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Song of Songs 6:8-9   Sixty queens there may be, and eighty concubines, and virgins beyond number; but my dove, my perfect one, is unique, the only daughter of her mother, the favourite of the one who bore her.  The young women saw her and called her blessed; the queens and concubines praised her.

While the Song of Songs is a very personal and intimate love song, it seems to me to be included by the Holy Spirit in the inspired Word of God because it speaks so eloquently of the relationship that exists between Christ (the ‘He’, or King Solomon, of the poem) and his Church (the ‘She’, or Bride, of the poem).  The New Testsment gives us ample evidence of the depth and intensity of this relationship (cf Ephesians 5:25-33).

With this in mind, this is the way Eugene Petersen reads today’s verses in ‘The Message’: “There’s no one on earth like her, never has been, never will be.  She’s a woman beyond compare.  My dove is perfection, pure and innocent as the day she was born, and cradled in joy by her mother.  Everyone who came by to see her exclaimed and admired her – all the fathers and mothers, the neighbours and friends, blessed and praised her:”  In the light of the Church’s history over 2,000 years, and especially in the light of its present state, it is quite humbling and encouraging to read just how God in Christ sees us, loves us and treats us in spite of our all our frailty and weaknesses; and to meditate on the fact that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:25b-27).  Moreover, “God placed all things under [Christ’s] feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (Ephesians 1:22-23).

How important it is for us to be striving to be everything that God sees us to be, knowing that he has chosen us, his frail and fumbling ‘Bride’, to be the primary means by which he would reveal himself to his broken world, and to draw broken people to himself through our witness.  Think about the comment made by my new atheist friend of whom I wrote yesterday, and please join with me in praying for him (Joseph, from Iran), and many others like him, that he, and they, by God’s abundant grace, will turn from their entrenched atheism and find new life and hope in Christ alone.

– Bruce Christian