God’s Word for You
Song of Solomon 7:9b-10 Words of faith
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, August 11, 2024
The Husband
The fragrance of your breath is like apples,
10 and the kisses of your mouth are like the best wine—The Wife
It goes down smoothly for my lover,
gliding over the lips of the one who is sleepy.
Here we are still within a passage that does not easily allow us to apply it both to marriage and to Christ and the Church. However, there are some terms that we can identify.
The fragrance of apples comes either from the flowers, which must fold up and disappear for the apple to be formed around them, or from cutting into a ripe apple. The husband is saying that her breath is nice, and this is followed with the beginning of a comment about her mouth. Usually a reference to the mouth in this context would be about kissing, and therefore the translation is interpretive: “the kisses of your mouth,” since “your mouth is the best wine” might seem awkward.
Yet “mouth” can also refer to words. Spiritually speaking the statement is about speech, teaching, preaching, prayer, praising God, and confession, which are the finest things we do with speech and are the best application of the Second Commandment. This would be in perfect step with God’s invitation for the church and for all Christians to confess our faith in him. He considers this to be the best produce; the best wine. Thomas confessed: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). And the prophet proclaimed: “I will rejoice in the LORD; I will be joyful in God my Savior” (Habakkuk 3:18).
In our verse, the wife interrupts her husband—the only time this happens in the Song. Her words, taken at face value, are about wine and not the lips; it is about their shared love, and about his own apparent drowsiness. Perhaps there could be a suggestion here of Christ’s true humanity and his state of humiliation, in which he experienced the need for sleep along with other human actions. He slept in the boat on the Sea of Galilee as the storm approached (Matthew 8:24; Luke 8:23). But he also used the figure of sleep to talk about death (John 11:13). By describing death in this way, he showed that death is not the natural state for man; man is meant to be deathless and to live forever, since death came only as a result of sin (Romans 6:23). Therefore Christ entered the world to conquer death, to enter into death of his own free, divine, and holy will, to kill it. “I will have no compassion on the grave,” he said, “even though it thrives among its brothers” (Hosea 13:14-15).
His work was to destroy the results of sin, and therefore death. “Where are your plagues, O death?” (Hosea 13:14). I will be your plague, O death! I will descend to the world I made with my own voice and I will kill you, O death, forever and ever. I will kill you by dying and rising, which will rip you apart from within. You have no power over me, even though I die on the cross. And all who put their faith in me will be called up out of their graves by the simple call of my voice. And this is what he proved even before his death, by calling up the daughter of Jairus from her deathbed (Mark 5:41-42). And he did it a second time with the son of the widow of Nain, calling him from his coffin as they carried him out to be buried (Luke 7:14-15). On that occasion he showed that death, which made the Israelites unclean when they came into contact with it (Numbers 19:16), did not make him unclean, for with his very touch the boy came to life again. And a third time, he raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, calling him from his sealed tomb after he had been buried for four days (John 11:39). Lazarus came out, and everyone in Bethany and in Jerusalem saw him, and Jesus’ enemies conspired then to kill him (John 11:53). But even Satan could not plot well enough to kill Jesus and keep him a prisoner of the grave.
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and I am the life” (John 11:25). And even though he did sleep in death, it was only for a short time, a trifle—no longer than Jonah was in the belly of the whale (Jonah 1:17), and that was the very sign he gave to his opponents when they demanded that he give them a sign (Matthew 12:40, 16:4).
The bride wants her husband to drink the best wine even as he sleeps, and Christ entered the world to hear the confession and faith of men before he died for us. Peter said: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), and Jesus builds his church on that confession (Matthew 16:18). Death and hell will not overcome it, just as death and grave will not overcome you or me. We will die, we will sleep, but we will awaken at the trumpet call. “For then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them” (Ezekiel 37:13).
“God will redeem my life from the grave; he will surely take me to himself” (Psalm 49:14). We, his church, would like to think that we all gave him our good confession before he slept in death, but most of his own followers were too sleepy or afraid. No, we give him our good confession before we ourselves sleep in death. “It is you, O Lord, whom we must worship.” Whatever confession we give, a simple statement of faith, a prayer of believing trust, a life’s work of praise and proclamation, a mother’s task of raising godly children, or whatever declaration of faith it may be, it pleases our dear Jesus. His mercies are new every morning, and there will be a bold, bright morning on a great and golden day, when the sun will never set, the sky will light up in glory, and we all will rise to meet him in the clouds to live for all eternity. This is most certainly true.
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.