Means of Grace, Day 3

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By Chuck Griffin
Editor, LifeTalk

“And when you fast, don’t make it obvious, as the hypocrites do, for they try to look miserable and disheveled so people will admire them for their fasting. I tell you the truth, that is the only reward they will ever get. But when you fast, comb your hair and wash your face. Then no one will notice that you are fasting, except your Father, who knows what you do in private. And your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.”—Jesus, speaking in Matthew 6:16-8 (NLT).

I mentioned yesterday that Scripture and prayer work together in the life of the serious Christian. The same can be said of fasting. From a spiritual perspective, fasting is meaningless if not combined with Scripture and prayer.

Think of fasting as a catalyst. Spiritual disciplines performed while fasting should be more focused and effective.

Fasting is not a popular topic in a culture where Taco Bell once advertised, “Welcome to Fourth Meal.” As Americans, we tend to have easy access to what we want when we want it, be it food or other needs and wants. When we discover people among us going hungry, particularly children, we rightly see their plight as a travesty in a nation of relative abundance.

It perhaps is a little easier to talk about fasting now because so many people fast for nonspiritual reasons, to lose weight or improve blood work. Variations on the “intermittent fast” abound. At least the idea is now less-foreign in what can be a gluttonous culture.

The spiritual idea behind such self-denial is to remind ourselves of our fragility, and therefore, our dependence on God. As a Christian, it is important to be sure those hungry moments are filled with something other than food. In the right frame of mind, Scripture should leap to life and the prayer experience should become more vivid as we fast.

As Jesus said, “I have a kind of food you know nothing about. … My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work.” (John 4:32-24.) As followers of Christ, we similarly should focus during our fasting on aligning ourselves with the will of God and doing the work of the kingdom.

Fasting for spiritual reasons looks externally like fasting for physical reasons. The only real difference is intent. The first time I read about one version of intermittent fasting, where a person doesn’t eat after dinner until about mid-afternoon the next day, I thought to myself, “That’s just John Wesley’s 18th-century way of fasting.”

Some people have physical reasons they cannot fast from food. In such cases, it’s perfectly appropriate to abstain from other activities so as to spend more time in prayer or the Bible. Deliberately leaving the television off for an extended time would be one example.

What’s important is that we learn to put aside distractions and live in the Kingdom of God. As we fast or abstain, the contrast between this hungering world and the eternal abundance of where we are headed can be remarkable.

Lord, give us the courage to try spiritual practices that may be new to us, and please speak to us clearly as we attempt them. Amen.

Means of Grace, Day 2

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By Chuck Griffin
Editor, LifeTalk

Philippians 4:6 (NLT): Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.

Like Scripture, prayer is an extremely broad subject. Again, we are talking about a many-layered discipline, one with more depth to it than we can hope to explore in a lifetime.

Prayer takes time, and that causes us to shy away from a deep commitment to it. And yet, prayer also seems to interact with time in mysterious ways, making other moments more fruitful.

In one of his great sermons, “Degrees of Power Attending the Gospel,” C.H. Spurgeon spoke in 1865  of how important the “spirit of prayerfulness” was in his church, Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.

“Let me entreat you never to lose it,” he said. Later in the sermon, Spurgeon exhorted his congregation this way: “Let us increase our praying as we increase our doing. I like that of Martin Luther, when he says, ‘I have so much business to do today, that I shall not be able to get through it with less than three hours’ prayer.’ Now most people would say, ‘I have so much business to do today, that I must only have three minutes’ prayer—I cannot afford the time.’ But Luther thought that the more he had to do the more he must pray, or else he could not get through it. That is a blessed kind of logic—may we understand it!”

Like so many spiritual activities, the only way we can understand prayer is to actually pray. If we over-intellectualize the process, seeking to understand everything before we begin, we will never give this work of piety the time it deserves.

Prayer is very much about submitting ourselves to the will of God. Too often, we see prayer as our effort to get God to do what we want, when instead we first need to be sure we are aligned with what God wants. For me, anyway, it has been important to get to a place where I’m allowing the Spirit to enter.

I am far from being an expert on prayer. All I can do is offer what has helped me as a person who has struggled with sustained prayer through the years. I certainly make sure to praise God in prayer and lift up petitions, but I have become more comfortable with prayer as I’ve combined it with Christian meditation, a deliberate effort to set my shallow desires aside so God can shape me.

