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3

Being Touched, Hearing Voices

Song of Songs 2:6–14

Verse 6

Shulamite is in Solomon’s tender embrace. How each of us longs to be embraced! A propensity that people have is the need to touch and be touched. It is said that a person needs at least six hugs a day to remain emotionally healthy.

Babies need to be touched. Studies have shown that babies who are never touched or cuddled often become sick, and, in fact, some die. People need to be touched as an expression of love. The Body of Christ needs to be tender and expressive toward others.

We need a touch from someone, especially from our God. How does the Lord embrace His own? Where are His arms today? His bride is His hand extended and His open arms. We, the Church, are His hands and feet.

A spiritual embrace that is almost as real as a physical one happens during times of deep worship—there is an awareness of God’s presence. A loving tenderness is perceived through the Spirit of God. The glory of God becomes a reality. The bride of Christ senses the same care and protection during the very moment of worship that a baby feels when his mother or father gently supports his little head and cradles him in their arms.

Being the youngest in my family, I never had younger brothers or sisters so I never really held a baby until my oldest son, Stephen, was born. The nurse showed me how to put my arm under his head. I soon felt comfortable in holding him. I never dropped him. Not once . . .

So it is with God. He never lets go. He never drops His bride. She is secure in His embrace. Jesus said it this way—“and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. My Father who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand” (John 10:28–29).

Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Christ is holding us tight. When we are at our weakest, He is there to sustain and support us. Do not shrink back from His touch. Simply rest in the Lord’s embrace.

Shulamite pictures herself nestled side-by-side with her husband in a full and satisfying embrace (Song of Songs 2:6). The tenderness between husband and wife here is beautiful. Solomon cherishes this woman who holds his heart.

I am reminded of Matthew Henry’s words regarding the making of the woman in the Garden of Eden. He wrote:

Adam was first formed, then Eve. If man is the head, she is the crown, a crown to her husband, the crown of the visible creation. The man was dust refined, but the woman was dust double-refined, one removed further from the earth. That Adam slept while his wife was in making as one that had cast all his care on God, with a cheerful resignation of himself and all his affairs to his Maker’s will and wisdom. Jehovah-Jireh, let the Lord provide when and whom He pleases. That God caused a sleep to fall on Adam, and made it a deep sleep. While he knows no sin, God will take care he shall feel no pain. That the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.1

Solomon and Shulamite tenderly exchange an embrace.

Verse 7

“I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem.”

Scholars say that the word you and the accompanying verbs are masculine, yet the subject is clearly feminine. This suggests that true femininity had been lost. The painted beauties of Solomon’s court knew nothing of restraint, modesty, or decency.

“I charge you” are words that are an oath, a pledge. Shulamite said to the daughters of Jerusalem, “Do not stir up.” This means that love is too powerful, too all-consuming to be lightly aroused. (She is talking about sexual intimacy.) The point of the oath is that the young women should not spend their youth and sexual vigor foolishly.

Do not awaken love until it pleases. The Hebrew word translated as awake means “to entice.” Shulamite is saying that these passions are not to be excited, awakened, and stirred up, until it is the right time. This is the idea of abstinence until marriage.

Another application could be this: Love can’t be rushed. We can’t make our loved one love the Lord. We can’t force our friends and neighbors to accept Christ. We can pray for the Holy Spirit to have His way in their lives, and we can make room for Him to work.

Sometimes, well-meaning people can pressure us to move faster or to do something that God is not asking us to do. When that happens, stand firm. You please the Lord. Speak the truth in love and humility, resist the fear of man, and fear God.

We need to be sensitive to God’s timing and leading in our lives. He is with us. He is working in each of us, perfecting His bride. Let us seek to please Him, to walk softly before Him, and to welcome the work of His Spirit in our lives.

The woman’s imagination has had full play. She has fantasized about the power, the beauty, and the pleasure of marital intimacy. In the next few verses she pictures her lover’s approach to make her longing a reality.

Verses 8–9

Having called on the daughters of Jerusalem to swear an oath by the gazelle, the woman suddenly exclaims that she sees her beloved coming, leaping over the hills like a stag. To her he is virile, handsome, and attractive. The metaphor changes when he comes and looks in her windows at her.

