“He brought me to his banqueting house,
And his banner over me was love.”
— Song of Songs 2:4
“Listen! My beloved!
Behold, he is coming,
Climbing on the mountains,
Leaping on the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Behold, he is standing behind our wall,
He is looking through the windows,
He is peering through the lattice.
My beloved responded and said to me,
‘Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come away.’”
— Song of Songs 2:8-10
Now we come to the second section of the Song of Songs. In this stage, the seeker begins to have progressively higher realizations as her knowledge and experience of the Lord advance. She was primarily self-centered in the first stage. In this second stage, the Lord calls her to rise up.
The Lord wants her center of focus to shift from herself to Himself, from her satisfaction to His satisfaction, from the fellowship of the chambers to a deeper fellowship with Him, and from the initial knowledge of the cross to the real experience of the cross. In the past the church was for her; now she sees the church is for the Lord. Her Christian life is no longer on the plains, but is now climbing upward. She begins to live a progressively higher life before the Lord.
Adapted from The Journey of Life, page 181.
Tomorrow: “To Be Delivered from the Self”