and gave himself for her. And Christ is referred to the
bridegroom in the church as the bride in the book of Revelation. So we see that this concept of
God entering into relationship with his people along the pattern
of marriage is a common thing in scriptures. Now we'll pick
up here in verse 8 and of Song of Solomon, Song of Songs, chapter
4, verse 8. Come with me from Lebanon, my
bride. Come with me from Lebanon. Descend
from the crest of Ammanah, from the top of Sinair, the summit
of Hermon, from the lion's dens and the mountain haunts of the
leopards. Now, the key in all of this,
and it's the main phrase of this sentence, is simply this, come
with me. Come with me. When our Lord was here on earth, as he called the
disciples, what did he say to them? Follow me. Come with me. That is the essence of the Christian
life. Come with me. When he calls us
to him, he says in a sense, come to me, but with that is the understanding,
come with me. It says of the I believe of the
144,000 that the book of Revelation mentions, which is a symbolic
number describing all believers in all ages. But this full group,
they were described in this fashion, they followed the lamb wherever
he went. Now, this is a key characteristic
of the people of God. Now in their following, they
stumble, they fall, they may wander from time to
time, but in general, they are following Him. Having seen Him,
they have fallen in love with Him, they want to be with Him,
and even though they continually wrestle with the things of the
flesh, yet The spirit always eventually wins out, and the
believer continues to follow his Lord Jesus Christ. Come with me. Come with me wherever
I go, he said. Come with me, though I may be
leading you away from places that you think are good to remain. He says, come with me from Lebanon,
my bride. Now, the word Lebanon, it's something
new I learned. When we hear the word Lebanon
now, we are thinking of a nation over there in the Middle East. It was not a nation at this time.
Now, there were some city states there, Tyre and Sidon. And then
King James will say they had kings, but it was just, it wasn't
like the King of England or anything like that. These were just men
who were the most powerful political figures within these, as they
called them, city states. But Lebanon was a region. And interestingly enough, the
word means white. And probably because It's very
mountainous. And I don't know if snow stayed
on the top of those mountains year round, but it was there
a lot. And that's where it got its name.
And when we think of whiteness, of course, we think of purity
and all of this. And you can understand. He says
to his bride, come with me from Lebanon, my bride, come with
me from Lebanon. Now, he's not calling her away
from purity as such, but he's calling her away from an isolated
existence wherein it is presumed we're better able to live in
purity. It is a tendency of some to think
that the best way to live pure lives in this world is to so
separate yourself from the world that you have no interaction
with it. Now, we need to do that some. That's what we do here
on Sundays. We withdraw from the world and
all the pollutions associated with it. As much as we can, I
realize we drag some of the pollutions of the world in here with us
because they're connected to our flesh. But nonetheless, we
do draw away from the unbelieving world and from the world that
is opposed to God. And for a time, we spend some
time with our beloved one, separate from all those things. But you
can't stay there. We can't stay here in church. The idea of monasticism,
where somebody takes a vow and he goes up and he lives with
some other people of the same attitude, you know, and they're
never out there in touch with the world. You know, they light
candles, pray prayers, and they're useless to themselves and useless
to the world. The Lord God did not call us
into this world to absent ourselves from connection with it. Any more than when he came here,
He absented himself from connection with the world. He left a place
of absolute purity and came here into this mess. And we are called
to go with him outside, shall we say, the temporary protection
that meetings like this afford us. And we go out into the polluted
world to take the message of the Lord Jesus Christ. But here's
one of the nice things about it. He didn't say, I'm sending
you from Lebanon. He says, come with me from Lebanon. Our Lord is even now going out
into the world. He says, I've come to seek and
to save that which is lost. He's still doing that. He's not
doing it in the physical presence that he had a couple of thousand
years ago, but he is here through his spirit, working through his
people, both individually and as a group. But if we cloister ourselves,
if we do, well, in a sense, you know, the Amish, they think that
they're, the best way for them not to be polluted by the world
is just all live together, and don't participate in anything
the world does as much as possible. Bonnie and I were talking about
the other day, and they supposedly don't use or own modern
technology. And I asked Bonnie, I said, I
wonder why the technology, say, of the late 1800s, that was the
time to stop. Horse and buggies, you know,
like that. Why was that? Why aren't they going all the
way back to 2000 BC to the Bronze Age? They won't even use steel.
