Lecture 15: Enjoying Life Under the Sun, the Song of Songs, and the Mystery of Marriage

The lecture, section by section

1. Crooked things and unpredictable days

   Consider the work of God: who can straighten what he has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity, consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that no one can discover what will come after him. The point is not that God has lost control on the hard days; it is that you cannot predict tomorrow, joy or sorrow, and on either kind of day the calling is the same: fear God and keep his commandments. Life is puzzling, perplexing, unpredictable, unjust, and sometimes maddening, and there are no formulas; none of that means God does not rule.

2. It will be well beyond the shadow

   The Preacher grants that a sinner may do evil a hundred times and prolong his life, and still insists it will go well with those who fear God and it will not go well with the wicked, whose days will not lengthen like a shadow. Since the book has said repeatedly that the wicked may prosper and the righteous may suffer now, Schreiner takes this as a look past death: ultimately, it will be well with the God-fearing.

3. The gift of an ordinary day

   Ecclesiastes also speaks positively: there is nothing better for a person than to eat, drink, and enjoy his work, and this is from God's hand, for who can enjoy anything apart from him? This is not the fatalist's eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. God has given his creatures tasks to occupy them, has made everything appropriate in its time, and has set eternity in their hearts, and still no one can discover his work from beginning to end. No one can unravel what is happening in life; so rejoicing in the good is itself the gift of God.

4. Bread, wine, and your fleeting portion

   Even where the futility bites hardest, the righteous receiving what the wicked deserve and the wicked what the righteous deserve, the book commends enjoyment. Eat your bread with pleasure, drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already accepted your works; keep your garments white and oil on your head; enjoy life with the wife you love all your fleeting days, for that is your portion; and whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your strength, for there is no work or planning or wisdom in Sheol, where you are going. Do not wear yourself out decoding what God is doing; trust him, keep his commandments, and take each day as it comes, very near, Schreiner notes, to Jesus' word against anxiety about tomorrow. This is no hedonism; it is receiving today instead of fretting over tomorrow.

5. Earthy on purpose

   One benefit of the Old Testament, and of the wisdom books especially, is that they keep believers earthy in the good sense: connected to meals, work, marriage, the stuff of everyday life. Some are so heavenly minded they are no earthly good, and some the reverse; the whole Bible read together keeps the balance. Ecclesiastes adds a sober contentment: do not assume you will turn the world around, and if life turns south, that does not mean God has left you or that you displease him. Your task is to obey and serve. Schreiner adds that he cannot commend Tremper Longman's commentary's reading of the book as a whole, brilliant as Longman is, because it takes so negative a view of the Preacher.

6. The Song as love poetry

   Song of Songs does not advance the storyline, and it has been read as allegory, drama, cult ritual, wedding, funeral, and more. Schreiner reads it as love poetry with two characters, not three: the love of a young maiden and the king, a royal wedding. Its subject is the bliss of married love, sung in images: love intoxicating as wine, the beloved fragrant as perfume that overwhelms the senses, delightful as fruit and aged wine, arriving like spring after a dreary winter. And he adds a pastoral rule: preach and teach the book the way it is written. The Song speaks of sexual union delicately, poetically, indirectly, and that delicacy is deeper and richer than the crassness some preachers bring to it.

7. A garden locked

   With Duane Garrett, Schreiner reads the maiden as a virgin who fears the loss of her virginity: she is a garden locked and a fountain sealed, and the thought haunts her, as it would anyone formed by a biblical vision of sexuality, until she is given to the king. Hence the book's refrain to the young women of Jerusalem: do not stir up or awaken love until the appropriate time. Do not hurry sexual longing awake, and perhaps, the author hints, do not even hurry toward marriage. Restraint belongs to the Song's wisdom.

