As I said last week, these wonderful
pictures that Song and Solemn are full of are like doorways
into beautiful worlds and there is just an endless Endless streams
of delight. These scriptures that we have
in our hands are just, they are one, aren't they? And every verse
is interconnected with all the other verses. We have a word
from God which is sure and which is true, but it reveals the most
remarkable things. And it says in verse 12 of the
Song of Solomon, after he has praised her. He says that she's
ravished his heart in verse 9, and then he praises her love,
he praises her graces, he praises her words, he praises her thoughts,
he praises her garments. And then he says in verse 12,
a garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse, a spring shut up a
fountain sealed. Then he says, thy plants are
an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits, campfire and
spikenard. And he goes on to talk about
those spices in that garden, those spices that flow out. But
he begins again by reminding her of the fact that she is his
sister. He is One who is near to us by
the ties of nature. We are next of kin to Him. We have the same Father. We are
partakers of this humanity together. Because of His Incarnation we
can be bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh. And then he says
that she's his spouse as well, and in a normal course of events
it would be a horrible thing, but in a book like Song of Solomon
he can be both a brother and a bridegroom to her. She is his
sweet companion. She's united to him with the
most tender bonds of love. He's betrothed to her, betrothed
in eternity. And she has been taken from among
others to be that special one for him, embraced in the arms
of his love, bound to him forever. And it's as if with these two
hands he holds her. If he holds her with one hand
they can walk and almost part from looking at each other. The
bride is held with two hands together. She might look down,
but he can't take his gaze from her. She's held, she's bound
to him. And that's where the scriptures
take us again and again, isn't it, into that extraordinary pictures
of union with Him, that love that was set before Him, that
drew Him to this earth, that drew Him into humanity, that
drew Him and caused Him to set His face like a flint to go to
that cross. because of His love for her. And the Holy Spirit then promises
and comes and He takes the things of the Lord Jesus, the things
of His person and the things of His work, and He reveals them
to us. And the Holy Spirit does two
things, doesn't He, within us. He puts into us streams of living
waters and then He enables us to pour out streams of those
living waters. He plants a new nature, a new
creation, a new life as that famous book by Henry Sturgill
all those hundreds of years ago. It's the life of God in the soul
of man. The heart of true Christianity
is a life that's from above that comes and energises a new life
in us. We are a new creation. We have new eyes, we have new
ears, we have a stony heart removed and we have a heart of flesh
in us. But here in this verse He actually
says something about his care and his protection and his enclosing
of her. The scriptures are full of pictures
of gardens, and some of you are gardeners, some of the daughters
of great gardeners. But there's something in so many
of us that just delights in gardens. And the garden here is a garden
enclosed, and I was talking to Peter about the enclosed gardens
that they have in England, and he said some of them are just
quite remarkable gardens. The walls might be 20 feet high. And often they're set in a place
where obviously there's good soil and a stream flows through
it. And such is the nature of these
enclosed gardens that you can in some places in England even
grow citrus trees in these gardens. And they are bolted and barred.
They are a garden set aside for the Lord of the Manor and for
His people. Here he says, a garden enclosed
is my sister, my spouse. A garden, as distinguished from
the rest of the world. You know well that story. That's
reality in Genesis, isn't it? The Lord God. planted a garden
in Genesis chapter 2. He planted a garden eastward
in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the
Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and
good for food, and the tree of life also in the midst of the
garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river
went out to water the garden, and from thence it parted and
became four heads." So you have this beautiful picture of the
Lord God creating this garden. And the word for garden there
in Hebrew probably means more like an orchard. It was especially
planted, it was a special part of God's creation, a beautiful
garden. And the Lord God came into that
garden and he walked in that garden with Adam in the cool
of the evening. And in that garden he created Eve out of Adam's
side. She should be called Woman. This
garden is a special garden. As you know at the end of Revelation
we have another picture of a garden, don't we? That beautiful garden
with that remarkable stream, with that tree of life which
they had no longer access to after they ate from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. But in the tree of life,
the tree of life in the garden in Revelation 22, it's there
and it's freely accessible all of the time. A great picture
of our Lord Jesus holding and keeping his people. So this garden that we see here,
as he calls her this garden, is a garden which is distinguished
from the rest of the world. And it's created like all of
our gardens, they're created for our use and our enjoyment. I've spent most of my life playing
in gardens of one sort or another, and there's something beautiful
about gardens, isn't there? There's something beautiful about
the smell of beautifully freshly turned There's something wonderful
about seeing things grow with a vibrancy in a garden. To go and see tomatoes with those
lovely fresh green leaves on them and you can almost hear
them growing. I used to love growing pumpkins
and watermelons and you come back and they'd grow so much
every day. It's a lovely thing, isn't it?
