Worship Music and the Language of Romance

 The Bible nowhere describes the relationship between the individual Christian believer and Christ using romantic terminology. It does describe the Church as a collective body that way - “husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church”. But nowhere does it tell the individual person to think of his salvation in those terms. And yet that language has tended to permeate contemporary worship music since its beginning. And this is one of contemporary worship music’s biggest problems. The fact is that when you use an unbiblical terminology to refer to something as central to the Bible as salvation, wrong theology and a wrong spiritual life can’t help but be the result.

One question that is brought up in this, though, is whether or not The Song of Solomon should be taken as a metaphor for the individual believer’s relationship with God or Christ.

The Song of Solomon serves at least two purposes. The first one was, and is, to teach the people of God what a godly, natural, romantic relationship is supposed to look like. Its second purpose, in its Old Testament context, was and is to illustrate Yahweh’s love for Israel collectively. That then carries over to Christ’s love for the Church in the New Testament. The Church is the New Israel.

As a picture of Yahweh’s love for Israel, this then sets the stage for the writings of the OT prophets later, as Yahweh brings charges of adultery against Israel, and as He threatens her with divorce for her harlotry with the nations, which divorce is finalized in the Book of Revelation, manifested in real history through the Roman assault on Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

It is also with this divorce motif in mind that Revelation 2-3 also has to be read, alongside of the apostasy passages of the New Testament, namely John 15, Romans 9-11, and the entire Book of Hebrews. Yahweh has divorced Israel, because He requires faithfulness, as any spouse should. Individual churches then also should be diligent in their faithfulness, lest He remove their lampstands, which is just another metaphor intended to illustrate the same ending of relationship with God.

But there isn’t a verse in Scripture, in either the Old or New Testaments, that suggests we should take the Song of Solomon as an illustration of the individual believer’s relationship with God. There have been commentators over the past two thousand years who have tried that, but Scripture simply doesn’t support it. There’s nothing inside or outside of the book that says we should read it and apply it that way.