Love as Strong as Death, Set Like a Seal

King Solomon made up more than a thousand songs.
(The Bible counts them: one thousand and five.
That is a new song every day for almost three years.)
One of them is called the Song of Songs,
which means the best song of all.

It is a wedding song.
A bride sings, and her groom sings back,
and now and then their friends join in.

The bride hears him before she sees him.
"Listen! It's my love!
Here he comes, leaping over the mountains,
bounding over the hills like a young deer!"
He stops outside her wall
and peeks in through the lattice of her window.
(A lattice is a wooden screen full of holes.
It is very good for peeking.)

"Get up, my darling, my beautiful one," he calls.
"Come away with me!
Look, the winter is over.
The rain has stopped and gone.
Flowers are popping up all over the ground.
The time for singing has come,
and the doves are cooing in our land.
The fig tree has its first green figs,
and the grapevines in blossom smell sweet.
My dove, hiding in the cracks of the rock,
let me see your face.
Let me hear your voice."

Then someone in the song shouts out a job for everyone:
"Catch the foxes for us,
the little foxes
that are wrecking the vineyards,
because our vines are in bloom!"
(Foxes dig under the vines and nibble the new buds.
To a fox, a vineyard in flower is a party
with no grown-ups watching.)

The bride laughs and sings,
"My love is mine, and I am his."

Near the end of the song,
she asks him for one thing more.
"Put me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm."
(A seal was a carved stone
for pressing a name into soft clay.
People wore it on a cord around the neck,
right over the heart, or as a ring.
Nobody went anywhere without their seal.)

"Love is as strong as death," she sings.
"It holds on as hard as the grave holds on.
It burns like a blazing fire,
like a flame from the LORD himself.
Oceans of water cannot put love out.
Rivers cannot wash it away.
If a man offered everything in his house to buy love,
people would only laugh at him."
(The richest king in the world
put that line in his song.)

But Solomon could only write this love down.
He did not keep it.
He married seven hundred wives,
and they turned his heart away from the LORD.

God kept singing his part of the song.
Through the prophet Isaiah he promised his people,
"As a groom is full of joy over his bride,
so your God will be full of joy over you."

Hundreds of years later, a groom came for his bride, God's people, and he did not bring gold.
He gave himself.
He went down into death,
deeper than all the oceans,
and death could not put his love out.
On the third day he rose.

The bride asked to be a seal on her groom's heart.
Jesus does more.
He sends the Holy Spirit to be God's own seal
on the heart of everyone who belongs to him,
and no river can wash it away.