Authority in Intimacy

(This week's message is part of a concurrent series on the Song of Solomon. For more on the Canticles, please visit our archives)

Out of the place of intimacy, the believer is given all authority to crush the head of the serpent and live the life of an overcomer. Ever since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, God’s universal plan has been to restore mankind to a place of communion, wherein our hearts and lives are drawn back to Him. As we are positioned into a place of restored relationship with God, we find that our lives begin to once again demonstrate the authority over our atmosphere and circumstances, much like Adam held authority over his own surroundings in Eden.

The first realm of authority we begin to inhabit is self control over our own deeds. Sin no longer is given license to reign in our mortal flesh. But God seeks to entrust us with much more rulership than simply over our own habits and actions. The life of the believer is not centered around overcoming personal sin issues. That is a rudimentary starting point, but our lives are centered around the Lord Himself.

The authority with which we can be entrusted really has no boundaries, and is measured only by the degree in which we are submitted in love to the King of Kings. Spiritual authority is not dependent on years of training, seminary education, age or length of time as a Christian. It is measured solely by how much of the Lord we have in our lives.

Last week we read of the beloved emerging from the dark night of the soul, to a triumphal vision of King Solomon – who is here a type of Christ, specifically modeled as the King of Glory. He came from the desert like a column of smoke, not unlike the cloud of glory that encamped about the children of Israel and led them, even when they were in the dry places.

King Solomon made for himself the carriage; he made it of wood from Lebanon. Its posts he made of silver, its base of gold. Its seat was upholstered with purple, its interior lovingly inlaid by the daughters of Jerusalem. Come out you daughters of Zion, and look at King Solomon wearing the crown, the crown with which his mother crowned him on the day of his wedding, the day his heart rejoiced (Song 3:9-11).

Notice that the King was crowned on his wedding day. Isaiah 61:10 further illustrates this “as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest. …” In the place of intimacy, we are crowned with authority. But moreover, the Lord Himself is crowned with authority as we turn our hearts to Him. As we give him our allegiance, we increase the scope of His power. Notice that this is the “crown with which his mother crowned him.” Who is the mother of Christ, but the church? Of course we are not the mother of God as if we preceded Him – but the church, like Mary, gives birth to an expression of Jesus and His Kingdom in the natural realm of the earth. As the presence of God hovers over us in secret prayer, it causes us to release a tangible Heavenly deposit into the world around us.

One way that we crown Him, is when the crowns of our lives are given to Him. All of the service, glory and accomplishments of our lives are laid before Him to increase His domain, even as the elders laid their crowns before Him in the Book of Revelation.

The paradox is this: although the church, like a womb, gives creative expression of God’s Kingdom into the natural realm, yet we are still the work of His hands – Him who is the Creator of all things. We are made by Him, to be carriers of Him. Solomon made for himself the carriage, and the carriage is us. “He made it of wood” means He made us of flesh, as wood is a typology of mankind in scripture. We are the vessels that carry His glory, created specifically for that purpose.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us (2 Cor. 4:7).

Our calling is to be a habitation place for His presence. A place that the Son of Man can finally rest His head. A softened heart is like the royal upholstery of this carriage; our inner life is like its interior lovingly inlaid for Him. We are the temple He inhabits, and the Lord will never dwell in another temple made by hands – He will live only in the chosen ones who carry His name.

It is for this reason, in Amos 9:11, that the Lord says He will restore the Tabernacle of David. He never promises to restore the Tabernacle of Moses, the temple of Solomon or any other earthly structure. Why? Because the Tabernacle of David represented intimate worship, where His people could come openly, without the barriers and veils of the Mosaic Tabernacle, to worship directly before the Ark of the Covenant itself. It was symbolic of direct, unhindered communion between God and His people, which did not hinge on works, ceremony or outer form. It spoke of a new covenant. Remember that this was the lifestyle lived by David, the worshipper, who was commended for having a heart after God’s own heart. For this, David was given a kingdom – authority – that would never end. An eternal throne, birthed in the place of intimate worship as a poor shepherd boy. In fact, even Jesus sits on David’s throne! David was a “mother” who crowned the Lord in the place of intimacy.