You see, looking in the window is something that the stags in ancient Israel probably rarely did. But Solomon’s looking in the window is an invitation for her to become a doe and join him. The leaping of the gazelle on the hills represents the physical play that he wants her to join him in.

Depicting his desire to see the one he loves after a long winter’s separation, Solomon is seen as springing and bounding with speed and eagerness to get to Shulamites’ home.

He is seen as coming with the speed of a gazelle as his eyes seek for his unforgotten one. Gazelles and young stags climb mountains and leap over hills with ease and grace, and so does Solomon, her beloved.

“Behold, he stands behind our wall.” The word wall refers to the wall of the house itself rather than the outer wall surrounding the house. The picture is that Shulamite is within the house. Solomon, having leaped and bounded over the hills, now stands behind the wall outside and looks in through the window, gazing through the lattice.

The translated word looking means “to look by way of fixation for reflection and meditation.” The word gazing would be better rendered “peering” and actually means “to peep or to twinkle,” a reference to the quick darting glances of the eye and to the gleam of the eye.

While Solomon is trying to see his love through the window, he looks one time through a window and then through another in order to see her. Once having seen her, he feasts his eyes on her and fixes them on her to reflect and to meditate on her beauty.

Verses 10–14

“My beloved spoke . . .” This is an interjectional clause and should be taken as the call of the approaching lover. He is calling for her as he is approaching. Shulamite, having described Solomon’s anxious approach to her home, now describes the words and content of this particular call in verses 10–14.

The Voice of the Lord

The Lord does speak to us. I remember between 1972 and 1973 when the Lord wooed me to Him. I resisted sheepishly at times and at other times aggressively. However, it was through the testimonies of certain people and finally through the teaching of Scripture that I came to know Him. With tears running down my cheeks one Friday evening in June 1973, I confessed that I was a sinner and yielded my life to Christ.

Shulamite describes him as “The voice of my beloved. Behold he comes leaping upon the mountains skipping upon the hills.”

His voice brought all the music of heaven into her heart. It was the first thing that arrested her attention. She could pick that voice out of a thousand—it was her beloved’s.

Truly the first thing our “Beloved,” Jesus Christ, would have us remember is His voice.

1 It was this voice that Adam heard while walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

2 It was this voice that cast the demons out of Mary’s tortured soul.

3 It was this voice that stilled the tempest of that Galilean sea.

4 It was this voice that caused the demons to flee into the sea.

5 It was this voice that healed the leper.

Shulamite remembered Solomon’s vigor: “Behold he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.” The word he is emphatic and could be rendered as “this very one.”

What a picture of health, boundless energy, and joy. He is coming to be with her, and nothing can hold him back. O beloved, this is exactly what our “Beloved,” the Lord Jesus, thinks of us!

John the Baptist said of the coming of the Lord Jesus that the crooked places would be made straight before Him, the rough places would be made smooth, the mountains would be leveled, and the valleys would be filled (Luke 3:5). The idea is that if you place a hundred obstacles before Him, he will overcome them all.

1 The Lord Jesus laid aside His glory, the glory that He had with the Father before the worlds began, and He stooped to be born into a human family by way of the virgin’s womb.

2 He entered His ministry in the face of ridicule, opposition, and unbelief to face Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed and sweated drops of blood and was betrayed by Judas.

3 Then to Gabbatha the place where Pilate sat on the judgment seat and sentenced Jesus before the people.

4 Then to Golgotha, where Jesus hung between heaven and earth, paying the price for sin, becoming our sacrificial Passover Lamb. There Jesus shed His blood for our sins as the earth shook and darkness fell upon the earth.

Not only did He go to Gethsemane, Gabbatha, and Golgotha, Jesus went to the grave. He was spat upon, beaten, scourged, crowned with thorns, and nailed to a cross. He died beneath the wrath and curse of God. He laid in death for three days and three nights while the entire universe held its breath. But the Lord came forth from the tomb on the third day.

We ask: Why would He do this? Why would He do this in all the enormous energy of His deity, to pay such a price for us? There is only one answer: “He loves us.”

And, one day, like Shulamite’s beloved, our Beloved, the Lord Jesus, will come leaping upon the mountains and skipping upon the hills and say to us, His bride, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

1. Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary, Genesis 2:21–25.