I will not go into great detail about this meditative aspect of prayer—your details may differ from mine. I will say that location, posture and breathing are important. The place of prayer must be quiet and feel connected to God. The posture needs to be reverent and submissive, but also comfortable enough to not be distracting. The breathing needs to be slow, deep and deliberate.

If you feel the need to be led through prayer, there are all sorts of guides, ancient and modern, and many of them build in time for meditation or reflection. “A Guide to Prayer for All Who Seek God,” by Norman Shawchuck and Rueben P. Job, is one of my favorites. Combining prayer with Scripture, which go together like ice cream and hot fudge, this particular guide keeps me in the flow of the lectionary, used in particular by some preachers as they work their way through the church season.

As you commit to a deeper prayer life, promise me this: Expect something big to happen. You may find yourself shaken into a bold new life—for an example, see Acts 4:23-31.

That’s the kind of prayer experience that changes not just us, but the world around us.

Lord, bless us with a deep desire to pray, and bless us continually as we pray. Amen.

Means of Grace, Day 1

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By Chuck Griffin
Editor, LifeTalk

Acts 1:8 (NLT): “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.”

In my Sunday sermon at Holston View United Methodist Church, I mentioned what are sometimes called the “means of grace.” That’s a very Methodist phrase for spiritual practices that create an encounter with God.

An encounter with God should bring about very positive change, of course. I would compare the offer God is making us to a rich man saying, “Any time you come to the corner of Church and Clonce streets, I will give you a bag of cash.” We likely would go to that obscure intersection quite often.

God is offering us much more, saying, “Meet me in these spiritual practices, and I will mold you for eternal life, letting you experience its joy now.” All the cash on the planet cannot match the value of eternal life! If we can better grasp what is being offered, we will regularly engage in these spiritual practices.

John Wesley talked about many different ways we can encounter God, but I’m going to focus the rest of the week on what he called “works of piety.” We will begin with the tremendous impact Scripture can have on our lives.

Paul told a young pastor in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.” And Paul was referencing just the Old Testament—remember, as he wrote this letter, he was creating an early piece of what would become the New Testament.

Bibles used to be hard to come by, but that’s no longer true in our digital culture. We can carry multiple translations on our phones, and if you have a little trouble reading—for example, I have friends with dyslexia—there are audio versions.

We also need to be sure we are working from a plain-English translation we can understand. Again, there are many options. I’m particularly fond of the New Living Translation, and Bible Gateway will let you explore a huge list of translations.

With all the resources we have available, encountering God in Scripture mostly is about taking time out of our too-busy lives.

The Bible is a library, meaning you cannot read it the way you would read a novel, but if you’ve never read it from start to finish, I would encourage you to do so. It helps to start with the big picture, understanding the library and its broad themes. Read just three chapters a day, and you’ll finish in a little more than a year. Don’t get bogged down on the lists, like the census data in the Book of Numbers. Where necessary, skim!

You will walk away with a deeper understanding of some basic truths. God is our creator. Creation rebelled by sinning, rejecting God’s will. God loves his creation so much, however, that he began to work to restore us, despite our sins. Through a particular people, the Israelites, a savior eventually came into the world, God among us in flesh. He died to free us from sin, and then rose from the dead to prove his victory. The Spirit of God sustains us now, until such time as God completes his work and we are restored to him in full.

Once you have those concepts in mind, you can dive into the individual books and letters, developing a deeper understanding of these life-changing truths. We are talking about a lifetime of study—you just keep going deeper and deeper.

It does take a little work to learn to process Scripture. The chapter numbers and verse numbers, which are not in the original manuscripts, make the Bible look like a book full of rules to be cited, but don’t be misled. There are powerful stories and mysteries to meditate upon. God wants to use all of Scripture to reach deep within our souls, helping us understand there’s so much more to life than what we simply have experienced.

It also is good to come alongside more experienced Christians. Find a small group of people committed to continuing the great traditions of the church as they delve into the gift God has given us all.

The other means of grace we will consider this week are prayer, fasting, the Lord’s Supper, and participation in the life of the church. Stay with me this week. I pray we will see how all of this comes together to give us a much fuller experience of God.

Lord, may your word work in us in new ways, making us better equipped to be citizens of your eternal kingdom. Amen.

Hellish Behaviors

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By Chuck Griffin
LifeTalk Editor

Galatians 5:15 (NLT): But if you are always biting and devouring one another, watch out! Beware of destroying one another.

