Bible Survey: Song of Solomon
Brother Barker called the Song of Solomon the most difficult book in the Bible to interpret, and a good many preachers never preach from it at all. Its theme is love, its key words are whom my soul loveth, and its key verse is Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it (Song of Solomon 8:7).
At the plainest level, this is the one book of the Bible given over to the beauty and purity of love between a husband and wife. God ordained marriage in the garden, and in days of adultery, pornography, divorce and homosexuality, it matters that He gave us a whole book about love kept within marriage. There are further pictures here too: Jehovah and Israel, For thy Maker is thine husband (Isaiah 54:5), Christ and His church, and the believer and his Lord.
Some read the book as pure allegory, as if the story never happened, and that is the wrong way to handle Scripture. A type is real history that also points to something greater, the way the serpent of brass really was lifted up in the wilderness and also pictured the cross.
Most commentators see two people in the song, Solomon and the Shulamite. Brother Barker was convinced there are three: King Solomon, the Shulamite woman, and a shepherd she loves. She asks him, Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon (Song of Solomon 1:7), and Solomon, raised in a palace, was never a shepherd. The king had threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number (Song of Solomon 6:8), and he wanted her as well, but she stayed true to her shepherd. Read that way, the picture of Christ in this book is not a king with a harem but the shepherd, a picture of the Good Shepherd.
Charles Spurgeon said we see our Saviour's face on almost every page of the Bible, but in this book we see His heart.
Next in the series: Romans.
Taught by Brother James Barker in Sunday School at Naples Independent Baptist Church, September 13, 2020. Watch the lesson.
