Reading: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is as strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave; its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame” Song of Solomon 8:6

In more recent years many evangelicals have viewed the Song of Solomon as “a sex manual” or a “Manual for a good marriage.” They are willing to see Christ all the way from Genesis to Ecclesiastes and from Isaiah to Malachi, but the Song of Solomon is a glitch in the Christological panorama of the Old Testament. Others, following the ideas of Plato, the Greek philosopher, want to ignore all the physical stuff and jump straight to Christ. For them the Song of Solomon is allegorical and the physical relationship evaporates in the heat of fanciful spiritualization and a run-away imagination.

Both these views, on either end of the spectrum, rob each other of beneficial instruction—the one of practical instruction in marriage and the other of spiritual instruction in the joys of the embrace of a loving and lovely Saviour. The Song of Solomon therefore, is a real-life love story which points us to the story of love between the believer and his/her Saviour. It is a type, like the story of David and of Moses and of Noah.

Read the Song of Solomon in the flow of redemptive history—real-life history that points to Christ. There we can learn how Christ loves us with “a love as strong as death,” and there, in turn, we can learn to love our wives as Christ loved the Church (Ephesians 5:25).