The Well-beloved

"Yes, He is altogether lovely." Solomon's Song 5:16.

The soul that is familiar with the Lord worships Him in the outer court of nature, wherein it admires His works, and is charmed by every thought of what He must be who made them all. When that soul enters the nearer circle of inspiration, and reads the wonderful words of God, it is still more enraptured, and his admiration is heightened. In revelation, we see the same all-glorious Lord as in creation, but the vision is more clear, and the consequent love is more intense.

The Word is an inner court to the Creation; but there is yet an innermost sanctuary, and blessed are they who enter it, and have fellowship with the Lord Himself. We come to Christ, and in coming to Him we come to God; for Jesus says, "He that has seen Me has seen the Father." When we know the Lord Jesus, we stand before the mercy-seat, where the glory of Jehovah shines forth. I like to think of the text as belonging to those who are as priests unto God, and stand in the Holy of holies, while they say,

"Yes, He is altogether lovely." His works are marvellous, His words are full of majesty, but He Himself is altogether lovely. Can we come into this inner circle? All do not enter here. Alas! many are far off from Him, and are blind to His beauties. "He was despised and rejected of men," and He is so still. They do not see God in His works, but dream that these wonders were evolved, and not created by the Great Primal Cause. As for His words, they seem to them as idle tales, or, at best, as inspired only in the same sense as the language of Shakespeare or Spenser. They see not the Lord in the stately aisles of Holy Scripture; and have no vision of Himself. May He, who opens the eyes of the blind, have pity on them! Certain others are in a somewhat happier position, for they are enquirers after Christ.

They are like the people who, in the ninth verse of the chapter, asked, "What is your Beloved more than another beloved, O you fairest among women? What is your Beloved more than another beloved, that you so charge us?" They want to know who this Jesus is. But they have not seen Him yet, and cannot join with the spouse in saying, "He is altogether lovely." If we enter this sacred inner circle, we must become witnesses, as she does who speaks of Christ, "Yes, He is altogether lovely." She knows what He is, for she has seen Him. The verses which precede the text are a description of every feature of the heavenly Bridegroom; all His members are there set forth with richness of Oriental imagery. The spouse speaks what she knows. Have we, also, seen the Lord? Are we His familiar acquaintances? If so, may the Lord help us to understand our text!

If we are to know the full joy of the text, we must come to our Lord as His intimates. He permits us this high honor, since, in this ordinance, He makes us His table-companions. He says, "Henceforth I call you not servants; but I have called you friends." He calls upon us to eat bread with Him; yes, to partake of Himself, by eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Oh, that we may pass beyond the outward signs into the closest intimacy with Himself! Perhaps, when you are at home, you will examine the spouse's description of her Lord. It is a wonderful piece of tapestry. She has wrought into its warp and woof all things charming, sweet, and precious. In Him she sees all lovely colors,—"My Beloved is white and ruddy." In comparison with Him all others fail, for He is "chief among ten thousand" chieftains. She cannot think of Him as comparable to anything less valuable than "fine gold." She sees, soaring in the air, birds of diverse wing; and these must aid her, whether it be the raven or the dove. The rivers of waters, and the beds of spices and myrrh-dropping lilies, must come into the picture, with sweet flowers and goodly cedars.

All kinds of treasured things are in Him; for He is like to gold rings set with the beryl, and bright ivory overlaid with sapphires, and pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold. She labors to describe His beauty and His excellency, and strains all comparisons to their utmost use, and somewhat more; and yet she is conscious of failure, and therefore sums up all with the pithy sentence, "Yes, He is altogether lovely." If the Holy Spirit will help me, I should like to lift the veil, that we may, in sacred contemplation, look on our Beloved.

I. We would do so, first, WITH REVERENT EMOTIONS. In the words before us, "Yes, He is altogether lovely," two emotions are displayed, namely, admiration and affection.

It is admiration which speaks of Him as "altogether lovely" or beautiful. This admiration rises to the highest degree. The spouse would sincerely show that her Beloved is more than any other beloved; therefore she cries, "He is altogether lovely." Surely no one else has reached that point. Many are lovely, but no one except Jesus is "altogether lovely." We see something that is lovely in one, and another point is lovely in another; but all loveliness meets in Him. Our soul knows nothing which can rival Him: He is the gathering up of all sorts of loveliness to make up one perfect loveliness. He is the climax of beauty; the crown of glory; the uttermost of excellence.

Our admiration of Him, also, is unrestrained. The spouse dared to say, even in the presence of the daughters of Jerusalem, who were somewhat envious, "Yes, He is altogether lovely."

They knew not, as yet, His perfections; they even asked, "What is your Beloved more than another beloved?" But she was not to be blinded by their lack of sympathy, neither did she withhold her testimony from fear of their criticism. To her, He was "altogether lovely", and she could say no less. Our admiration of Christ is such that we would tell the kings of the earth that they have no majesty in His presence; and tell the wise men that He alone is wisdom; and tell the great and

mighty that He is the blessed and only Potentate, King of kings, and Lord of lords.

Our admiration of our Lord is inexpressible. We can never tell all we know of our Lord; yet all our knowledge is little. All that we know is, that His love passes knowledge, that His excellence baffles understanding, that His glory is unutterable. We can embrace Him by our love, but we can scarcely touch Him with our intellect, He is so high, so glorious. As to describing Him, we cry, with Mr. Berridge,

"Then my tongue would sincerely express All His love and loveliness;
But I lisp, and falter forth Broken words, not half His worth.
"Vexed, I try and try again, Still my efforts all are vain:
Living tongues are dumb at best,
We must die to speak of Christ."

