Song of Songs Verse 13a - Is Jesus Your Wallet of Tears?

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I just wanna explore both of them as deeply as we can. And so it has everything to do in my opinion with this idea of statutes and us learning how to keep statutes as these are God's love songs. And clearly there's so much love in this verse.

It's unbelievable. So to read verse 13 in English, and we're gonna just deal with the first part of it today, is a bundle of myrrh is my well beloved unto me. Again, we'll do part B next time, but I've entitled this one a wallet full of tears. And the reason I say that is the word bundle here that is used in this verse is the same word of the money bag that was in the mouth of the sacks. And clearly it's used as a money bag throughout the scriptures.

But in this case, although it's a money bag, what it's full of is myrrh. And this is the deep, deep, deep part of this particular section of the verse, because the word myrrh is going to be used eight times in the Song of Solomon. And the word myrrh, as you know, is very significant when you think about Christ. And it's significant throughout the Bible, but I don't think it's any accident at all. There are two words in this verse that are mentioned eight times. We're gonna cover the next one on the next episode, but this word myrrh is very significant when it comes to the idea of Christ. And it's certainly significant throughout the Bible. And of course here, this person is saying that basically a wallet full of myrrh is my well beloved. And again, using that word that we talked about, the dalet vav dalet beloved, that word which is the same as David's name.

And we're gonna talk more about that throughout this because it's repeated over 30 times in the Song of Solomon. But right now I just wanna focus on myrrh for a minute because in Hebrew, the word is absolutely spectacular. And the reason it is is because it starts with a mem, which is the letter that means water quite often. It also means Torah, but it certainly is the Messiah.

And you can hear Messiah in that mem sound. And since it is water, it has a lot to do with the fact that it's myrrh. The second letter in the word myrrh is arash, which is like the head of or the start of something. And so the idea of, this is the start of a river or the start of any body of water is a drip.

An idea of tears, they are drips and they start the river of water that run down our eyes. You might remember in the pay section of the 119 Psalm. But here, the idea of this drip has to do very much with tears because they may know that myrrh is always connected to mourning as it was what they use to embalm people in Bible times.

And that wonderful odor that would come from this myrrh. Well, the other thing that's just really spectacular from my standpoint and you don't wanna miss and it's so connected to what we just talked about in verse 12 is that the name Miriam, or would be translated Mary in Greek starts, it is basically the same concept that mem-resh, which also means bitter. And you might have heard that Mary means bitter or Miriam means bitter. And this is so significant when you think about who Miriam was in the Bible and where you see her and what she's remembered for, has to do with drawing Moses out of the river, right? So she's connected to water there.

And then she's connected to what would be called Miriam's well. And the idea is that she would sing to the rock and out would come these gushes of living water, which of course started with from, you know, what you can gather from this, a bitterness, in other words, tears, the bitterness of slavery, the bitterness of thirst leads to these tears that again, as really a beautiful thing that leads to living water. And so, you know, if you can't help and notice, or I've noticed that most people when they come to Christ, if you listen to their story, and I've had a chance to interview, you know, maybe thousands at this point in my life of people hearing their story, how many times they'll talk about, they just weeped and weeped and weeped.

And you might remember John Bunyan in the Pilgrim's Progress, that when a Christian actually, you know, came to Christ and got this burden lifted off, what happened? It was just tons and tons and tons of weeping. And don't miss, I mean, don't miss the weeping that was involved in the anointing of Christ, because that's what we talked about in verse 12, that this spikenard was going to be used. Well, remember what twice in the Bible, both Mary's, Mary of Bethany, and what most people believe would be Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, they both wet Jesus's feet with their tears, you know, they both essentially, you know, just like they were anointing him with their nard, you know, well, obviously, or maybe not obviously, our tears are very, very, very precious to Christ. And those tears apparently have a connection to myrrh, as here's why, that when you go to harvest myrrh, the way that they make it, and the way they made it back in the old days, and I've got a link to this information in the show notes, is they would slice cuts into myrrh trees, and then the trees weep tears, and they look just like tears going down the sides of the tree. Those who have been out west might have seen pine trees, they weep what looks like tears that come down off of the side of those trees as well. Well, they simply take those, you know, and extract the oil in order to do it, use it today, but in those days, they would just take those tears that were on the side of the tree, and they would burn them over coals in order to get this scent of myrrh. And again, it was very, very precious, because, you know, it was hard to come by, and those days there weren't just a whole lot of myrrh trees apparently just around.

And so when you found one, people would cut them. In other words, you can see that the tree would literally be weeping and mourning, and then, you know, clearly this is harvested and very precious to God that he later would use it in the anointing oil that you see when they anointed the high priest, or in the case of King David, when he was anointed. You know, this is what would be used, is this myrrh, and very much connected to weeping, and very much connected to this whole idea of mourning. And so when you look at this verse, you're gonna see the first part of it is definitely going to be blessed are those who mourn, and the second part will, before they will be comforted.

And we're gonna get to that in part B, but right now we're just talking about blessed are those who mourn. And part of your mourning, I don't know if you've ever thought about those tears, and that sense of how God collects them in a bottle. Here, your own tears, because what she said was, what the beloved said was, you know, my beloved is to me like a bundle or a sachet of myrrh, of tears. And so, you know, our own tears are actually very precious, and I don't know if you're like me, but since you came to Christ, a lot of us, our hearts are a lot more sensitive, and we tend to cry a lot more than we used to. And so my question for you today is have you thought about how precious your tears are?

Just last night, my wife and I watched the movie for the second time, it was on Pure Flix, called War Room. And oh my goodness, the weeping, as I couldn't help but think about that as I was thinking about this verse this morning, the weeping that's in that movie that you'll see the stars do, and the weeping usually at the point in time of surrender. And what they're usually mourning is their own, you know, sin or their own distance from God and their own ability not to be able to make things work. And then, you know, the need for Christ is so clear as we mourn, right? And the beauty of what the Beloved says here is not only are our tears precious to God, but they're precious to us because we know that they are tears of joy that Christ brings in his own way.

As you see that movie, if you've seen War Room, and you see what God does, it brings tears. It brings tears of joy, and again, rivers of living water, which, you know, this has to do, again, it's interesting that the I in Hebrew sometimes is the same spelling as the word well. And the idea is that tears are actually got enzymes and things in them.

It's got, you know, proteins that are, you know, chemicals that make you feel better. And so it's interesting, it's more than interesting to me that all these things are connected through the Bible that have to do with Miriam's well, this bitterness that led to a tear that started a river. Just think of the letter mem, I mean, think of the word mer, that mem, that little bitty tear that starts the river of life, because the river of life, you know, clearly comes through God's garden, which we're gonna talk a lot about in this, and don't miss again, that it's gonna be mentioned mer eight times in this verse, and if you don't remember, the letter het is the eighth letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It is also the miracle letter in our view that is our union with God. And we're gonna get a lot more into the letter het in the next episode. Thanks for listening.