Richard Sibbes, The Love of Christ (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 2011). Sibbes’ sermons on the Song of Solomon are fully presented in Volume II of his Works.
“The Holy Ghost is pleased here,” that is, in the book of the Song of Solomon, “to condescend to our infirmities; and, that we might help ourselves in our spiritual estate by our bodies, he speaketh here of heavenly things after an earthly manner, and with a comfortable mystery. As in other places the Holy Ghost sets out the joys of heaven by a sweet banquet, so here he sets out the union that we have with Christ by the union of the husband with his wife; and that we might the better understand what this union is, he condescends to our weakness, that we might see that in a glass which we through our corruptions cannot otherwise discern. This book is nothing else but a plain demonstration and setting forth of the love of Christ to his church, and of the love of the church to Christ; so familiarly and plainly, that the Jews take great scandal at it, and would not have any to read this book till they are come to the age of thirty years, lest they should thereby be tempted to incontinency; wherein they would seem wiser than God himself. But the Holy Ghost is pleased thus by corporeal to set out these spiritual things, which are of a higher nature, that by thinking and tasting of the one they might be stirred up to translate their affections (which in youthful age are most strong) from the heat of natural love to spiritual things, to the things of God; and all those who are spiritually minded (for whom chiefly the Scriptures were written) will take special comfort and instruction thereby, though others will take offence and scandal at it.” Thus said Richard Sibbes in a sermon on Song of Solomon 1:2 titled “The Spouse, Her Earnest Desire After Christ.” Elsewhere he said that the intention of the Holy Ghost in this book is “by stooping low to us, to take advantage to raise us higher unto him, that by taking advantage of the sweetest passage of our life, marriage, and the most delightful affection, love, in the sweetest manner of expression, by a song, he might carry up the soul to things of a heavenly nature.”
It would be well for the church if such an understanding of this book of Scripture were recovered today. The fact that the classic Protestant understanding of the book seems strange to many is a symptom of our sad decline in the areas of heavenly-mindedness and heart religion. To many of us, perhaps, there have been, for too long, in effect only sixty-five books in the Bible, with this precious Song being locked up to us. Understanding the Song will, in a manner, unlock the rest of the Bible to us as well. It is, according to Sibbes, the holy of holies. The re-reading of classic expositions of the Song, like that by Sibbes, can teach how to enter this holy of holies.
The friends of the “heavenly” Sibbes prized his expositions on the Song of Solomon. Four years after the Cambridge preacher’s death in 1635, Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye published twenty of Sibbes’ sermons on this book under the title, “Bowels Opened, or A discovery of the near and dear Love, Union, and Communion betwixt Christ and the Church, and consequently betwixt him and every believing soul.” Goodwin had been helped at an earlier stage by the personal counsel of Sibbes, “Young man, if you ever would do good, you must preach the gospel, and the free grace of God in Jesus Christ.”
The sermons in “Bowels Opened” testify that Sibbes modeled the counsel that he had given to Goodwin. Clearly, to Sibbes, preaching the gospel meant more than declaring the historical facts of what Christ had accomplished, though it certainly included that and was built upon that. Sibbes’ gospel preaching did not just open up the cross, it opened up the bowels, that is, brought Christ home to the heart and experience of his hearers.
These twenty sermons expound Song of Solomon 4:16 through 6:3. They begin with Christ’s spouse under the awakening influences of the Spirit, with her spices flowing out, and trace her experience through that night time of sleepy neglect of Christ’s advances that led to a time of desertion. She seeks Christ, and cannot find him. But then, she answers the query of the daughters of Jerusalem about her beloved, and this begins her recovery. The spouse’s description of the excellence of Christ, beginning in Song 5:10, is one of the high points of Scripture: “My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.” The spouse comes in the end of this passage, at 6:3, to say, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”
A thorough analysis of these sermons is not the purpose of this brief review. Take however, as a sample, one of Sibbes’ six directions for coming to be able to say, “My beloved is mine”: “And labour we also every day more and more to bring all our love to him. We see in burning-glasses, where the beams of the sun meet in one, how forcible they are, because there is a union of the beams in a little point. Let it be our labour that all the beams of our love may meet in Christ, that he may be as the church saith, our beloved. ‘My beloved is mine, and I am my beloved’s,’ saith she, as if the church had no love out of Christ. As all streams meet in the great ocean, so let all our loves meet in Christ.”
