I love discovering a new inspiring Christian voice, someone I hadn't heard of before. I just discovered Charles Alexander when I was looking for some good preaching on the Song of Songs at Sermon Audio. Vernon McGee is good but I think Alexander is better. Nobody yet is completely convincing on all parts of this subject though. Many parts of the Song get a new interpretation from each individual preacher and I'm not in a position to know who is right. All I know is I'm attracted to those who bring out the most glorious characteristics of the Beloved and I'm looking for something to increase my love of God far more than I'm looking for correct theology.
Besides sermons at Sermon Audio, I found this page of Alexander's thoughts on the Song of Songs - http: www.allbygrace.com/alexsong04803.html - which has many inspiring passages. "Name Above All Names" is the theme. I just ran across one statement that particularly thrills me though it's not directly related to what I was just saying:
We repudiate with disgust the modern attempt to force upon the Christian public the false name YAHWEH in place of Jehovah. No such name exists. It is without meaning, invented largely when theology had begun to be perverted during the course of the nineteenth century.
YES YES YES YES YES! Thank You Lord. I don't recall ever before seeing anyone repudiate that abomination of a name for God, but it's grated on me for years as so many products of the "higher criticism" do (along with so much of the work of Westcott and Hort in foisting an abomination of a Greek manuscript and a repugnant English translation on the Church). I've mentioned my abhorrence of this name many times in my blogs though I really only have my own visceral repugnance for it to go by. At least now I find that repugnance shared by someone whose perspective is appealing to me in general.
There are so many things in the Biblical record that I think most of us grasp only superficially without making an effort to understand them better. That's true of me anyway and now that I know it I'm hoping to get more deeply into these things. Alexander for instance discusses the incarnation in far more depth than I've encountered before, and of course it must be a very complex topic that could take us deeply into mysteries of God we've hardly ever touched on if we spend time thinking it through. We believe it of course, we know it's true, but how many of us have spent any time contemplating its mysteriousness? And that's just one of hundreds of topics we could and should think about more deeply. Jesus prayed that we would "know" Him after all, and that takes learning more about Him, spending more time with Him etc..
And I just want to say one more time that the Song of Songs must surely be understood in the spiritual sense and that those who interpret it as about human married love are missing the whole point. For one thimg it just seems so unlikely that God would include a whole book on that subject when there are so many believers who are single and will never marry. Addressing specific instructions to special groups (husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, parents, children, slaves, slave owners, pastors, elders, women etc.) makes sense, but not writing a whole book about married love to congregations in which there are many unmarried people. The love between Christ and His Church, which scripture calls His Bride after all, includes all believers. And that's not even to address the point that the ancient Jews called the book the Holy of Holies. Married love is certainly a great blessing given by God, but calling it the Holy of Holies, no. But the mystery of the union of Christ with His Bride deserves such a designation, a union of soul with soul or spirit with spirit, not a carnal union. And only the carnally minded are going to think of this as something wispy or unreal, whereas the spiritual has a reality far more solid than the physical.
