When you read about this blazing fire that cannot be put out, you might think that this is about a strong sexual attraction, and that one therefor should always give in to those feelings. But that is not the point here. The point is that the love for your own husband or wife is so strong that it rejects any interference from a third party. True love between husband and wife is more than sexual pleasure. It is also something entirely different from a sexual relationship for which you have to pay. It is entirely different from seeking some sexual satisfaction with someone after a party. Real love cannot be bought. Real love is not a consumer product.
True love does not disappear when the other person is no longer capable of physical intercourse because of an illness or other difficulty. The fact that you cannot buy true love is very clear in the last sentence of this verse: If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly despised.
This is the way of the Lord. This is life as the Creator of heaven and earth intended it to be. Where love is lived like that, love is strong. Such love can even fight against death. Then that love is precisely the means of God to give life to new people again and again (becoming pregnant with new life), and so ensuring that the world never becomes a dead world. Where love is experienced in this way, we see in faith that this love has no other origin than the Lord alone. That love can never exist without Christ. Without Christ, love can never be as God intended it to be. You see this at the end of Song of Solomon 8:6 where we read, “Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord.”
Our marriage is only and truly good when God’s love controls our lives. You can see this very clearly when Paul speaks about love in 1 Corinthians 13:1–13. We read there, among other things, the following: If I would give up all I have [e.g., for the sustenance of the poor], and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing
(1 Corinthians 13:3).
That is how it is in the life of husband and wife as well. When the love for husband or wife does not come from the love for Christ, it ultimately benefits you nothing. Then God’s judgment and death will remain the prospect of your life. But where love is carried by the love of Christ, there is forgiveness. There is a beautiful perspective. Many waters cannot quench that love and neither can floods drown it.
For true love is a blazing fire from the Lord. It is a flame that the Holy Spirit wants to fan again and again.
7 Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly despised.