All right, you can open your
Bibles to the Song of Solomon, Chapter 7. Song of Solomon, Chapter 7. Heavenly Father, bless our gathering
this morning and use these scriptures to reveal your son to us and
the blessings that we have through him. In Christ's name we pray,
amen. All right, we've gotten as far
as, let's see, We're up to verse 10. So we'll
begin there. Song of Solomon, chapter 7, verse
10. I belong to my lover and his
desire is for me. Now, this is the answer of Shulamith
to the words of Solomon. And of course, then it represents
the response of Christ to the Word
of Christ. She says, I belong to my lover. Shulamith declares her submission
to Solomon as his wife. She is happy to be his. Now in our day and age, particularly
as citizens of the United States of America, we are raised on
the concept of individual freedom, and the concept of submission
is very nearly foreign to us. I mean, I realize that because
of our sinful nature, all of us are self-ruled, that is, we
think that we ought to be in charge of everything about us,
but you add to that that our very culture is based upon the supposed rights of the individual,
the idea of submitting to anyone is somewhat foreign to us. And
this has infiltrated, you know, after it was, shall we say, first
born in our culture at the founding of our nation, you know, we hold
these truths to be self-evident, which means this is a truth that
we don't have to prove. It's so obvious, you don't need
proof for it. all men are created equal, they're
endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and
all of that. From that point on, it has crept into more and
more parts of our society, and I'm old enough to remember when
feminism, as it's pretty much practiced now or understood now,
when it began to come up, a more militant form of feminism, and
the whole idea of a wife in submission to her husband, kind of got thrown
out the door, or the window even, you know, didn't even bother
going to the door, tossed it out. And, you know, we understand
that people, male or female, as they grow up, before the law,
they are. That is, before the law of men.
and no one is obligated to another. But when the scriptures speak
to us of marriage, it always speaks of it in terms of, so
far as the submission angle is concerned, wives, submit yourself
to your husbands. Now, men have misused that concept. One thing you'll not find in
the scriptures is a concept, men, rule your wives. Lord it
over your wives. You never find that in scriptures.
You find wives, submit yourselves to your husband. And that word,
by the way, that's translated submit, at least in the New Testament,
and I don't even know if it's ever used in the Old Testament
to describe this relationship, it always involves a voluntary
submission, such as when someone submits to being in the military.
They're not drafted. They went and enlisted. So the
idea is that, yes, a woman is completely free, but if she enters
into marriage, she does so with the understanding she comes in
as being in submission. But once again, this submission
is not what many have made it out to be over the generations.
The idea that she's not a person in her own right, or the idea
that a man dare not listen to her, or that kind of thing. That
is a complete corruption and misuse of the concept of a woman
being in submission to her husband. But there are several things
about marriage and even the way we mostly practice it in our
day that do show something of what this submission involves.
And that is, in a marriage, nearly all of the change that
goes on happens to the woman. Traditionally speaking, her father
walks her down the aisle. Up to that point, that's the
man in her life. That's the man under whom she
had submitted to that point. He walks down the aisle, what
does he do? He gives her away. A tough thing to do, if you've
ever had to do that. You know, I've participated in
all of the weddings of all three of my children, two sons and
a daughter, and it killed me to walk Mary down the aisle and
answer that question, who gives this woman to be married to this
man? And I thought, can we just do a lease agreement here or
something like that, you know? I said the words, but my heart
wasn't in it. But she has changed from under
the submission to her father to the submission to her husband.
