In the Songs of Solomon, the book that was nearly rejected from the sacred canon many, many times, because it was a love story. The love story leaves little to the imagination. And in days of the Puritans, many of them thought this book had no place in the Holy Scriptures.

But in the sacredness of the marriage, we have the beautiful picture of Christ and the Church. And some of the greatest books that have ever been written on devotion have been written in an exposition of the Songs of Solomon, comparing Christ and the Church to the love story of the Songs of Solomon.

There are little hints in it. In fact, verse after verse, it just becomes literally a sermon.

Well, God is concerned about our relationship to Him. The whole thing begins with a deep plane of worship, and it progresses as God demands and possesses more and more of our life and our love.

In the Songs of Solomon, we have a picture of what the church is going to be. In the 6th chapter in verse 10 was the question, who is she that looks forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?

This was a picture of the church. Terrible as an army with banners, the nations will be terrified of us.

Like the moon that always reflects the light of the sun in varying degrees according to the time of the month, the church is likened unto the moon.

When the moon is reflecting the glory and the light of the sun, even in the night hour. This is the night hour for the whole world. It’s that period in which the kingdom has not advanced upon the whole earth, but Parallel’s with a period called the age of man.

We are in a period of the age of the kingdom and the age of man. In a sense we are in the age of the church, since it is divided (Christianity is the largest religion globally, with over 2 billion followers, and its diversity has led to the formation of roughly 45,000 distinct denominations as of 2024). The next age is the age of perfection.

And God has allowed His light as dim as it might be, to be reflected into the world through the church.

 

So, the church is likened unto the moon. We look forth as the morning, the expectation.

 

We are the herald of something that’s great, that’s coming. And the glory of our Christ is reflected from us to the world.

 

 

And that’s the only light that the world has in this time of darkness.

In the song of songs chapter 6: 10, the church was also, pictured here as terrible as an army with banners.

This from the old custom that when one army was defeated, its banner was immediately taken as the trophy.

Sometimes in the march, the Roman army would have hundreds upon hundreds of flags and banners and standards. Sometimes they only represented a little tribe of people that had been subdued, perhaps up in the country of the Gauls. But still, they took their banner. They took the indication that here was another army that was defeated.

The Church of Jesus Christ will come forth terrible as an army with banners. Every one of us carrying a banner means that we are carrying a symbol of the defeat of the enemy. How many enemies have we defeated? How many victories have we won?

How many are in the army of the Lord? it’s terrible as an army with banners all of them carrying a symbol of some army that was defeated by them, this doesn’t seem to indicate that the church is going to finally fizzle out defeated, it’s the picture that God gives to the church in its great Victory.

In chapter 8 verse 5 was the picture of the bride of Christ, the church in a little different way. It said who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved. Now, what does this mean?

It means that the Church, as it finally emerges with Christ, is coming up out of the wilderness, and the Church, pictured as this bride, is leaning upon her beloved, the whole of her dependence and support is because she’s leaning upon her beloved.

The wilderness is there and it’s a very real experience, you’ll come up out of it leaning upon the Lord a little bit more. Notice who is this one comes up out of the wilderness.

The beauty, the devotion, the dedication, the utter dependence, the love that will be in your heart as you emerge from every wilderness experience that the Lord puts you through, depending upon the Lord a little bit more.

You can always tell a Christian where they’ve been and how far along they are.

Find a Christian that is very self-sufficient. And you will see a babe. You see one that does not know the score. The man or the woman that is self-sufficient, they need no one else. They need nothing else. There’s no aura of dependence in their spirit. They are quite self-sufficient.

They haven’t been any place or seen anything yet at all. Because when God begins to deal with you, He brings forth faith in your heart because He puts you in places where you can’t handle a circumstance, you can’t handle a situation, and you start leaning a little more upon the Lord.

And when you come up pleasing to God, when you come up with the relationship that you should have with the Lord, it’ll be because somewhere along the way you faced your inadequacy. You faced the fact that you couldn’t handle the situation in which God Himself placed you.

And so, you began to lean a little more upon the Lord. And one day you come up out of the wilderness, leaning upon your beloved. When you come forth, it won’t be because you have won the battle yourself, but because Christ has become your strength more than ever. He has become the heavenly bridegroom to you. He has become more and more to you.

After all, for what purpose does God give tests and trials to the saints of God? Just so that they’ll have a little more courage, a little more guts, they’ll go after it, they’ll fight through and become victorious, that isn’t the idea at all.