I will say this that I discovered about them. They won't buy those
things, but they're quite willing to use them. When we were visiting
a place that had a lot of Amish workers at it, well, they didn't
own any cell phones, but they were plenty happy to use yours
to call someone who knew the person they wanted to talk to
and could hand them their phone. So everybody finds a way around
their own restrictions. But the Amish, they think that
if they live in their Amish communities and they don't let the world
in, well, of course, I don't believe
the doctrines they believe. But even if they were believing
the correct doctrine, What value is that? What honor does that
bring to Christ in this world? And what value does it bring
to sinners? Come with me from Lebanon, my
bride. Come with me from Lebanon. Descend
from the crest of Ammanah. Now, he's not talking about a
microwave oven. I think Ammanah was the first
company that commercially sold them to They were sold to restaurants
and stuff. But the Amana radar range, as
I recall, was the first microwave oven made available to the consumer. But that's not the Amana here.
Amana is one of the mountains of Lebanon. And there is a river
whose name is very similar. And some think that really it's
essentially the same. The river that flows out of that
mountain is named the same as the mountain. But the mountain
itself means trustworthy. That is the word
Amana. Trustworthy, faithful, steadfast,
that kind of thing. And so he's saying here, when
he says from the top or from the crest of Amana, He's saying
you cannot stay and live in that moment in which
we first met. You know, when a couple get married,
they generally go on a honeymoon. And it can be a rather heady
time. And it's good, but you cannot live in a honeymoon. There is a time to get on with
the regular things of life. And so our Lord is saying here
that mountain of faith, in fact, the Greek translation of the
Old Testament uses the word for faith here to translate a manna.
And he says, your initial faith and all the giddiness, all the
soul-stirring power of That was good. But you have to move on
to maturity. And so he says, come with me
from Amana. And then he says, from the top of Seneir, or it
probably, my understanding is it's supposed to be pronounced
with an S-H, Seneir, the summit of Hermon. Now, Chenier and Herman
are different names for the same place. So he's just being poetic
and mentioning the same place twice. But notice this, from
the lion's dens and the mountain haunts of the leopards. Now,
here we see another application of this, come with me from Lebanon,
my bride. This is also a call to us, in
a sense, our final call from this world. Because in this world,
what does Peter say? Be sober, be vigilant, for your
adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking
whom he may devour. And leopards, the only other
reference I can remember in the scriptures with regard to lepers
is, can the leopard change his spots? Well, if a leopard can
change his spots, then we can change what we are. Well, we
can't. But we are confronted in this
life with the lions, and we are confronted with our own spottiness,
if you will. those aspects of ourselves, we
can't change. Most who believe the gospel in
the beginning think that there's going to be a remarkable change
in them, and you know for some there is. That is outwardly,
changes that people can see. But for most believers, The only
real change that occurs upon conversion is our attitude towards
God and Christ. All those things of the flesh
remain, and they are troublesome. Now, if God is pleased for our
sake in this life, to remove some of our leopard spots, that
is, things which used to trouble us and no longer seem to trouble
us, that is, sinful inclinations, then we need to thank God for
that, but we must be very careful that we do not judge our brethren
for whom the Lord has not done the same thing. I'll give an
example. In the last century, they've
come to understand addiction quite a bit better. You have
Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I'm not promoting them in
the sense of I think they're doing everything right. It's
a semi-religious organization because they do refer to a higher
power though they don't name him nor describe him. Unfortunately,
there are many who will use AA as their church. But I'll say
this, their program helps a lot of people in terms of helping
them restrain themselves from expressing their addiction to
alcohol and all the destruction that that addiction brings. Now,
there are some alcoholics, drug addicts, whatever a person may
be addicted to, there are some whom God has saved, and when
he saved them, the addiction disappeared. And some of those, because that
was their experience, They think that should be everybody else's
experience, too. Well, if God saved you, you wouldn't
have a problem with that. Well, if you're going to go with
that, then you're going to have to say, if God saved you, you
wouldn't have a problem with anything. How come, you know, a former
alcoholic He says, God saved me from my alcoholism. I have no desire for it. I have
no trouble with it. And if he saves you, it'll be
the same for you. And if you're having trouble with that, if
you're still really wrestling with it and everything, probably
you aren't saved. Well, you might want to ask that guy, well, what
about that temper of yours? I've seen it explode. Isn't God going to erase that
from you? How about your inward lusts that
we may never see, but we know they're there? God didn't remove
them, did he? At any rate, the point is, at the end of our life, he's
going to say, come with me. Come with me. Let's get away from where the
lion is. Let's get away from the leopard
spots, because you see, when we are with Him, we won't need
a mountain to be pure. We will be pure, period. We will
be white as snow, not just by the declaration of God, but by
the power of God that transforms us to be conformed to the image
of His Son. And at that time, A manna, faith, is no longer
what we are called on to exhibit. You say, why? Well, Paul says,
now these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. But the
greatest of these is love. Why is love greater than faith
and hope? Because faith disappears when
we see what we believed in. You don't believe what you see.
