The Covenantal Garden of Delights Text: Song of Solomon 4:12-15
Introduction: The World's Counterfeit Garden
We live in an age that is utterly confused about love, sex, and marriage. Our culture has taken the glorious, God-given reality of marital intimacy and has dragged it through every conceivable gutter. They have made it common, cheap, transactional, and ultimately, meaningless. They have ripped the garden out of its protective walls, torn down the fences, and invited every beast of the field to trample it. The result is not the promised liberation of Woodstock, but a wasteland of heartbreak, disease, abortion, and confusion. They promised a garden of free love, and they delivered a desert of loneliness.
The world preaches a gospel of self-fulfillment through sexual expression, but it is a false gospel with a counterfeit garden. It is a garden without a covenant, which is to say, it is no garden at all. It is a wilderness painted green. It is a mirage. The modern view of sex is that it is a recreational activity between consenting adults, a biological urge, a consumer good. But the Bible teaches that it is something far more profound. It is a covenantal act. It is a one-flesh union that pictures the ultimate reality of Christ and His Church. And because it is so glorious, it must be fiercely protected.
The Song of Solomon is God's inspired poetry celebrating this very thing. It is an erotic, passionate, and unblushing celebration of marital love. And for centuries, many in the church have been embarrassed by it, trying to allegorize it away into something more "spiritual." But this is a Gnostic error. God created the material world, including our bodies, and called it good. Marital love is not a concession to our fallen nature; it is a gift from the hand of a good Creator, intended to be a signpost pointing to the gospel. This book is in the canon to teach us about the goodness of this gift within the protective fortress of the marriage covenant.
In our text today, Solomon, the husband, lavishes praise upon his bride, the Shulamite. He uses a series of powerful, interlocking metaphors to describe her beauty, her purity, and the exclusive delight he finds in her. He is not describing a casual girlfriend or a temporary partner. He is describing his wife. And in his description, we find a robust theology of covenantal marriage that stands in stark opposition to the folly of our age.
The Text
A garden locked is my sister, my bride, A rock garden locked, a spring sealed up.
Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates With choice fruits, henna with nard plants,
Nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, With all the trees of frankincense, Myrrh and aloes, along with all the finest spices.
You are a garden spring, A well of fresh water, And streams flowing from Lebanon.
(Song of Solomon 4:12-15 LSB)
The Fortress of Fidelity (v. 12)
Solomon begins with a declaration of his bride's exclusive devotion to him.
"A garden locked is my sister, my bride, A rock garden locked, a spring sealed up." (Song of Solomon 4:12)
Notice first that he calls her his "sister, my bride." This is not incestuous language. In the ancient Near East, this was a term of endearment, signifying the deepest possible friendship and partnership. He is saying, "You are not just my lover; you are my closest companion, my confidant, my peer." This establishes the marriage on a foundation of friendship and equality of personhood before God, even within a covenantal structure of headship and submission.
But the central metaphor here is one of enclosure and protection. She is a "garden locked," a "spring sealed up." This is a direct and beautiful statement of her virginity before marriage and her continued fidelity within it. A garden in the ancient world was a place of immense value, a cultivated oasis of life and beauty in an otherwise harsh landscape. But it was vulnerable. It had to be protected by walls and a locked gate. A spring of fresh water was likewise a source of life, precious and essential. To seal it was to protect it from contamination and to reserve it for the exclusive use of its owner.
This is the biblical picture of sexuality. It is a glorious garden, a life-giving spring, but it is not a public park. It is a private reserve. The lock on the gate and the seal on the spring is the covenant of marriage. Within that covenant, there is freedom, delight, and exploration. Outside of it, there is only theft, vandalism, and pollution. Our culture has spent the last several decades systematically dismantling these walls. They have preached that the lock is oppression and the seal is repression. But in doing so, they have not created a paradise; they have invited the wild boars of the forest to come in and devour everything (Psalm 80:13).
The exclusivity of the marriage bed is not a restriction of freedom; it is the very thing that makes true freedom possible. It is the trellis upon which the vine of intimacy can grow. Without the covenantal commitment, "till death do us part," the love expressed is always conditional, always temporary, always holding something back. The locked gate says, "I am all yours, and you are all mine, forever." This is the security that allows for complete vulnerability and, therefore, complete delight.
The Fruitful Paradise (v. 13-14)
Having established the security of the garden, Solomon now describes the wonders within it.
"Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates With choice fruits, henna with nard plants, Nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, With all the trees of frankincense, Myrrh and aloes, along with all the finest spices." (Song of Solomon 4:13-14)
This is not a barren, empty garden. It is an explosion of life, color, and fragrance. It is a paradise, an Eden. He moves from the external defenses to the internal delights. The language is rich with sensory detail. He sees an orchard, laden with "choice fruits." Pomegranates, in the ancient world, were symbols of love, fertility, and abundance. He smells the exotic and costly spices: henna, nard, saffron, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, aloes. These were not common plants; they were the stuff of kings, of worship, of immense value.
What is he saying to his bride? He is saying that his experience of her in their marital intimacy is not mundane or utilitarian. It is a multi-sensory feast. It is precious, rare, and overwhelmingly beautiful. He is not just fulfilling a duty; he is reveling in a world of delights that is reserved for him alone. This is sanctified hedonism. God is not a cosmic killjoy. He invented pleasure, and the marriage bed is one of the chief places where He commands us to enjoy it.
There is a polemic here against two errors. The first is the worldly error of promiscuity, which cheapens the gift. The world thinks that by multiplying partners, it multiplies pleasure. But it is like a man who, instead of cultivating one magnificent garden, tramples through a hundred vacant lots, picking weeds. The second error is the false piety of asceticism, which views physical pleasure with suspicion, as if it were somehow unspiritual. But Solomon, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells us that the covenantal garden is meant to be a place of exotic, fragrant, and intoxicating joy. The frankincense and myrrh were used in temple worship, linking this marital delight to something holy and set apart for God.
The Life-Giving Source (v. 15)
Finally, Solomon returns to the imagery of water, but with a significant development.
"You are a garden spring, A well of fresh water, And streams flowing from Lebanon." (Song of Solomon 4:15)
In verse 12, she was a "spring sealed up," emphasizing her purity and exclusivity. Now, she is a "garden spring," a "well of fresh water." The seal has been opened by her husband within the covenant. The spring is no longer just potential; it is actualized. It is flowing, and it is the very source of life for the garden itself. He is saying that his bride is not a passive recipient of his love, but an active, life-giving source of refreshment and joy to him.
The love in a Christian marriage is not a one-way street. The husband initiates and gives, and the wife receives that gift and glorifies it, returning it to him multiplied. She is not a puddle; she is a well. Her response, her love, her respect, her delight in him becomes a source of profound strength and refreshment to him. This is the glory of complementarity.
And the source of this water is not stagnant. It is "streams flowing from Lebanon." The mountains of Lebanon were famous for their snow-capped peaks, which would melt and send down pure, cold, life-giving streams to the valleys below. This is a picture of abundance and constant renewal. Their love is not a finite resource that gets used up. It is constantly being replenished from a transcendent source. For us, as Christians, we know that source is God Himself. A marriage that is not constantly refreshed by the streams of living water that flow from the throne of God will eventually become a stagnant pool. But a marriage centered on Christ finds that its capacity for love and delight is ever-flowing, ever-new.
Christ and His Garden, the Church
Now, we must not miss the ultimate reality that this beautiful poetry points to. The Apostle Paul tells us that marriage is a mystery that ultimately refers to Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32). This entire song, while being about a real man and a real woman, is also a picture of the divine romance between the heavenly Bridegroom and His bride.
The Church is Christ's locked garden. We are set apart for Him, purchased by His blood, and sealed by His Holy Spirit. We are His exclusive possession, and He will share us with no other. The world did not choose us, and we are not for the world. The gate is locked by the covenant of grace.
And within this garden, the Church, Christ does not find a barren wasteland. He finds an orchard that He Himself has planted. Each believer is a "shoot," and through the fruit of the Spirit, we produce pomegranates, choice fruits. Our worship, our obedience, our love for one another, these are the fragrant spices, the nard and saffron and cinnamon, that are a pleasing aroma to our King. He delights in His people. He rejoices over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17).
And the Church, in turn, is a source of refreshment in the world, not from herself, but because she is a conduit of the "streams flowing from Lebanon." The Church is the well of fresh water in a thirsty land, offering the gospel of grace to all who would come and drink freely. We are the channel through which the living water of the Holy Spirit flows out to a dying world. Christ pours His life into us, and we, in turn, become a spring of life for others, all to His glory.
Therefore, let us learn two things. First, for those who are married, cultivate your garden. Husbands, praise your wives with this kind of lavish, poetic delight. See her as your exclusive, protected, glorious paradise. Wives, be that locked garden for your husband, a well of fresh water that refreshes his soul. Protect the covenant. Nurture the fruit. Expel the weeds of bitterness and the pests of worldly compromise.
And for all of us, married and single, let us rejoice that we are part of Christ's garden. He is our true Solomon, our heavenly Bridegroom. He has locked the gate behind us, not to imprison us, but to protect us. He delights in the fruit that His grace produces in us. And He has made us a channel of His living water. Let us therefore live as those who belong exclusively to Him, a fragrant offering, a fruitful orchard, a fountain of life in a desert world, all for the praise of His glorious grace.