The whole purpose, as far as the divine viewpoint is concerned, is to put you in a place where you appropriate a little more of the Lord, you come a little more dependent upon Him, you love Him a little more.

He has no other way of revealing Himself to you many times except to put you in a corner. And He puts you in a corner so that you don’t know which way to go except that you begin to trust Him more and love Him more.

And the way that He’s revealed to you is a very present help in the time of trouble. That is the way that He becomes more real to your heart. And believe me, you’ll come up out of that wilderness leaning on the arm of your beloved. You’ll come through the tests and through the trials. Christ will mean a little more to you. The further you go, and the more it seems that you always notice this one thing, maturity and the growth of a Christian is marked by the fact you can see the dependence.

When you come forth into maturity, you’re leaning upon the Lord all the more. You’re depending upon Him day by day, hour by hour. You have learned to live a supernatural, miraculous life by a plane of utter dependence upon the Lord every hour, every day.

Now this is what the communion really represents to us too. We come to partake of the Lord’s very life. We know that unless we eat of His flesh and drink of His blood, we have no life in us. We’ve come to the conclusion that we ourselves are not the fountain source of encouragement, of strength, of achievement.

If anything is really worthwhile, sometimes you wonder when the ages have rolled by and the plans of God have been executed, what will remain of all the works that man has done?

What great buildings that he has built? What great engineering problems that he has solved? What great books that he has written? What deep secrets of science? What great masterpieces of art? Which of these things will stand when the age we are in comes to an end? When we stand before the Lord to give account of our lives, the only thing throughout those eons of eternity that will stand is that there will still be the Christ who took upon Himself once and for all time the humanity of man and bears in that human body prints of nails in His hands, wounds in His side, and the scars of what man did to Him in the will of the Heavenly Father.

It humbles you to realize that God, all through the ages, is working one thing. He’s not working to make you a self-sufficient, independent person that can spit in the eye of everyone else.

He’s trying to bring you down to the place where you will be utterly dependent upon Him. You know, you say, well, I don’t need anybody else. I know there’s a lot of people who say that. And I watched that attitude. And then I watched God the Great Leveler. I’ve been watching how easy it is for young couples to say, oh, now we have our little group, and we have everything going fine for us.

The Lord has a way of dealing with that. He pulls the plug, and everything drains out. And all that self-sufficiency ends. And then what comes out of it? Then comes their spirit reaching up, more dependent upon the Lord.

The ways of the Lord are marvelous. Don’t ever grumble and complain if you are in a wilderness. We are either led by the Lord into the wilderness, or we enter by default.

But what His intent and purpose is that He’s going to become so real to you, He’s going to be your Lord. He’s going to love you. He has no other way of opening your heart to you to let you see it.

But this is what He does, so that you begin to humbly say, Heavenly Father, this day I partake of the life of Jesus Christ. I partake of it as the only source of life. I partake of it knowing that He is the Creator of a whole new nature that’s coming forth within me, the divine life of a child of God that will spend eternity with You.

Father, we pray, help us that we would see the love behind everything that happens us. Though we cannot clearly see it at the moment, yet we do believe in you. We do believe that you are causing all things to work together for good to them that love you who are called according to your purpose.

We are coming up out of a wilderness leaning upon the Lord as never before. We do not focus on the past when you had to deal with our self-sufficiency because it became the only way that you could become more precious to us.

We’re not looking to those days to be resentful or wonder why, but only to say, we wanted a walk with You, and this is how we learned our dependence upon you, through your faithfulness.

We know that the more we depend upon you, the more of a victorious life you set before us.

In the wilderness, there’s a desire in your heart, that wilderness that you’re traveling through, to submit more completely to the Lord. You want to lean more heavily upon Him. There may be areas where you’ve stumbled and you’ve failed, and your heart’s heavy because you’re not learning your lessons very well. You’re not doing the thing God called you to do. You’re not trusting Him. You’re murmuring, you’re complaining.

Sometimes you give way to that which is disobedient.

This is why our walk with God is progressive, every day our heart needs to be wholly trusting the Lord a little more, giving Him a little bit more of ourselves than we’ve ever before. We will be withholding a little less of our heart and our very life from Him than we have before. We’re committing ourselves a little more to thee. As much as we’re able today, we say, here we are, Lord. Receive us in the name of the Lord Jesus with mercy.