You are Beautiful: a Study of the Song of Solomon for Two

I put this together many years ago as a single Bible study for just my wife and I after we’d been married for more than twenty years. It contains the entire Song of Solomon. It’s not that long a book. You can easily read this out loud in about thirty minutes, certainly under an hour. My part of it is not a paraphrase and certainly not a translation. Any emphasis of scripture by underlining, boldface, or exclamation points is mine but does not change the words. Any words of mine are in italics and should be taken for nothing more than just that, the expression of what I felt and thought upon reading what Solomon had to say. This is not intended to add or take away anything from inspired scripture. I almost didn’t write it because I feel deeply that is the last thing of which the world needs any more. The word of God does not need my help.

What provoked me to go ahead was a need on my part to express something very important to the life partner the Lord had sent my way. Not surprisingly, I found I needed His word to show me what to say and to hold it all together for me.

After many wonderful years of marriage, raising a family, pursuing a career and so on, I found myself annoyed at what seemed a failure on my part to convince my wife of what to me was a simple and obvious fact. She took it as a compliment, but nothing more than polite words, when I told her she was beautiful. I meant it as an obvious truth, an unarguable reality. We had a disconnect somewhere.

It didn’t take much thought, or TV or magazine covers at the store, to realize this was a very common situation. It seemed to me that, no matter what they said, a large number of women had been lied to for so long in words and pictures that even someone as lovely and intelligent as my wife had a hard time believing down deep how truly beautiful she was in my sight.

It is one thing to say to oneself, as many do, that what the world pushes on us is shallow and so forth. It is quite another to truly get past it and find the humbling joy that comes from seeing more clearly how beautiful you really are to the one your Lord has given you to love and be loved by. If you can begin to get an idea of the reality of truly being beautiful to that person, then read some of the first chapter of 1st John, and perhaps you can start to see how beautiful you are in the sight of the God who loves you and whom you love in return.

My saying, “You’re beautiful” was not enough. I needed help. What I really needed was authority. Somebody who knew what He was talking about. So did the scriptures back me up?

Long story short, Song of Solomon, and how!

No body-shaming nonsense here. Far far from it. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. The Song has much more to tell us, but this meditation is limited mostly to what I happened to think I saw in it about pure, unadulterated, physical love and sex between a man and wife. It especially speaks to the fact of how truly beautiful she is to him who loves her. It also indicates that those about them should see this as well and rejoice along with the beloved and her lover in the love and pleasure they find in one another.

I called this a Bible study, but it’s probably not like any you’ve done before. Here’s how we did it. Remember it’s for husband and wife only! We both got naked, sat facing one another, and I read out loud straight through the Song and the thoughts I had put down in their entirety. Depending on your wife, it might be good for her to read her parts. When the reading was done, what would normally be the discussion following was more in the nature of a very lively re-enactment of all we could find ourselves capable at that point! Read and heed, indeed!!

So for all these words above, the doing itself is easy. We’re fortunate to live on a few heavily wooded acres out in the country, so we still get to put quite a bit of it into practice out under the trees, the sun, or the moon and stars, from time to time.

Really though depending on your situation, even if there are parts that are too difficult or impossible to actually carry out, discussing how it would be if you just could with the one God gave you can lead to some awfully nice times itself.

Some last things: If anything I’ve said (that’s the italicized stuff) seems to be too little, too much, or makes no sense then the fault is likely mine. Feel free to add, subtract, and reword the italicized parts as the Song speaks to you. Go ahead and make it your meditation, not just mine, if that suits you.

This is not just a mental exercise so here’s a quote from Leonardo daVinci (who may have been channeling Yoda):
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; We must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
In any event, let the word of God be done.

So, if you’ve a mind to, you and your honey—just the two of you—get naked, sit so you can gaze into one another’s eyes when you want, read through what’s below, and see what happens.