One day, every knee will bow to the Lord. The Lord will eventually appropriate His authority over all things, but He is lingering for those who will, by choice, first submit their allegiance to Him willingly. We will either bow our knee to Him out of force, or out of passionate desire. To those who bow the knee out of desire, their inheritance is to rule and reign with Him forever. The more authority we give to God in our lives, the more authority He will entrust us with in our own lives here on earth.

God does not want those who bow the knee like robots. He wants lovers, not slaves. This is why there was free choice in the Garden. And this is why He did not keep His presence in the dead, stationary forms of manmade temples. We are a house built of living stones. Like Solomon’s carriage, or the throne on wheels in Ezekiel’s vision, we are a moving seat for the King. We can operate in the fluidity and life of the Spirit and move at His will.

Understand that God does not need our service, and that is not His reason for exercising authority over us. Our love and service toward the bridegroom makes his “heart rejoice.”

Divine Interception

In recent weeks we have discussed the strategic dance of divine intimacy, as the Lover of our souls will often hide from us, only to be revealed in the very next instant. This repetitive transition between hiddenness and manifestation is a consistent pattern for the one who sets his heart to love. From the place of spiritual sight and revelation, we are often taken next to a place of darkness. It is there that we must come to grips with the true depths of our blindness and spiritual bankruptcy. Though in seasons of manifestation, we clearly see our Heavenly riches in Christ and taste His abundance, it is in the dark night that our faith is strengthened so that we no longer doubt, are no longer double minded, and can therefore be entrusted with even greater riches of the Kingdom.

We are on a path from glory to glory. We are consequently on a road from death to death. The more He increases, the more I decrease.

When we honestly confess our lack, limitation and ultimately, our dependence on the grace of God alone, we are freed to enter another season of revelation and visitation. In this cycle of up and down, we eventually are led into a place of peace and inner stillness that is no longer dependent on the soul’s sensory experience of God. We have contentment and an abiding pleasure in being grounded in the truth of God’s undying love for us, whether we feel it and experience it or not. Though we are in the night season, the terror of the night no longer affects us. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we fear no evil.

One of the only constants in the life of the believer is the assurance of discontinuity and turbidity. Jesus promised us not a rose garden, but in fact, the opposite. He assured us that we would face considerable ups and downs in this life. Jesus Himself experienced a broad range of emotions: at times He was broken with weeping; at times He feasted and rejoiced; at times He was so distraught that He sweat drops of blood. And though He was one with the Father, His communion with the Father was not always crystal clear. He developed it over time. Jesus went through a desert season (at least one, literally), where he was personally tempted by the prince of darkness. He went so far as to be “led” by satan during this process (see Lk. 4:5, 9). Of course, Jesus was not led to the point of sin, but the fact is that when He limited Himself in power and entered humanity, He laid aside some of his communicative privileges with the Father.

Is that too hard to swallow? Consider this “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mt. 27:46). Jesus was obviously not in touch with the Father on the cross, that is for sure. The Father totally turned His back on His Son, because of our sins that were placed upon Him. This was the cup that was given to Him by the Father to drink.

The point is, it is a natural part of our Christian walk to encounter desert seasons and dry spells. The dark night is not to be interpreted as God’s abandonment of us. He will never leave us nor forsake us. Rather, we should count it a privilege that He has hidden from us for a season, because we are given the opportunity to search Him out anew. After all, “it is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings” (Pr. 25:2).

Amid God’s seeming arrival and departure, our faith is being consistently rooted in the truth. And this produces great peace, aside from circumstances. As the apostle Paul stated, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want” (Phil. 4:12).

