“Look, you are beautiful, my beloved. Look, you are beautiful. Your eyes are doves. Look. you are beautiful. my beloved. Truly pleasant.”
– Song of Solomon 1:15–16
All right, how are we going to pray according to God’s word to us in the song of Solomon? There’s so much we could talk about with this book, and so much that is a little more challenging to talk about when I think about some moms and dads riding with their kids in the car who listen to Pray the Word and want to keep this appropriate for all ages, knowing the picture we have in the book of Song of Solomon is a picture of love between a husband and a wife, between two people made in the image of God, male and female, and created to enjoy one another in sexual relationship with one another.
And that, if you were one of those parents, that’s about as far as we’re going to try to go in these Pray the Word episodes. But this book is really important because it’s a powerful, beautiful picture of God’s good design for marriage going all the way back to Genesis 2 when a man and woman come together in one flesh marriage, and then the way that points us to Ephesians 5, and the reality that God designed marriage this way to be a picture of Jesus’ love for the church and the church’s love for Jesus.
Song of Solomon 1:15–16 Reminds Us of Marriage
So I would not be of the understanding that Song of Solomon is an allegory that’s intended to just depict in all these specific ways the relationship between Christ and His church, but marriage absolutely is a picture of the relationship between Christ and His church. And in this way the Book of Song of Solomon, as it reflects the beauty of marriage, is absolutely a picture of Christ’s love for the church, in ways that every person who’s listening to this who is married or will be married in the future, wants our marriages to reflect the love of Christ.
And so we come to a verse like this, Song of Solomon 1 15–16. “Look, you are beautiful, my beloved. Look, you are beautiful. Your eyes are doves. Look, you are beautiful, my beloved. Truly pleasant.” You hear the repetition don’t you? Look, look, like this is a picture of loving to look at someone and to admire and enjoy their beauty, to see another’s beauty as truly pleasant. And so I want to lead us to pray for marriages like this, whether marriages that we’re in now, or future marriages to come. And, yes, in this pray that the marriages around us would be a reflection of the love of Christ for His church. So let’s pray.
This Verse Praises God for His Word
Oh, God, we praise You for all of Your word, including the book of Song of Solomon. What a good gift you’ve given to us. A holy spirit inspired picture of love between a man and a woman the way you’ve designed for marriage. And so God, I pray for my marriage. I pray for every single person who’s listening to this who is married. God, we pray for this kind of beauty and love and enjoyment for truly pleasant marriage to mark us and to mark our relationships with our spouses.
God, we pray that You would help us to cultivate that and even as we pray through the book of Song of Solomon, that You would help us to grow in all these areas. I know there’s an adversary who does not want husbands and wives to experience deep and beautiful and pleasant unity in marriage and intimacy and marriage. God, we pray for that, for each of our marriages, for the marriages around us, even for brothers and sisters who are praying this in the middle of singleness or younger kids. We pray for all the marriages around us to experience this.
Song of Solomon 1:15–16 Prays for This Kind of Marriage
And God, if You so lead any one of us who would be single now into marriage. We pray for this kind of marriage in the future. We pray all of this knowing that there is such a skewed picture of marriage in the world around us today. Sadly many times in the church. In ways that skew the love of Christ for the church and the church for Christ. We pray ultimately that the gospel would be clear. In the way we love and enjoy one another in marriage between a husband and a wife.
And in this way, we connect praying for our marriages with the spread of the gospel in the world. I think about today being my son’s birthday, who’s from Kazakhstan. God, we pray together for the spread of the gospel among the Kazakh people. Among unreached men and women all over Kazakhstan who have little to no knowledge of the gospel right now. God, we pray that the gospel would spread to them.
And God, we pray that they would see, behold, and experience the beauty of marriage. We pray it would be as a picture of Christ’s love for the church as the gospel spreads to them. God, help us to connect marriage with mission in the world, just like Ephesians 5 does. We love Your word, God, and we pray that You would help us to grow in our experience of it. And we pray that You would help us to grow in our understanding of it. Help us to grow in obedience to it as we pray through the book of Song of Solomon. In Jesus’ name, amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
