[Wisdom of Solomon] Keys to a Lasting Love

Scripture: Song of Songs 8

Happily Ever After

Growing up, you may have read fairy tales or watched animated movies that always had a happy ending. He got the girl, she got her prince charming, the frog was kissed, or two long lost loves found each other again. Regardless of how a story or movie ended, it wasn’t your story or the story told by many other people. Many marriages have ended in divorce. For a lot of people, “happily ever after” is actually a fairy tale. At the same time, though, we do see couples married for seventy-plus years. We see happy marriages with lasting love. How do we get that? How do we build a foundation in our marriages that will lead to lasting love? This doesn’t mean there won’t be trials or hard times, but that in the middle of difficult moments there are biblical keys, founded upon Jesus, that can keep lasting love alive. These keys remind us of all Jesus has done and continues to do for us, giving us the motivation to love others the way we have been loved by Him.

In a world full of the debris of broken homes, crushed spirits, and fractured dreams, God’s people need the message of Song of Solomon as never before. The Song is a righteous antidote to a licentious society that has prostituted the nature of human love. Hope exudes from its pages. If ever a book was written with a message for today’s generation, Solomon’s ode is that book. We need to hear it because there’s so much confusion today about intimacy, marriage, and relationships. Solomon’s account helps us to realize God has given us an entire book of the Bible dedicated to guiding us to understand God’s plan for marriage and intimacy. God wants us to see the beauty of His ways, the beauty of Him ordaining the sanctity of a marriage between a man and wife. This is the template God gives us.

Wherever you are today, I cannot promise that everything in your relationship will be fixed in a moment. However, I can show you, through the Song of Solomon, what God intended for marriage, what sin ruined, and how God is key to reconciling and redeeming all that is lost. Fairy tale endings are simply part of fairy tales, nice ideas, but when we submit to God’s template and His ways, we get God’s ending for our story, an ending filled with the hope and joy of our salvation. Lasting love must be rooted in what Jesus did for us.

Scriptures: Song of Songs 8:5, 2 Corinthians 12:1-10, Psalms 55:22

Lean On Me

The first key to a lasting love is leaning on one another. You might know the song “Lean on Me.” Maybe you can sing it in your head right now, or you will be humming it long after you finish this devotional.

In Song of Songs 8:5, you see Solomon’s wife coming out of the wilderness leaning on her husband. Marriage is not meant to be about independence, but rather dependence. Ultimately, you want to be dependent on the Lord, but when you grasp that marriage was intended for a husband and wife to lean on each other, everything fits.

If you were a Jewish person reading this passage about them coming from the wilderness, you would understand that “wilderness” was used to sometimes symbolize trials and suffering. You will be tested in life; you will for sure be tested in marriage. Every year will bring about different trials. One year it might be that your kids seem to always be sick; another, that the house seems to be breaking left and right. You will always go through tests. Martin Luther, the reformer from the 1500s, said “A man or a woman can become more like Christ in marriage than in a monastery.” This is because trials are meant to push you closer together, not to put a wedge between you and pull you apart. No person should be more for you than your spouse. This verse is amazing to think about, recognizing that the bride of Christ is the church and Jesus is the groom; we are to lean on Christ in the midst of trials.

No one can do it alone. We can’t make it by our own strength or our own bootstraps. We need one another and are supposed to be dependent on one another. Marriage isn’t supposed to be a ball and chain. Recognize the Lord is using this person whom you love to make you more like Christ. The stronger believers become, the more conscious they are of their personal weaknesses. This causes them to cast their whole self on the Lord, with joy and trust, and lean on Him completely, knowing that He is ever faithful and always good. Christ is our example. We can be the ones leaned upon. We can also be humble enough to do the leaning; Christ was dependent on the Father. Seeking to be like Christ will always be worth our while.

Scriptures: Song of Songs 8:6-7, Romans 8:26-39

Till Death Do Us Part

Signing a legal document usually means that you are agreeing to its terms and it is now binding. It is permanent and official. You shouldn’t ever take this step lightly. Do not sign any document without reading the fine print.

Solomon and his wife had read the fine print. They knew what they were getting into and they were in it for the long haul. They knew it would at times be difficult but the love they had for each other and God would get them through.

The next key to a lasting love is to love each other deeply. In Song of Songs 8:6, we see that she says to set her as a seal upon his heart and a seal on his arm. A seal was saying that one is wholeheartedly committed. A seal is a sign of permanence. She was saying to her husband, I want you to treasure me in your affections and I want you to care for me with your strength. Lasting love is a wholehearted commitment. It requires your emotions and is evident by your actions. So, how do we put a wholehearted seal on a romantic relationship today? We seal it with a wedding ring. It is a public commitment before the world. That ring shows you belong to someone else and your affections are theirs too. If you are married and don’t wear your wedding ring, I encourage you to wear it. If you can’t find it, buy another one. Make sure every guy or girl knows that you are off-limits.

Have you ever wondered where we get the phrase, “Until death do us part?” It comes from the Bible.

Romans 7 tells us a wife is not released from her husband until her husband dies. Then, Romans 8 tells us that neither life nor death will separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Love is stronger than death. There’s this jealousy that comes from such deep love. It should cause us to jealously protect our marriage. It is better to be rude than to seem romantically interested in someone who is not your spouse. You should only flirt with one person and that is your wife or husband. This biblical jealousy is a passion and desire for someone else that tolerates no rivals. We must, at all costs, set a seal on our hearts and arm to show that we are protecting this love, our marriage, at all costs. We know that God’s love protects us, it led to His taking on flesh and dying for us. That’s how much He loves you and me. Now, we reciprocate this love with our spouse.

