One of my friends read the book of Ecclesiastes every year-end. She said it’s a good book to help her reflect on the year gone by and to prepare for the year ahead. Perhaps, we need to keep the Song of Songs as an annual must-read book too.

Pastor and Author Ray Stedman said, “As you read in this book of the rapturous delight that is exchanged and experienced between the bridegroom and the bride, you are discovering a magnificent description of what God intends for the relationship between Himself and the human race.” In the book Five Smooth Stones, Eugene Peterson wrote: “The love lyrics of the Song are guard against every tendency to turn living faith into a lifeless ‘religion.’  . . . It insists that however impressive the acts of God and however exalted the truths of God, they are not too great or too high to be experienced by ordinary people in the minutiae of the everyday.”

In fact, the Song of Songs was read during Passover. The reading, of course, was not originally a part of the feast; the feast was kept long before the Song was written. It was assigned much later. The intent is obvious. The Passover feast with all its declarative power of God’s saving grace, through the years, and with each repetition of the ritual, was in danger of becoming a shell, a husk of reality. In order to protect against this danger, someone assigned the Song of Songs for reading at Passover.

Song of Songs is a book that will help us protect our first love, and to guard ourselves from the tendency of turning living faith into lifeless religion.

In Song of Songs 2: 10, we read these beautiful words:

“My lover spoke and to me: Arise, come, my darling;

my beautiful one, come with me.”

And again in verse 13, the Lover of our soul repeats His invitation:

“Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.”