January 14 | Bible in a Year: Genesis 33-35; Matthew 10:1-20

The End of the Search

I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go. Song of Songs 3:4

READ Song of Songs 3:1–4

While browsing in a charity shop, Hannah, my daughter, spotted a wedding dress. She tried it on. The whole shop froze. It was perfect. “Mum?” she beamed at me, “What do you think?”

Mean mother that I am, I made her spend a whole hour looking at wedding dress photos on her phone to be absolutely certain this was it. An hour and five minutes later, we emerged as the proud owners. A pang of sadness hit me, however, because now we would never have the excitement of going wedding dress shopping. Fun though it would have been, we didn’t need to keep searching for the perfect item which we’d already found.

Solomon describes the end of an even more important search: “for the one my heart loves” (Song of Songs 3:1). Although he was thinking of the love between couples, there are echoes here of our spiritual searching, which ends when we find Christ. “I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go” (v. 4).

Sometimes the excitement and soul-satisfaction of knowing Jesus fades over time. We search again for a new thrill. But like the lovers in this passage, once we’ve found Jesus, our search has stopped. Instead, we can echo the passionate single-mindedness of holding Him and never letting go!

If you feel like you’re lacking something today, cling even tighter to Jesus. There’s endless fulfilment and joy to be found in getting to know the One our hearts love.

By Debbi Fralick

SCRIPTURE INSIGHT

While there are different interpretations of the Song of Songs, the most immediate reading shows that it’s a collection of poems that celebrates love and the physical intimacy that flows from it and warns about keeping love in the proper context (2:15). The Song presents us with a number of poems that express godly desires in keeping with the way God made us at the time of our creation, desires that are met in the “two becoming one flesh” marriage relationship instituted in the garden.

But does the Song have anything to say about God and our relationship with Him? We can answer this question with an enthusiastic yes when we read the book in the context of the whole Bible, where we see a frequent comparison made between our relationship with God and human marriage. The apostle Paul described the church’s relationship with Jesus along the lines of a marriage (Ephesians 5:21–33), which he called a “profound mystery.”