She leaves the household she was raised in and becomes part
of the household of her husband. She even changes her last name. Now, you know, with the rise
of feminism came the rise of these hyphenated last names because
women didn't want to give them up, so they just put a hyphen
at the end of their name and add. their husband's name. And I'm not here to say any of
this is right or wrong. It doesn't matter to me. The
point is, when the scriptures were written, they were written
in light of the view of marriage that God had set forth at that
point. And so this woman, in saying,
I belong to my lover, she was encapsulating, in those words,
everything it means for a woman to leave the household she was
in and come under the protection and the leadership of the household
of her husband. Now, we know that in many societies
marriages were arranged, and in some they still are. Many still practice these arranged
marriages and often it was arranged when the participants were mere
children, an agreement between the two fathers. And I'm sure
that much of this went on even in Israel, but I'm reminded of
the story of when Abraham's servant went to find a wife for Isaac. And Abraham gave him specific
instructions, you're to go back to Haran, back to the land of
our relatives. And you are to choose one from
there. And so he goes up there, and
he prays to the Lord, he said, give success to my efforts here,
you know, how am I supposed to, I'm sure what was going through
his mind, how am I supposed to know who's a good woman for my
master's son? But he says, you show me, and
sure enough, Rebecca shows up at a well just as he's sitting
there, and she offers to draw water for him, and that's a sign
to him from God, this is the one. So he goes back to the house,
and it says, he showed them all of Isaac's, all the gifts he
had sent along, and all of this. In a sense, setting forth the
glories of Isaac. But he set forth the whole household.
But his purpose was clear. This was to make Isaac known
to the household, but particularly to Rebekah. And there was lots
of talking and negotiating went on, but at the very end, the
servant puts the question. He says, I gotta go back, and
I need to take her with me. And they said to that woman,
will you go with this man? In other words, this was all
arranged, but it involved her consent at the end. Well, she's being called on to
leave her home and would probably never see
them again. She's being called on to leave
her father and her mother, brothers and sisters, the town she grew
up in, everything about her former life, she's got to leave it.
And she wouldn't be forced to do that. And then she's supposed
to go and she's supposed to be married to a man whom she has
never met. She's only seeing the things
that he sent to kind of give her an idea of what sort of man
he is. Of course, this is a beautiful
picture of the preaching of the gospel. We haven't seen Christ,
have we? But we sure have seen the things
that have been sent via one of God's messengers, the things
that have been sent to give us an idea of what kind of Savior
he is, what kind of Lord, what kind of husband he is. We've
seen all of this. But she willingly goes back.
Now, in our theology, you know, we're not what is normally called
free willers. Though most people misunderstand
what we mean when we say we don't believe in free will. But we
believe in the sovereign grace of God. We believe that before
the world began, God chose a people out of this sinful race of humanity. And he chose them not because
there was anything good in them or that he foresaw that there'd
be anything good in them. The only thing God ever foresaw
was that which he ordained. So to say that he just looked
down through history to see what was going to happen as though
he didn't know before he looked, that's just not so. For absolutely
no other reason than his own goodness and love and his own
will, he chose a people to save through Jesus Christ. And they
will be saved, every last one of them, and nobody else will.
Now people will say, that's unfair. Why is it right for God to choose
to save some and not others? Well, I'll ask you this, why
in the world did he choose anybody? Really think about it. Would
you have? You know, when they said God
looked down to foresee, well, if he did look down to foresee,
I'll tell you one thing he's gonna foresee, that their representative
in the garden shook his fist in the face of God and rebelled
against him and cast the whole of humanity into condemnation. That's what he would have foreseen. And there was no, shall we call
it a just cause for God to choose anyone. So, if he's choosing anyone,
whether it be one or the entirety of the human race, it's more than justice for him
to do it. That is, it goes beyond what
justice would require. He was under no obligation to
choose any. Therefore, he may choose anything
from zero to everybody, or anything in between. And it's all right,
because every one of them has already been bound over to judgment
and death. He chose to save these people.
