Unembarrassed By The Bible
By JOHN PIPER
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD, and he ponders all his paths.
–Proverbs 5:18–21
We are not supposed to be embarrassed by the forthright sensuality of sexual love in marriage as the Bible portrays it—sometimes graphically.
It is no shame that “a man’s ways are before the Lord” as her breasts fill him at all times with delight. This is why God made her that way and him that way. In fact, that this delight in her is “before” the Lord—in the presence of the Lord—points to the truth that all our joy in what God has made is meant to be a delight in God. There is something of his glory in all the glories of the world.
We are not meant to revel in his creation instead of him or more than in him but because of him, and because there is something of him in all that is good and beautiful. The heavens are telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1). We are to see it. And worship him. So it is with the breasts of our wives. The breasts are telling the glory of God, the goodness of God, the beauty of God, and more. We are to see it. And worship him.
The Song of Solomon is in the Bible, among other reasons, to make sure that we take seriously the exquisite physical pleasures between a bride and a groom as a picture of Christ and his church. The point is not that we nullify the physical pleasures of this Song by seeing it as a full-color image of Ephesians 5:22–33. The point is that we let the Song stun us that God would design such a relationship between man and woman—from the beginning—as the image of the covenant-keeping pleasures between Christ and his church.
TALK ABOUT IT
Read aloud Song of Solomon 4:5–7 and 7:3–10, and answer together these two questions:
1) What is the significance for our marriage that marital love and sex are celebrated like this in God’s holy word?
2) What makes me most uneasy with such a view of marital love, and why might it be that I feel this way?
Source: https://www.desiringgod.org/books/happily-ever-after
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