What beauty lies in the intentions of the mind of the person who truly loves! Here in Song of Songs, the language is that of love-sick, passionate longing. It is as if he sees her as so elevated in beauty and purity that to touch her would be to damage that purity. Yet at the same time, he truly desires her more than anything. For her, she fears that her ways may have offended him and that for him to return to her would be a wonderful, unearned blessing. It is the very thing that seems unreachable in her that she is willing to give the most and it is the thing that she fears losing in him that he desires to give the most. Each sees something truly desirable in the other, and it is that very desirability that the other aches to give the most freely. The most wonderful thing for her is to give him herself in her pure, undefiled state as the richest gift he could ever imagine. She wants him to be overwhelmed by the experience of enjoying that which he longs for most. He wants her to know that he would sacrifice anything to hold her up high, to protect her, provide for her, cherish her, prise her above all things. As she longs for him to overlook her personal oddities and to receive her as his own, it is exactly that that he desires to do with fiery zeal (See the strong language of love in 8:5-7).

In each of the people in this relationship, what they see in the other is the beauty of flawlessness. There is the constant danger of overstating the intentions of the text, yet at the same time, lets avoid the error of understating it.

The psalmist wrote in Psalm 119:96, “To all perfection I see a limit, but your commands are boundless.” The first statement must ring true in every human mind. The man who sees beauty without limit in the woman he loves is guilty of worshipping her in an inappropriate way. He is attributing to her what can only be attributed to God. His yearnings for female beauty and desirability consume him and rule out any other kind of possibility for beauty. Men so taken up by the beauty of women fail to see God as desirable because they are worshipping the sample beauties God has made rather than the limitless beauty of God in whose mind beauty exists. Beauty is an attribute of God.

In the same way, women whose only desire it is to receive the protection, provision, cherishing, prising of a man, are similarly desiring inappropriately. If your vision is so coloured by your desire to be married and live under a husband who sacrifices himself completely for you, that you have not been consumed by the beauty of God, you are worshipping a facet of God’s design, not God Himself.