One of the unique privileges of blogging is getting to know people you’d never meet otherwise here on earth. What a joy to make new friends who live far away—sometimes even on other continents!—but with whom there is the precious bond of sibling kinship through our common faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior and God as our heavenly father! In April I shared several poems by Carol Floyd, who is a newly found sister and soulmate from Kentucky. Today I want to share with you another such friend, this time from France: Jérôme Framery. Jérôme approached me initially about helping him find photographs to illustrate some of his work on the Song of Solomon. I was more than delighted to be a tiny part of his project, and we have quickly become friends. Today I’d like to introduce you to Jérôme and encourage you to see his lovely YouTube video on the Song of Solomon.
Combronde (France), May 3rd 2020.
Dear Kathi,
In your last message you told me that you would be honored to feature me on a blog post on your website. I’m honored indeed to get a small place here!
We met as per e-mail in March (it was just the beginning of the quarantine in the USA but the quarantine had already begun two weeks previously in France).
I was looking for information and photographs about the Song of Solomon in order to make and broadcast on my channel a video telling this passage of the Bible. Searching on the global Internet, not only in French, I found your website and the huge work you did. I wrote you and you immediately gave me a very friendly and optimistic answer.
For the past few months I’ve been producing short and funny videos on YouTube to teach the Christian religion to children. I teach religion to a group of 6 children (10-year-olds) in my village, but because of the quarantine the children stay at home so I decided to make more videos to help children of my group and all other children to continue to learn the Gospel “online”.
It is easier to find virtual material (pictures, clip art, coloring, …) in English than in French. For example I translated in French the “Pumpkin Prayer” which seems to be popular in the USA, and I used it with my group last Halloween.
A few words about me: I’m married and I have three teenagers. I’m a mechanical engineer and my wife (whose name is Catherine or Cathy!) is pharmacist, but she stays at home since we had our third child.
In France the government decided in 2013 to authorize “marriage” (I put the word in quotation marks) for homosexual people. There was no vote, no debate. My wife and I have been very shocked and disturbed. I tried to have a political commitment during 4 or 5 years, but it wasn’t going anywhere. So, I decided to teach religion to children to help them to be strong in their faith and get a critical mind so they can be confident in the Lord. Children are our future and THEY will change the society, not “aged” people like me. Maybe the children will make a better society because of the good example of the Lord. I don’t know if I’m a good catechist but I try.
I subscribed to you daily newsletter, and now I feel very close to you because your messages are so friendly. With you we feel like a member of the family.
Thank you, Kathi, for your help to make this video. For the first time but probably not the last, I made it in French and also in English. The English version of the video is dedicated to all your subscribers.
Blessings, from France.
Your Jérôme.
“O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together” (Psalm 34:3).
Studying the Song of Solomon has been one of the highlights of my life, but it’s finally come to an end (at least for now). This post will serve as the final “bookend” on my blog, but it will be the first post that comes up for anyone who scrolls down the right-hand side of Summer Setting’s home page and clicks on the “Rise Up, My Love” tab. Therefore, for anyone who would like to read the posts beginning at the beginning rather starting at the end, I wanted to let you know that you can access the entries sequentially on my home page by typing into the window box that has the word “Search” next to it in the upper right-hand area of the page. For example, if you type in: Rise Up, My Love (1) and then hit “Search,” it will bring up the first post, which was written exactly six years years ago, on October 7, 2012. Here’s the link:
Song of Solomon 8:14 “Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.” The bride desires for her husband to be like a young stag and make haste…to what location? “The mountains of spices.” This is the last picture painted for us…the last “snapshot” in the bride’s album…the last poetic rose in the bride’s bouquet…the last lilting melody in this song of all songs.
The words “mountains” and “spices” are used multiple times earlier in the Song, and these references give the clues we need to understand what the bride is saying. First, let’s consider what the spices represent. From 4:12—16 we learn that the bride is like a protected garden, designed by the master gardener, watered by the Word, filled with the fruits of the Spirit, and whose aroma wafts out like heavenly spices. In 5:1 we find the husband enjoying his garden wife and taking pleasure in the spicy fruits found in her.