I used to love going away on holidays as a little kid at Christmas
time because I'd have my garden all organised as a little guy
and then I'd go away and the first thing I wanted to do when
I came home is I'd rush over to my garden because in the week
that we were away, things were just so different. There's life
in a garden, isn't there? And it's happening while I'm
not there. It's happening while we're asleep. But gardens give
us pleasure. and these gardens contain a variety
of flowers and herbs and plants. They're not the natural things,
are they, that grow in gardens. They're not wild things, they're
cultivated things. They're grown specifically, they're
grown purposefully and they're selected and they're planted
at an appropriate time with soil that's prepared properly for
them, fertilised and watered, and there's constant care required
of them. Care must be given. Trees must
be pruned, the weeds must be removed, and it's remarkable
how the plants just love having the soil stirred up around them. It seems as if they get a whole
new lease of life when you go and fiddle with them and take
care of them. And of course the garden is a
small and set apart piece of ground. And the Lord likens his
flock, his people, to a little flock, to a small remnant. to a few, a garden is a pleasant
and a fruitful place. And all through the scriptures
we have again and again pictures of our God as a gardener, gardening
and planting his people. The one that you might remember
so well is in John Chapter 15. It says, I am the true vine,
and my father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth
not fruit he taketh away, and every branch that beareth fruit
he purchases it, so that it may bring forth more fruit. And then
he says, Abide in me, and I in you, as the branch cannot bear
fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye,
except ye abide in me. I am the vine. You are the branches,
he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth
much fruit. And then the Lord says those
remarkable words which we are so prone to forget. As we look
at ourselves and we look at things of this world, he says, for,
or because, without me you can do nothing. What a great and comforting word
from our God. So God our Father is the farmer
and our Lord Jesus as his great son, he purchases the land, as
he's purchased us with his precious blood. And he ploughs the field,
and he encloses the field, as he does with us, he hedges our
ways. And He marks us as a special
possession of Him. And He ploughs that field of
our hearts. He ploughs it with conviction,
in readiness for the grace of the Gospel to come. He breaks
us down. He wounds but He can heal. He kills so He can make alive
again. He is a good gardener of our
souls. He is a good gardener of our
lives. He sows that seed. He plants
that good seed of the Gospel. He gives eyes and ears and He
gives a new heart and He produces. from all of that. He produces
this fruit, the fruit of His own doing in the lives of His
people. He cultivates the tender plants
and He rewaters them. He waters us and grows us by
His grace and He cultivates us in trials and affliction and
He removes the weeds. He removes the weeds of sin,
the weeds of self-righteousness, the weeds of us looking to ourselves,
the weeds of our ability, I will, I will. We remember well our
friend Peter. and the other ten at that last
supper, they all said, I will, I will, I'll stand by you, I'll
stand by you. And the Lord took away the I
wills from his friend Peter. Why? because he loved him, because
he wanted Peter to have one home and one place of rest and one
place of refuge. And when Peter again in Antioch
wanted to move back to legalism, the Lord hedged him around and
removed those weeds. There's a remarkable incident
of it in the life of our friend Paul that we may not be aware
of so often as we read the Scriptures, but saw Paul probably through
just being worn down by years and years and years of persecution
and difficulty, finally comes back to Jerusalem and extraordinarily
he takes a vow. He takes a vow to purify himself. He takes a vow that lasts a whole
week long. Verse 26 of Acts 22, then Paul
took the man and the next day purifying himself. This is a
man who knew that the hearts of God's people are purified.
