Spurgeon's Handling of Solomon's Song

by Phil Johnson

The following article is the foreword I wrote for The Fairest of Ten Thousand, a fine collection of Charles Spurgeon's sermons on texts from the Song of Solomon. The book is available in hardcover from The Northampton Press.

harles Spurgeon loved the Song of Solomon. Sixty-three of his published sermons are based on texts from Solomon's Song. That's two-plus sermons a year on average, twice as many messages as Spurgeon preached from Colossians. In fact, Spurgeon's unabridged Song of Solomon sermons contain enough material to fill a fifteen-hundred-page book with a typeface smaller than you are now reading. All that material was drawn from an Old Testament poetic love song that most preachers would say is the single most difficult book in Scripture from which to preach.

Spurgeon said:

If I must prefer one book above another, I would prefer some books of the Bible for doctrine, some for experience, some for example, some for teaching, but let me prefer this book above all others for fellowship and communion. When the Christian is nearest to heaven, this is the book he takes with him. There are times when he would leave even the Psalms behind, when standing on the borders of Canaan. When he is in the land of Beulah, and he is just crossing the stream, and can almost see his Beloved through the rifts of the storm-cloud, then it is he can begin to sing Solomon's Song. This is about the only book he could sing in heaven, but for the most part, he could sing this through, these still praising him who is his everlasting lover and friend.¹

The Song of Solomon is, of course, a song about intimate love. It celebrates the bonds of affection between husband and wife—specifically between Solomon and his queen. It is filled with expressions of tender warmth and intense desire. Its imagery is so vivid and the metaphorical pictures of marital passion so powerful that the ancient rabbis forbade young men to read it until they reached the sacerdotal age of thirty (see Numbers 4:47). In Spurgeon's words, "This book was called by the Jews, 'the Holiest of Holies'; they never allowed anyone to read it till he was thirty years of age."²

Spurgeon (in accord with Victorian sensibilities) paid scant attention to the historical context of Solomon's song. Passing over the literal sense of Solomon's love song, he regularly preached from this book about Christ's love for His church (and vice versa). He regarded the poetry of Solomon's Song as "the language of a soul longing for the view of Jesus Christ in grace."³

Spurgeon has frequently been vilified in the current age for his handling of these texts. Some of today's rude-and-randy hipster preachers have viciously mocked Spurgeon for the respect he showed to Victorian modesty—while they themselves have reduced Solomon's love song to a vulgar sex manual. More significantly, Spurgeon has taken fire from advocates of sound expository preaching for his exegesis of the poetry. He is often accused of spiritualizing and allegorizing Solomon's song in a way that is wholly unwarranted by the text itself.

When handling the Song of Solomon, Spurgeon did take some hermeneutical shortcuts that we might well quibble with.

For example, his earliest published sermon on Solomon's Song begins with these words: "I shall not, this evening, attempt to prove that the Song of Solomon has a spiritual meaning. I am sure it has." He went on to give some reasons why he did not believe the Shulammite in the poem was the daughter of Pharaoh mentioned in 1 Kings 3:1. He did not then explain the actual historical background of the poem. He simply stated dogmatically, "This is Jesus speaking to his Church."⁴

We might quibble with Spurgeon's hermeneutical shortcut, but the point he was ultimately making is not altogether invalid. Marriage is, after all, a picture of Christ and His church (Ephesians 5:22-33). Spurgeon's dogmatic assertion simply echoes the words of the apostle: "This mystery [marriage] is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (v. 31). In the preceding verse, Paul had Quoted Genesis 2:24 ("Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh"), which is the original divine mandate for the institution of marriage.

If marriage itself "refers to Christ and the church," and Solomon's song is a poem about marital affection, then it is not at all far fetched. to say, as Spurgeon did, that a Holy-spirit-inspired poem about marriage "is Jesus speaking to His Church."

A careful expositor today would no doubt handle these texts somewhat differently from Spurgeon. We wouldn't hesitate to acknowledge the author's original meaning and the proper historical context of the poem. Nevertheless, given the fact that the whole purpose of marriage in the first place is to serve as a living, holy picture of Christ's union with the church, there are many valid and important spiritual truths about Christ's love for His people to be gleaned from the Song of Solomon. It may well be that those who omit this aspect of Solomon's song have missed the most important point of all.

In any case, Spurgeon's approach is vastly superior to the boorish way stylish postmodern preachers have recently tried to treat the book as an explicit sex manual or an evangelical Kama Sutra. As you read these sermons, I trust you will be captivated by the lofty way Spurgeon unfolds the real significance of marital love, the reverent way he honors Christ, and the genuine desire he has for the whole church to see our Lord in all His glory. Above all, I trust you'll begin to appreciate Spurgeon's conviction that Christ alone is "altogether lovely."

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1. Charles Spurgeon, The New Park Street Pulpit, 6 vols. (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1859), 5:458.

2. Ibid.

3. Charles Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 63 vols. (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1863), 9:625.

4. The New Park Street Pulpit, ibid., 5:457ff.

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