...............how to read the song of songs
First off, a quick bit to give you some tips on how best to read the book and study it for yourself. Mike Bickle talks about ‘pray-reading’ the book, where you turn what you read into prayer back to God, thanking him for what it says and praying for more revelation, understanding and experience of what it means, and hopefully turning the book into genuine loving conversation with him, rather than it just a cerebral exercise. This is the most important thing to do. Learning what the symbolism means is all good and well, but if that's all you do, it'll be a bit like reading and understanding the menu at a french restaurant without actually eating anything on it. It's in the eating that it makes sense, not just understanding what goes into each dish.
So when you get a verse that tells you a truth, either about you or God, start by thanking God for that truth, and then pray for greater revelation and experience of it. For example, where Jesus says our eyes are like doves (ch1v15), thank God that you have doves eyes (not literally of course, unless you’re some weird mutant freak) and that he sees this about you, and ask for greater understanding of what it means to have doves eyes. Or where the beloved says to him that his love is better than wine (ch1v2), thank him that this is true and pray that you would experience for yourself that his love really is better than wine.
Then when you get doing verses, if it’s us that’s doing the doing, commit yourself to doing it (assuming it’s something you actually want to do), and ask God for the strength and ability etc to do it. If it’s God that’s doing something, pray that he’d do it.
For example, in chapter 3 verse 2 she says ‘I will search for the one my heart loves.’ If you reckon that’d be a good thing to do, then commit yourself to searching and ask God to help you do it. And in chapter 2 verse 8, we see Jesus leaping over mountains, so thank God that he can effortlessly overcome mountain-sized problems, and pray that you’d experience him doing that in your life.
The other main tip is to help find out what's meant by all those seemingly odd metaphors. I don't think the symbolism is arbitrary, but rather it all has meaning. So when Jesus says your waist is like a mound of wheat, he's not just attempting to be romantic (which, if he was, is a pretty lame attempt), but our waist represents something, and there's a reason why it's like wheat, and a mound of wheat at that.
There's two main ways of doing this. The first is get a good concordance and look up where else a word appears in the bible to see if there's a common context it turns up in. Eyes, for example, are always compared to doves, and a quick look at other dove references shows things like the Holy Spirit being like a dove, so there's probably going to be some link between eyes and the Spirit.
The other way is to simply look at the characteristics of the nouns and adjectives. You can either draw on your own extensive knowledge of Middle Eastern flora and fauna, or use things like the internet, where sites like googlism or wikipedia offer up a veritable wealth of information. So, using the doves example again, you can quickly find out things like they only have one mate for their entire lives, so there'll be something about us being devoted, only having eyes for Jesus, that sort of thing.
The thing to remember with this is that it isn't a precise science – it's not about finding exact, complete meanings. Jesus himself couldn't exactly define the Kingdom of God, he could only say it's a bit like this or a bit like that, so I don't see why we think we should be able to give the full meaning for a verse. That's the beauty of parables – on the one hand, they make things easy to understand, but then they also make it hard, and you have to think about what it means, actually chew it. When Jesus said to consider the birds of the field, he actually meant to consider them. What is it about yeast being worked through some flour by a woman that tells us about the Kingdom of God? Keep asking questions, seek the kingdom. One of the things i love about the bible is its infiniteness. It's like those computer generated fractal pictures you get, where there'll be a spiral with an identical but smaller spiral branching off it, and another off that, and another off that, and you can keep going further in infinitely, but it's still the same original shape.
One interesting note of caution about this,though, which Mike Bickle makes, and which I'll go with on the grounds that he's a very wise, anointed teacher, is that any principle you get in your studying/meditating should be backed up in the New Testament. If you can't find something similar there, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.
One other great tip for reading the book is to get a Hebrew lexicon. I use Zondervans Exhaustive NIV Concordance which, as well as telling you every time a word turns up in the NIV, gives you a little reference so you can look up what the original Hebrew (or Greek) means, and also tells you the other ways the Hebrew (or Greek) has been translated. Admittedly this isn't going to be everyones cup of tea, but it appeals to the scholarly side of me and throws up some fascinating stuff. For example, chapter 1 verse 11 God talks about making us earrings, meaning he'll work to make us beautiful. But one meaning in the original Hebrew is, oddly, 'turnings' and is translated as 'turn' in Esther 2v15: 'When the turn came for Esther to go to the king...'. So this gives the added meaning that God will work to make us ready for our 'turn', be that our ministry/calling or even a specific event, as happened with Esther. The book is fairly pricey, about £30 when i bought it. But then most of us would probably pay that for pair of shoes that may only last a year or two, while this book should last you a lifetime. Say it lasts you 30 years, that's just £1 a year, which is a bargain in anyone's book, especially when you consider the hours of fun and joy it could give you.