by faith purified by the Lord Jesus. He had no need to go back
to the law. You can read the account of it
in Acts 22. And then something remarkable
happens in this week-long purification process so that he could in a
sense live with peace with the legalists in Jerusalem. In verse
27, At the end of this week-long purification was a blood sacrifice. Just remarkable to think that
Paul could get so close. And in verse 27 it says, were almost ended. God says to us, as he says to
Paul, you will go this far and you will not cross a line. I
will hedge you in, I will enclose you, even if it is the reason
God has to stir up a whole city. when the Jews, which were of
Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the people
and laid hands on him, crying out, Men of Israel, help. And
Paul was stopped. As Peter was stopped in Antioch,
Paul was stopped in Jerusalem by the grace of our God, who
is a wise gardener. He would not let his bride fall
that far. We stumble. I don't know about
you, but for myself I find so much of my life is a stumbling. And I need a gardener. I need a gardener to cultivate
me. I need a gardener to enclose
me, to surround me. A garden enclosed. This garden enclosed and it's
a spring shut up and a fountain sealed, they all imply secrecy,
don't they? That there is something that's
set aside in the life of God's people. It's enclosed. It's enclosed to be a place where
his activities in the life of his bride is a secret thing. Not to him, obviously, but a
secret thing to the world. So the enclosed garden is enclosed
for the sake of God distinguishing, isn't it? The Church of God is
distinguished from all others. There is a dividing wall, a dividing
wall as we saw in our journey through Niyamaya, a dividing
wall which separates God's people, puts them in a place of His choosing
for His security and puts the others outside. It's not a dividing wall that
we create. The dividing wall is the gospel
of the free and distinguishing grace of God. The garden is enclosed
for her protection. We are enclosed, as it were,
by God for our protection. A wall of fire around about it,
says Zechariah, and the glory in the midst of it. We have angels
encamping around us. The Lord Jesus had access to
myriads of angels. Those angels are there now as
ministering spirits to us. God encloses His people. He encloses them to distinguish
them from others, to protect them. And as I said earlier,
He encloses them so that the activities are secret. The activities of God in the
life of His people, the activities of the triune God in eternity,
the activities of the triune God in the cross of the Lord
Jesus, the activities of the triune God in the lives of His
people throughout this time that we live in, these last days,
is a hidden thing from the world. It's hidden from the world. It's not seen by the world to
have any significance at all. It's not known by the world. Inside the garden, inside this
garden of God's creating and God's keeping are the sweet fragrant
flowers, these herbs and this fruit. And they are beautiful
to the Lord as He encloses them and separates them. And they
are beautiful to each other. But the world is totally oblivious
to the delights of God's people. The world doesn't know what thrills
our hearts. The world doesn't even know and
understand the struggles that we have as God's peculiar and
special people in this world. Our desires are different. Our
home is different. Our God is different. Our delights
are different, our struggles are different, our hopes are
different and these are all hidden, all hidden and will be all hidden
until that great resurrection morning when all things will
be revealed and God will hold up His people and present them
before this world and say they are and have been my delight
always. And there is, as we see in Song
of Solomon, there is a mutual delight. He delights in her and
she delights in him and remarkably they use the same language of
each other. They are all fair, my love. And then she says, Thou art all
fair, Thy love. Again and again they're seeing
each other reflected in the activities that God has brought into this
Bride of His which we call a garden. This garden is not open to all. It's an enclosed garden. It's enclosed for the exclusive
joy and pleasure and use of the owner. And the garden enclosed
implies that the beasts and the danger I kept out. God surrounds His people. He shields them and He surrounds
them. Now God is amazing in His love
for us. And He says that she's a spring
shut-up. Spring. a spring of water. We don't know the source of it. You might remember well the one
that we used to drive over all the way, all the time when we
came down from Kiama, coming down the bend on this side and
you come down the hill and around the first couple of corners and
there, in the middle of the water, it didn't seem to matter what
time of year it was. was this spring of water. And
that spring came up through all of that road base they had worked
and packed and packed and through the tar and out it bubbled. See, it's like God's activities
in our lives, isn't it? Where did that water come from?
