I'm thinking that today's lesson
and one or two more lessons will finish our study in the book
of Song of Solomon. And I haven't yet settled on
where we'll go next, but what I'm presently thinking is just
to back up one book and do the book of Ecclesiastes. I've never
heard anyone do a series on the book of Ecclesiastes. It's a
unique book. But there is a great deal of
wisdom in it, particularly for the believer
living his life in this world. And actually, with what Solomon
says in that book, there's some wisdom for the unbeliever. because
he fools himself into thinking there's some value in this life
apart from God. And one of the primary themes
of that book is apart from God, everything is just pure vanity,
comes to nothing. But we'll see how that works
out in the next couple of weeks. But if we look now at Song of
Solomon, and we got through verse four last week, Heavenly Father,
bless our study this morning and do not let us get taken up
with useless things. Rather, may we see Christ and
the grace that he has shown toward us. And it's in his name we pray
it, amen. Verse five, who is this coming
up from the desert, leaning on her lover? Now, the picture we
get here is, you know, they had gone out into the wilderness,
gone far away from Jerusalem to where they had vineyards and
things like that. Solomon and Shulamith had gone
together to these places, and now they're coming back. When it says, who's this coming
up from the desert, our modern concept of desert is a dry and
sandy place. It would be better to translate
this simply as the wilderness. Now, desert is a good word for
the wilderness, because after all, we use the word deserted,
and a desert is a deserted place, that is, people don't live there. And so it's the wilderness, and
of course the wilderness indicates, you know, the first word is wild.
It's just wild out there, uncultivated, unsettled. And so in coming back
to Jerusalem, they're coming through the wilderness. Now,
there is a picture here, and I don't know that it's necessarily
a reference back to the wanderings of the Jews in the wilderness
between Egypt and the Promised Land, but that is a figure that's
brought up from time to time in the scripture, and certainly
the concept could be applied here, for the Lord and his church
are often traveling through what may be called a wilderness. and
especially do we see ourselves as people in this world. And
so far as spiritual things are concerned, we live in a wilderness. We live in a desert. Now, of
course, part of the wilderness of the Palestinian area over
there, Israel over there, would be the dry and thirsty land that
the scriptures speak of. But some of it would just be
all grown up. We don't know what kind of wilderness
it was, but wherever they were, there were none others like them.
That is, they weren't traveling through an inhabited area where
they could frequently stop and see friends, or something like
that, or even just other human beings. They're coming up from
the wilderness. Much of it is like the wilderness
in that we have to spend a great deal of our time among those
who are not like us. And you have to be careful saying
something like that. I'm certainly not talking about
anything in terms of racially or anything like that. I'm talking
about God's people are spiritually alive. And we might say that
of the creatures of the area, we are tame. We've been tamed.
We've had a spiritual mind of reason put into us. Now we can't
take credit for it, we can't exalt ourselves over other people
for it, but it is a matter of fact that God finds us in our
spiritual insanity, in our innate wildness, such as the man possessed
of legion demons, remember him? And he comes to us like that,
he takes us from living in the caves, living out in the wilderness,
and he restores a right mind in us. Now again, we need to
issue a little disclaimer. That doesn't mean a believer
cannot experience mental illness. That's another thing. That's
a psychological thing. But when it comes to spiritual
matters, the believer is in his right mind. He understands what
is true. You know, the Lord said, you
shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. And
the Lord, having set that demoniac free from those demons, that
man was then free to think rationally. And that is a picture of how
once the spiritual forces that held us in bondage You know,
it says the God of this age, and that's not a reference to
God whom we refer to as God. In both Hebrew and Greek, the
general word for God can be a reference to the God, or it could be a
reference to any of the other gods that men set forward, invent. And actually, Paul says all these
idolatrous gods, they're just demonic entities. You know, we
might say, we might want to say of the mythologies of Greece
and Rome and all the idolatries of the various Gentile nations,
well, there's nothing real behind them. They're just the product
of men's imaginations. Maybe some of them are. But I
believe the scriptures would tell us that these spiritual,
these forces of spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places as the
book of Ephesians refers to them. they have been able to somehow
appear and communicate to, or in the case of possession, they
could possess a person and cause that person to speak as the oracle
of some divine being, and from that arises the worship of these
various false gods. So when it speaks of the god
of this age, when Paul refers to the god of this age, he's
speaking probably of Satan himself. who Paul also says he has his
ministers all over the place. They are ministers, they disguise
themselves as ministers of righteousness, which is a cue to us right away,
we need to be wary of everyone that claims to be a preacher
representing God. Because, you know, I remember when I was, it was
probably in the 60s, So I was born in 55, so that means somewhere
between the ages of 5 and 15. But that Anton LaVey wrote the
Satanic Bible. And I mean the church I was going
