Day 1

Step 1: First love

 

Reading: Song of Songs 4:1-7

 

 

Before I started dating my wife Honor, there was a season when I was beginning to feel attracted to her, but I hadn’t had the courage to tell her!  I can still remember one particular moment.  I was involved in running a special Christian event at a church.  It was the church in which we would eventually be married.  One of my jobs at the event was to run the sound desk, which was on a balcony looking down on the main part of the church. 

 

I was at the church early to get various technical items set up and, when all those jobs were done, I went up to the sound desk in the balcony to run the sound for the event.  Looking down into the church I had a good view of the door into the building.  So I could see all the people who were coming in for the event.  And as I was watching the door, I saw Honor come in.  She didn’t know I was hiding up in the balcony.  At that time, she had this fun pair of trousers with flowers on it, and that night she was wearing that pair of trousers.  And when I saw her, my heart went all gooey, because I realised I had fallen in love with her.  When we feel something like this, we sometimes say we’ve become “weak at the knees”.

 

That was an early experience of love towards Honor.  There’s an intensity of feeling about first love.  We can experience strong feelings.  Our heart can flutter and beat fast and strong.  We can feel a kind of rushing power in our body.  This is the experience of first love.

 

Have you ever thought that God experiences the same passion of first love towards us?  We capture a sense of God’s first love for us through the words of the man in the poetry of Song of Songs in today’s reading from chapter 4.  These are the words of a man whose heart has been captured with love for a woman.  We see this in four different ways.

 

First of all, in the original Hebrew poetry, there’s a repeating word which doesn’t often get translated into English, as it has many meanings.  But in the context of love, the first lines of this poem, could read like this:

 

Behold, you are beautiful my darling.

Behold, you are beautiful. (verse 1)

 

The word “Behold” could be translated, “Ah!” or “Wow”.  The word in Hebrew is an attention-grabbing word.  The man’s attention has been caught by the beauty of the woman.  Where we have repetition, (You are beautiful x 2), as I explained in the introduction to this series, it means emphasis.  To say, “You are beautiful,” twice means, “You are beautiful beyond words.”

 

In a way, this man is so having first love, he is “lost for words”.

 

The second way we see the intensity of first love is in this line:

“Your eyes are like doves behind your veil.”

 

Eyes like doves.  Even if we don’t understand this poetry fully, the man definitely intends this as a compliment!  It could relate to the dove’s gentleness and the beauty of its feathers.

 

Thirdly, the woman is wearing a veil over at least part of her face.  “Your eyes are doves behind your veil.”  On our wedding day, Honor wore a veil as she came into the church and walked down the aisle with her father.  When she got to where I was standing at the front of church, I lifted the veil back from her face.  A veil creates a sense of anticipated mystery.  The man sees part of the woman, but not everything about her.  A view of a part arouses desire for the whole.[1]  This is another description of the passion of first love.

 

And fourthly we have this description:

“Your hair falls in waves, like a flock of goats winding down the slopes of Gilead.”

 

Now if I came to Honor and said, “My love, your hair is like a flock of goats,” she might not see this as a positive statement!  But in this poem, the man is definitely paying the woman a compliment.  Gilead is a very beautiful part of Israel.  Goats, in that historical context, would have been black, so picture a stream of black goats coming down a hillside in Gilead and you can see it might remind a man of a woman who has beautiful, long, black hair.

 

This poetry is meant to convey the truth that God loves us with the passion of first love.  How does it make you feel that God loves you like this?  Sometimes, with people, the strength of their first love can fade over time, but this is not the case with God.

 

 “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” Jeremiah 31:3

 

This is just one of the examples in the Old Testament of the phrase, “Unfailing love” or, “Everlasting love”.  It comes a total of 42 times in the Old Testament.  The unfailing love of God is a very regular theme. One of the great early bishops of the Church, St Augustine, wrote that God loves us as if there were only one of us.  He looks at each of us with the energy and passion of someone who has just fallen in love for us.  The intensity of that love never diminishes.  God loves us with an everlasting love.

 

 

Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank you that you love me with an everlasting love, with a fierce passion, the strength of first love.  May I never confuse the way you love with the examples of imperfect human love that I have experienced.  Your love is in a category all its own.  Help me to marvel so much more how you love is undiminished, faithful and constant.  May I rest today in the unrelenting passion of your first love for me.  Amen.

 

[1] Longman T, Song of Songs, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 2001, Eerdmans, p143