Where did that water come from? My grandfather lived on a property
on Emery's Plateau west of here, one of the remarkable things
about the springs, there are two springs on that place, one
goes to the west and one to the east, is that the remarkable
thing is that in the drought, it has never in white man's memory
ever been dry, that spring. The thing that's remarkable is
it has such a tiny catchment area. The whole area where the
water could gather is possibly not much more than 100 acres
or so. And yet it just flows and flows
and flows. And it flows so consistently
and regularly that in that stream and in that little glen, before
it falls over the mountains to the west, You can get watercress. Watercress grows there beautifully
all the time. And yet that spring, where does
it come from? We know that the water must be
coming from that small area, but it just flows and flows and
flows. It bubbles up from an unknown
and unseen source. Is that how you see your Christian
life? We are kept how? We are kept by the power of God
as Christians. We are kept by God's life within
us. And it comes in a way almost
unknown and imperceptible to us. And it bubbles up and creates
life where there was no life before. And it bubbles up and
it sustains life where there was no reason for life, no reason
for spiritual life. You remember the story of the
Lord Jesus in John chapter 4. He came, he must need to go through
Samaria. The Lord Jesus had to go through
Samaria. Why did he have to go through
Samaria? Because his bride was there. And there she is. Now Jacob's
well was there, and Jesus, therefore being wearied with his journey,
sat thus on the wall, and it was about the sixth hour, and
there cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water, and Jesus saith
unto her, Give me to drink. For the disciples had gone away
into the city to buy meat. Then saith the woman of Samaria
unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, asked this drink
of me, which am a woman of Samaria, for the Jews have no dealings
with the Samaritan. Jesus answered and said unto
her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith
to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldst have asked of him, and
he would have given thee living water. The woman saith unto him,
Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. From
whence then hast thou that living water? Jesus answered and said
unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again,
but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall
never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in
him a well of water springing up into eternal life. And the woman
so wisely and rightly said, Sir, give me this water that I thirst
not. And then he exposes her, exposes
her for what she is, but reminds her again who she is in him. She went away. She went away
with that well of water welling up in her. And she went back to her town.
And she said to them, come see a man which told me of all the
things that I ever did. Is not this the Christ? She saw a man and came away from
her encounter with him acknowledging that he was the Christ and encouraging
others to come. But that water wells up. It wells
up in God's children because the source from which it comes
is not a human source. It's not something that's welled
up inside of us. It's something that wells up
because the source is outside of us. The source is God Himself. What a remarkable picture, isn't
it, of a garden with a spring in it, with the water just welling
and welling and flowing and flowing, and water in the garden. As I
said to you about Peter, he said, the gardens, the enclosed gardens
often were built around and over a little stream. What a delightful
picture of that stream just flowing and flowing. and flowing. And it's a fountain sealed, a
fountain where the water has been collected in some special
way and it flows over, fountains flowing. But these are fountains
and springs that are shut up and they are sealed. And in those
barren lands there was the case so often where the king or those
who were wealthy enough would actually claim and build a house
around a spring or a fountain for their own particular use. Solomon had such a garden it
seems between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. that's shut up for the owner
to use. It's sealed, sealed by God. It's safe, it's secure. As Colossians says, our lives
are hidden with Christ in God. We are sealed by the Holy Spirit
of promise. Spiritual life comes from a source
which cannot be touched by other men, and wonderfully spiritual
life comes from a source that cannot be disturbed even by us
and our sin. It flows from God who sees no
sin in His children. no sin in His bride. You are
all fair, my love. There is no spot in Thee." God's