to at that time, and many churches like it, just kind of like went
berserk. Oh no, Satan has written the Bible, you know, and it's
going to deceive so many people. Very few people were deceived
by it, and the real deception in that book is this. Anton LaVey
did not worship Satan. He was an atheist. He was mocking. He wrote that. He didn't believe
that that was Satan's Bible. It was a deception. And most
of those who call themselves Satanists are just snickering
up their sleeve because they think that, for instance, the
Christian religion is no more real than Satanism is. Now, there
are, doubtless, some people who, you know, draw a pentagram on
the floor and light candles and do all that kind of stuff and
think there's something real going on. But when it talks about
the god of this age blinding people, What he's generally doing is
putting them in some perverse form of the truth. Now, if he puts them in, say,
rank idolatry, which I suppose he could do that, you know. He
can blind them, and that may be, in their blindness, what
they wander into. I mean, when I was in India,
I don't know how many thousands of so-called gods they have in
India, because they invent them just on a regular basis, and
they've been piling up over the centuries, you know? And they
may go into that, but do you realize how relatively easy it
is for a Christian missionary to go into that situation and
what he's preaching, is instantly and obviously different from
what the folks of India are worshiping. I mean, it's not hard to see
the difference between worshiping some kind of monkey, because
that's one of them, monkey god. When I was over there and we
were talking to Parshuram, he told us that as a, I think starting
when he was 13, he was a priest to that monkey god. Of course,
this was all before the Lord saved him, but you know, when
you come and preach to them, God revealed in the flesh, freely
giving himself up as a sacrifice unto a just God, that that just
God might show mercy to his chosen one. They see the difference
right away. But if you really want to deceive
people in a kind of deception that's very hard, to make clear. Turn them into a form of Christianity
that's almost right. Spurgeon said, discernment is
not the ability to discern right from wrong. It's the ability
to discern right from almost right. And there are many forms of the
Christian religion, and I'm using Christian religion as the intellectual
world would as they look at the various religions of the world.
Or we could just say, by Christian religion, I mean all of those
people who claim to be Christians. Now some of them, for example,
if I were to say what I believe and then a Mormon were to say
what he believes, the difference would be so obvious pretty quick. But there are some out there
who we could, if we both wrote up our own statement of faith,
you could lay them down side by side. You'd be hard-pressed
to find a difference. And yet one is preaching the
gospel, and the other is not. Because there is more to the
preaching of the gospel than simply the declaration of doctrine
that is correct. It involves that, no question.
But we are not purveyors of doctrine, as we normally use that word. You know, when I came here and
this church was started, you know, so we needed to organize
it as a legal entity so that we could own property if we ever
had enough money to buy it. And frankly, so that they could
pay me. Because as soon as you start paying somebody, you become
a legal entity in the sight of the government. Well, in doing
that, we had to come up with a name. And so we're all sitting
down together. And they had called themselves
up to that point just Grace Ministries. And that was enough to get them
a checking account. But there were no employees,
they just gave an honorarium to whoever flew in to preach.
But now, they're going to have an employee and all this, got
to get all official about it, you know? And I said, let's make
sure and not do this. Let us not put any kind of denominational
name in our name. Because first of all, that means
anyone who does not consider themselves to be of that denomination
will be prone to say, well, that one's not for me. And secondly, for example, we're
Baptistic. Anybody that's been here very
long would understand that. We believe pretty much what Baptists,
well, you'd have to go like a century and a half ago, believe. They
were virtually all what you would call sovereign grace Baptists
back then. But when people see the word Baptist, you know, well,
if they're from my generation, they're going to think of Jerry
Falwell and others like him. We're not that. You know, I don't want them thinking
that's what we are or didn't want that. And the word Baptist
means different things to different people. So you don't put that
out there. But that's what the devil does. He gets these various
denominations, all coming under the general umbrella of Christianity. And in his churches, no matter
what the official denomination is outside, here's how you can
identify one of the devil's churches. and that is simply this. There
will be in their doctrine and in their manner of presenting
it a tendency to direct the attention to you. The devil deceives people by
turning their attention to themselves. What did he do in the Garden
of Eden? He said, did God really say that you can eat of all the
trees of the garden? And he rightly replied, well,
all of them but this one. And he said, ah, he says he doesn't
want you to eat of that one because he knows that if you eat of that
one, you will be like him. And he's got Eve looking at herself,
looking at her own, perceiving things according to her own natural
wisdom, and she gets deceived into doing the wrong thing. And all churches that are products
of, shall we call it, the gospel of Satan, You will find in the
end the message comes down to you. You will find in the Lord's
churches that the message comes down to Christ. The Spirit of
God is described this way. The Lord described him this way.