As painful as it is to consider, let’s take a few moments to imagine what life in hell must be like. I’m not going to deal with all the fire-and-brimstone imagery—while there are some fiery biblical images associated with Satan or hell in the Bible, much of what we imagine is rooted more in secular literature.

Here’s what I suspect is really painful about hell. It is a place where souls are cut off from the grace of God. (Grace simply is unmerited love, given freely to the undeserving.) In hell, God no longer gently tugs at people to make them aware of his existence; God no longer provides a way to escape the power of sin; certainly, God no longer works as the Holy Spirit to grow us toward a state of holiness.

And of course, if God is not present to inject grace into people’s broken existence, then people cannot possibly show grace to one another. If there’s any kind of society in hell, it is a nasty, backbiting, hateful, grudge-holding, vengeance-seeking kind of culture.

I fear some people are trying to develop a little microcosm of hell in our own culture right now. Popularly, it’s called cancel culture. If you’ve ever tripped up, letting poor judgment lead you to say or do the wrong thing, you’re liable to pay, big!

Criminal behavior needs to be dealt with, of course—under the rule of law. A lot of the criminal events triggering our current social unrest, such as the killing of George Floyd, will be settled under the rule of law. And if the rule of law needs to be changed, we have a process for that to happen. You go to the polls and you vote for representatives who will make that change.

What strikes me as strange are the efforts to destroy people for decades-old poor judgment, when the cultural context for what they may or may not have done was very different. We saw a glimmer of this when Neil Gorsuch was being vetted for the U.S. Supreme Court, as opponents went as far back as his high school years in an attempt to discredit him.

Such deep, unforgiving vetting is now a bizarre extension of the social unrest we’re seeing. It has gone so far that statues of brilliant-but-imperfect historical figures are being torn down. The basic complaint: People living in the 15th through the 20th centuries didn’t have 21st century values.

Well, duh. We honor most of these people with statues not because they had it all figured out, but because in difficult times they figured out important pieces of the grand puzzle, helping us see the clearer picture we have today.

Back to the need for grace from God and grace for each other. In the Galatians text above, Paul makes clear what happens as we begin to bite and devour one another—destruction! In Romans 3:23, he also notes another important fact: “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”

There do seem to be important developments that show the Bible to be right. Some of the people who might have initially supported much of this divisive behavior are now finding themselves bitten as their shortcomings become public, be it over the wearing of blackface, insensitive tweets or some other sin of speech or action. It helps when we remember the “everyone has sinned” part.

Perhaps we will soon get to a place where we all take a breath, rub our painful bite marks, and say, “Let’s show each other a little grace. Let’s try to work together as the people we are now, rather than fighting over who we used to be.”

In an environment like that, we will better deal with both our history and our current crises. God might even bless us anew.

Lord, give us the long pause we need to overcome animosity and rebuild our nation, trusting the scriptural truth that your forgiving grace is always available and can be imitated. Amen.

Psalm 119, Day 3

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By Chuck Griffin
LifeTalk Editor

We continue our exploration of Psalm 119:105-112, meditating on the last two verses.

Your laws are my treasure; they are my heart’s delight.

I love that verse. It could be spoken only by a person who has turned to God in full. There is no fear of retribution or condemnation. Such a person understands that the law gives life!

Everything written about God, including God’s laws, paints a portrait of the one who first loves us, and who in turn becomes the object of our love and eternal gratitude.

Walking with God and having no fear, it’s only natural to want to treasure and examine what is of God. Would you fear exploring the varied and sometimes unusual objects in a beloved grandmother’s house? Of course not—they tell you so much about her, and what is important to her.

Let’s say the last verse as a prayer: I am determined to keep your decrees to the very end.

Amen!

Here are all our verses from the last three days:

Your word is a lamp to guide my feet
    and a light for my path.
I’ve promised it once, and I’ll promise it again:
    I will obey your righteous regulations.
I have suffered much, O Lord;
    restore my life again as you promised.
Lord, accept my offering of praise,
    and teach me your regulations.
My life constantly hangs in the balance,
    but I will not stop obeying your instructions.
The wicked have set their traps for me,
    but I will not turn from your commandments.
Your laws are my treasure;
    they are my heart’s delight.
I am determined to keep your decrees
    to the very end.

Psalm 119, Day 2

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By Chuck Griffin
LifeTalk Editor

Let’s continue our meditation on Psalm 119:105-112. Yesterday, we got through the first two verses; we’re picking up at verse 107.

