Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Every woman wants to be beautiful, and that is why the beauty business is a seven billion dollar a year industry, and the largest advertiser in America.

American women actually worship beauty.

They will do almost anything to attain it, including fasting if it is necessary.

They will try anything, and the result is sometimes tragic.

In his book, Love In America, David Cohn writes, "These martyrs to physical beauty are buried or hustled to hospitals while millions of their sisters, quite undaunted, continue their fanatically persistent search for the perfect figure, grimly making their way through tasteless diets, gymnasiums, dancing classes, and plastics surgeon's offices with a fatalistic tenacity unmatched except by lemmings marching to destruction."

Why do women have this drive to be beautiful?

The answer is very simple-men.

A woman's deepest desire is to be attractive to men, and her greatest fear is to lack that attraction.

This leads to all kinds of vanity.

A woman came to a pastor and confessed she had a problem with the sin of pride.

She said, "Sometimes I sit before my mirror for hours admiring my beauty."

The pastor responded, "That is not the sin of pride.

Your problem is an over active imagination."

Many women imagine they are beautiful because they try all the gimmicks, and use all the products that promise beauty.

Arlene Dahl has taken a more logical approach.

She wrote a book titled, Always Ask A Man.

She spent years asking men what they felt made a woman beautiful.

She says that by listening to men you can learn what qualities every Adam looks for in his Eve.

She learned that the ideals of men vary, but she writes, "But without exception-every man put one quality above all others in describing his ideal.

That one essential attribute which all men seek and admire in a woman is femininity."

She then quotes a host of famous men on the subject, and shows

that they all agree.

Yul Brynner summed it all up, "Simply femininity is the most important thing about a woman, and it is a quality a great many women are in jeopardy of losing.

Women are being emancipated out of their femininity in this modern age."

It is not just modern men who feel this way about feminine beauty.

We can go back to Washington, the father of our country, and discover the same feelings.

We so often see George Washington in cold stone, or metal statues, that we seldom think of him as a man with warm affections, and a love of beauty.

From his youth he struggled with his passions for pretty girls, and he wrote a poem about it.

O ye gods, why should my poor resistless heart

Stand to oppose thy might and power,

At last surrender to Cupid's feathered dart,

And now lays bleeding every hour.

He fell in love several times, but his proposals for marriage were refused.

We have other poems he wrote to his sweethearts.

When he fell in love with a widow, Martha Custis, he finally found one who would marry him, and they had a great love, and a great life together.

So passionate was their love that before she died Martha Washington destroyed all his letters to her, for she felt such love deserved to be kept secret.

The Song of Solomon, however, records for us the universal experience of love, and the universal love of beauty.

The Shepherd lover of this great song feels toward his shepherd maiden just like men have always felt about the women they love.

Throughout the song he praises her feminine charms, and expresses delight in every aspect of her beauty.

He makes it clear that beauty does include the physical, for he describes how he adores her eyes, hair, teeth, lips, cheeks, neck, and breasts.

All of these are described in the first few verses of chapter 4.

Beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholder, but is an objective reality visible to all.

Someone said the average man can tell all he knows in 2 hours, and after that, he begins to talk about women.

Men do not claim to understand women, but they do understand beauty.

A man does not need to know anything about flowers to appreciate and enjoy them.

So also, ignorance cannot rob men of the one thing they do know about women, and that is their beauty.

Abraham loved Sarah, and she was beautiful to him, but he knew other men could see her beauty as well, and so when he went to Egypt he said to her in Gen. 12:11, "I know that you are a woman beautiful to behold, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife, then they will kill me, but they will let you live."

He persuaded her to say she was his sister.

The text goes on to say the Egyptians thought Sarah was so beautiful, so they told Pharaoh, and he took her into his harem.

She was spared, however, and God saw to it she was returned to Abraham undefiled.

Beauty, we see here, was objective, and could be the cause of a great deal of trouble in the life of a woman, or in the life of a man who marries her.

Confucius was at least partially right when he said, "She who is born beautiful is born with sorrow for many a man."

Uriah got himself murdered because he married the beautiful Bathsheba.

I remember an old Abbott and Costello film in which Lou Costello was determined to marry a homely girl.

He said, "If I marry a pretty girl she may run away."

Abbott thinks that is stupid logic and says, "But a homely girl may run away too."

"I know," said Costello, "But if a homely girl runs away, who cares?"

Beauty can be a problem, but it can also be a blessing.

In Esther 2:7 we read of her, "The maiden was beautiful and lovely."

In her case, many lives were saved because of her beauty.

The Jews would have suffered a great slaughter had it not been for the kings love for this beautiful woman.

The Jews celebrate to this day a yearly feast in remembrance of their deliverance because of a beautiful woman.

The Jews have always had a very positive attitude toward the beauty of women.

Ibn Ezra said, "Rather little with beauty than much without it."

Ben Siriach said, "The beauty of a woman maketh bright the countenance," and, "As the lamp shining on the holy candlestick, so is the beauty of a face on a stately figure."

We could go on stressing the importance the Old Testament gives to beauty in a woman, but to relate it all to our passage in the Song of Songs, we need to see that beauty is not limited to the feminine.

Males can also be beautiful.

In I Sam.

16:12 we read of David, "Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome."

His son Absolom was even more so, for we read in II Sam.

14:25, "Now in all Israel there was no one so much to be praised for his beauty as Absolom; from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him."

Beauty is a two way street and covers both male and female.

This is what we see in the 15th and 16th verses of this first chapter.

In verse 15 the Shepherd says to the Shulamite girl, "Behold you are beautiful, my love, behold you are beautiful."

The repetition is a method of expressing superlative and surpassing beauty.

In verse16, most commentators agree, we have her response, and she returns the compliment, behold, you are beautiful my beloved."

Leigh Hunt said, "The beautiful attracts the beautiful."

Here are two beautiful people trying to out do each other in expressing their adoration.

This is the kind of mutual love and admiration we see between the lovers in this greatest of songs.

Beauty is one of the themes that runs all through this song, because beauty and love go together, and that is why beauty, like love, is a great power.

Beauty can motivate both men and women to live lives of loyalty and sacrifice.

When Paul wrote to the Philippians he said in 4:8, "Whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

Paul probably did not have lovely looking people in mind, but the fact is, the power of positive thinking is aided by the beauty of people.

Power can be used for good or evil, and so the devil himself uses the power of beauty, for he can be an angel of light.

The world is full of beautiful lights and beautiful places to lure people into the ugliness of sin.

Evil cannot succeed on its own.

It must make use of something good to get anywhere, and that is why beauty is one of its primary resources.

Nevertheless, it is God who is the author of beauty, and it is a great power for good.

Joanna Bailie wrote,

To make the cunning artless, tame the rude,

Subdue the haughty, shake the undaunted soul;

Yea, put a bridal in the lion's mouth,

And lead him forth as a domestic cur,

These are the triumphs of all-powerful Beauty!

Micheal Angelo said of his love, that her beauty led him up from low desires and made him want to strive for heaven's best.

He said, "How good, how beautiful must be the God that made so good a thing as thee."

History is full of great men of God whose greatness, in part, was due to their love of one they felt was beautiful.

Johnathan Edwards, the giant intellect, had some awful burdens to bear.

Without his wife Sarah it is doubtful he could have survived his trials.