He shall take from what is mine, that is, the things pertaining
to me, and show them to you. Now some churches, their doctrines,
they may be doctrines of demons, as Paul refers to them, but they
may seem very innocent. In other words, for example,
the churches of Satan, far from being black-robed, pointy-capped,
you know, mysterious creatures, they are fine-dressed, professional,
seminary-trained men. And you'll find them in churches
like where the primary message is that we need to be kind to
the poor. And the church becomes essentially
a charitable organization. Now, we should be kind to the
poor. Even the scriptures say that. But there's a difference
between being kind to the poor and making that what the church
is about. And there's some churches, you
can go to them and you can listen to the message they preach, and
they can get through an entire message and never even mention
Christ. Hardly mention God, even in general terms. They're urging
the people about how they should treat other people. Well, that
theme is in the scriptures, but it's not the theme of scriptures.
The Lord said, these are the scriptures that testify of me.
So if we look at a scripture and we don't see and preach Christ
from it, we're handling it wrong. And we either need to take a
bigger chunk of scripture because we're getting so fine, you know,
maybe just a half a sentence or whatever. We're not seen in
its context because everything in the Bible is to be understood
within the context of Christ and Him crucified. And if it's
not that, it's not from God. We live in a wilderness. Just
before we started here, we were talking about several who watch
us via live stream. It's one family, but it's two
or three generations of that family, but they watch us live
stream or later just go in and look at the recording. Why is
that? They live near very large cities.
It's a wilderness. There's lots of people there,
but they can't find anyone that believes the gospel as we do. Okay, who is this coming up from
the desert, the wilderness, leaning on her lover? As we go through
this world, which is a wilderness to us, we lean upon
the one whom we love. We lean on him in dependence.
We depend on Him, don't we? Where would we be without Him?
What would we have without Him? And the Old Testament says, who
can do us any good? Isn't that a good question? Who
can do us any good? That is, eternal, spiritual good,
who can? Can the church? No, not even
the real one. Not even the true church can
do you any good in the absolute sense of the word. All they can
do is point you to the one who can do you good. The only one
who can do us good is God, and more specifically, God as He's
revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the only source of good
we have. And so we depend on him, lean
on him, in our dependence on him. But I actually think that
probably more prominent is here, she leans on him in affection. Now, if you want to get a picture
of what this would be like in modern day, or semi-modern day,
all cars nowadays have bucket seats. I honestly have not seen
a modern car with a bench seat in the front in a long, long
time. But I remember them with a bench
seat. And they were real handy when your girlfriend was there,
because she could scoot over. You could put your arm around
her and look real cool driving with one hand going down the
road. I'm that old. I saw it. I did it. She knows. That's the leaning, speaking
of here. She scoots over. She leans on him. Why? because
there is no greater delight to her than to be that close to
him, to be as close as can be. Having gone to a Bible college,
they used to joke that the rule was you had to keep a Bible between
you and your girlfriend. One of my friends says, well,
I memorized the Bible, so they could get pretty close. It's
her desire to scoot over and be near him. And I'll tell you
this, it was my desire that she scoot over. The church loves nothing more
than to lean upon the Lord Jesus Christ in affection. And the
Lord Jesus loves nothing more than to put his arm around her
and pull her close. Isn't that an amazing thing? And is it not true of you that
your greatest dissatisfaction in this life is that those times
of feeling that closeness are very rare? Now, we can rejoice in this. Whether or not we feel the reality
of it, it is nonetheless real. The old hymn writer said, near,
so near to God, nearer I cannot be, for in the person of his
Son I'm as near as he. But all the blessedness of those
times when the fleshly mind is so suppressed and our thoughts
are set so exclusively on spiritual things. We are in the chariot
or the car, if you will, of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we've
scooted over and he's put his arm around us. And we can say,
as was earlier mentioned here, I am his and he is mine. Well, the woman begins to speak
Shulamith. And she says, under the apple tree I roused you,
there your mother conceived you, there she who was in labor gave
you birth. Now that seems kind of strange,
you know, the apple tree and then where your mother conceived
you. These are all symbols of marital love, and then the But
what is expected would come from marital love, which is children.
