certain oils, such as myrrh, could also connote more marital, intimate feelings.

So try to picture this whole scenario. Solomon wants to be intimate with his wife, but she shoots him down. So what does Solomon do?

He anoints the handle of the door with precious oil.

He doesn't retaliate. He doesn't argue. He doesn't lash out. He doesn't fight back.

He blesses her. She just shot him down, and he responds by anointing the handle of their bedroom with one of the most precious, expensive oils in the world.

By doing this, he signifies something very important. He is saying to her that even when times aren't perfect, even when there's conflict and hurt feelings, she is still precious to him. When times get hard, he won't be harsh with her. Even when he's hurt, he will bless her, to show her how much he cherishes her.

This is hands-down the best way to respond to conflict, whether it's in your marriage, in a dating relationship, in a friendship, with another family member, or even with a co-worker.

When you are attacked or hurt, respond by blessing them. This demonstrates love and commitment, even during the hard times. After all, it's during the hard times that this affirmation is needed the most.

Why is this important? I probably don't have to say. Our generation, more than any generation before, fears this. Statistically, we put marriage off until later and later in life. When asked why, the response is usually that we fear divorce. We fear loving someone, committing ourselves to them, and then getting our heart broken by them. So we live together before marriage, or we date casually for years. We try to avoid the fractures in families that have hurt our generation so badly. Tragically, these behaviors only make the likelihood of divorce and fracture greater: read the statistics at the end of this post.

Resolving conflict in Solomon's way actively fights against the fracture of a relationship. Conflict often has the potential to damage a relationship, but this is a way to use conflict to actually strengthen the relationship!

It does wonders to your partner's heart (or friend's heart, or co-worker's, or parent's, or sibling's) to see that when you could have attacked them, you instead blessed them. It demonstrates that you truly love them, rather than loving yourself, first. Instead of being selfish and lashing out when hurt, you serve them and show them that you value them and honor them.

This is one of the best ways to demonstrate long-term commitment in a relationship. It builds a great deal of trust, showing your partner that they are safe around you. They don't have to fear you exploding in anger, and they don't have to fear that you will leave if things get hard. They can be open emotionally to you, because you've proven that you will respond first and foremost with love, honor, commitment, and service.

This is how you melt the heart of a partner who is emotionally upset with you. You can never calm a conflict down by winning the argument. Even if you win, the relationship loses, because by stressing "I'm right and you're wrong," you're creating a fracture in the relationship. Instead of you being one as a couple, you're split, because one of you is right while the other is wrong. Yelling at each other won't solve anything, because yelling is a tool of warfare. You don't yell in tender romantic moments; you yell on the field of battle. If you yell in your marriage, you're making it a battlefield, and it will shatter your intimacy.

The only way to melt the other person's heart and end the conflict is to do what Solomon does. Bless them. Whether you feel hurt, they feel hurt, or you both feel hurt, bless them. Anoint them. Serve them. Love them, even when emotions say you should scream. Love is the only way to dispel anger. Anything else either makes anger explode or causes it to simmer under the surface, boiling until it has a chance to burst forth anew.

This is the wisdom of God. This is how God has chosen to relate to us. 

After all, we have wronged God more than our loved ones will ever wrong us. Each and every sin of ours is a direct act of rebellion to God. We continually tell Him that other things are more exciting to us than He is. We continually live as if we know what's better for us than what He does. Our societies openly mock Him, deride His truth, and attack His beloved people.

God has every reason to hate us. But He doesn't. Instead, God chooses to love us, even when He has every reason in the world to reject us!

And it is precisely this amazing love and kindness that draws our hearts to God! Romans 2:4: "God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance!" Psalm 130:3: "If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared."

Did you catch that last one? So often we feel that God is waiting to crush us, to punish us for our sins. We feel like He is shaking His head at us until we do better. But the exact opposite is true! God endears Himself to our hearts by forgetting and forgiving our sins entirely. Instead of fighting back against our rebellion, He forgives us and blesses us by cleansing us from our sin, entirely. He doesn't demand that we do more, and He doesn't delight in punishing us. Rather, He delights in suffering our punishment in our place, so that we are free to experience love.

This might seem odd; after all, so much bad teaching exists that portrays God as an angry bad father figure in the sky, constantly upset with us, always unhappy. This couldn't be further from the truth!

Consider again one of my favorite passages, Ephesians 2. It states that while we "were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked ... Yet God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus."

God loved us when we were at our worst. He's not disappointed with us when we mess up our today in the present. He saw the totality of our sin and failures all at once, and even seeing that mountain of reasons to hate us, God instead chose to love us and wipe away that mountain of sin with His own blood!

In other words, God had every reason to hate us, but instead, He chooses to love us with His whole heart!

So when you are attacked, or hurt, or rejected, or reviled, or in any way made to feel bad, respond by blessing that person. Serve them. Do the modern-day equivalent of anointing them with precious oil. Do something that clearly signifies that you aren't fighting back, that you are choosing love instead of anger. If you have trouble figuring out what to do, remember that the point of this is to put them first. Do something that puts them first, in love. Do something for them that you would normally only do at your most romantic moment.

It might feel really good to fight back. It might feel right to shout, to argue, to show why they're wrong. They might not deserve your love, at all. But that's precisely why this is so powerful!

We didn't deserve God's love, yet He gave it to us. So even if your partner is entirely in the wrong, you still have no right to fight back. Especially when they don't deserve it, respond by blessing them. This is grace, and it is the lifeblood of relationships that last, that grow deeper and more beautiful as time goes on.

And just one minor caveat: there's no such thing as yelling at a person in love. Some people have the excuse that it's okay to yell at them when you're mad, because they know that you still love them anyway. But your actions are communicating exactly the opposite. When you're hurt, if you respond with anger, fighting, or God forbid, violence, then you are communicating that your love is conditional, based on their good treatment of you. It communicates that you are more important to yourself than they are. Even if you apologize immediately after shouting, your shouts have still done their damage. Tough love may have its place on the football field, but a husband never has an excuse to shout at his wife in the same way that he shouts at his linemen.

Consider it this way. There's a saying in our culture, something like "the best part of fighting is the make-up sex." Think about what that's saying. Why is physical intimacy so amazing after a fight? Because the fight was a separation, a shattering of oneness, a dis-integration of unity as a couple. It's the fear of a break-up. When you realize that you're not splitting, not even in the emotional sense, the relief in that moment wells up into especially passionate physical intimacy. It's a celebration of oneness and love, after the fear of division and separation.

As amazing as that make-up intimacy might feel, I recommend not even fighting that way in the first place. There's no need to fight so poorly that you fear emotional separation, or even a split in the relationship. Keep intimacy high in the first place by blessing instead of fighting, and your normal intimacy will be far greater than make-up intimacy. After all, you gain a lot more altitude by flying upwards continually, rather than plunging in a nose-dive and pulling up just before you shatter on the ground.

Because this is the wisdom of God, it takes the power of God for us to be able to live this way. Naturally, we don't have the capability to forgive people before they even ask, to bless them when our emotions might rage. We can only become like God by the power of the Holy Spirit, given to us because of the sacrifice of Jesus the Savior. Only the Gospel can empower us to live like this.

So fight well, my friends. Conflict is not always a bad thing. It can be navigated in such a way as to strengthen the relationship and re-emphasize your love for each other, if it's done in the same way that God loves us. 



Note: To give credit where it is due, I am heavily indebted to Ben Stuart and his preaching of Song of Solomon 5-6 in the Breakaway Podcast. His ideas shaped this post.