The Song of Solomon
Is in the Bible

I want to begin with a small but important observation: the Song of Solomon is in the Bible.

That sounds obvious. But the way most churches treat it, you would be forgiven for thinking it had been quietly removed at some point and nobody told you. It is rarely preached. When it is referenced, it is usually explained away quickly, treated as a nice allegory or a distant metaphor, stripped of its intensity and filed somewhere safe where it cannot make anyone uncomfortable.

But it is there. Eight chapters of some of the most vivid, passionate, intimate poetry in all of literature. And it did not end up in the canon by accident. Every book of Scripture was preserved and recognised by the community of faith because it carried the word of God. The Song of Solomon was no exception. Which means we are supposed to read it, sit with it, and let it tell us something we need to hear about who God is and how He loves.

Why the Church Has Been Embarrassed

The discomfort is understandable, even if the response to it has been unhelpful. The Song of Solomon is sensory, physical, and deeply emotional in ways that many Christian traditions have struggled to integrate. There has been a longstanding tendency in parts of the church to treat the physical and the spiritual as opposites, to assume that God is encountered through the mind and the will but not through longing, beauty, or desire.

Under that framework, a book full of longing and desire feels out of place in Scripture. So we allegorise it at arm's length, acknowledge that it says something vague about love, and move on quickly to something more manageable.

But that discomfort reveals a problem not with the text but with the framework. The incarnation alone should have dismantled the idea that God is embarrassed by the physical and the intimate. He became flesh. He entered a body. He wept at graves and ate fish on beaches and let people touch His wounds. The God of the Bible is not embarrassed by the earthy and the tender. He created them.

That verse has been called one of the most complete statements of mutual belonging in all of Scripture. It is not a transaction. It is not a contract. It is not even primarily a promise. It is a declaration of a reality that already exists: I belong to him, and he belongs to me. The possession goes both ways. This is not a God who holds Himself at a distance while demanding your devotion. This is a God who gives Himself as thoroughly as He asks you to give yourself.

What It Tells Us About God

Jewish and Christian interpreters across centuries have read the Song of Solomon as a portrait of God's relationship with His people. The rabbis saw it as the love between God and Israel. The church fathers and mystics read it as the love between Christ and the soul. These are not competing readings. They are the same truth at different scales.

What the book tells us, in language that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the heart, is that God's love for His people is characterised by pursuit. The lover in the Song does not wait passively. He comes to the window, He calls through the lattice, He searches the city when the beloved is nowhere to be found. This is not a God who sits back and waits to see if you make the right choices. This is a God who moves toward you.

It tells us that God's love is characterised by delight. Not tolerance. Not patient endurance. Delight. The lover in the Song looks at the beloved and is undone by her. He finds her beautiful not after she has met certain conditions but simply because she is her. This is not the language of a God who loves you despite who you are and how you are made. This is the language of a God who loves you in particular, in all your specificity, in the exact way you exist right now.

And it tells us that God's love is characterised by intimacy. Not an arm's length relationship managed through correct behaviour and religious practice, but a closeness so complete that the two say: I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine. The goal of the relationship is not service or usefulness. The goal is mutual belonging.

Love as strong as death. A flame that cannot be extinguished. This is not the description of a polite affection or a managerial relationship. This is the language of something that consumes and transforms and will not let go. This is the love God has for His people. It has always been this intense. It has always been this personal. The Song of Solomon simply has the courage to say so out loud.

What Happens When We Lose This

When the church loses the Song of Solomon, it does not just lose a book. It loses a way of understanding who God is and what He is after in relation to His people.

What tends to fill the gap is a much thinner version of the faith. God becomes primarily a lawgiver or a judge, someone whose primary interest is your compliance. Your relationship with Him becomes primarily a matter of duty: reading the Bible because you should, praying because you are supposed to, attending church because it is the right thing to do. All of those practices are good. But when they are disconnected from the reality of a God who is pursuing you, delighting in you, and longing for closeness with you, they become empty very quickly.

The mystics of the Christian tradition understood something that much of the modern church has forgotten: that the deepest motivation for devotion to God is not duty but desire. Not the fear of getting it wrong but the love of the One you are pursuing. The Song of Solomon exists, in part, to ignite that desire, to give language to the longing that God Himself has placed in the human heart for closeness with Him.