"He is altogether lovely." Do we not feel an inexpressible admiration for Him? There is none like You, O Son of God! Still, our paramount emotion is not admiration, but affection. "He is altogether" -not beautiful, nor admirable, -but "lovely." All His beauties are loving beauties towards us, and beauties which draw our hearts towards Him in

humble love. He charms us, not by a cold loveliness, but by a living loveliness, which wins our hearts. His is an approachable beauty, which not only overpowers us with its glory, but holds us captive by its charms. We love Him: we cannot do otherwise, for "He is altogether lovely." He has within Himself and unquenchable flame of love, which sets our soul on fire. He is all love, and all the love in the world is less than His. Put together all the loves of husband wives, parents, children, brothers, sisters, and they only make a

drop compared with His great depths of love, -unexplored and unexplorable. This love of His has a wonderful power to beget love in unlovely hearts, and to nourish it into a mighty force. It is a torrent which sweeps all before it when its founts break forth within the soul. It is a Gulf Stream in which all icebergs melt. When our heart is full of love to Jesus, His loveliness becomes the passion of the soul, and sin and self are swept away. May we feel it now!

There He stands: we know Him by the thorn-crown, and the wounds, and the visage more marred than that of any man! He suffered all this for us. O Son of man! O Son of God! With the spouse, we feel, in the inmost depths of our soul, that You are "altogether lovely."

II. Now would I lift the veil a second time, with deep solemnity, not so much to suggest emotions as to secure your intelligent assurance of the fact that "He is altogether lovely." We say this WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY. The spouse places a "Yes" before her enthusiastic declaration, because she is sure of it. She sees her Beloved, and sees Him to be altogether lovely. This is no fiction, no dream, no freak of imagination, no outburst of partiality. The highest love to Christ does not make us speak more than the truth; we are as reasonable when we are filled with love to Him as ever we were in our lives; no, never are we more reasonable than when we are carried clean away by a clear perception of His superlative excellence.

Let us meditate upon the proof of our assertion. "He is altogether lovely" in His PERSON. He is God. The glory of Godhead I must leave in lowly silence. Yet our Jesus is also man, more emphatically man than any one here present this afternoon, for we are English, American, French, German, Dutch, Russian; but Christ is man, the second Adam, the Head of the race: as truly as He is very God of very God, so is He man, of the substance of His mother. What a marvellous union!

The miracle of miracles! In his incomparable personality He is altogether lovely; for in Him we see how God comes down to man in condescension, and how man goes up to God in close relationship.

There is no other such as He, in all respects, even in heaven itself: in His personality He must ever stand alone, in the eyes of both God and man, "altogether lovely." As for His CHARACTER, time would fail us to enter upon that vast subject; but the more we know of the character of our Lord, and the more we grow like Him, the more lovely will it appear to us. In all aspects, it is lovely; in all its minutiae and details, it is perfect; and as a whole, it is perfection's model. Take any one action of His, look into its mode, its spirit, its motive, and all else that can be revealed by a microscopic examination, and it is "altogether lovely." Consider his LIFE, as a whole, in reference to God, to man, to His friends, to His foes, to those around Him, and to the ages yet to be, and you shall find it absolutely perfect.

More than that: there is such a thing as a cold perfection, with which one can find no fault, and yet it commands no love; but in Christ, our Well-beloved, every part of His character attracts. To a true heart, the life of Christ is as much an object of love as of reverence: "He is altogether lovely." We must love that which we see in Him: admiration is not the word. When cold critics commend Him, their praise is half an insult: what do these frozen hearts know of our Beloved? As for a word against Him, it wounds us to the soul. Even an omission of His praise is a torture to us. If we hear a sermon which has no Christ in it, we weary of it. If we read a book that contains a slighting syllable of Him, we abhor it. He, Himself, has become everything to us now, and only in the atmosphere of fervent love to Him can we feel at home.

Passing from His character to His SACRIFICE; there especially "He is altogether lovely." You may have read "Rutherford's Letters"; I hope you have. How wondrously he writes, when he describes his Lord in garments red from His sweat of blood, and with hands bejewelled with His wounds! When we view His body taken down from the cross, all pale and deathly, and wrapped in the garments of the grave, we see a strange beauty in Him. He is to us never more lovely than when we read in our Beloved's white and red that His Sacrifice is accomplished, and He has been obedient unto death for us. In Him, as the sacrifice once offered, we see our pardon, our life, our heaven, our all. So lovely is Christ in His sacrifice, that He is forever most pleasing to the great Judge of all, yes, so lovely to His Father, that He makes us also lovely to God the Father, and we are "accepted in the Beloved." His sacrifice has such merit and beauty in the sight of heaven, that in Him God is well pleased, and guilty men become in Him pleasant unto the Lord.

Is not His sacrifice most sweet to us? Here our guilty conscience finds peace; here we see ourselves made lovely in His loveliness. We cannot stand at Calvary, and see the Saviour die, and hear Him cry, "It is finished," without feeling that "He is altogether lovely." Forgive me that I speak so coolly! I dare not enter fully into a theme which would pull up the sluices of my heart. Remember what He was when He rose from the grave on the third day. Oh, to have seen Him in the freshness of His resurrection beauty! And what will He be in His glory, when He comes again the second time, and all His holy angels with Him, when He shall sit upon the throne of His glory, and heaven and earth shall flee away before His face? To His people He will then be "altogether lovely." Angels will adore Him, saints made perfect will fall on their faces before Him; and we ourselves shall feel that, at last, our heaven is complete. We shall see Him, and being like Him, we shall be satisfied.

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