Song of the Bride, Parts 1-34 - Feasting at the King's Table

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All anxious care will disturb Him and attract your attention so that your eyes will wander from Him. All selfseeking and self-assertion will arouse and grieve Him. All complainings, questionings, doubts and fears will disturb His rest. Sometimes your devotions are distracted by the cares of life; and sometimes your devotions themselves, because they are full of fleshly energy and fervor, will waken your beloved; and He will withdraw leaving you dry and barren. Let Him move when He pleases. Keep in touch with Him; not with anxious strain and effort, but in rest and quiet, in submission and mediation. Listen for His Voice, and worship Him with your whole being. CANTICLE TWO APPROACH OF THE BRIDEGROOM 2:8 “The voice of my Beloved! behold, He cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.” How sweetly He comes to us when, for any cause, He has hidden His face. Though there are many obstacles, which appear to us as mountains, He treads them all down and leaps from one obstacle to another. He comes skipping upon the hills as the roe or the hind. All inaccessible heights, all bottomless chasms are nothing to him and he draws nearer until He stands behind our wall. 2:9 “My beloved is like a roe or a young hart; behold He standeth behind our wall; He looketh in at the windows; He glanceth through the lattice.” The first wall behind which Jesus stood was “the middle wall of partition” which He broke down.(Ephesians 2:12-18). Jesus stood upon the wall of our sins and when we believed upon Him and humbled our hearts, this wall of sin and unbelief was torn down. After we are saved, we may build a wall through unbelief, carelessness or slackness, but it is always our wall, one of our own building. I have found that we may build a wall when we have certain expectations of the Lord and He does not fulfill them just the way we thought He should. We can be offended with Him and a wall of distrust starts to go up. We need to let Him be God, and order our life as He only knows how to do! He may hide Himself for a time in order to quicken our faith, to make us want Him rather than His blessings, but when there is a wall, we are the builder of it. He has never left us or forsaken us, as He promised. “He looketh in at the windows; He glanceth in at the lattice.” First we see the Lord at a distance, then behind the wall and now in front of the window and glancing through the lattice. The little squares of glass in a lattice window break the vision of all without, so that nothing is clearly discerned. We see Him through the lattice of His Word and when we come to His table and partake of the emblems of His broken body and shed blood. Let us behold him more clearly through His acts, His Word, His ordinances and through the windows of prayer and communion. Like Moses, let us learn God’s ways. We are told that Israel knew the Lord’s acts, but Moses knew His ways! PART FIVE Newsletter No. 178 – November 2001 Song of Solomon 2:10 “My Beloved spake, and said unto me, rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” The Lord is calling His Bride to shake off every touch of slumber, to put away all indolence and all vain confidence in her past experiences. She may have, in the past, had great prophetic words in which she is trusting, but the call of the Bridegroom is for her to take up her cross daily and follow on to know Him. It is when we first hear His Voice that we must respond by rising up and coming away to meet Him where He abides in Spirit. God does not stand still. He is ever moving on. If we delay, His Voice will grow fainter so that when we do arise to go to Him, we may not find Him right away, for He has moved on. Every drawing upon our heart is the voice of Jesus calling us to “rise up and come away.” It is easier to settle down and rest upon past experiences or words we have had, than to run harder, that we may enter into a higher realm. There is a time for abiding and there is a time for arising and we need to be sensitive and obedient to obey the Voice of the Lord in each time. Remember when it was time for the children of Israel to enter the Promised Land? They were fearful at the negative report of the spies and chose to believe their evil report than to believe SONG OF THE BRIDE, Parts 1–34 [Elaine Cook] ~ BIBLE STUDY 10
the Voice of the Lord who promised to give them the victory. They refused to “arise and come away” from their unbelief and from their fear, so they turned on Moses and purposed to return to Egypt. When God spoke to Moses, telling them what the result of their rebellion would be, they had a change of mind and decided to go up the very next day. They went not up in obedience, but in presumption, and the Lord was not with them. They were defeated by their enemies. They had not heeded the Lord’s call to “arise and come away” so it was evident that they needed a further time of processing in the wilderness, which was what the Lord gave them—forty years of it! 2:11,12 “For lo, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing (of birds) is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.” There are several levels at which this verse may be understood. One is that it is a picture of the soul who is dead in unbelief, whose life is bleak and cold like midwinter. It is the rain that comes when winter begins to break up that prepares the ground for the seed. It is conviction and repentance that prepare a man to receive Jesus Christ, but they do not save a man—they just break up the soil. When the breaking-up comes, the rays of the sun begin to fall upon the winter of death and unbelief, the rains and mists of doubts and fears begin to roll away and the warmth of the “Sun of righteousness” brings light and warmth to the soul. On another level, it is the “winter” of the harsh dealings of the wilderness that are sent “to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments, or no.” (Deut. 8:2) Sometimes we feel that this “winter” will never cease, but when the work has been done, we will feel the balmy spring breezes blowing upon us with the promise of spring—with summer (the highest time of light, warmth, and blessing) not far behind. Then shall we discover that we are no longer barren and unfruitful. Flowers of His beauty are appearing in our “earth.” And, the flowers foretell of fruit that shall come forth. The warmth of grace woos the buds to burst forth into flowers, which give place to the tiny fruit, and the immature fruit goes on unto perfection. “The time of the singing of birds” is historically a figure of Christ’s coming that heralded the springing into life of that which was dead through the fall of man. It is also symbolic of the music that should fill the heart of every believer, for the Lord has put a new song in our mouths. This is also translated “The time of the pruning of the vines is come.” This is also a time of pruning so that when the Master comes, He shall find fruit and not leaves only. The Husbandman never prunes a dead branch. Heb. 12:8 says that if we are without chastening, we are not sons, but bastards. The vine is pruned that the branches may bear more fruit, for herein is our Father glorified, that we bear much fruit. The word “of birds” has been inserted by the translators, so it should read, “the time of the singing is come.” Oh yes, when we see His nature beginning to show forth within us and see that obedience to Him has been inworked in us during the cold hard winter, we have reason to sing. Our trials and suffering have not been in vain, but have accomplished His purposes and a good work has been wrought in us. Perhaps we are not even aware of it, for the pain of our processing may still be upon us, but others will see that “we have been with Jesus” and the smell of His anointing oils are upon us. It is time to sing! “The voice of the turtledove” is an emblem of peace, and we know that John the Baptist came as a fore-runner of the One who is our Peace, even the Heavenly Solomon, the Prince of Peace. The turtledove is also an emblem of love, and of the Holy Spirit, and he is the first of the birds to return in the springtime as John the Baptist was the first to proclaim the approach of the Spring of grace, the Summer of God’s presence, the dispensation of the grace of God. In Jeremiah, God uses the turtledove to reprove His people because the dove knows the time of His coming, but God’s people know not the law of Jehovah. The dove is also an emblem of repentance and of the Holy Spirit. John was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb, and came preaching repentance. The sound of the dove went forth in the land at the time our SONG OF THE BRIDE, Parts 1–34 [Elaine Cook] ~ BIBLE STUDY 11
Page 1 and 2: SONG OF THE BRIDE BY: ELAINE COOK P
Page 3 and 4: 1:4 "Draw me and we will run after
Page 5 and 6: of the vineyard that she neglects h
Page 7 and 8: of the myrrh is perceptible to othe
Page 9: trees but they do not bear fruit. T
Page 13 and 14: who do not accept the Atonement and
Page 15 and 16: This shining way is not an easy one
Page 17 and 18: With the coming of the reality of t
Page 19 and 20: gates of the city where the citizen
Page 21 and 22: PART TWELVE Newsletter No. 185 - Ju
Page 23 and 24: PART FOURTEEN Newsletter No. 187 -
Page 25 and 26: As a cedar must be cut down before
Page 27 and 28: For some years, the Lord has been s
Page 29 and 30: Song of Solomon 4:2, “Thy teeth a
Page 31 and 32: The last time I said that, I asked
Page 33 and 34: eastplate. Only when the bride’s
Page 35 and 36: and frankincense were but small dro
Page 37 and 38: This chain about her neck was not o
Page 39 and 40: glorified.” All her beauty of spi
Page 41 and 42: acknowledges the right of God’s S
Page 43 and 44: In the early part of the Song, the
Page 45 and 46: He had continued knocking at the do
Page 47: of the nails in His hands and feet,

Song of the Bride, Parts 1-34 - Feasting at the King's Table

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