8. Eden remembered

   The Song is a foretaste of paradise. Death is mentioned only once; the bride and groom are young, beautiful, and strong, and within the poem there is no defect in either; their love is as verdant as spring, trees budding and flowers blooming. It reminds the reader, strikingly, of Adam and Eve before the fall.

9. Strong as death

   The Song's climactic words on love are among the most powerful ever written: love as strong as death, jealousy as unrelenting as Sheol, a fire no torrent can extinguish and no river sweep away, a treasure for which all a man's wealth would be utterly scorned. Love, like death, is inexorable, and love transforms. Schreiner reads Garrett against the dark cellar in which some religion locks sexuality, treating the body and its joys with guilt and suspicion; the Song, Garrett argues, condemns that as substandard spirituality. Asceticism is not the path to holiness; within marriage, the Song celebrates union without shame. Schreiner recalls the worst counsel he ever heard given to a bride, to withhold herself from her husband as much as she could, and calls it the opposite of the Song and of Scripture.

10. The mystery of marriage

    Is the Song's contribution limited to human love? Schreiner argues, against the current fashion, that it is also legitimate to read the book in terms of Christ and the church, and his warrant is Ephesians 5:32: marriage is a mystery, something previously hidden and now revealed, pointing to Christ and the church. The direction matters: it is not that marriage came first and Christ and the church illustrate it; marriage reflects the prior reality. The Old Testament already pictures Israel's relationship to Yahweh as a marriage, as in Hosea, and Revelation ends at the marriage supper of the Lamb. None of this silences the Song's plain voice celebrating human sexuality in marriage. But the Song never shows its lovers aging and dying, and earthly paradise does not last; so the poem finally points beyond itself to the eternal paradise and the greatest love of all, to which every marriage canonically points. The correspondence is general, not detailed: Schreiner refuses to allegorize particulars, the locked garden is not the church shutting Christ out, and the kisses of the poem are not to be decoded line by line.

11. Prophecy fulfilled and mystery revealed

    Asked whether the poet himself saw all this, Schreiner answers that Solomon or his circle knew Israel's marriage to Yahweh and may well have heard the whispers of paradise in the poem, but the case does not rest there: it rests on the New Testament's own appropriation, which shows God's intention, discerned in the words of the poem itself. This opens a framework the course will need: some Old Testament texts are prophecies fulfilled, directly predicted and directly kept; others are mysteries revealed, previously hidden and unveiled by the New Testament in the light of Christ. If everything were prophecy, the whole Old Testament would have been transparent in advance; if everything were mystery, nothing would have been clear until Christ came. Scripture holds both, and the hermeneutical work lives in the tension. Schreiner promises to unpack it with the New Testament authors themselves.

12. Questions at the edges

    The classroom presses details. The he and she labels in modern translations are editorial helps, not part of the original text, basically right and open to question. The king's praise that his beloved surpasses queens and concubines is an observation of his heart, not a justification of his household: the Torah forbade the king to multiply wives, Solomon disobeyed it, and his life did not match his book's ideal. The beating of the bride by the watchmen is probably poetic rather than literal, in a poem where myrrh on the handles speaks of union and not of doors. Polygamy God in some sense permitted, as Jesus explains in Matthew 19, for hardness of heart, while the creation ideal remains one man and one woman; David's plural marriages, permitted in that sense, are not in the same category as his adultery and the murder of Uriah, and blameless never meant sinless. And on a disputed rendering of 1 Corinthians 7:1, Schreiner agrees wholeheartedly that a wife must never be treated as an object while doubting that the verse itself is making that point.

1. Ecclesiastes commands consideration in adversity and enjoyment in prosperity. Which of the two is harder for you in this season, and what would obeying it look like before the week is out?

2. The Song refuses both crassness and the dark cellar of shame. Which distortion shaped the air you grew up breathing about marriage and the body, and what does the Song's delicacy recover?

3. If marriage preaches a sermon about Christ and the church whether it means to or not, what sermon are the marriages nearest you preaching, and what would you want to change about your own part in one?