Saved by the Well – Solomon

Saved by the Well – Solomon. 

“You are my private paradise, my treasured sister, my lover and friend, a secluded wellspring, my bubbling fountain hidden from public view… You are a pure garden fountain, a well of fresh, living water like a mountain brook flowing into my heart.” (Song of Solomon 4:12,15).

SAVED: The Hebrew word for save is “Yasha,” which means to be set free into the wide open; to be delivered in a time of desperate need; to be saved from destruction and certain death. “Salvation” literally means to become spacious, and refers to “the sense of deliverance from an existence that had become confined, compressed, or cramped.” (Eugene Peterson). When Jesus delivers us from our inner spiritual confinement, we are liberated into a wide open, broad, expansive place. The word for “wide open space” is the opposite of a straitjacket. Without Jesus, our soul will never be freed from our spiritual straitjacket. There are three passages in Psalms that describe this freedom deliverance beautifully:

1. “From my distress, I called upon the Lord. He answered me and set me on a large place. After being in a tight spot, the Lord placed me into a broad space. Because I was hemmed in, I called on Lord Yahweh. He answered me and gave me room.” (Ps. 118:5);
2. “Lord, you have not given me over into the hands of the Enemy; You have liberated me and set my feet in a wide expanse, a good and spacious land. You have given me the freedom to roam at large, where I can freely move. You have given me room to breathe.” (Ps. 31:8);
3. “The Lord rescued me because He delighted in me. He brought me out to freedom into a wide-open space. My soul has been delivered because of God’s love for me, and my soul finally has some elbow room!” (Ps. 18:19).

THE WELL: There are four Hebrew words used in the Jewish Bible to describe the different kinds of ancient wells. There was the traditional well that was a deep hole dug in the ground to tap into an underground source of water. Another type of well was a fountain spring that had naturally broken through the earth’s surface on its own without man’s help. The wellspring is another version of well in Scripture in which fresh water flowed out of the ground in any number of ways to become available for cleansing, nourishment, refreshment, for survival itself. Life-giving wells of water have always been a powerful picture of our dependence upon God for spiritual survival. Just as Creator God has designed the human body to completely depend on water to live, our spiritual life totally relies on His presence in us to not just survive but to flourish. God is our spiritual well of fresh water, the only stable source of nourishment and purity. He is our fountain of life that gushes forth to replenish and cleanse us. God is our eternal wellspring of living water that will never run dry. Each of us is born spiritually dehydrated, and God alone is the constant, reliable water source to bring us back to life. As the silly joke goes, wells are a deep subject, and the biblical wells involve such stalwarts as Hagar and Abraham; Isaac and Moses; Samson and Solomon; the psalmists and the prophets. And of course, the glorious fulfillment of all these ancient stories of wells… Messiah Jesus and the woman at the well.

“For all the world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.’ (Rabbi Akiva, the ‘Chief of the Sages,’ 50-135 AD).

The Song of Songs, often called the Song of Solomon ever since it was written around 960 BC. The title of this love poem means that this is the best song of all the songs, the most important song, and that this one song surpasses all others. There is debate as to whether Solomon literally wrote this extended love poem, or it was composed for Solomon, or written in honor of Solomon. Because this biblical poem has been understood in many ways down through the centuries, perhaps we can discuss it in the classic Jewish way of, on the one hand this, and on the other hand that…

Literally. On the one hand, the Song of Songs has been accepted simply as a superb piece of poetic literature in honor of romantic love between the lover and his beloved. It has become more popular now to claim that we shouldn’t read too much into it, that it is no more than an extended erotic conversation between two lovers. The intimacy between them is spelled out in graphic detail and the language is the most sensuous and explicit in all of Scripture. The faithful love between the two is a beautiful thing to behold as they celebrate the divinely created union between a woman and a man, a union that is enjoyed physically, emotionally, whole-heartedly, just as God intended.

Symbolically.  On the other hand, limiting this classic piece of Scripture to a love poem flies in the face of how it has been historically understood by Jews and Christians alike. Jewish scholars and readers have always understood this book to be an exquisite picture of how God loves His people, Israel. Picking up on this, the early church leaders embraced the Song of Songs as a glorious allegory of the love Christ has for His bride the Church, as well as the love He has for each individual soul. If we followed the tributary of human love back to its source, we find the mysterious river of divine love. The pure intimacy between man and woman is the closest picture we get on earth to grasp the union that God wants with each of us and His body of believers. The human intimacy of Song of Songs is intended to help us understand and develop a profound spiritual intimacy with the Lord. The Song of Songs has been used throughout the history of faith to enable believers to contemplate the mystical union between God and His people, between Christ and His followers, both collectively and individually.  In this surprising biblical poem, love is in the air, on every page, in every word. Eugene Peterson encourages the believer to read the Song of Songs devotionally, and he observed that this poem is a “prism in which all the love of God in all the world, and all the responses of those who love and whom God loves, gathers and then separates into individual colors.”