You see it, and the time will come that everything we now believe,
we'll see. So faith is not the operative
principle in glory, is it? Because we see everything that
right now we only believe. And hope, Paul says, who hopes
for what he already has? Well, when we're there, we will
possess it. So it'll no longer be a hope,
it'll be a possession. So you see, faith and hope belong
to this existence we live in right now. But love is for this
existence and the existence to come. So he's saying that in
that time, when he finally calls us to be with himself, that hope and faith are no longer
a part of the experience. It's all together being with
him and like him. Now he goes on to say here in
verse nine, you have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride. You
have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one
jewel on your necklace. Now, strictly speaking, it says,
You have stolen my heart with one of your eyes." Now, this
can be taken two ways. Women did wear veils in that
day, though I do not know how much Jewish women covered themselves. You know, over in the Islamic
countries, the ones that are really seriously Muslim, you
know, the women, it's just like they got a black sheet over them
and a screen where their eyes are so they can see out. Nobody
sees a woman's face or even her eyes. And so maybe he's saying here,
if they were similar in the way that the women dressed back in
that time, he said, you did not even have to remove your veil
so that I saw both of your eyes. When I saw one of them, my heart
was ravished. But I tend to believe that This
is the proper interpretation of it, with one glance, with
one look of your eyes. Earlier on in our study, when
it was talking about the eyes of the bride, I made mention
that the world describes feminine attractiveness almost entirely
in body shape. And it's not to be denied. That's
part of it. What I think that many young
women who agonize over that aspect, you know, are they pretty enough
or whatever, they don't understand the power of the attractiveness
of the eyes. You know, Well, I've experienced
it myself with my wife, you know, the way she looks at me. And
this was before we were even dating. But the right kind of
look from a woman can make a man weak in the knees, you know. That's one reason, really, that
I think that there's a general tendency for men and women who
are not married not to look at one another in the eyes so much.
There's communication in the eyes. And you can just imagine
this scene. He comes into a room, maybe like
a party or some celebrations going on. And he's looking across
this room, and he doesn't even know who this woman is. But he
looks that way, and she looks over him and glances at him out
sideways out of her eye. And he's smitten. Through her glance, she has communicated
to him what has stolen his heart. Now, you know, for us, we think
it would be entirely correct for us to say something like
this to the Lord Jesus Christ, one look at me and you had me. But to think, that he says to
us, one glance at me, toward me, and you stole my heart. Now, what does this say to us?
Well, first of all, let us just revel in the love that our Lord
Jesus has for us. whether or not we understand
it, whether we can fully believe the idea that Jesus
Christ loves us even more than we love Him. Let's believe it anyway and live
in that truth and walk according to that truth. Most of religion wants people
to walk in fear. Trembling. And so they speak
to them all the time in terms of God's disfavor. Well, there
are some people to whom that message is applicable. But never should it be told to
believers that there has been any diminishing of the love of
Christ for them. One look. For a long time, we wouldn't
look at him at all. He was repulsive to us. We wanted nothing to do
with him. The Spirit of God worked in us that we might see his beauty. And we looked. And with that
one look, so to speak, we stole his heart. Isn't that remarkable to think?
And if with that look we stole his heart, with that one glance
of our eyes, Should we not look to Him over and over and over
again? Not just so that we might attract
Him to us, but because evidently He likes that. He loves it when we look to Him
and when we gaze upon Him. And gaze upon Him with that look that says, you are mine and I
am yours. One jewel of your necklace. This necklace may represent the
many graces that God bestows upon his people, I don't know,
you know, a single necklace made up of many jewels, but you know,
the Lord Jesus, he looks on us And He sees in us what His work
did for us. And just one jewel created by His grace is
a delight to Him. And the first one on that necklace
was faith. By His Spirit, He created faith
in us. captured his heart, ravished
his heart. The word actually means to set
your heart aflutter, to cause it to speed up. Well, we're out
of time. We're not out of verses, but
we're out of time to talk about them. So we'll pick up there
next week.