It has been made clear earlier in this book that what matters is that the love in your marriage for each other remains. Love is a task for which the Spirit wants to give us strength again and again.
It is clear that love does not exist by itself. It is not a feeling that never goes away once it is there. The Lord wants the special bond of love to remain in our marriage for life. This love is a love that is focused on the other. Even so that the husband in this verse can say: You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride; you have captivated my heart with one glance from your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace.
Notice the words you have captivated my heart
here: his wife has caused him to surrender himself completely to her. He no longer lives for himself, but for her. He cannot resist her. She has enraptured him. You may wonder if that is a good thing. The question may arise from the fact that we live in a sinful reality. It may be such that the love for husband or wife, for son or daughter, so engages the person that it is everything to him or her. Nothing and no one on earth exists than this one person. He is completely absorbed in her. When the other person says that something must be done in a certain way, then the spouse always does it that way. Love for that other person has then become the highest good in your life. If the other person asks you to do things that are contrary to the will of the Lord, you do them. The other person has become everything to you. That person has become an idol that has taken the place of Christ in your life. It may never get to this in a marriage. Above our marriage—where we may be totally enraptured in love toward each other—is always the love of and for God, always Christ as our King.
Yet, in a marriage where the love of God is present, the one partner may excite the other. As long as we do this together from that love for Christ and his Word as the highest and most important thing in our lives.
Such is the situation between husband and wife in this book, for the husband speaks here of his bride as his sister. We must remember that the word sister
here has the deep connotation of a sister in the faith, a sister in the Lord. Just as it is also described in 1 Corinthians 7:39. The term sister
has the deeper meaning of being children of God together. A bride who is your sister in the Lord. Here we see how important it is that you seek a husband or wife who is first and foremost your brother or sister in Christ. We may not separate the love between a boy and a girl, between a husband and wife, from loving the Lord together. If that shared love for Christ, according to his Word, is missing, it will erode the foundation of a true and lasting love for one another. Then we are not building our love and our marriage on the only proper foundation. Then we are engaged in what the Lord Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount characterized as building on sand instead of on the solid rock.
When you are moving toward a marriage together on the sure foundation, it is wonderful that one partner is all excited about the other. That is because then you are together full of delight in Christ as your Redeemer and King. Based on this union with Christ you then seek to help the other to live for Christ. You can truly entrust yourself to the other because the other does not want to take you away from Christ and from obedience to him, but rather desires to encourage you in this. Then the love of the other partner never becomes a threat to serving the Lord.
9 You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride; you have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace.