‏ Song of Solomon 1:7-8

Where Do You Pasture the Flock?

Now the bride addresses the groom. She turns to him after her own failure in her work. This is what the Lord wants us to do when we have failed. Then we shouldn’t give up in self-pity, but go to Him. She turns to the groom as someone whom she knows and deeply loves. The appeal of love is greater than the dejection caused by failure. Our failure can never be greater than the love of Christ. We should always bear this in mind.

Peter also experienced this. The Lord Jesus speaks of his failure in advance, but He says that He prayed for him that his faith might not fail (Lk 22:31-32). Whoever loves the Lord wholeheartedly is saddened by his own failures, but is also convinced of the love of the Lord Who never writes off a failing disciple, but always gives him a fresh chance.

The bride’s failure brings her back to the one she loves so much to be in his company again. She realizes that she needs food and rest. It is exhausting to do work in which the Lord Jesus is not involved. When we experience that, we feel hunger and long for rest. This is the order: first food and then rest (cf. Eze 34:15). A hungry sheep will not rest until it has found something to satisfy its hunger.

Only the Lord Jesus can give us food that satisfies our spiritual hunger and gives us the strength to live in fellowship with Him and for Him. That food is in fact He Himself. We feed on Him when we read God’s Word, because that speaks all about Him (Jn 5:39). Then we also get rest for our souls. It is important to start the day with food from the Word of God. When it is noon then, when the sun is at its hottest, i.e. when the circumstances of life become difficult (Mt 13:6; 21), we will be able to continue our way in the power of this food (1Kgs 19:5-8).

Just a practical application. If we have lunch break at work around noon, what do we do? Are there possibilities to read something from the Word of God? Or are we constantly busy? I know of a representative who was always busy. He had to meet his target number of sales. He was busy with that. When he had visited some customers and it was time to have something to eat, he drove to a quiet place to eat his bread. As he ate his bread, he thought about how the conversations with the customers had gone that morning and how he would handle the following conversations instead of unwinding by reading something from the Word of God. It will not apply to everyone, not even to every break, but are we at the very least trying, if the possibilities are there, to use a break in this way?

To the bride the important point is to be at the place where He pastures the flock and where He makes it lie down at noon. She seeks the personal relationship with him. This is an important example for us. Nothing is more important than a personal and living relationship with the Lord Jesus. We belong to His flock, we are together with other believers who also follow Him, but we do not go up into the mass. If we are looking for the flock, it is to be with Him. We do not follow a group and do not derive our identity from it, but we follow Him with Whom each of us has an own relationship. The good Shepherd knows every sheep of His flock “by name” (Jn 10:3).

The bride doesn’t want to get lost in the mass and walk around there like one who veils herself. She should take that place if she were to join ‘the flocks of your companions’, which are flocks other than his. With this she says that her personal relationship with him cannot run through others. We see an illustration of this in professing Christianity. Therein are companies of people who follow human leaders. These are leaders who are working for the Lord, but the sheep still gather around themselves. They take the place of ‘mediator’ between the people of God and God Himself. Such leaders speak of ‘my church’, whereas only the Lord Jesus can say so.

We can only grow spiritually if we have a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. If we listen to God’s Word, what is it saying to us? Is it important to us who says it and how it is said? Or are we really open to what God has to say to us? The norm of our judgment must be whether the things that are said strengthen our relationship with the Lord Jesus. The preacher disappears, but Christ remains.

We see this with the eunuch in Acts 8. The evangelist Philip taught him the Word of God and baptized him. Then Philip disappears. We do not read that the eunuch was sadly left behind because his teacher was gone now, but the contrary: he went on his way rejoicing (Acts 8:26-39). Every preacher who has been called by the Lord to serve with God’s Word, does not want anything else than that the one he has served with God’s Word, goes his way with joy in fellowship with the Lord. We should not be content with men, whoever he is, but only with the Lord. That is what we can learn from the bride here.

Go Forth on the Trail of the Flock

The groom immediately answers the bride’s question, where he pastures the flock. His first words are: “If you yourself do not know.” Therein lies a soft reproach. It sounds like she could have known. If this gentle reproach could possibly be misunderstood by the bride and taken as rejection, his following words make it clear that there is no such thing. He calls her the “most beautiful among women”. That means that he tells her how special she is to him. Although he has to make her a gentle reproach, he appreciates that she comes to him with her question.

The Lord Jesus also sometimes has to reproach us gently for things we ask for, but for which we should have known the answer (cf. Jn 14:8-9; cf. Heb 5:11-14). At the same time, He appreciates that we come to Him with our questions and He answers them. He does not reject us.