This principal is true both in natural and in spiritual matters. Paul was not speaking only about money here. While we all desire spiritual abundance – supernatural encounters, angelic visitations, prophecies, healings, etc. – we cannot forget the important beatitude that “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mt. 5:3). Those with no spiritual abundance in their outward lives are still heirs to the Kingdom, which is inherited through faith alone.

Blessed are the poor in spirit … this verse is not given so that we will desire spiritual poverty, or to discourage us from searching out spiritual riches. The exciting part is that we can inherit the Kingdom of Heaven now, here on earth, as was Jesus’ prayer: “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven” (Mt. 6:10). But we should be quick to admit that we are already in a wretched state of spiritual poverty (no matter how many demons we’ve cast out, how many prophecies we’ve uttered or hours of prayers we’ve prayed). This is a necessary step toward entering this abundance. On the one hand, we are utterly bankrupt, yet paradoxically, the work of Christ makes us heirs to the throne.

We cannot rely on our old experiences or the manna of yesterday to calculate our spiritual wealth. If we are so full of yesterday’s bread, we will miss the Lord when he comes new and afresh.

The Lord says to “realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see” (Rev. 3:17-18).

We are heirs to Heaven on earth. But in the grand scheme of things, even the greatest saint on earth has barely tasted a drop of what Heaven holds. We are like children playing in the mud puddles of Heaven’s lowest levels, and calling ourselves satisfied. In the end, the richest reward is neither Heaven nor earth, anyway. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away” (Mt. 24:35).

Jesus is the treasure. Jesus is the Word of God that is formed in our hearts through a process of faith and patience. Faith comes by hearing the Word of God. Patience comes in the waiting, in the testing. In confessing our wretched need, I do not suggest we overly identify ourselves as sinners. We identify ourselves with Christ, and that is the quest of the beloved.

When we last left the beloved, she had searched through the streets for her Lover to no avail. Though she asked Him to appear as He did in days gone by – like a gazelle or like a young stag – He had not revealed Himself to her in the way she desired. He was still hidden. She remembered Him in His wildness and unpredictability. But this same unpredictability, like a double-edged sword, had left her wondering, grasping at straws as to His whereabouts.

And now, after searching desperately:

The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city.

“Have you seen the one my heart loves?” (Song 3:3)

Notice that she has searched and found nothing. And yet, she herself has been found in the process. Found by the watchmen, who she questions. The watchmen often represent the seers, the prophets. One job of the watchmen is to keep the times. They not only stand guard on the city walls to search out what is coming on the horizon. The watchmen also search out the city from within. And that is what they are doing here. While the watchmen do not represent Christ Himself, they do point to Him.

In the night of purging, our hearts are searched deeply by the inner lamp of the Lord. Within our city walls, as we come to grips with the depth of our inner lostness – our continual need for deeper and deeper levels of sanctification and evangelism of the secret recesses of the soul – the Word is brought into the inner courts of our heart.

As we submit to the process of the dark night – as we willingly encounter the cross – we find shortly thereafter, past a brief process of entombment, that new life is given. And suddenly, without notice – perhaps without any real expectancy – we encounter the object of our search.

Scarcely had I passed them when I found the one my heart loves. I held Him and would not let Him go till I had brought Him to my mother’s house, to the room of the one who conceived me.

Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires (Song 3:4-5).

We see that, although she was faithful to rise from her slumber, the beloved’s earlier chasing and striving through the streets after her Lover were partly in vain. An “A” for effort, but in the end, it was the watchmen who came to her. And it is the Lord who reveals Himself. In the desert, we often move from one extreme to the other: from snoozing on the couch to flailing in the water. From complacency to vain chasing. God is not after our works, as much as He is after our realization of Himself. It was good that she ran through the streets, not that it accomplished anything in itself, but it was a confession of her inadequacy apart from a deeper level of communion. And as we draw near to Him, He draws near to us.

Really, transcendence to deeper planes of romance is as simple as asking with pure motives. There is not much doing involved. However, those motives are purified in the furnace of the desert. And just when there is nothing left within us to search, God seems to intercept us unaware.

