For almost a year and a half now I have been adapting the Old Testament book The Song of Solomon to English poetic meter, and I have now completed it as a book named Meeting Jesus in the Garden: Walking with God in The Song of Solomon. Solomon’s Song depicts the beauty of an ancient Israelite marriage between a woman (The Shulamite) and her groom (King Solomon) in all its God-given glory. It describes what it means to know another and to be known.
In December 2022 I began writing what came to be my first draft; however, I was not pleased with the effort and so I came to write a second version that reads faithfully to the original biblical text and is easier to understand. I wrote this poem because The Song is rarely preached on and many Christians neglect to see what it has to say about what it means to walk closely with God.
I have now arrived at a place where I am comfortable publishing this feat of strength. Turning The Song into an English poem has not been without its challenges and I spent many hours in the local Botanic Gardens, on my living room floor, and at the library penning it. I often thought of giving up, although I am very thankful that I pushed on and reached the ‘end of the race’, so to speak, because after reading its final draft I can see how magnificent its doctrines are.
I got to the end because I kept in mind why I was writing it in the first place. Here are my reasons for doing so:
- I want people to enjoy God’s presence. God gives many gifts but the greatest of these is His own presence (Song of Solomon 2:3; Luke 10:38-42). People want God’s presents but not His presence, a state of affairs that is all back-to-front and even idolatrous. My book explores how restorative it is to fearlessly ‘enjoy God’s presence’ with full disclosure and freedom;
- To recapture an understanding and appreciation of heterosexual marriage between one man and one woman, and what being a man means in relation to being a woman. These are things that our modern world has completely lost sight of with the emergence of homosexuality, fake ‘marriage’ between members of the same-sex, and transgenderism. The results of this are frightening (Romans 1:18-32);
- To illuminate how sex and marriage are good gifts from God that He created, in spite of the perverse ways that sinners exploit such gifts through pornography, fornication, rape, adultery, sexual abuse, promiscuity, and divorce;
- To help readers grasp how Jesus is, even more so than King Solomon, a faithful Husband and lover to His bride, the Church. (When I say lover, I do not mean someone who is having an illicit sexual tryst but one who deeply and sacrificially loves the object of His desire).
Now I am in the process of completing final edits and checks before I have it published. When that happens I will let my readers know.
God bless, Nahum.
Liquørice Fjørds 