Solomon’s Well. Those references in Solomon’s love poem above, 4:12 and 15, remind us of how powerful the symbols of wells, wellsprings and fountains can be in the hands of a love-stricken poet. Solomon is enraptured by the beautiful virginity of his bride, of how she has been protected from public view, reserved and sealed off just for him. He is extolling how important it is to remain faithful to him and him alone, of her remaining pure and exclusively his lover. His lover-friend is like the gift that keeps giving, never failing to satisfy and refresh, like a continuously burbling well in his own beautiful and lush Garden of Eden. The early Church said that this idea is fulfilled in the faithful devotion of Christ’s body on earth to Jesus their Lover, His exclusive and spiritually intimate followers. And too, many say this is a vivid picture of an individual believer’s heart that is set apart for God and kept holy and undefiled from worldly corruption.

This spiritual understanding of the Song of Songs shouldn’t come as a surprise for students of Scripture. The inspired words of the Bible have primed us to consider the spiritual symbolism of marital love, since Yahweh God has described Himself as the Husband to His Chosen People, while the Son of God, Jesus, is described as the Bridegroom. The Scripture has consistently given us the metaphor of marriage as the deepest way to think about not only the divinely ordained intimate love between a man and a woman, but also the divine spiritual union desired by God with each of us.

Your Name: “Your name is like precious, perfumed anointing oiled poured out…” (S of S 1:3). The beloved woman is introducing an important quality of her lover right here in the beginning of this poem.  The name of a person always referred to character and reputation. She is making it clear that she values her lover’s character, his personal qualities, and how he is admired by others for those qualities. She loves him for who is, not merely for what he looks like or his wealth, or anything else. The beloved loves her lover for being beautiful inside and out.

There is no doubt that the inspired love poetry in the Song of Songs continues to inspire a devotional focus on the beauty of Christ. Literally speaking, it is a poetic celebration of the beloved’s embrace of her lover’s beauty. Spiritually speaking, her sensuous description of her lover provides a way to imaginatively gaze upon, to meditate on, God’s beauty, Christ’s beauty, the beauty of our spiritual husband and bridegroom. As the reader soaks into these words, we do well to remember St. Paul’s instructions in Philippians 4:8, “Whatever is lovely and admirable… think deeply and fix your thoughts on these things.”

BEAUTY as Described in the Bible: The quality of outstanding excellence in appearance, in usefulness, in moral character, in creative expression; brings delight to the senses; well-designed and constructed; a harmony that reflects creation; extremely attractive; that which inspires awe, wonder, admiration, praise; profoundly pleasing; an act of pure goodness; the presence of loveliness and grace; something exquisite in form, function, and proportion; that which contains glory and splendor.

Formed by Beauty. As we contemplate the divine beauty of Jesus Christ in the Song of Songs, we do not want to merely appreciate or admire His beauty, but by fixing our eyes and imaginations on His beauty, we can be spiritually formed by it. “We do not want merely to see beauty. We want something else… to be united to the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” (C. S. Lewis, “Weight of Glory”).

“Of all men you are the most handsome, my King. You are more beautiful than all the others. Grace is dew upon your lips, pouring forth your gracefulness. For God has blessed you forever! So gird up your sword upon your thigh, O Mighty One, and ride on in your splendor and beauty and majesty. Ride on for the sake of truth! Ride for the righteous meek!” (Psalm 45:2-4). 

Dwelling on His Beauty. It’s not enough to simply appreciate or admire the beauty of Christ. Instead, we need to fix our eyes on Jesus and His beauty, to gaze upon Him and worship His beauty, to allow His beauty to be formative in our lives. David exclaims in Psalm 24:7 that he has ‘one thing’ he wants more than anything else, there is one thing that would help form and direct his life… “to gaze with complete focus upon the sweet and delightful beauty of the Lord.” There’s a good chance that centering our life on the beauty of Christ, of worshiping His beauty, of allowing His beauty to change our lives into one like His, is indeed our ‘one thing most needful.’