We can apply this to the situation in which our children come to us with questions, including questions to which they should already know the answer. How do we react? Do we then react, for example, as follows: ‘Why do you ask that, silly? I told you that already, didn’t I?’ A child may have forgotten something. If that is the case, we should not outcry against the child.

We must not forget that we ourselves are also constantly educated by the Lord. We are all at the school of life, both parents and children. The same can be said of young people in the church. How do we as elderly people deal with them? Do we have patience to explain certain things more often, as often as they need it?

The bride is told to follow the trail of the flock to see where he pastures the flock and makes it lay down. The word “follow” is literally “go out”. So she gets the assignment to go out, to go outside to follow the trail. It means she was in a place she had to leave, where she didn’t belong. There is distance between her and the groom. To get to him she must first leave the area where she is. She moved in a different world from the one in which he pastured the flock. When she leaves, she can follow others who belong to him.

The same applies to us. If, spiritually, we are in a place where we don’t belong, where we miss the Lord Jesus, where He can’t be, then we might ask Him where He is. Then He will tell us to leave that area. This can relate to the comfort with which we have surrounded ourselves. It can also mean that we have to let go of human traditions, because they stifle our faith life. It also means that we must leave a community that has become a human system, which means that not God’s Word is decisive, but what people consider to be good (Heb 13:13).

Then He says we have to follow the sheep’s trails. By ‘the sheep’ believers are meant (Jn 10:27; Jn 21:17). The sheep in question are sheep that are in the truth about the church and live according to it. Many believers today are sheep, but they have no ‘flock consciousness’. They have no idea that they belong to the one flock of the one Shepherd. This is shown by the fact that they have no awareness of the church of Christ to which all believers belong. They believe that they should be a member of this or that church or group and they have no regard for the fact that there is for God only “one flock”, to which all true believers belong, with “one Shepherd”, the Lord Jesus (Jn 10:16).

The bride can follow the groom’s sheep by following the “trails” they left behind. The ‘trails’ are the foot prints of those who have gone out before. ‘Trails’ also speak of movement and progress. Anyone looking for this should follow the same path and take the same actions. So it is not about taking a new road, but about following ancient trails or paths (Jer 6:16) that have been there for a long time. They are there “from the beginning” (1Jn 1:1). We can think back to the truths of the church and its gathering, because these words “were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 1:17; cf. 2Pet 3:2).

It is about words that “were spoken beforehand”. This refers to the words of Scripture. We have everything we need in the Bible. There is no need to invent new things. When we have questions about coming together with the Lord, it is not about inventing something new. This does not mean that we could not experience the coming together in any other way. It is good to think about how our enthusiasm for the Lord can increase and how it can be expressed. Whoever desires to be with the Lord Jesus will make sure that being together around Him does not become a routine, but he will want to honor Him from the bottom of his heart time and again.

Sometimes it is predictable how a meeting, a prayer or a speech will go. Then the question is justified whether the Spirit can really work and make hearts fervent for Christ. If these predictable situations occur frequently, it will be good to pray the Lord together that He points out what we need to change to really experience His presence again. After all, we want to be with Him, don’t we?

To be truly with Him means to be impressed by Who He is. When something is read from the Word of God, we will be aware that God speaks. We will respond, either loud or in our hearts: ‘God speaks to me!’ We will be open to what He has to say. The Word will be alive and powerful for us and work within us. In this way there is a living relationship with the Lord.

We all react differently to the Word. Older people do this differently from young people. Everyone does it in their own way. There is no particular language, a jargon that one must first know to thank the Lord or to ask Him anything. Any believer may speak to the Lord in the same way as he speaks to others. The intonation may also remain the same. We don’t have to change our voice suddenly when we read something from God’s Word or pray out loud.

Every believer, old or young, may be himself with the Lord. We are all unique to Him and to each other. Every child the Lord has given us in our families and every member of the church has his own development and must be given room for it. It is about a new enthusiasm in life with the Lord. This life develops on trails that have been there for a long time. The trails are fixed, because the Word is fixed.

The groom then gives the bride a task: she has to pasture her goats “near the shepherds’ homes”. She herself is a sheep that is put by the groom on the way of the other sheep, a way that leads to him. Here she is told that she has to do her work as a shepherdess of goats near the homes of his shepherds.

We can apply these houses to the local churches. There are the shepherds of the Lord Jesus who do their work as His under-shepherds (1Pet 5:1-4). All those who are looking for a new experience of their dealings with the Lord Jesus can learn of these shepherds how to live this out in the local church. It is about dealing with each other, accepting each other and learning from each other. The shepherds’ homes are places where we are stimulated in our relationship with the Lord Jesus, where it is further developed or revived.

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