He sent His Son to die for them. And He sends His Spirit to call
them. And there's other words for that. There is what you call a general
call in which the Spirit of God works and ministers the gospel
to preach the gospel to anyone who will listen. But then there
is the specific call of the Spirit of God in which he comes one
on one with each of God's elect and works in them something that's
necessary for them to give consent, as it were, to be married to
Christ. The Lord Jesus called it the
new birth, to be begotten again. Our first birth brought us into
condemnation because it tied us to Adam. Our second birth
ties us to Christ. Therefore, there's no condemnation
to them who are in Christ Jesus. But once a person has been born
again by the Spirit of God, he freely and willingly chooses
to be among God's elect. One of the friends of mine in
my mid-teens, really up until probably mid-twenties, a fierce
freewill guy. We went to the same college the
first year, a very freewill school, but it was there I learned about
the sovereign grace of God, though they did not intend for me to
believe it. They just told me what it was because it was one
form of theology. You know, when you're studying
theology, you gotta learn what other beliefs are as well. And
they really didn't like that Calvinism stuff. But they said
what it was, and I thought, that makes perfect sense to me, but
not to this other guy. And he actually left that school
thinking it was too Calvinistic. I remember even with my very
early understanding, of the sovereign grace of God, I thought, this
school is anything but Calvinistic, you know. They believe that a
natural man, one who's not been born again, has the capability
within himself to believe God, if he chooses to do so. Well,
that's like saying a dead man is, he's able to breathe if he
wants to. Well, of course, but dead men
don't want anything, do they? If somebody is at cardiac arrest,
what would you think of an EMT that came up and said, all right,
we want to give you life, but we've got to wait for you to
give us the go-ahead before we can start CPR or do the shocky
thing, you know? But we're waiting for you, and
we're going to sing a hymn. Raise your hand if you'd like to be
alive. What would you think of that? But that's the kind of
gospel they say that God is presenting. He's saying to dead people, come
to me. I'm sorry, dead people can't
do anything. Life must first be given to them. And here's
the nature of life. It seeks life. I mean, why does the medical
profession take one-sixth of our economy? We cling to life
and the enjoyment of it. And when we are made spiritually
alive, we are made aware of the wonder of spiritual life, and
we cling to it, and we know the only way to cling to spiritual
life is to cling to Him. And then we realize that it's
because of Him that we have spiritual life, and therefore that endears
our heart to Him, and we believe Him. We do so freely, we do so
willingly, but we could not have done it before. But in all of
this, I love theology, so it's easy for me to stand here and
make a case for these points, and I enjoy doing it. But all
of this is to point out that even though we believe in the
sovereign grace of God, we also understand that that work of
sovereign grace always reveals itself in a heart willing to
be united to Christ and to come under His household. and to submit,
to disregard our old name, Adam, and take up the new family name.
The Bible says that we are all, we all have the same family name. So, she says, I belong to my
lover, and she was glad to say it. But then she goes on to something
else. It's a wonder that a man's ever,
if you understand what man is naturally, it's a wonder that
he ever comes to the point that he would consent to being united
to Christ. But even more of a wonder is
the realization, it says, his desire is for me. People have preached up the love
of God and the love of Christ so much. And that's what's gonna
be the topic of our sermon. And to be honest, you cannot
say too much in glorifying the love of God. But what they have
done for the most part in modern Christianity, and I say modern, it's been going on ever since
man fell. But the idea that for God to
be good, he must love everybody. And it's a horrible dishonor
to God for him to not love someone. Why is that? Why is it dishonorable
for God to not love someone? After all, These someones we're
talking about, everything about them is repulsive to God. And
I'm saying them, us is in them by nature. I'm not doing an us-them,
I'm doing God-them contrast. Do you love Adolf Hitler? No. If I'd have seen him, had
a rifle with a good scope, I'd have got him right between the
eyes. And you'd have been right in doing it. A despicable person. But as much as you may loathe
the concept of Adolf Hitler, that's nothing compared to what
we look like in the eyes of a holy God. So to say that his goodness is
dependent upon his love for every one of us, His good is magnified
in the fact He loved any of us. Even if He'd loved only one of
us, it would have been a testimony of the overwhelming goodness
of God, that those who had made themselves enemies to Him, He
has made to be the objects of His mercy and grace. You and I this morning who believe, In a very real sense, we have
not been saved because we believe. We believe because we've been
saved. Faith did not initiate salvation.
