In Daniel chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that bothered him a lot. He refused to tell anyone the dream but demanded it be interpreted. He’s the king, he make those kinds of demands I guess. His wise men were confounded. If he would tell them the dream, they’d at least have a shot at an answer! Finally, a Hebrew man who’d been brought into captivity in Babylon from Judah was brought to the king and he told the dream and the meaning. This wasn’t just dream interpretation, it was also prophecy. How could Daniel know the dream, especially with such specificity? Only because God had revealed it to him.

The dream was of a statue made of different kinds of metals and its destruction. It had a gold head, silver chest, bronze midsection, legs of iron and feet of mixed iron and clay. Then a rock came and struck the feet and destroyed the statue. What Daniel explained was that this dream was about coming kingdoms. Nebuchadnezzar was the head of gold. After his kingdom would come three others and then all of them would be blown to dust by one unlike the others. It would be a stone not cut by human hands and it would fill the entire earth.

Previously when I’d studied this I was impressed at how accurate this prophecy was. The Babylonian kingdom was replaced  by the Persians who were replaced by Alexander the Great who was replaced by the Romans. Jesus came during Roman rule and eventually the Roman empire became Christianized. Even the most liberal scholar wouldn’t suppose that Daniel had been written after all of these events and yet it was amazingly accurate as to how the next several hundred years of geopolitics played out. God is sovereign in the affairs of humanity including the establishment and removal of kingdoms!

What occurred to me this morning as I reflected on this was how each of these kingdoms was necessary. Not just so the prophecy would be true, but how each one lead to the ultimate conclusion of the prophecy. Israel (the Northern 10 tribes) had been taken into captivity by the Assyrians and years later Judah, the Southern tribes, were carried away by Babylon. After 70 or so years of captivity and exile, they were returned to the land. But weren’t they spread across two different kingdoms? No. The Assyrian kingdom had been taken over by the Babylonians after Israel’s exile in Assyria and before the Babylonians took Judah into captivity. So the kingdom of Israel that had divided under self-governance while in the Promised Land was reunited in exile under the Babylonians: the head of gold.

But Daniel, after explaining that Nebuchadnezzar was the head of gold went on to say “Another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you.” The Babylonian kingdom wouldn’t do all that God had in mind. Before the exile God, through Isaiah, had announced that a king who was yet to be born would be named Cyrus and he would return Israel to the land. God raised up the Medes and Persians who took over Babylon’s rule and their king was none other than Cyrus and he returned Israel from exile. That’s what Ezra and Nehemiah are about: the chest of bronze.

At this point, the Biblical narrative ends and we have a gap of about 400 years. We know from world history what happened next and it totally agrees with what is detailed in the book of Daniel. Alexander the Great defeated the Persians in 331BC and rose to global power.  His part in God’s work was to establish a global ¹And by ‘global’ I mean regional. The area of concern was ‘the world’ as far as those folks were concerned. lingua franca, or common tongue. Greek became the language of trade and commerce across the entire Mediterranean region. His reign also served to end the regional wars you read about in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles.

After Alexander’s death, the Greek empire was taken over by the Romans. The Roman general Antiochus Epiphanes invaded Israel and desecrated the temple and stirred up the Maccebean Revolt. He was a bad dude to say the least. However, the Romans did do some good in the world. They didn’t throw off everything Greek, instead they kept the Greek gods and kept Greek as the lingua franca. Their assimilation of portions of Greek culture enabled Rome to pike up where Greece left off instead of having to start from scratch.

Rome’s contribution to the world was travel. Rome constructed roads and began securing them. Before that, it was a much more dangerous business traveling between cities. They also began an international system of justice which, of course, favored Roman citizens.

All of these things contributed to the possibility and success of the gospel; that is, the stone that crushed the idol and grew and filled the entire earth. The Babylonians regathered the Jews. The Persians returned them to the land. The Greeks established a common tongue so that the gospel could more easily be preached internationally. The Romans made roads secure which made it possible for the gospel to spread. They also established a form of international justice by which “a company of evildoers encircles”and pierces the hands and feet of the Son of God. (Ps 22) He would be cursed by hanging on a tree (Gal 3:13) and thereby bear our sins (1Pt 2:24).

Each portion of Nebuchadnezzar’s idol made the next portion possible and successful and all made it possible for the gospel to spread and fill the earth. Amazing.

There has been some flap lately about preaching the Song of Songs. Some younger pastors, it has been said, have treated the book almost pornographically. Older preachers are calling for restraint and dignity when handling this inspired poem. Well, I don’t know about that. I haven’t listened to those sermons so I’ll just let the parties duke it out in their blogs or not. Either way, I’ve spent some time recently in the Song of Songs and so I do have some reflections on it. I doubt that my comments will a) be read by either side of the debate or b) help settle the discussion in the minds of my readers. But, I present them in hopes that they may aid in reading this beautiful poem to the glory of Jesus.

The first thing that I want to say about this is “grow up.” You cannot miss the sexual language in Song of Songs any way other than simply not reading the book. The question isn’t whether it is there or not, it is what you do with it. Our society tends to be very immature when it comes to sex. We kind of do a collective school boy snicker when it comes up in conversation. The way it is discussed at large reminds me of how we joked about it and drew “dirty” pictures when I was in elementary school. So the first bit of advice on interpreting Song of Songs is to just grow up about our attitude towards human sexuality. If your view of human sexuality was chiefly formed by MTV, you’re going to have a problem here. This is one reason I don’t immediately dismiss the criticisms of the older preachers; younger folks need to be more mature about this subject.