This is much like a male driver, who is so lost, he is finally willing to pull over at the gas station to get directions. God will draw us to a point of humility and desperation, where our only goal, our only desire, is to reach the destination, no matter the cost.

When the heart is positioned, by God’s sovereignty and our distinct, yet passive allegiance, we are suddenly surprised to find Him in the passing. Not as a destination, but in passing, we see Him to the greatest degree we are able to withstand in the moment. Our thirst is such, in those dry desert sands, that we are desperately ready to take Him right into the room of conception. At the first sign of water, we think we can drink a barrel.

Of course, God is moved by this kind of desire. In the opening of the Song, it is the King who draws us into His chambers. But now, our hunger for Him has grown so severe, that we have actually moved Him to go along with us. Not by our running, but by our desperation.

But the beloved still has quite a way to go, and true love is still being formed in her. Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires. Nevertheless, her love has begun to overtake the process of timing. To those who keep the times, she can only ask “Where is He?” The key to breaking the cycle of the seasons and the years in the desert is to have this question formed within us, “Where is He?”

The testings have put within her a resolve to seek the Lord while He may be found. So that when she finds Him, she holds onto Him – as did Mary when she saw the resurrected Lord – and she does not let go. Like Jacob, she has learned to value her birthright, and is willing to hold fast to the Lord, even if it means she must wrestle Him throughout the night.

Remember, it was not Jacob’s striving which moved God, but his hunger. In the same way, we should know that God is not moved by our blind searching throughout the streets for Him. But He is intoxicated by our willingness to go there for the sake of divine hunger.

And what is the reward? Those who seek will find. To those who knock, the door will be opened. The Lord honors our sincere, searching hearts. Though misguided we may be, no time spent in preparation and seeking is time spent in vain. The Lord will restore even the time spent searching in blind alleyways.

The beloved does not encounter the Lord in the way she wanted, as a gazelle or a stag. But the reward of her searching is a far deeper revelation of Him. To her surprise, she is intercepted by the Lord as He comes as the King of Glory. The Lord of Hosts – King of the armies of Heaven.

Who is this coming up from the desert like a column of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and incense made from all the spices of the merchant? Look! It is Solomon’s carriage, escorted by sixty warriors, the noblest of Israel, all of them wearing the sword, all experienced in battle, each with his sword at his side, prepared for the terrors of the night (Song 3:7-8).

Desert time is not wasted time. In the desert places, we are unknowingly preparing the way for the King.

God in Hiding

We must understand that a vital strategy in the Lover’s pursuit of His beloved, is to withdraw from her. We are engaged in a dance, in which the Lover is made manifest to us, just long enough to capture our attention before fleeing back again into the shadows.

Unless the Lord hides His face from us for a season, we are never stripped of our soulish frivolity to the point of sheer faith – faith being the only substance we can offer to God with which He is truly pleased, apart from love itself. And as we know, love is quite easily feigned and most often misunderstood as strictly the substance of emotion and sentimentality. Though it most assuredly involves these things, love is far richer a concept. It is laced with the truth and terror, the sacrifice and volatility of God Himself. Its depths cannot be charted or explored without, at times, a volitional estrangement from emotion and the lower states of the soul. Much of what we call love is self-centered fluff.

For the beloved, true love is still too elusive a concept to grasp as we enter the third chapter of the Canticles. We are left in chapter two with her pleas for Him to return to her in His earlier fashion, “turn my Lover, and be like a gazelle or like a young stag” – this being the likeness of His former visitation in the Song. How often have we pleaded with God to reveal Himself in the same way He did before? In the way we came to adore, when our heart first swelled with anticipation? We built monuments around that old well, that old movement, that old revival. The place is littered with sentimental relics of a day gone by, and we continue to ask God to operate as He did back then.