I have suffered much, O Lord; restore my life again as you promised.

Our lives exist in the midst of a sin-broken world, and suffering is a given. Absent an understanding of God, life at times might not seem worth living. But we know God, and we know he is the God of hope.

Almost immediately after human sin fractured this world, God went to work making our restoration possible. He made promises in the process. For example, he told Abraham that eventually, “All the families on earth will be blessed through you.”

The culmination of that work is in Jesus Christ, God in flesh walking among us and dying on the cross to break the hold sin had on us. Restoration is ours.

Lord, accept my offering of praise, and teach me your regulations.

We do not fully understand God’s plan or God’s timing, of course. First Corinthians 13:12: “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.”

But it is enough to know we are saved! The gift of eternal life and its accompanying joy, a joy we can experience now, should trigger great acts of praise. It also should be natural for us to want to understand God’s will and abide by it. The pursuit of holiness is the obvious way to say thanks and signal others that our lives are truly changed.

My life constantly hangs in the balance, but I will not stop obeying your instructions. The wicked have set their traps for me, but I will not turn from your commandments.

Hey, back to the here and now. Life with God currently can still be hard—bad things happen to good people. Preachers of the so-called prosperity gospel mislead their flocks.

We find ourselves thrown into a spiritual war, a battle for the souls of those who have yet to commit to God through Jesus Christ, and the enemy will shoot back. Like soldiers, we must discipline ourselves. Some commitment is required.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk a little more about joy.

Lord, we thank you for the salvation and hope we are given. Again, guide us down the paths you would have us follow! Amen.

Psalm 119, Day 1

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By Chuck Griffin
LifeTalk Editor

Let’s take a portion of a psalm familiar to many, Psalm 119:105-112, and meditate on it line-by-line for a few days. The first line is the basis of a well-known song, “Thy Word,” written by Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. They were working from the King James Version; I think I will use one of my favorites, the New Living Translation. I pray the brief thoughts I have will trigger some thoughts of your own.

Your word is a lamp to guide my feet, and a light for my path.

I spend a lot of time emphasizing the importance of Scripture. I feel obligated to do so; too often, the incredible wealth of information about God and God’s plan to rescue humanity from sin is ignored or distorted, despite God’s word being more available now than ever.

Frankly, I’m tired of hearing this sentence, sometimes uttered by churchgoers: “Well, I don’t know what the Bible says about [fill in the blank], but I know what I think.” Christians, we should always base our thinking on what the Bible says. This Spirit-driven revelation goes back not just decades or centuries, but millennia. The most important truths found here are timeless.

I prefer to light what can be a very dark path with a lamp that has proven effective for uncountable generations. Certainly, we can receive a word from God now, through prayer and meditation, or through someone speaking prophetically, filled with the Holy Spirit. But what we hear in those instances will not conflict with what we find in the Holy Bible.

I’ve promised it once, and I’ll promise it again: I will obey your righteous regulations.

As Christians, we have to process this line a little. Obviously, we don’t follow Jewish law to the letter anymore. The bacon cheeseburger I recently had for lunch is proof enough.

We are a people who understand that Jesus Christ focused on the deeper intent of the law, encouraging us to seek a kind of holiness that penetrates our very souls rather than simply restraining our actions. When asked to summarize the law, Jesus made it fairly simple: Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbors as you would love yourself. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus also made sure the definition of “neighbor” is quite broad.

We also have to develop the ability to discern the scriptural context of regulations. Were they meant for a specific time and community, or are they universal, tied to the very fabric of God’s creation? We focus upon the latter regulations, of course.

Tomorrow, we’ll consider what this psalm tells us about the burdensome aspects of life.

Lord, may your word guide us this day, and when we find ourselves in the dark, may we boldly explore Scripture for enlightenment. Amen.

The Unloved

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LifeTalk Editor
“Jacob Urging Rachel and Leah to Flee Laban,” Pieter Symonsz Potter, 1638.

Genesis 29:31-35 (NRSV)

When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren. Leah conceived and bore a son, and she named him Reuben; for she said, “Because the Lord has looked on my affliction; surely now my husband will love me.” She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also”; and she named him Simeon. Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be joined to me, because I have borne him three sons”; therefore he was named Levi. She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the Lord”; therefore she named him Judah; then she ceased bearing.