The next thing that needs to be said is that the poem is not an allegory of Christ and the Church. I don’t know of anyone who still interprets the book that way but I fear the tendency may still be there. The only recent approach like this I can remember reading was one by the Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton back in the 1960s. I mean, you can see why a monk might want to approach it like that right? But for those of us not given to a vow of lifelong celibacy, we want to handle the book in light of how and why the author wrote it and how people at the time would have read it. That said, we might still be tempted to “tame” the poem by reading it first in light of Jesus love and care for the Church and then as a poem about human love. I think those elements must be considered but I’m concerned about establishing a Biblical approach to how we layer these meanings on the book.

With those two lengths of “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape in place as borders, let me offer some reflection on how to read the Song of Songs. This is something I’d already taught in Sunday school but this morning during devotional reading I came across the text that formed my thinking on it. Ephesians 5:28-33:

In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Let me do some theological layering here to help this make sense. First, Jesus loved the Church before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4). So his love predates the creation of humanity as male and female. Further, Jesus will love the Church in eternity (Ps 118) when marriage is no longer (Matt 22:30). So Jesus love for the Church predates human marital love and it will outlast it. Give the fact that humanity was created in the image of God, I would have to say that human marital love is a picture of Christ and the Church, not the other way around. What Paul is saying the quote above is “I want your relationships to be good and happy. Your marriages should be the way they were created to be, therefore, look to the model marriage was built on: Jesus and the Church.” From the way he’s speaking, I don’t think what he did was try to find something that looks like what marriage is supposed to be, pick up Jesus and the Church and say “be like that.”

So the allegorical approach to Song of Songs is wrong, because it is trying to apply a creaturely condition to an eternal state. That’s why some parts of Song of Songs just don’t fit as a picture God’s love for his people. God’s love in Jesus is like marriage in some ways, but in other ways it is very different. In the New Testament, Jesus refers to himself as the bridegroom and the Church as the bride, but he also refers to himself as the Good Shepherd and the true vine. Yes, marriage is a very helpful picture of the relationship, but it doesn’t exhaust the meanings and implications of it. In a similar manner, human marriage has aspects that are rooted in our created-ness that don’t connect with God’s relationship with his people.

No, the allegorical approach is not the way to go. Instead, Song of Songs should be applied to human relationships. It is and inspired view of what human love should be like. So let Song of Songs be part of what Biblically informs and corrects our approach to human love and then let a Biblical version of human love help us to understand, in part, Jesus love for his Church. Song is not all the Bible has to say, but it is an important part that shouldn’t be dismissed. Consider the repeated refrain “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases.” (2:7, 3:5, 8:4) doesn’t advocate reckless love; there is a proper time and place for it. Chapter 3 has a wedding procession. That is the proper context for human love and sexuality: marriage.

In the ancient Near East sex and religion went together quite closely. Asherah poles were prolific fertility symbols in Israel during the time of the kings. Temple prostitutes were common in pagan temples; the sexual act was intended to arouse the gods so they might grant fertility. These views of human sexuality do not fit in Biblical religion; the Song of Solomon shows that human sexuality is part of creation. There is no appeal to the arousal of the gods in Song of Songs, only an appeal to Eden and human pleasure and joy. Sex is a creaturely thing that is neither to be worshipped nor is it a form of worship. It is a gift from God and should not be denied as an evil either. We are meant to love and be loved and Song of Songs shows the appropriate use and expression of that desire.

What about singles? There are those who are called to live single, celibate lives. Does Song of Songs not have anything to say to them? Of course it does, as I’ve said it warns that love is not to be aroused before its proper time. A person called to an unmarried life may look for love and partnership but should not awaken love before its time, even if that time does not come. A single person needs to know about Jesus’ relationship to his Church as much as a marriage person does. As a matter of fact, Paul was most likely single (1 Co 7:8) and he is the one wrote about God and his people this way.

Instead of trying to create a new post on Michael Wittmer’s Don’t Stop Believing for the blog tour, I’ll provide a link to my original post. There were some good comments worth reading too.

I completed my first 10k run this weekend. It was a great day for it. Warm and sunny in the morning. My unofficial time was 1:08:15 or so, higher than I wanted. Also, I stopped and walked for about a quarter mile, something I didn’t want to do. But I finished and that’s a place to start.

10k is 6.2 miles. The first 4 miles were ok. I was maintaining a pace of under 10 minutes per mile which is where I was hoping to be. At the 3.5 mile point I decided to save some energy till the end and scoped out where I was going to start pouring it on to make up some time. That never happened. A mile later I was walking. The reason was that I overheated. The reason for that is that I didn’t properly hydrate the day before or that morning so my body wasn’t equipped to handle the heat. The race started at 9AM, a bit late, especially for a 10k, and before 10 the sun was up and the temperature was rising. Ok, it’s April, it isn’t that hot, but it felt hot after running for 45 minutes. When I finally made it to the 5 mile mark, they had bottled water. I rinsed my mouth two or three times and dumped some on my head. From there I felt better.

So important lesson learned, drink water, listen to your wife, don’t eat potato chips the night before. I’m going to find another run in about a month or so and try it again.