But those whose hearts were truly enlivened in that day have come to understand, in their inmost being, that the living flame of divine love no longer burns around those old relics as it once did. Though we all play the same old ritual and sing the same old songs, everybody knows. Though the form and structure remains the same, there is an awareness that the spark of life no longer dances in those old statuaries. Ichabod, the glory has departed. Something within her – not the slave woman who has fully come to idolize the old forms, but rather the remnant of the beloved who still remembers what those forms once represented – something within her still cries out that there is something more. And so we suddenly find her, here in the throes of the dark night, longing to see the one her heart adores past the shadows of confusion, isolation and the aridity of the soul. She tosses and turns over the hope of a deeper communion she has never really tasted, yet somehow she knows it exists.

All night long on my bed I looked for the one my heart loves; I looked for Him but did not find Him. I will get up now and go about the city, through its streets and squares; I will search for the one my heart loves. So I looked for Him but did not find Him (Song 3:1-2).

We see a number of transitions in this passage, and there is no need to point out the obvious. She is stepping out past the complacency and immaturity of soulish fancy. From dreaming on her bed to putting feet and action behind her love. She is stepping out of the window and reaching into the cold, dark night. She willingly steps out of a place of comfort and security into what may seem like an irrational void. She risks a pointless pursuit, and seemingly, that is what she gets. “I looked for Him but did not find Him.”

Those who have faced spiritual disappointment. Those whose hopes and dreams have at some point crumbled, understand this feeling of divine distance far too well. It is one thing to lean on the false comfort of the appetites, then to have them removed. It is altogether another thing to become dependent on a preconceived framework for the divine, just to have the rug pulled out from under you.

The dark night has several fundamental purposes. Foremost is to strengthen, out of sheer necessity, our belief in the substance of things not seen. To simply believe that He is. Beyond all feeling, learning and even experience – to know on a primal level that He is. And secondly, if not equally important: to believe that He is good. The desert is a gift to us, in that it allows us to consolidate our misconceptions, insecurities and slavish fears regarding God into one lump sum and then put the whole nasty mother to death. In the desert, between Egypt and the Jordan, we are transformed from slaves into warriors.

Yes, it is necessary that God hides from us, so that our dependence is not built upon an experience of Him, or even on facts about Him – but rather, our dependence is placed strictly on Him and Him alone. Trusting in the one who is unseen and unfelt is a required rite of passage. Blessed is he who has not seen, and yet believes.

As I said, we are engaged in a dance, in which the Lover is made manifest to us, just long enough to capture our attention before fleeing back again into the shadows. In this we are allured, not by manipulative advances and false starts. But in fact, we are allured to the soul’s graveyard, where we chase our Lover into those self-same shadows until we lose ourselves. And all the time, unknowingly, we are falling headlong into Him. In the end we will see that He was with us all along.

The soul must become detached from its perceptions of God, in order to make room for Him. In this, I do not advocate the utter detachment of the darker mystics. We are not called to a lifestyle of nihilistic, stoic withdrawal. However, the Lord does delight in suspending our senses, putting to death the lower passions of the soul, in order to relate with us on a higher plane of spiritual consciousness.

The key here is to allow the Lord to do His own hiding. Instead, we are the ones most often hiding from Him in the name of maturity and prudence. We choose our deserts and detachments, even when He, in no way, is calling us to go there. We would often rather run to our own religious, nihilistic corner, then enshrine the sepulcher as if it were the destination, instead of a momentary, often unnecessary tool. We think that God’s hiding is a cat and mouse game, and in slavish spite, we seek to turn the tables and demand that He pursue us for a change. We are quite unaware that He has been doing this very thing the entire time.
Thank God that, in our self-imposed isolation and self-destructive self-pity (the kind we enter sulkily when he reappears without explaining His absence), he does not enable our bitterness. But like Jonah, He sends a worm to eat away at our shade tree and add to our self-imposed misery until we choose to snap out of it. We can have a desert if we want one, but the Christian walk is much more full of life and liberty than the stale mess kit we’ve been shoveled.