“The Church’s Love for Christ” – so my Bible heads the page of the first chapter of the Song of Solomon. In previous articles I have suggested that, in the first place, the Song was a dramatically enacted allegory of the marriage of David’s son Solomon to his bride Zion, the Kingdom of Israel, Solomon acting as God’s representative in this matter. We have carried this allegory to its conclusion in .seeing it properly fulfilled when God’s King (also David’s son) the Lord Jesus is set on the holy hill of Zion, and takes regathered and redeemed Israel once mire as his bride.
Yet we know that the Apostle Paul maintains that all Israel, that is, not only the natural seed, but also the ingrafted Gentile branch, will be saved in the day of the coming of the Redeemer out of Sion (Rom.11:26). This final ‘Israel’, composed of both Jews and Gentiles, is being prepared now, by the conversion and baptism into Christ of Gentiles, in order to make up the number of the bride. In Eph. 5 the bride who is loved by Christ is ‘the church’; and in v.27 there is a picture of this undefiled bride in the day of her marriage, which links with other scriptures (Rev.19:8,9; 21:10-27; Is.54;60;62) which in turn recall the Song. There is no doubt of it; the Gentile Church in our age may take to itself the imagery and destiny once only bestowed on Israel.
And yet …is this understanding of the Song as the love between Christ and the ‘Church’, which has for centuries been the teaching of both Roman and Anglican churches, entirely accurate? For the Roman Church, in which the full exposition of this allegory as referring to the ‘Church’ was developed, has never properly understood :the things concerning the Kingdom, and therefore those things concerning the marriage of the Lamb. Somewhere there is a false note; as with so many other doctrines, the orthodox teaching on the Song seems right in parts, but gives a total wrong view which needs to be carefully examined before we accept it.
The City of God
The scriptures quoted in the last paragraph, and the Song of Solomon, were made use of by Augustine of Hippo in his important theological treatise, ‘The City of God’. In this work he maintained that the Christian Church was the city of God, the New Jerusalem, betrothed to Christ, and ruled by him as its head.
On a surface reading there seems to be little wrong with this idea. Yet what evils derived from it! For this conception, accepted by the Church, meant that the bishops and priests of the Church were to be thought of as Christ’s nobles in the ‘heavenly’ City, ruling directly by his authority; and that the chief bishop, the Pope, was Christ’s vicegerent on earth ruling with divine authority by the power of the Holy Spirit over the ordinary citizens of the City, so that to question the Pope was to question Christ. The ordinary Christian thus became subject to the Pope and his priests in exactly the same way as the subjects of an earthly kingdom were subject to their kings and nobles.
There is clearly something wrong in a theory which could lead to such an end; and it seems to me that the fault lies not only in the human failings of the men who put these beliefs into practice, but in the theory of the City and the Church itself, as propounded by Augustine – a theory which has governed most men’s idea of the Church as God’s heavenly City since that time.
The Heavenly Kingdom
My belief is that the fault lies in applying the things of the heavenly City to the Church now, in this Gentile age, instead of seeing them as in existence as promise or prophecy.
The Spirit in scripture frequently refers to things which are to be in the future as if they already existed in the present. For example, the writer to the Hebrews declares,
“But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,”To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, “And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant….” (Heb.12:22-24).
This passage sees the Christian as already a citizen in a city, and it is easy to see how the Roman Church came to claim that it was itself the City of God on earth, with the rights and authority of its supposed head, Christ.
However, the reference to ‘the spirits of just men made perfect’ ought to make us wary of this view. *Let us look at a linked passage in Gal. 4. At the end of this chapter Paul contrasts ‘Jerusalem which now is’ (v.25) with ‘Jerusalem which is above’ (v.26). In this passage the Jerusalem existing and ruling on the earth at that time was the Jewish polity still ruling over God’s city; while’ ‘Jerusalem’ to which the Christians belonged was ‘above, i.e. a ‘heavenly’ . Kingdom.
