The watchmen that went about the city
They found me,
They smote me,
They wounded me;
The watchers on the walls
They stripped my veil off of me. Song of Solomon 5:7
Probably the most misunderstood book of the Old Testament is the Song of Solomon. The most important difficulty is that most translators and interpreters establish the story along the lines of two principle characters: Solomon and the Shulamite virgin. The reason that this problem exists is because translators refuse to properly render the Hebrew letters d-w-d as David. Obviously, this rendering would introduce another character into the story that would make it more complicated. However, when one reads the book of Ecclesiastes immediately before the Song of Solomon, the allegorical meaning of the Song becomes clear. Solomon, knowing that he is profligate and unfaithful to the Lord, is able to point out his failure poetically by placing this virgin in “romantic” tension between himself and his powerful father, David. The resulting story is a question to be answered by Israel; will you follow David with a heart for God or Solomon with all the trappings of religious power?
The tension in this book is poignant today in that there are religious ideas such as calvinism that are offered that seem wise and grandiose like Solomon. The proponents of this system of thought strip away the heart of the loving God that is represented by David (1 Samuel 13:14, Acts 13:22) to exalt an image of God that is derived from pagan and Greek sources instead of the Hebrew pasture. If calvinism could work its will throughout Christianity, it would rewrite the Christmas story as the birth of Herod the Great’s grandson in a palace instead of the son of David in a manger. The notions of calvinism are designed to reconstruct a city like the one administered by Solomon; heartless, pompous and apparently powerful but, in fact, a prison of man-made foolishness.
The prophetic character of the verse above shows the Shulamite virgin, supposedly the object of the king’s desire, being stalked and beaten by the administration of Solomon. Watchmen, who are paid to protect the city from an outside threat, are imprisoning and terrorizing the virgin. She is desperately trying to escape the walls of Solomon’s pagan city to pursue the vision of her beloved, King David. She, like the church, is mistreated in the same fashion as her beloved, Jesus, Messiah, son of David the King (Romans 8:17).
The trajectory of this story finds a landing place in a courtyard in Jerusalem where hidebound fools who deliberately ignored the heart of the Scriptures in favor of its ritual demands curse God by claiming that they “have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). The echo of this shout is punctuated by the sound of a hammer, driving accursed iron into the hands of God Himself (Jesus is God!) as the Savior completes the last details of a plan that was made before the foundation of the world. The glorious promise made by God to all of humanity is that He has broken down the walls of Solomon’s city and opened the doorway of the cross to humble hearts that want to come home to a loving Father.
Come to the Cross.
No comments:
Post a Comment