I recently completed a sermon series on the Song of Solomon, a beautiful collection of love poems in the Old Testament that have a lot to encourage us about in the areas of love, sex, and romance. My first interaction with this book was back in 2000, when I went through a study on the Song of Solomon that had been done by a Texas pastor named Tommy Nelson with three teenage boys that I was discipling. That study was an excellent and unforgettable time of teaching these teens what it means to love someone Biblically, and is especially meaningful as one of those teens just had his first baby and one of the others is getting married this May.

The impact that study had made on those teens was one of the reasons I wanted to do a sermon series with the whole church. However, as I studied the book, read commentaries, and listened to other sermons on the Song of Solomon, I found myself moving away from the Tommy Nelson-style of preaching, which in many ways treated the book as a how-to manual for Biblical love, dating, and marriage. The more I meditated on the book, the less I felt it was meant to be read as a how-to manual. I still felt, however, that there were valuable lessons to be learned from the book, and that the book would make a good springboard from which to talk about the rest of the Bible’s counsel on love, sex, and marriage.

One of the preachers I listened to as I prepared for the series was Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington. Pastor Driscoll is a very influential and dynamic preacher and leader who has founded and grown a huge church in the midst of a very non-Christian city, and the timing of his Song of Solomon series was great as it gave me another voice to listen to as I prepared to do a series of my own. Pastor Driscoll has also become immortalized as “Mark the cussing pastor” by Donald Miller in Blue Like Jazz, as Pastor Driscoll is a funny individual who speaks to a crowd of mainly 20 & 30-somethings, and on occasion crosses the line of decency in the words he uses. In my opinion, Driscoll’s series, called “The Peasant Princess,” had lots of good insights but again fell too much into the “how-to manual” approach in my opinion for me to base my series on.

I bring up Mark Driscoll because this past week, John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California and author of numerous books, including the MacArthur Study Bible, rebuked Driscoll and his method of preaching on the Song of Solomon, as well as the preponderance of ‘sex sermons’ in churches these days with four lengthy blog posts entitled “The Rape of Solomon’s Song.” If you are interested, you are welcome to listen to Driscoll’s sermons hereat and to read MacArthur’s critique here. Since we just completed our series last month, and since I have made similar observations about church “sex series” over the past year (see the February 10th, 2009 and July 8th, 2008 posts), I thought it would be worth reflecting on some of the objections MacArthur raises.

“Apparently the shortest route to relevance in church ministry right now is for the pastor to talk about sex in garishly explicit terms during the Sunday morning service… Sermons about sex have suddenly become a bigger fad in the evangelical world than the prayer of Jabez ever was. Everywhere, it seems, churches are featuring special series on the subject. Some of them advertise with suggestive billboards purposely designed to offend their communities’ conservative sensibilities.”

I made this point in my February 10th, 2009 post. The motivation to preach on sex often seems to be that it can be the fastest way to get people’s attention and grow your church, not to glorify God or correct false teaching on love and sex being preached by the culture or by the church. I know I needed to check my motivation before preaching to be sure it wasn’t why I was preaching on the Song of Solomon.

“But the language Scripture employs when dealing with the physical relationship between husband and wife is always careful—often plain, sometimes poetic, usually delicate, frequently muted by euphemisms, and never fully explicit… [Song of Solomon] is, of course, a lengthy poem about courtship and marital love. It is filled with euphemisms and word pictures. Its whole point is gently, subtly, and elegantly to express the emotional and physical intimacy of marital love—in language suitable for any audience… Tom Gledhill wisely sums up this point in his IVP commentary on Song of Solomon (pp. 29-31): To unpack metaphors and unwrap euphemisms [in Song of Solomon] may mean that our thoughts spiral out of control, and we end up by committing adultery in our imaginations. So if the interpretation of Scripture proves to be a stumbling block, and a cause of offence to some who believe, what then? . . . Once a particular line of interpretation has been suggested, it is difficult to avoid seeing explicit sexual allusions everywhere, until the whole work becomes saturated in references to genitalia, intercourse and explicit sex.”

As I prepared to preach on the Song of Solomon, I came to the realization that there would be no value in trying to figure out every metaphor or guess at what body parts and actions the writer might be referring to. There is a reason the Song of Solomon is written as veiled metaphor, and to try to explain each allusion robs the song of its beauty and purpose and can turn it into something that causes men and women to stumble. I’m thankful I came to this conclusion, even as I listened to many sermons or read commentaries that sought to explain every little metaphor. The overarching themes of servant love, covenantal marriage, and the need for grace and forgiveness, were ultimately what deserved the greatest attention.

“We’re assured [in these sermons] moreover that the shocking hidden meanings of these texts aren’t merely descriptive; they are prescriptive. The secret gnosis of Solomon’s Song portray obligatory acts wives must do if this is what satisfies their husbands, regardless of the wife’s own desire or conscience.”

This point that Pastor MacArthur made was unfair in that he was referring to an older sermon by Pastor Driscoll where he preached the things described in Song of Solomon as things God commands people to do, instead of the most recent series where he was careful to say that the book is descriptive, not prescriptive. Nevertheless, the point remains that Song of Solomon is a book describing love between a man and a woman, and is not a set of laws on what we can or can not do in a relationship. It describes a love relationship from which we can learn a great deal, but does not require us to do what they do.

One of the things I gained most from Pastor MacArthur’s evaluation of current preaching on sex and the Song of Solomon was the importance of preaching and speaking in order to honor God rather than please men. Getting graphic in discussion of love and sex and even making jokes might win you the laughter of man, but in the end gains nothing if it compromises the beauty of what God intended or the sanctity of the pulpit. In the end, it is best to keep in mind the words of Paul:

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. (Ephesians 4:29)

But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person– such a man is an idolater– has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. (Ephesians 5:3-5)

Any thoughts? If you were a part of the Song of Solomon series, do you feel it was edifying and God-honoring? Or were there ways in which it crossed the line into something that was not appropriate for God’s church? If you have any feedback, feel free to email or call me or post a comment.

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