Now this idea of ‘heavenly does not mean that in heaven there is a literal organisation existing to which the souls of dead believers have been taken in, and to which living Christians belong. This ‘kingdom of heaven’ exists in heaven in only one sense, that is in the rulership in heaven of God and His Son, and the angels, over the earth. The believer on earth may count himself as truly belonging to that Kingdom; but his actual participation is reserved for the future, for the time when Christ and the angels will descend from heaven and rule over the earth, with the resurrected saints as the kings and priests of the literal City-state centred on Jerusalem. In the present age, the believer has his citizenship of the New Jerusalem by promise, which is what Paul is saying in Galatians (4:28). In Paul’s day the bond-slave Israel(Hagar) ruled the kingdom of Israel on earth, while the true wife(Sarah) had but the promise. The children born to Sarah are born immortal, in one day (Is:66:8), when the City will descend to earth. In this age there is faith, and promise, that is, the certainty of things yet to be revealed.
This means that, for us on earth) belonging to a ‘heavenly’ kingdom means belonging to a kingdom of the future. To all intents and purposes, anything in heaven’ means something which will be revealed in the Kingdom age.
And so it is untrue to say that any organisation existing now is the New Jerusalem, the heavenly City. Therefore the kings and priests of the future have no present authority to command allegiance over others now, in this age; for now all believers are on a level, citizens of a Kingdom which exists in heaven in the rulership of God, Christ and the angels, but has no delegated power on earth.
Thus it can be said that no Church now organised on the earth is the City of God, the bride of Christ, except by promise; and so no church has temporal authority as a present organisation before God, though individuals and ecclesias who remain faithful may claim to belong to the City-bride.
Two Wives
Having made this point, let us return to the Song, and see how far the latter refers to the Gentiles.
There is in Scripture an allegory, closely connected with the allegory of the bride, which has to do with two wives. There is a husband who is father of a race, who has two wives, one of whom has children, while the other is barren. We saw this allegory in Gal. 4, based on the stories of Sarah and Hagar. A connected story, which serves the purpose better at the moment, is that of Leah and Rachel, Jacob’s two wives. Leah, the first wife, bore sons; Rachel, the loved wife, was barren, weeping for her children.
This story is part of the basis of the prophecy in Isaiah 54:
“Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord” (v.1).
Rachel’s seed are to inherit the Gentiles (v.3), as indeed the story of Joseph and his Gentile wife prefigures. It is therefore very apt that barren Rachel should in this prophecy stand for the Gentile church, barren during the long centuries of Jewish domination in the Land, but who in the end triumphs over her sister and ‘breaks forth’ in birth on right and left hands (Joseph and Benjamin). It is for Rachel that the New Jerusalem is built in fair stones (v.11)0
The Gentile Bride
In the Song of Solomon there is reference to a younger sister of the Shulamite, barren in the time of the marriage of Solomon’s bride. On her, in the day of her maturity, a city will be built.
“If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will in close her with boards of cedar” (Song 8:9).
The Shulamite too is a city, with breasts like towers; but her city will be taken away and given to others, as may be seen from the parallel figure of the vineyard (Is.5:1-7; Matt.21:33-41). The one to whom the city is given is the little sister, in the day that she shall be spoken for. The Shulamite degenerates into ‘Jerusalem which now is’ of Gal. 4.
But the Song was recorded before the falling away from favour of the Israelite bride (8:10). So it refers not to the faithless bride, but to the faithful one; and so, as with all allegory and imagery which refers to faithful Israel, the picture in the Song may apply in some measure to the Gentile bride also (provided caution is employed, and the original application of the Song to Israel remembered).
In the final outcome, of course, there is only one faithful bride, made up of both Jew and Gentile, and ‘all Israel’ is built into one beautiful, undefiled City, made up of those whose names are ‘written in heaven’ (Heb.12:23; Rev.3:12), that is, those whose names are now inscribed on the roll of citizens of the New Jerusalem.
“Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the LORD:
“This gate of the LORD, into which the righteous shall enter”.(Ps. 118:19, 20).
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One