What is a mountain? It is something massive, grand, impressive. Mt. Everest is so big it can reach through the clouds and kiss heaven’s feet. Mountains are spectacular: they fill people with awe and a sense of wonder. Mountains are a force to reckon with…to be conquered by or to conquer. Mountains are immovable apart from the work of God in response to faith. Mountains are majestic. Mountains should humble us and cause us to praise this one whose massive hand is so large that the whole world could fit inside, and Mt. Everest wouldn’t even look as big as a hangnail. What a mighty God we serve!!
Oh, beloved, are we mountains of spiritual delights? Massive. Immovable. Majestic. Abounding. Able to feed the soul of our mate? Notice that the bride, after a timeless length of time, still refers to her husband as a “young stag.” Dear wife, is your passion for your husband as fresh and fervent as it was at the marriage altar? In your heart, is your love still young? Does our longing for our Savior still burn as hotly as it did at first? Though we may have found our true loves (if we have indeed found both a spouse here on earth and our bridegroom in heaven), we must ever seek them still! “Let her be as the loving hind and the pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love” (Proverbs 5:19). As we close the study of this greatest of all love songs, may this picture linger like a sunset in our hearts. May we be like mountains of spices where our beloved spouse can graze with abandon and be always ravished with our love! Amen!
“This dwarfish age is not likely to esteem this book [The Song of Solomon] as it ought to be esteemed; only those who have lived near to Jesus, have drunk out of his cup, have eaten his flesh and drunk his blood, only those who know the fullness of the word ‘communion,’ can sit down to this book with delight and pleasure; and to such men these words are as wafers made with honey, manna, angels’ food: every sentence is like gold, and every word is like much fine gold.” —Joseph Iron, quoted by Spurgeon in, The Most Holy Place, p. 295.
Song of Solomon 8:14 “Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe, or to a young hart…” What are the roe and the young hart like? The NIV translates these animals as “deer and gazelle.” Earlier in this book we discussed the Middle Eastern cousins to the North American members of the deer family with which we are so familiar. What are their outstanding characteristics?
All this, and yet there is more to be learned about Christ in the bride’s simile about the deer. It is hunting season in Michigan today (or at least it was when I wrote this years ago!). There is no more prized game in this state than the wonderful taste of flash-fried, fresh venison. (No, you don’t have to simmer it for hours to make it tender; overcooking is what makes it tough in the first place.) 
One of the men in our “care group” (a group of families from our assembly who met weekly for Bible study, prayer, support, and accountability when I was writing this) shot an eleven-point buck while bow hunting. This friend is in the ministry overseeing a Christian “growth center” for young people who have finished a rehabilitation program and are now trying to find jobs and reintegrate into society, so you can bet that deer will be a great blessing to the folks struggling to make ends meet there. (By the way, I was later treated to some venison stew for my birthday…so I was one of the beneficiaries as well!) 
“Be thou like to a roe…” Picture Christ as that great eleven-point stag…whose life was forfeited so that others could be sustained. Surely the bride did not have in mind that her husband would give his life for her, but he did. Jesus fulfilled her request in a most unexpected way. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). Like the desirable “clean,” innocent deer, our Lord Jesus Christ gave up his life so that spiritually we could “take, eat; this is my body..this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:26-28). Jesus sacrificed himself so that he could impart to us his own eternal life and through a great divine mystery make us “bone of his bones and flesh of His flesh.”
Song of Solomon 8:14 “Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart…” Have you digested the past few weeks’ sampling of the wonderful names for our beloved One? There is a lifetime of food for the soul in the verses on which we just meditated. Wouldn’t those verses make a great list to commit to memory? Every year during our homeschooling years, my children and I tried to memorize a verse each day from the Bible as part of our home school program. Some times we memorized passages, or favored verses from each book, or choice verses from each chapter of a book, but more often than not it was a compilation of verses on a subject, such as the “I ams” or the “I wills” of God. One of the best concerned the names of God! 
Do you have a memory program for learning Scripture? It is a wonderful way to hide God’s Word in your heart in order to avoid sin and please him (Psalm 119:11). It was my hope that during this study we would memorize the words of the Song of Solomon without much effort simply by meditating on them day by day, but I see that—at least for me—I do not completely memorize without conscious effort and oral recitative practice. 
