Sex is good, even beautiful. Many, many non-Christians and even Christians do not know that this is what the Bible teaches and what we believe. But we heard it clearly in last week’s text, especially Genesis 1:31 and 2:18. For human beings to be male and female, with sexuality as part of our nature, is good. For there to be a single sex, for the Man to be alone, was not good.
When we come to the Song of Solomon, this biblical view of sexuality as something good and beautiful is confirmed beyond a doubt. It’s a wonder that anyone who has read this book of the Bible could ever imagine anything else, but even Christians often regard this Scriptural love poem as an anomaly, something not quite fitting into our theology and perhaps just not quite “fitting.”
We really need to hear the whole book, the whole long poem, but I’m going to focus on Song of Songs 2. For the record, I last preached on the Song of Solomon back in 1989. Back then I, perhaps foolishly, tackled chapter 7 in a sermon on the importance of family love, including romance between husband and wife. But I think the lovely call and yearning of chapter 2 lets us get the idea without worrying about the titters of children and youth (not to mention some adults) in the congregation.
It was supposedly a Jewish maxim that no one under age thirty should study the Song of Songs. That’s perhaps just anxiety arising out of a fear that what is there is “dirty” or somehow inappropriate for younger minds.
The misunderstanding of how Christians view sex is largely because of the ages-long inroads of gnosticism into the church and the surrounding culture’s confusion of the gnostic view with the Christian view. Gnostics were an ancient cult, spun out of Christianity but also drawing on neo-Platonism, which taught that the material world was secondary and inferior to a spiritual world. Thus material bodies, including the human body, are like prisons for the human spirit. The goal of religion is to free one from the sins and limitations brought about by being embodied.
Christian (and Jewish) faith, on the other hand, celebrates the material world–and human bodies–as the good creation of God, something beautiful, not dirty and not opposed to spiritual life. The sexuality which is part of our bodies is included in this goodness and beauty, and the Song of Songs is a witness to this.
All this does not keep us from drawing spiritual analogies from the love imagery of the Song of Songs. A long Christians (and Jewish) tradition has seen this book as an allegory for the relation between God and His people. And of course that is played out in other places in Scripture (in the prophet Hosea and Ephesians 5 and in the last chapters of Revelation). One of the reasons to hold onto our conviction that sex is good and beautiful is to uphold that human end of that allegory. God’s love for us is a beautiful thing and it is signified and glimpsed in the beauty of sex.
Of course, we manage to do disastrous and ugly things with sex all the time. But that is true of all the gifts with which God has blessed us. But the beauty remains and shines through when ever we receive the gift of sex as God meant it to be received and offer it to each other and to Him in the goodness in which it was created.