Scriptures: Song of Songs 8:6, Exodus 3

Trust Fall!

Do you ever remember doing trust falls growing up? For those who don’t know, you have someone stand behind you to catch you while you just blindly fall backward. If they catch you, all is good. If they don’t catch you, then you know you probably shouldn’t trust them. This should be an easy way to figure out who is trustworthy, right? Sadly, this isn’t the best way. It was once said that trust is lost in buckets, but built-in drops. Trust is built up over time. It comes when someone or something shows a track record of being steady and consistent.

In your marriage, you can be given many keys to a successful and healthy marriage, but if there isn’t trust there, these keys won’t matter. So, what do we do when we find that we have lost trust in our loved one? How do we stay the course for a long time? If we continue to walk, or sometimes trudge, and work on rebuilding that trust, our marriage gets better and better and our love grows deeper and deeper. How do we do this? We must trust God for help. This is the next key to a love-saturated marriage: trusting God for help.

Song of Songs 8:6 talks about love that is as strong as death, but it also mentions flashes of fire, the fire in which is the flame or blaze of the Lord. Going back through the Old Testament you can see the track record of the Lord’s flame. You see it in chapter 3 of Exodus as the burning bush with Moses, a bush that doesn’t burn up, which symbolizes that the flame of God in marriage will never be burned up. Then you see the flame in Exodus 13, where it is a pillar of fire leading the Israelites through the night. Sometimes it can feel like darkness and night in your marriage. You’re not sure if the light will ever appear, but we only need to remember that the flame of the Lord still burns.

In the toughest moments, you can trust that the Lord sees you and hears you. His work in your marriage and your life is still going. When we find it difficult to trust that everything is going to be okay, all we need to do is look back, set our feet on the Rock that doesn’t move, and warm our cold hearts by the flame of the Lord again. He is always steady and always trustworthy.

Scriptures: Song of Songs 8:8-10, Psalms 1, 1 John 1:8-10

How’s Your Diet?

Some passages in the Bible seem weird to us as 21st century readers. Song of Songs 8: 8–10 isn’t applicable just to marriage but also to parenting. What we are looking at is a flashback to when Solomon’s wife was young. Her brothers were her protectors. This is the next key to a lasting love: a present and protective family. This is what we must provide for our kids. This is the parent’s role. We must be present for our kids, and we must protect and direct them.

Where must we be most protective? When the topic has anything to do with sex, intimacy, and purity. We can’t just assume we know who our children are with or what they’re doing on Friday nights. The next area we must be watchful of is their diet of media and entertainment. What are they watching? What is being fed to their soul? What is shaping their desires? Another critical area is what your children are being taught and what are they learning. You must understand that the world is not thinking about the soul and eternal implications for your children, but rather how they can influence them.

His family understood that they were there to make sure she was a wall, meaning pure, and not a door, someone who allowed guys to walk in and out of her life. We, too, must understand our duty to protect our children, even when they may not understand what we are doing at the time. We must care more about their soul than their happiness.

Now, what does this mean for those who aren’t married or who don’t have kids? Look at it from the perspective of your relationship with the Lord. Do you trust that His template of one man and one woman in marriage is the only way? Do you trust that His Word is what we need to live by? When you think about the entertainment that you consume, does it stir your affections for Christ or does it cause your fire to dwindle? What are you being taught? What is shaping your understanding of the world? The Bible, the Word of God, must be what shapes our worldview. It transforms your mind to be like Christ. It tells us to take captive every thought and submit it to Christ.

If you have not walked in purity or by the template God has laid out, know that God can restore you. He offers you forgiveness through Jesus today. Though God’s commands are real and have consequences for disobedience, the Bible also tells us that when we fall short, if we confess our sins, He is faithful to forgive us those sins.

Scripture: Song of Songs 8:11-14

What’s Mine Is Yours

Imagine a couple getting married and during the vows, they say, “Everything I have is yours, but you can’t touch my car.” Then the other replies and says, “Everything I own is yours, but Friday nights are mine.” I know there would be gasps and eyes bigger than a bug’s eyes. In a lasting marriage, there is trust and sacrifice willingly given knowing that two people are becoming one. Solomon and his wife knew this.

Solomon was the richest man to ever live. He had horses, camels, gold, silver, land, and more things than any other king to ever live. He also was the wisest, besides Jesus, to ever walk this earth. This passage tells us of the vineyards Solomon owned and how much fruit came from them. Solomon’s wife tells him she is a vineyard and will give Solomon all she has.

This romanticism and intimacy ran deep even in the later years of their marriage. For some, the later years are when couples grow apart, but here we see the template of two lovers with deep affection who still do all they can to give each other more. The wife encourages Solomon to run away with her and be like a gazelle or a young stag on her mountains of spice.

Romance is lived in real life. I don’t want you to leave this devotional thinking, “Wow. I can never attain this level of romance or love in my marriage, so what’s the point?” Everything isn’t going to always be great. You will have a tiff, probably this week. You’re going to want something and then your spouse is going to be in the way of the drawer you need most. One of you will allow sinful desires to win and you will sin against one another. But if you seek to be wholehearted, if you will jealously protect and love each other deeply, if you lean on one another and trust God above all else, then most of the time you will be satisfied in your journey. Don’t work on intimacy in your marriage; rather, work on tenderness, knowing that intimacy will follow. It’s all built on the foundation of trust. Trust is the foundation upon which we lean on Jesus Christ. It’s the same for our marriages. We must trust that giving our all to this person is the best thing for our marriage. Ultimately, placing your trust in God, saying that you are walking by faith, and following His template for marriage brings lasting love. Give your all to God and then, out of the abundance you experience, give everything to your spouse.