Song of Solomon study notes

Important Concepts

• Covenant Love Celebrated: The Song honors romantic and marital love as a good gift of God, worthy of joyful, unembarrassed praise within the faithfulness of marriage.
• Mutual Delight: The lovers admire and desire one another with equal devotion, modeling a love of tenderness, longing, and wholehearted belonging.
• Exclusive Faithfulness: Love is portrayed as a garden locked and a fountain sealed — exclusive, faithful, and safe within the marriage covenant.
• Love Strong as Death: The Song’s climax exalts love as a mighty, unquenchable, priceless flame, more valuable than all one’s wealth.
• The Goodness of the Body and Marriage: By celebrating beauty and intimacy, the Song affirms God’s good design for the body and for marital love, against both shame and license.
• An Image of Christ and the Church: In the whole story of Scripture, the love of bridegroom and bride pictures the greater love of Christ for His church, the marriage toward which redemption moves.

Practical Application

The Song of Solomon gives God’s people something rare and precious: permission and poetry to celebrate the goodness of love and marriage. Against the world’s tendency to cheapen intimacy into appetite, and against a false spirituality that treats the body and desire as shameful, the Song affirms that romantic love within the marriage covenant is a good gift of the Creator, to be delighted in with gratitude. It calls husbands and wives to cherish and admire one another wholeheartedly, to guard their love as exclusive and faithful — a garden locked, a fountain sealed — and to treasure it as a mighty and priceless flame. Its refrain “not to awaken love before it pleases” also offers wisdom to the unmarried, honoring love enough to wait for its proper time and place.

Read within the whole of Scripture, the Song lifts the eyes higher still. Every good and faithful human love is meant to echo the truest love of all — the love of Christ for His church. The believer can therefore read the Song not only as a celebration of an earthly gift but as a window onto the heart of the Bridegroom who loved His bride to the death, whose love is stronger than the grave and cannot be quenched by any flood. To meditate on the Song is to be moved to guard and rejoice in the good gift of marriage, and to long all the more for the great wedding at the end of the story, when the Bride, made ready, will be joined forever to the Lamb who loved her.

Questions for reflection

1. The Song celebrates covenant love as a good gift of God. How does that shape a God-honoring view of love, marriage, and intimacy against the distortions of our culture?
2. “Love is strong as death... many waters cannot quench it.” How does Christ’s love, stronger than death, deepen your understanding of this verse?
3. The love of bridegroom and bride images Christ and His church. How does reading the Song in that light stir your affection for your Bridegroom, the Lord Jesus?