garden is a perfectly preserved and protected garden. And we
see the fruit of God's sealing and His protection. I love in
the story of Noah's Ark how when all the animals would come in
and all the people would come in, And then God comes along
just before the rain comes, they're all in the ark, and then it says
in Genesis 7.17, and God shut them in, sealed inside with propitiation,
sealed outside with propitiation. Wrath absorbing protection. and sealing, sealed by God. And I have to be brief because
our man outside is going to start, but I just wanted to talk about,
just very briefly, this orchard of pomegranates. I knew nothing
about pomegranates until I went to India. but I've had pomegranates,
I've eaten pomegranates a lot because they are a bit of a pain
to get the seeds out of them, but in India there are plenty
of people to get the seeds out of them. So we ate pomegranates
for five years in Australia and I got to love pomegranates. Pomegranates are a special, special
fruit aren't they? Aaron had pomegranates a pomegranate
and a bell, and a pomegranate and a bell all around the hem
of his garment. He actually took them into the
Holy of Holies. It's a holy fruit, and it's a
sacred fruit. In Deuteronomy, Canaan is described
as a land of pomegranates, and when the Twelve went in to seek
out and search out the land, the fruit they brought back were
pomegranates and grapes and figs. And pomegranates are mentioned
again and again in Song of Solomon. And pomegranates picture, I have
an illustration for you, I don't often have illustrations, but
pomegranates Pomegranates picture God's enclosed garden. And in fact he says in verse
13 that it's an orchard of pomegranates. The trees grow quite big, they
can grow five or six metres high. They're not terribly leafy but
they have these beautiful fruit on them and as you can see one
of the remarkable things about them is the striking colour of
them and some of them are yellow. The other thing about them is
that I've had these pomegranates since Jerry was here. So these
pomegranates come from America, been in a shop in Sydney and
been sitting on my desk for three weeks and inside it's still perfectly
wonderful. And in those dry, dry lands to
actually be able to take these fruit with you. One of the things
that people complained about is that they had pomegranates
in Egypt And they had pomegranates in Canaan. They had no pomegranates
in their 40 years of wandering. And the thing that you can't
see because these get damaged, but Solomon had his crown made
to copy the crown that's on the top of the pomegranate. That's
a little crown on top. They're beautiful, beautiful
things. So the color is red, and the skin is hard, and they
are preserved and protected. And inside, and when you open
them up, they have this beautiful fruit. And in so many ways it's
just a great picture of God enclosing His people. On the outside it
looks hard, isn't it? But inside the fruitfulness of
God and the fruitfulness of His people even in a church is remarkable. As you can see it's so tightly
packed together and each of the shapes of every individual seed
is made by the other ones around it. So every seed fits tightly
together. I think it's just a beautiful
picture of the Church, isn't it? That we're actually shaped
by each other. As God plants his people together,
they're actually shaped by each other. They are protected and
encased from the world around them. But inside they are luscious
and they're beautifully refreshing as you bite into them, they almost
explode in your mouth. They would have been just delightfully
refreshing to carry on those long journeys. But these pomegranates, he says,
she is an orchard of pomegranates. flowing and flowing. The picture
is of course that there is just this remarkable providence and
remarkable blessing of God upon this garden. It grows and it
grows and it grows. It grows from outside of itself. It grows with a life which produces
an abundance. Again and again you can read
it in the scriptures, read Ezekiel 34 and read Revelation 22 and
you find that there is this abundance, there is an abundance of water,
there is an abundance of fruitfulness, seen by the Lord for His good
and His glory, seen by His people as they are encased and wrapped
up in who God is. And of course the blood red is
indicative again and again of the fact that we are the children
of Adam, that we are the children of God by blood sacrifice and
we are encased, we are wrapped up in who the Lord is and we
are living stones being built together into a holy temple,
being built together that God may take pleasure in his garden,
and his people will find themselves delighting in his provision and
in his fruitfulness that he brings into our lives. Let's pray.