SOS 2:1-2 THE BRIDE, HIS INHERITANCE

Chapter 2:1-2

“I am the rose of sharon, the lily of the valleys.”

“Like a lily among thorns, so is my darling among the maidens.”

The bride is starting to see her significance to her bridegroom. Not only does he love her, not only did he call her the most beautiful of all when she came to him with her shame and brokenness, not only does he enjoy being with her, but she is THE rose. She is THE prized gift of the Father, cultivated and given to the Son to captivate his senses and fulfill his heart. The Father cultivated a bride for his Son, a rose like no other, and she is this rose. She is beginning to see herself this way as she spends time with him. She knows that she is his inheritance.

She is the lily of the valleys. Lilies tend to speak of purity due to their white color. She is the only pure flower in a fallen world. (the valley) The bridegroom even goes as far as to call her the lily among thorns compared to all the other “maidens.”

We get confused about this because it sounds like a contradiction to the truth that “God is no respecter of persons,” meaning that he doesn’t play favorites between one person and another. Really, this is speaking of who we are in Christ being valued above mankind’s old identity in Adam. It isn’t that God chooses some people to be his bride and others to be his enemies forever. (I’d hate to be one of those who randomly got a short straw on that draw, what a sick joke that would be) In Adam all die, but in Christ all are made alive according to Romans 5. All of mankind descended from Adam and we’ve gotten our genetics and our nature passed down from him, we’ve had a corporate identity in him as fallen ones. The “Adam’s family” is corrupted in the sense of missing an essential connection with God as a result of the fall, therefore bent on relying on other sources in God’s place to fill that void, and walking out a vicious cycle of dysfunction, self-damage, and further depravity as a compounding result. We all come from that, but Christ came to redeem humanity, and he finished his work. We have another identity. We are new creations in him, totally pure and totally redeemed. We still see remnants of the Adams family traits in our lives, but our Bridegroom sees past that and sees who we are in him. His work in us is more powerful than the effects of the fall and is transforming our old nature from the inside out as we believe and allow him to do it. His reality is making that lesser reality obsolete and irrelevant and he knows it. To him, we are truly the lilies among the thorns of unredeemed humanity.

"I am the rose of sharon (the unique companion created and cultivated for oneness with Christ, to captivate his senses and fulfill his heart)" "Like a lily among thorns, so is my darling among the maidens."