How about you? If you have no consistent memory program, won’t you consider beginning one, perhaps even by using the lists of verses given over the past couple of weeks as a start? There are fewer than sixty verses…hardly more than one a week. Will you try? Feel free to photocopy the pages with these verses and tape them to your mirror or keep them with your Bible so you can memorize them more easily. As we appeal to the Lord to make haste and return to us, so he appeals to us to “occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13)! I can think of no better way to be “occupied” with Scripture than to memorize it and then put it into practice. May we always be occupied with our Savior and his Word! 
Song of Solomon 8:14 “My beloved…” Finally, let’s meditate on some more names for God, this time from the New Testament, that remind us why God, in the Person of Jesus, is our beloved:
John 6:35 “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”
John 8:12 “I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
John 11:25 “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
John 15:5 “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”
Heb 12:2 “Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”
Revelation 1:18 “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.”
Revelation 22:16 “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”
Song of Solomon 8:14 “My beloved…” Last week we began meditating on some of the many names of God listed in the Bible, and for this week and next week, I’d like to continue with this project. Here is another list of names from the Old and New Testaments that describe God as our Savior, and his Messiah, who was “Immanuel,” (God with us). These verses give a little insight into why Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament:
Isaiah 53:3 “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him.”
John 1:14 “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Song of Solomon 8:14 “My beloved.” From Solomon’s song, we’ve seen many reasons why the king is our well beloved, and we’ve learned a few of his names. The bride calls him her “king…thou whom my soul loveth…my well beloved.” She likens him to a cluster of camphire and an apple tree, and she asks him to be “like a roe or a young hart.” But, throughout the Bible there are dozens of names given to our Lord, and each one expresses some aspect of his character that makes him beloved. Let’s consider a number of them.
Jesus is like a huge diamond, and each of his names is like a brilliant flash of colored light reflecting one facet of his amazing personality. Please read the following list slowly, considering these questions: What does the name mean? How does that aspect of his being impact me? Have I learned to utilize this aspect of who he is? Do I love and appreciate him for being this in my life? 
Deuteronomy 32:4 “He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.” 
Deuteronomy 32:15 “Then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.” (May we never forsake God…may he be the Rock of our salvation always!) 
Psalm 78:35 “And they remembered that God was their rock, and the high God their redeemer.” 
Psalm 118:22 “The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.” 
Isaiah 8:14 “And he shall be for a sanctuary; but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel.” 
1 Corinthians 10:4 “For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.” 
So, there are many verses about God being our Rock. He is also our Redeemer (our Lord and King, our God, our creator, the Holy One of Israel, our Savior, our Maker, our father, etc…all found in these verses):
Isaiah 49:7 “Thus saith the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One, to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant of rulers, Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship, because of the LORD that is faithful, and of the Holy One of Israel, and he shall choose thee.”
Well, that’s probably more than enough for one day’s meditation, so I’ll continue on next week! May we be amazed and blessed this week as we remember God, our Rock, our Redeemer, and so much more!
Song of Solomon 8:14 Well, last week’s meditation was quite an aside. I hope you didn’t mind. Let’s go back to our last verse and savor just two words: “My beloved.” First, Jesus is ours: He belongs to us. Second, Jesus is our beloved: He is the one with whom we are entwined forever in a love relationship. “My beloved.” He is mine. He is yours! He belongs to each of us uniquely and individually, and we all belong to him and to each other in the universe’s grandest and most glorious, mysterious corporation…a corporation which offers incredible benefits, perfect job security, dividends “above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20), and a pension plan that will provide for us through all eternity. How do you like that for a package? “Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation” (Psalm 68:19).
He is our Morning Glory…the one who satisfies us early. (As a flower lover, the idea of him being my Morning Glory is my own “pet” name with a double meaning, but isn’t it a sweet thought?) Are you feasting on the warm, fresh, inviting, living Word and being filled afresh with his glory morning by morning? The children of Israel got to the point where they complained bitterly about having to eat manna in the wilderness. “Our soul loatheth this light bread” (Numbers 21:5). They grew tired of perfection. Have you?
Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah
Summer Setting 