Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

A French pilot, by the name of Guillaumet flew over the Andes on a regular basis.

One time he disappeared for a week, and hope that he would be found was given up.

He was eventually rescued, however, and his first intelligible sentence was, "I swear that I went though what no animal would have gone through."

For two days and two nights he lay helpless.

Then he walked five days and four nights through deep snow.

When he was found his hands and feet were frozen.

He had no food and no tools.

He had to crawl up walls of ice in 20 degrees below zero.

Many times he said it would have been pure pleasure to give up and go to sleep, yielding to the cold hand of death.

He had not read the Song of Solomon 8:6 which says, "Love is strong as death."

But he was demonstrating it, for it was love that kept him going.

All he could think about was his wife.

He knew that when a man vanished his death was not legally acknowledged for seven years, and so if he died where no one could find him, his wife would be left in poverty.

He had to get to a place where his body could be found so she could get the insurance.

It was this loving concern for his wife that drove him to super human efforts, and it save his life.

He lost his memory, and was little more than a frozen vegetable stumbling through a wilderness, but still he kept going,

because of love.

Had he not been a loving man, he would have been a dead man.

Very few ever have to put their love to that kind of test, but there are enough such examples to prove the truth of what the Shulamite girl said, "Love is strong as death."

This is the kind of love that the Song of Songs is all about.

It is not about wishy washy sentimental infatuation; and not about superficial lust, which when satisfied forsakes its object, but true love, which is able to overcome all obstacles which threaten to detour it off its course of faithfulness and loyalty.

In verse 4 the Shulamite girl gives us the first hint as to her predicament, and why it is she is separated from her true love, and why she so desperately longs for him to come to her.

She says, the king has brought me into his chamber.

King Solomon has brought her to his chamber to try and persuade her to be one of his wives.

Many would be flattered, and would have forsaken their country lover without a tear.

It was the chance of a lifetime, but here was a rare girl who wanted love rather than riches in a royal harem.

That is why she cries out for her Shepherd lover to come and make haste, for it is his love alone in which she rejoices.

Solomon, no doubt, sought to weaken her resistance to his charms by the use of wine, but she is not taken in by this, for she has tasted love, and what it wine compared to love?

Love is what she will sing about.

Let those who give up love to be in Solomon's harem sing songs of the glory of wine, for that is all they have to keep them warm and happy.

The choice between love and wine is one that is the theme of thousands of love stories and films.

Four times the word love is used in the first four verses of this song, and two of them refer to the conviction that love is better than wine.

This conviction is a challenge to the values of many in both the ancient and modern world.

Wine was as a god all through ancient history, and every nation had its wine songs, including Israel.

Wine was the source of joy and happiness.

It was the means by which sorrows were escaped and burdens endured.

It even helped cure physical problems.

It was to the ancients what the doctor, psychiatrist, and TV is to the modern man.

It is entertaining, exhilarating, and a means of escape.

Spurgeon said, "The fruit of the vine represents the chiefest of earthly luxuries."

The Shulamite girl says, however, what good is all of life's luxuries without love.

To wine and dine and live like a princess is no match to goats milk, lamb chops, and the Shepherd man I love.

Love is personal, but wine and the luxuries it represents are impersonal.

Those who try to find fulfillment in the impersonal, pervert their own nature which was made for love.

They turn to drugs and sex, and in their search for what only love can provide, they develop loves greatest counterfeit which is lust.

Love and lust not only begin with the same letter, they are very much alike.

Sometimes the difference between good and evil is very slight.

In fact, sometimes they are identical twins, but just going in different directions.

Angels and demons, for example, have the same origin.

They were once identical, but now are radically different because one resides in the will of God, and the other rebels against it.

The noble lover and the brutal rapist are both governed by passion, but one is expressing love, and the other lust.

The pure sex relationship and the immoral one cannot be distinguished by observation.

The mechanics of love and lust are the same, but one fulfills God's will, and the other violates it.

Lust is like love going in the wrong direction.

Most evil is a good gone wrong, or to an extreme.

The same sun that helps produce a lovely garden can also produce a barren desert.

So it is with love and lust.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox put it in poetry.

Passion is what the sun feels for the earth,

When harvest ripens into golden birth.

Lust is the hot simoan whose burning breath

Sweeps o'er the fields with devastating death.

Solomon sought to persuade the beautiful Shulamite girl to yield to lust, but she remains steadfast in her loyalty to love.

This is a story of a great temptation, and a powerful testing of love.

We see love and lust in combat seeking to win the maidens heart, and we learn to distinguish between the two.

We want to examine the main characteristics of love which make it different from lust.

The first is-

I. LOVE IS EXCLUSIVE.

True love, be it romantic or religious love, can only have one lover.

God is a jealous God and will not tolerate men saying they love Him, and then bow down to other gods.

This was the conflict all through Israel's history, and it still is today.

You cannot serve God and mammon.

God, and nothing else, must be your first love, or you are not a true lover.

So it is on the romantic level.

A sailor was looking at some valentine cards, and the clerk said here is a good one, to the only girl I've ever loved.

The sailor said it is a good one, give me a dozen of them.

Here is a good illustration of lust in contrast to love.

The person who is tossed about by every wind of affection does not understand love.

I will be true.

The fickle tide, divided

Between two wooing shores, in wild unrest.

May to and fro shift always undecided;

Not so the tide of Passion in my breast.

With the grand surge of some resistless river

That hurries on, past mountain, vale, and sea,

Unto the main, its water to deliver,

So my full heart keeps all its wealth for Thee.

This loyalty of love to one lover, even in the face of a charming enticer like Solomon, is what makes love so different from lust.

Lust does not feel any particular need to limit itself to one partner.

Lust is not exclusive, it is promiscuous.

Love is fire which is confined, but lust is fire uncontrolled.

Fire under control is a great power for good, but once out of control it is a great power for destruction.

Love and lust are not two different emotions, but the same emotion, either under control, or out of control.

This fire from God's altar, this holy love flame,

That burns like sweet incense forever for you,

Might now be a wild conflagration of shame,

Had you tortured my heart, or been base or untrue.

The emotion that is a precious gift of God when kept under control, and directed exclusively toward one's lover, can suddenly become a negative emotion when it forsakes exclusiveness, and is directed toward more than one.

The Song of Solomon is designed to inform us of the subtle temptation toward letting love go out of control, and to inspire us with an example of love that resisted that temptation and maintained control.