Hopefully that's given you some helpful tips (apologies if it hasn't, or if I've said something deeply heretical, or I've simply bored you).
So when you get a verse that tells you a truth, either about you or God, start by thanking God for that truth, and then pray for greater revelation and experience of it. For example, where Jesus says our eyes are like doves (ch1v15), thank God that you have doves eyes (not literally of course, unless you’re some weird mutant freak) and that he sees this about you, and ask for greater understanding of what it means to have doves eyes. Or where the beloved says to him that his love is better than wine (ch1v2), thank him that this is true and pray that you would experience for yourself that his love really is better than wine.
Then when you get doing verses, if it’s us that’s doing the doing, commit yourself to doing it (assuming it’s something you actually want to do), and ask God for the strength and ability etc to do it. If it’s God that’s doing something, pray that he’d do it.
For example, in chapter 3 verse 2 she says ‘I will search for the one my heart loves.’ If you reckon that’d be a good thing to do, then commit yourself to searching and ask God to help you do it. And in chapter 2 verse 8, we see Jesus leaping over mountains, so thank God that he can effortlessly overcome mountain-sized problems, and pray that you’d experience him doing that in your life.
The other main tip is to help find out what's meant by all those seemingly odd metaphors. I don't think the symbolism is arbitrary, but rather it all has meaning. So when Jesus says your waist is like a mound of wheat, he's not just attempting to be romantic (which, if he was, is a pretty lame attempt), but our waist represents something, and there's a reason why it's like wheat, and a mound of wheat at that.
There's two main ways of doing this. The first is get a good concordance and look up where else a word appears in the bible to see if there's a common context it turns up in. Eyes, for example, are always compared to doves, and a quick look at other dove references shows things like the Holy Spirit being like a dove, so there's probably going to be some link between eyes and the Spirit.
The other way is to simply look at the characteristics of the nouns and adjectives. You can either draw on your own extensive knowledge of Middle Eastern flora and fauna, or use things like the internet, where sites like googlism or wikipedia offer up a veritable wealth of information. So, using the doves example again, you can quickly find out things like they only have one mate for their entire lives, so there'll be something about us being devoted, only having eyes for Jesus, that sort of thing.
The thing to remember with this is that it isn't a precise science – it's not about finding exact, complete meanings. Jesus himself couldn't exactly define the Kingdom of God, he could only say it's a bit like this or a bit like that, so I don't see why we think we should be able to give the full meaning for a verse. That's the beauty of parables – on the one hand, they make things easy to understand, but then they also make it hard, and you have to think about what it means, actually chew it. When Jesus said to consider the birds of the field, he actually meant to consider them. What is it about yeast being worked through some flour by a woman that tells us about the Kingdom of God? Keep asking questions, seek the kingdom. One of the things i love about the bible is its infiniteness. It's like those computer generated fractal pictures you get, where there'll be a spiral with an identical but smaller spiral branching off it, and another off that, and another off that, and you can keep going further in infinitely, but it's still the same original shape.
One interesting note of caution about this,though, which Mike Bickle makes, and which I'll go with on the grounds that he's a very wise, anointed teacher, is that any principle you get in your studying/meditating should be backed up in the New Testament. If you can't find something similar there, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.
One other great tip for reading the book is to get a Hebrew lexicon. I use Zondervans Exhaustive NIV Concordance which, as well as telling you every time a word turns up in the NIV, gives you a little reference so you can look up what the original Hebrew (or Greek) means, and also tells you the other ways the Hebrew (or Greek) has been translated. Admittedly this isn't going to be everyones cup of tea, but it appeals to the scholarly side of me and throws up some fascinating stuff. For example, chapter 1 verse 11 God talks about making us earrings, meaning he'll work to make us beautiful. But one meaning in the original Hebrew is, oddly, 'turnings' and is translated as 'turn' in Esther 2v15: 'When the turn came for Esther to go to the king...'. So this gives the added meaning that God will work to make us ready for our 'turn', be that our ministry/calling or even a specific event, as happened with Esther. The book is fairly pricey, about £30 when i bought it. But then most of us would probably pay that for pair of shoes that may only last a year or two, while this book should last you a lifetime. Say it lasts you 30 years, that's just £1 a year, which is a bargain in anyone's book, especially when you consider the hours of fun and joy it could give you.
Hopefully that's given you some helpful tips (apologies if it hasn't, or if I've said something deeply heretical, or I've simply bored you).