Desperate sadness surrounds this part of Jacob’s story in Genesis. If you don’t know all the background, I would encourage you to find a plain-English translation and read Genesis chapters 27 through 36—it’s just a good story!

Leah was married only because her father tricked her husband Jacob into taking her, when Jacob really wanted her younger, more beautiful sister, Rachel. Within a week of marrying Leah, Jacob married Rachel, too, making Leah the ultimate third wheel in her own home.

Jacob wasn’t reluctant to use Leah for breeding purposes, but clearly, there was no affection. Undoubtedly, he held her father’s deception against her, even though there was no way in her day she could have defied her father. It’s not hard to imagine Leah weeping over her circumstances, crying out “Why?” to God. All she wanted was to be loved, too.

In this story, we see early evidence of how God notices and blesses the unloved. God gave Leah what a woman needed most in those days to be relevant, male sons, heirs for her husband. And in her case, she ultimately delivered the progenitors of six tribes of Israel, including Judah’s tribe of kings and Levi’s line of priests in the first flurry of four sons. Jacob may have failed to love Leah, but God honored her mightily.

In Matthew 1, the lineage for Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph, traces back to Judah, making Leah very much a part of Jesus’ family memory. I wonder if the boy Jesus, sensitive to the stories of his world, was moved by his ever-so-great grandmother’s need to be loved. Did her story echo in his mind as Jesus reached out to the unloved of his day? Jesus spent a lot of time with untouchably ill people, traitorous tax collectors, prostitutes, and other outsiders, ministering to them in ways supposedly holy people would not.

There’s a lesson here for the church today. Filled with the Holy Spirit, we act on God’s behalf. And there’s no doubt we are called as the church to love the unloved as God loves them. There’s plenty of evidence of this call in the New Testament. Matthew 25:31-46 alone should be enough to convince us.

We are led to a simple question. Do we know the unloved around us?

Lord, give us eyes to see and ears to hear so no one in our community is left unloved and alone. Amen.

Put in Place

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By Chuck Griffin
LifeTalk Editor
Psalm 131:1-3

Lord, my heart is not proud;
    my eyes are not haughty.
I don’t concern myself with matters too great
    or too awesome for me to grasp.
Instead, I have calmed and quieted myself,
    like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk.
    Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, put your hope in the Lord—
    now and always.

Scripture can be tough on free thinkers. The Bible reminds us from time to time that our thoughts must be kept in place.

If you’re an American, even a Christian American, there’s a good chance you’re already wriggling with discomfort. The idea of submission can sound very negative to us—it seems in conflict with favorite words like “freedom” and “independence.”

And yet, the notion of humility before God is a constant theme of the Bible. With no reference to the Garden of Eden or forbidden fruit, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 1 about haughty, foolish thinking being the root of sin. Paul’s account does us a great service—he helps us see how we personally cause the cycle of sin to continue.

We also could categorize our problem as “overthinking.” We take our eyes off plain revelations about God to create notions of our own, a process that inevitably leads to idolatry. Our desire to be novel can quickly cut us off from what is eternal.

Real freedom, the psalmist tells us, is found when we humble ourselves, maintaining proper perspective about who we are in relationship to God. As Christians, we know we cannot grasp God in full, but we can cling to what God has shown us through Holy Spirit-inspired Scripture. 

God is the maker of all things, standing outside of creation and ruling over creation. God also is love, and because of love God keeps intervening to pull us back into a righteous relationship with our creator and with each other, despite our ongoing foolishness.

In particular, God has come among us as Jesus Christ, dying on the cross and demonstrating the defeat of death in the resurrection. We are restored to right relationships simply by believing Christ’s sacrifice is real.

Belief also should lead to enhanced creativity—it opens the door to the eternal mind of God. When we submit to the truth of the cross, the Spirit of God rushes into our lives, penetrating our souls and our minds. We become more than we ever could have been on our own, and we are freed to grow into the images of God we were intended to be.

These are broad concepts, but they have very current, specific applications. As a nation, we are embroiled by a serious, important debate, one that goes to how we best ensure that people have the same rights and opportunities regardless of skin color. The debate has been deeply complicated by a piling on of ideas and causes, some possibly holy, some likely foolish.

Is there any way we can take a step back and humble ourselves, putting our opinions and decisions in the context of who God is and what God has revealed? I cannot ask that of nonbelievers, but I certainly can ask it of people who claim the name “Christian.”