Apple trees were symbols of both of those things, symbols of romantic
or marital love and symbols of birth. And therefore, she says,
under the apple tree, I roused you. And she doesn't mean she woke
him up. She seduced him. is what she's
talking about here. And again, you know, in our culture,
particularly as probably all of us would be considered religious
conservatives, we're a little careful in how we speak of sexual
matters, but a wife seducing her husband, there's absolutely
nothing wrong with that, you know? In fact, it's a good thing.
It's part of what marriage was designed for, and certainly the
spiritual equivalent of that is what our relationship with
Christ is designed for. You know, this whole book is
using the marital relationship as an illustration of the intensity
and intimacy of the love between the Lord Jesus Christ and his
people. She says, under the apple tree
I roused you. There your mother conceived you,
and she who was in labor gave you birth. And so she says, I
seduced you. I called after you, I appealed
to you according to the beauty you have given me by grace. And then she references childbirth. Said this is where your mother
gave birth to you. This is where I'll bring forth
children unto you. And is that not our desire? I know that it is the Spirit
of God who regenerates the people of God, and yet it's through
the agency of the church of the Lord Jesus that she goes out
with the message of Christ and preaches it. And as James said,
of his own will beget he us through the word of truth. And so we, as the church of God,
are pictured as a mother. for the wife of the husband of
this household. And by the ministry he's given
us, we give birth to more children. And of course, these children
are also considered then to be part of the wife, but these are
illustrations, and they have to be taken strictly within the
context in which they're given. She goes, now place me like a
seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm, for love is strong
as death, it's jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like a
blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Now, I heard Oprah Winfrey talking
just a couple of years ago, I think it was, and they were asking
her about her beliefs and religion, and she said, you know, that one
reason that she just can't, you know, believe in God as the Bible
believes in Him. It talks about God being a jealous
God. And she says, well, why would
God want what I have? Well, what that revealed is her
misunderstanding of what the word jealousy means. Now, we
use jealousy and envy, most of us do, as though they're synonyms.
They mean the same thing, but they don't. You envy what belongs
to others. You are jealous for what is your
own. I remember hearing, particularly
in the context of high school romances, some guy would have
a girlfriend and others would like the same girl, and they
would say, oh, these others, they're jealous of his girlfriend.
No, they can't be jealous of his girlfriend. They're envious
of it. But if he knows that those other boys are angling for his
girlfriend, he's going to become jealous of his girlfriend. Jealousy
is that which loves, desires, protects, and keeps to oneself
those things that belong to oneself. And so when it says that God
is jealous, it means that he fiercely protects those who are
his own. He will not let them be taken
away. It says here that love is as
strong as death, it's jealousy unyielding as the grave. Now, you put someone in a grave,
is the grave going to give him up? No. Not looking at it naturally. The grave is jealous of its own. And there is no power on earth
that can cause the grave to give up one of its own. And so it is with the love of
our Lord Jesus Christ in spiritual terms. There is nothing in heaven,
earth, or hell that can make him give up one of his own. He
said, I have lost nothing, and he will lose none of them. It
burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Not only does
this love burn with that brilliance just as an indication of its
power, it also shows the way that this jealous love is going
to deal with those who would deprive him of his beloved. Those who become enemies of the
church. become enemies of the Lord Jesus
Christ, and he will deal with them in a flaming fire. Many
waters cannot quench love, rivers cannot wash it away. Again, you
know, that's talking about what a great fire it is. Imagine a
fire so great that a river flowing over it wouldn't put it out.
Such is the love of the Lord Jesus Christ for his people,
and quite frankly, their love for him. Then lastly, if one
were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would
be utterly scorned. Now that doesn't mean that if
you with all your heart lay hold of Christ, and it is quite evident
that you have, at least in your heart, given up all things for
Him, and if all things were taken away from you, it wouldn't change
your desire for Christ. It's not saying that the world
will scorn you for that. Now, it's true that the world
will scorn you if that's the level of your love and dedication
to the Lord Jesus Christ, but here's what it means. If I were
to give up everything I have, For the love of Christ, what
I have given up would be scorned by me as worthless. And Paul
gave a good example of that. In giving his testimony and his
experience of the Lord's grace in Philippians 3, He talks about,
you know, how as a Pharisee, or you know, born a Hebrew of
Hebrews, and circumcised on the eighth day, and he gives his
whole pedigree, and all those things in which he used to boast,
all those things which he counted to be valuable. And he says,
but I have lost all for the sake of Christ, and count it but garbage. Paul didn't go around weeping.
He wasn't sad of what he lost in his pursuit of Christ because
it was nothing to him. Those who are thoroughly dedicated
to the Lord Jesus Christ do not sense a loss in what they lost
in their pursuit of Christ. All right, we'll pick up there
next week.