No one is saved without faith, I understand that. But we believe because God gave
us eternal life, and that eternal life expresses itself as faith
in Him. And why did He give that eternal
life to us? For reasons known only to Him,
He loved us and sent His Son to die for us. There's one of
the whys we cannot answer. We sing a hymn, and the whole
title is why? Why did they nail him to Calvary's
tree? I understand the theology, but I still can't understand
what motivated God. Well, the love of God, sure it
did, but why did He put that love on me? I don't know. And
so she says with wonder, His desire is for me. This is one of the things that
turned her heart to love Him. He loved her. First John chapter
4, we read, we love God because He first loved us. And when that love was revealed
to us, And, you know, it can't be revealed to us apart from
our understanding. That is, we can't understand
what the love of God really means until we understand just how
unlovely and unlovable we are. You know, if a man, you know,
has this absolutely stunningly beautiful wife with the most
wonderful personality you could think of, we could all stand
around and say, well, I know what attracted him to her. But we weren't the beautiful
wife with a lovely personality. We were deformed and distorted
by sin, ugly by all divine standards, crabby, rebellious, difficult. And then people say, but I don't
know what he saw in her. You know, it doesn't matter whether
or not we can see it. And Christ, we look at us. I don't know what
he sees in me. Nothing. Nothing. And that's the wonder of the
love of God. He saw nothing lovable in us. Yet he loved us anyway. Someone said a good definition
of the word grace is in spite of. He loved us. It says, Christ loved the church
and gave himself for her. And he loved the church in spite
of what she was and is. And that love is expressed in
that he gave himself for her. It wasn't just a sentimental
feeling or affection. He loved her and it says, As
he was instituting the Lord's table, he said, having loved
his own which were in the world, he showed them the fullness of
his love. And he washed their feet. He
said, what I'm doing you don't understand now, but you'll understand
later. And that's true. They understood he was washing
their feet. They didn't understand what it meant. He was talking
about how he submitted himself. He took on the form of a servant.
and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross,
and thereby washed our feet. And then he went on to set up
the Lord's table, which illustrated the manner by which he, as a
servant, would bear our sins in his body on the tree, and
thus we are forgiven. Therefore, when the Holy Spirit
comes and reveals the love of God toward us, under the circumstances
of our understanding of how unlovable we are, we are stunned. We are taken back. And oh, how
many times we've got to go through that process over and over again,
because we get so accustomed to the concept of being loved
by God, and then some fall on our behalf. Not like we aren't
falling all the time, but sometimes it's more obvious than others. And we're brought under legal
fears again, and maybe that's the reason God let us fall, to
let us realize that we were thinking too highly of ourselves, and
thinking that he, we were thinking that he loved us because of what
we'd become, or something like that. He says, let me show you
once again what you are, that you might understand my love.
And he just lets go for a second, and we fall face forward. And
if we land on the ground, how can I be a child of God, and
be face down in the dirt like this? And then we're reminded, herein
is love. Not that we loved God, but that
he loved us and gave his son to be a sacrifice of atonement
for us. I belong to my lover. I tell
you, if you ever come to the understanding that his desire
is for you, And you can't come to that understanding
unless that's truly the fact. But when we are brought to understand
who and what we are, and then God reveals his love for us,
even though he is God and holy and righteous and just, and has
good cause against us, but nonetheless he's for us, When we realize His desire is
for us, we most willingly say, I belong to my lover. I'm glad to be free of the household
into which I was born, for that household brought me death. I'm
glad to be done with the name I was born with. Let me have
the name of grace that God gives me. And I will gladly be united
to him and give him thanks that though everything about
me was repulsive to him, and though I with my whole heart
despise who he was and is, he loved me. And he paid an awful price to
have me. Therefore, I am His, and I'm
glad for it to be so. All right, we'll pick that up
there next week.