Desire Demanded (Song of Solomon 1:2-4)

The Song of Solomon is about Jesus and his people. It is a book in which many believers have discovered amazing spiritual experiences as through it he has drawn near to them and made himself known to their souls. This means that it is a book that describes the possibility of Christian experience as well as the pleasantness of it. Those who have obtained contact with Jesus through this book have testified to the great pleasure that they have known. And since that is the case, the book reminds us of the priority of Christian living, which is to know Jesus as well as we can. 

The book is a set of several poems, each connected to specific locations. Poetry, as we know, is often a vivid way of expressing desire, and it uses pictures drawn from everyday circumstances to express powerfully the feelings of the heart. Some of the poems in the set are short whereas others are longer. For example, there are two poems in chapter 3 and one poem covers 5:2–8:4. In chapter 1, verses 1-8 are one poem, and that section is followed by another poem that runs from 1:9 to 2:7. The first poem is about desire and the next poem is about desire fulfilled. Each of the poems focuses on different aspects of certain experiences.

1. Who are present and where are they?

We can see from the verses that there is a woman and her companions. As she says in verse 4: ‘Draw me after you; let us run.’ This would be a normal situation in which a high-ranking lady and her retinue are walking along together and speaking about what she regarded as important. But where are they? The answer to this question can be deduced from verse 4: ‘The king has brought me into his chambers.’ He has taken her in to his rooms, which indicates that before then the lady and her companions were walking together close by where he was. And they knew that he was close by because they could smell the oils with which he was anointed.

2. Who is speaking in verses 2-4? 

The main speaker is the lady and she tells her friends about what she wants from the king. In verse 2a, she speaks about the king and then moves to speaking to the king, before in verse 4 she expresses her excitement and gladness to having been brought into his presence. Her companions are still with her, and we see in verse 4 that they join in the praise of the king.

3. What is the lady wanting?

Verse 2 tells us that the lady wants personal contact with the king. It was not enough for her to be near the king in the sense that she was aware of his aromas; nor was it enough for her that she was with those who wanted to meet the king for themselves. Obviously, both of those aspects were very important for her, but they were not the one thing above all that she wanted. She was in the king’s palace and she was with the king’s friends. Yet she wanted more and her heart was not satisfied with the good blessings that she already had. I suppose we could say that she was like Mary who sat at the feet of Jesus enjoying his company as she learned of his love rather than being with Martha who was focussed only on doing what was good. Jesus commended Mary for her choice (Luke 10:38-42). It is more important to be with Jesus than to do things for Jesus. He must come first in our lives, and when that is the case he is very pleased.

We can also deduce from the lady’s statement in verse 2 about the king’s kisses that she wanted repeated expressions of his affections. There are some things that it would have been inappropriate for her to ask for, even although she was his beloved. She could not ask to have his authority, for example. It would have been inappropriate for her to have questioned the ways he exercised his government over the nation. But she could ask for his affections, and she could ask for very frequent expressions of them. 

This was her desire, then, to have more from the king. And is this not what should be the longing of the heart of every Christian? There are many things that we cannot get involved in as far as his providences are concerned. He did not involve us in deciding the content of the eternal plan that he is working out, nor does he ask us to interfere with his universal rule. But we can discover more and more of his affections and the blessings that he can give to us.

Do we know why things go wrong in the Christian life? It is when we lose sight of the fact that Jesus should be our number one desire and when we no longer enjoy the sweetness of his touch. Maybe it is appropriate for us to search our hearts and ask when we last experience a kiss from him in our souls. If we are not experiencing them now, we have to ask what kind of Christians we are at present.

The lady then contrasts the love of the king with other good things that she could experience regularly. She mentions the benefits of wine, which was regarded at that times as a means of getting strength and joy in one’s heart when one was feeling weak or sad. There is nothing wrong with wine, and the author is not suggesting that people should not drink wine. Instead he is stressing that beyond the best, there is something better; that beyond the best that earth can give, there is the best that heaven can provide. If she had been satisfied with wine, then wine would be the height of her experience. But she knew that Jesus could give her far more strength and joy than anything else could. Think of Isaiah 12:2-3: ‘“Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.” With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.’ As far as the lady in the song was concerned, this may be her looking back to previous encounters with the king. With believers, they can look back to many meetings with their loving Lord.

Then the lady mentions what she smells when she says in verse 3 that his anointing oils are fragrant. This is a reminder that wherever the king is, his presence will be sensed even before he is met directly. A point that could be suggested is that she, with her companions, has put herself where she knows his fragrance will be experienced, and as far as believers are concerned, those places are the means of grace. 

What are the fragrances of Jesus? In general, we could mention his perfect life, his atoning death, his resurrection and ascension, his intercession and all that it involves, and his return. In the next line, she focuses on the fragrance of his name and in the context it could be the literal name of the king, which is Solomon, and which we know is connected to the idea of peace. And it is the case that one of the strongest aromas that comes continually from Jesus is his love of peace. He gives peace, and he classified his followers as those who love peace. Whether it is that name, or another name, it is good to think about the names of Jesus.

Thinking in this way lead the woman to pray for close contact with the king. His fragrances cause encouragement in her heart to experience more from him. She is marked by perseverance to get more of what he can give, and in this she is a picture of one desiring to experience more intimate contact with the Master who wants to give such blessings to her. She has to become like Jacob on Mount Peniel, when in the middle of a mountaintop experience he wanted more and more from the Friend that was wrestling with him.  She is like Paul who wrote in Philippians 3:13-14: ‘Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.’

Yet her desires are not selfish and only concerned about what she might enjoy with the king. She urges her companions to run with her and get closer to the king for themselves. Her urging is a wonderful description of brotherly love, of exhorting one another to get closer and closer to Jesus. Were we doing this recently, and if we were, how close did we get? And if we have not reached that wonderful spiritual place, are we urging one another to keep going until we reach that location? Because it is there, and it is closer than we might imagine at present.

4. What happens to the lady?

Basically, we can say that she received what she wanted. She wanted to have more of the king, and she received more from him. He brought her into intimacy with himself, and we will see in the remaining verses of this poem, when we get to them, what that contact involved. This is a reminder that living Christianity is connected to desires of the heart, and that when our desires are right the Lord gives them to us. The correct desire is to want more and more of Jesus. This is what Paul wanted when he said in Philippians 3:10 that his desire was to know Christ even although he had known him for over three decades. He tells us what he wanted to know about Jesus: ‘that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.’

Something else happens too with the lady and that is that her experience of the king leads others to praise the king along with her. As they observe the king being good to her, they realise that they are watching grace in action. And it is a wonderful thing to see Jesus drawing near in great love to a person and shedding abroad his peace in that heart. Hopefully, he is doing so for us at the moment, because if he is not active in our souls, then others will not see the beauty of his grace in action.

So we must ask ourselves, ‘How strong are our desires after Jesus?’ Because he responds to those to who have them.