The ongoing debate is sometimes summarized in the question, “Should I take a knee?” Perhaps the Christian answer should be to get down on both knees, head bowed. That posture best prepares us for any conversation.

Lord, may we take time today to seek eternal wisdom, and may the Holy Spirit give us the strength we need to carry our understanding of your will to the places and people we affect. Amen.

The Lovers

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By Chuck Griffin
LifeTalk Editor

Song of Songs 2:8-13 (NLT)

Preachers and theologians have struggled through the centuries to interpret the biblical book Song of Songs, sometimes called Song of Solomon. Why is the book even in the Bible?

If you read it in a straightforward manner, there is very little instruction about God or humanity’s relationship to God. Traditionally, preachers have “allegorized” Song of Songs, reading it as if it is all symbolic of God’s love for humanity and humanity’s pursuit of God.

Some modern preachers, myself included, struggle with that approach, however. While I respect my predecessors’ efforts, I find it a huge leap to consistently turn what is sometimes very sexual imagery into allegory. When we do so, we dodge the direct meaning of the text.

And then there are all those unanswered questions about the lovers. Who are they? (Traditionally, one of them is King Solomon, but that seems a bit of a stretch, too, as we’ll see shortly.) Why do they speak so boldly of their passionate desire for each other? Did they or didn’t they? (Yes, I’m talking about sex.) And if they did, were they married? (There’s no clear evidence in the text.)

I’m going to offer you my conclusion about how to read Song of Songs. It’s an opinion I formed after marking up the text, making some observations about speakers, characters, and the nature of Hebrew poetry, and then consulting the writings of a lot of scholars I respect. Your eternal salvation is not dependent on your agreeing with me—I just want to share with you what I think.

First of all, I doubt Song of Songs was ever intended to be read as a cohesive story. Instead, it’s a collection of sexually charged love poems. Think of Song of Songs like a box of snapshots from a relationship. The pictures tell us much about the relationship, but they’re likely not in chronological order, and there are lots of details missing.

That’s not a radical idea; it simply makes Song of Songs more like the collections of psalms, proverbs and other wisdom literature preceding it in the Bible.

We also can glean a few interesting-if-vague details. In at least some of the poems, the woman is a working girl. She makes it clear her family has forced her to work in the fields, the sun tanning her so deeply that she describes herself as very dark. Her beloved is fairer-skinned and described as her “king-lover,” but that may just be poetic language, a deliberate effort to juxtapose him with King Solomon rather than make him out to be King Solomon.

Of course, I still haven’t made it clear why Song of Songs belongs in the Bible. Again, I’m having to trust the research of better-trained scholars.

What’s particularly helpful is that in modern times, researchers have found that Song of Songs is not unique. There were lots of similar collections of sexually charged love poetry in the cultures that surrounded the Israelites. The major difference is the polytheistic approach to sex these cultures took. (Polytheists worship many gods; monotheists, like the Israelites, worship one all-powerful God.)

Sex in polytheistic cultures tended to be about control. All sorts of sexual rituals evolved in these cultures to encourage the rain to fall, the crops to grow, and the livestock to multiply. Sex often was ritualized at temples with prostitutes in some of these cultures, and it certainly served as a way for men to control women.

The Israelites were radically different from their neighbors because they officially followed the One True God. Song of Songs is a good indicator of how the Israelites’ understanding of God affected their attitudes about sex.

The poems here consistently talk about passionate, long-term love between one man and one woman. They seek each other not for control, but for mutual satisfaction and ultimately, procreation. (The woman speaks of mandrakes in 7:13, a plant associated with fertility.) Sex is not to control a god; sex is a gift from God.

Marriage may not be a definable event in these poems, but it is easily assumed considering the deep commitments the lovers are making to each other. Their love takes us back to the creation story in Genesis, where one man and one woman are depicted as dependent on each other, inseparable.

King Solomon may even appear in these poems now and then as a kind of literary foil, present to make the lovers’ commitment to each other more commendable. We cannot forget King Solomon’s downfall in the eyes of God. In 1 Kings 11, Solomon is condemned for his many foreign wives and his willingness to introduce their polytheistic worship to the Israelites.

Song of Songs reminds us that proper worship of the One True God changes our relationships for the better. This includes our sexual relationships, the most joyous physical gift God has given us, a gift that is celebrated in Jewish tradition and now Christian tradition.

Lord, may we live out all our relationships as reflections of holiness and in appreciation of the tremendous grace we are given. Amen.