Fri Jul 4

Listen up, little ones

Especially for the littles in your household.

Listen for the word lovely.

Reading

Song of Solomon 1:5-11—You Whom I Love

Keys for kids

Also for the littles. Young households might choose, after Keys for Kids, to go directly to praise and prayer.

This song is about married love.
This song is full of the language of the rest of the Bible.
We should all honor married love.

Questions

(Some read the ?s before the notes/ ask them after.)

What terms of endearment might a person call their spouse?
Why do we need God’s wisdom about human love?
In what ways was Solomon a bad example of married love?

Notes

Today’s notes are from a commentary on the Song of Songs by Douglas Sean O’Donnell

With our second guidepost in place, let me quickly add the third lest we get off course. Just because I think this Song is about human love does not mean … that it has nothing to say about God’s love for us or our love for God.

This is not an English poem scribbled on the New York City subway. It is a Hebrew poem, and there is no Hebrew literature of this era that is nonreligious. The Song is constructed of imagery that borrows heavily from the rest of the Old Testament. For example, … when we read about the theme of intoxicating love in 1:2, the command of Proverbs 5:19 to be “intoxicated always in her [a wife’s] love” ought to come to mind. This Song of Scripture is saturated with other Scriptural language. …

Our fourth and final guidepost is about wisdom. This is a song (guidepost one) about human love (guidepost two) found in the Bible (guidepost three) written to give us wisdom (guidepost four).

I take the traditional view ... that Solomon was the author. ... I [believe] that Solomon wrote this Song not in his youth but in his old age and that he did so as an act of contrition. In other words, in view of his idolatrous, polygamous relationships that led his heart away from the Lord (1 Kings 1–11) and away from sexual purity and marital intimacy (it’s hard to be truly intimate with 700 wives), he … writes this greatest of his songs in a distant “self-deprecating tone” to say to his first readers and to us, “Listen, on this matter of marriage, do as I say, not as I did.”

Swedish Method questions

See the Sunday notes for meaning of the symbols.

Praise

Psalm 45c, 34a

Prayer

Pray for the marriages in our church to be full of love.
Pray for the hearing of God’s word preached this Sunday.
Pray for a member of our church, for your family, and for a non-Christian friend/family member.