God’s Word for You
Song of Solomon 4:16 The Garden of God’s Love
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, May 12, 2024
The Wife Speaks
16 Awake, north wind, and come, south wind!
Blow on my garden, so that its fragrance may drift.
Let my lover come into his garden and taste its choice fruits.
The wife speaks to the winds, the zaphon (north) and the teman (south). If the cool north wind would just wake up, please (she speaks like a mom even to the wind!) and if the warm sound with would come—not blow hard, or rage, but blow as “a gentle south wind” (Acts 27:13)—then all of the delightful fruit and flower fragrances of her private garden will waft and drift and fill the air with their many lovely and exotic scents. The north wind is cool, and is what generally brings rain to Israel (Proverbs 25:23). Unlike the furious east wind, the south wind usually means the coming of a hot day (Luke 12:55). Rain followed by hot sunshine is the formula for plants to grow and thrive.
A curious possibility occurred to me as I was meditating on this verse today (it happens to be Mother’s Day). The north of Israel is often called Galilee. The south is often called Judah. Together they made the Israel that David and Solomon knew and over which they reigned. In the Song, many commentators associate the husband with Solomon, and the wife is depicted as being from Galilee. The two parts of the nation, north and south, are necessary and even vital, even though they are mentioned together in the same verse only once in all of Scripture: when God commanded Joshua to set aside cities of refuge throughout the land (Joshua 20:7). Perhaps this is stretching the verse far beyond the limits of interpretation, but it was a pleasant thought for my morning walk.
There is a question in the central line of the verse: Do the winds blow, or does the garden itself blow and waft its fragrance? Either thought is possible according to the grammar, and poetry has a way of transcending the limits of grammar so that a written or spoken word can be seen from more than one point of view. The theology of the Bible is not affected by this; no new doctrines leap to the fore by preferring one to the other. In truth, the garden cannot “blow” or waft its fragrances without the arrival of the winds, and so both thoughts are not only possible, but inevitable.
When we apply this verse to marriage, we notice that the center of the book has arrived. While some take this to be the wedding night of the couple, it stretches the poetry of the eight chapters to limit the poem to a single narrative of the wedding day. The book is about the whole marriage and not merely the wedding. Couples who are planning their wedding should remember to plan and pray not only about the “big day,” but about their whole marriage.
The wife’s invitation for the husband to enter his garden (his garden is her body, and vice-versa) and enjoy all its fruits is of course an invitation to their love; their marriage bed. Nothing is withheld from the spouse.
The Targum of the ancient Jewish rabbis applies this verse to the Messianic kingdom in much the same way that my morning meditation brought a thought about Galilee and Judah, as I mentioned above.
But Spiritually, this is about Christ and the church. We remember that our physical flesh is God’s temple (1 Corinthians 3:16). Wherever we go and whatever we do with our bodies, we bring God along with us. Will we please him with what we do, or bring him disgrace? The immediate application made by Paul is a warning against murder, abortion, and suicide: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him” (1 Corinthians 3:17). But along the same lines, we do not want to involve God or his temple (our bodies) in crimes, lust, sins, or rebellion against God. “Let our whole body be preserved in Christ Jesus and let each put himself at the service of his neighbor.”
Let Christ delight in everything we do, to his glory. Let him enter his garden, the garden of our lives; the fountain of the temple of the Holy Spirit, and may he praise us for our thoughts, words and deeds. When the world hates the church and the church suffers evil, we suffer for Christ, not for ourselves (John 15:18-19). We preserve the garden of our lives of faith; we tend the doctrines, the law, the gospel, and the sacraments, and we are presented to Christ and by Christ “as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:27). And as Paul says in the same place: “This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.