Song of Solomon 7:13 The Beloved Fruit Smell And Layed Up Fruit

This is the Truth Network. Hidden Treasures of the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's. Wow, it's kind of bittersweet that we end the seventh chapter of the Song of Solomon today in the thirteenth verse, which is the Mem verse. And you may know the Mem is the middle of the Hebrew alphabet and often has to do with the Messiah, you know, that has to do with water. And in so many things that have to do with the kingdom. Start with malak or king are all that have to do with that. And I think you'll see that in this verse, the thirteenth verse in the seventh chapter.

I'll go ahead and read it. It says, the mandrakes give a smell and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruit, new and old, which I have laid up for thee. Oh, my beloved.

And so how amazingly cool. Lots of things to think about in this verse. The word mandrakes, of course, you might remember that Leah and Rachel had quite the argument over the mandrakes in the Book of Genesis. And they were considered to be an aphrodisiac or, you know, that which would make people fruitful.

And that's the reason that Rachel wanted them from from Leah. And, of course, fruitfulness is all that this has to do with. And the word in Hebrew is dalad vav dalad, which is the word that the beloved is referred to throughout the Song of Solomon.

It's also David's name. You can hear the dalad and then the vav in the middle and then another dalad. And that idea of the beloved is all, you know, connected to this idea of mandrakes. The interesting thing about the word mandrakes is it's a dalad vav dalad and then a yud, which would be light coming down from this love and this beloved that would essentially be fruitful, right? And that's the idea of mandrakes in so many different ways.

And then just another little side note that I think is really cool. The Jews don't translate this word mandrakes. If you look at their Bibles, they translate the word as baskets, because it's the same word that's used in Jeremiah 24 one when it says, The Lord showed me, and behold, two baskets of figs were set before me, the temple of the Lord. In other words, in one basket is verse two, one basket had good figs, and then the first figs were ripe and the other basket had naughty figs that would not be eaten.

They were so bad. Which is fascinating when you think about that what this talks about is old and new fruit as that might be connected to the 24th chapter of Jeremiah as described here. And so they translate this as basket of figs rather than mandrakes, which is an interesting thing, because that is exactly the same word that is there in Jeremiah that is holding these figs. And then this idea of new and old, and of course Rashi goes into this being connected to this thought of what happened to the bad Jews versus the good Jews with Nebuchadnezzar. But again, Matthew Henry takes such a different view on this and talks about how we lay up the good fruits, new and old. As we are discipling folks, we have new disciples hopefully that are coming all the time that we get a chance to share Jesus with on a regular basis and see them grow. And so over the years, you end up with having older disciples that you've been with for years, and then you've got new ones that are coming in all the time. And the Lord has blessed me to see that constantly. Even today, I was at the retirement home in Mocksville, and there were some of those residents that I've been sharing with for years and years and years, but we had a brand new one with bright eyes that I could see her wonder at the things that we were talking about and seeing Jesus in new and fresh ways. And so it's cool that we get to store up older fruit that's at our gates there for our beloved, and we get to store up older fruit.

But as Matthew Henry put it, and I think he's absolutely beautifully beautiful. In other words, without Jesus, we don't have any fruit. And the whole deal here is, as we talked about yesterday, that at the beginning of this Song of Solomon, she said she hadn't kept her vineyard, right? And she asked how she could get to the place where Jesus was and follow the tracks of the sheep idea. And you can see as a result of him coming into her life and the communion that they have here and him taking hold of her thorns, then she is phenomenally fruitful. But not after several struggles that we talked about in the fifth chapter and all these things that led to her being more fruitful because our father is the gardener, right?

And sometimes we get pruned, which I think is to an extent what Rashi's talking about too in that new and old. So you put this all together, and the idea is we live such blessed lives. And as a matter of fact, I can't help but think about as I was getting ready to leave the devotionals, one of the guys sat down that was in a wheelchair actually said, Robbie, I got to tell you how much that you thrilled me today with what we were talking about. And I got, you know, that my mother was here in 1998, and I knew that you were here, and did you ever meet her? And I had been talking about how in Mark 10-30, which is actually my birthday, 10-30, in that verse it says you're going to get a hundred mothers. And I had talked about in today's devotional how I have these hundred mothers because I've been doing this devotion for a long time.

And it fits with the idea of fruit over all these years, right? And so he went on to describe his mother, and I realized it was his mother that had had a stroke. And she said these words to me that I've never forgotten because when I saw her, her face had dropped on one side, and I started to weep. And she said, Robbie, don't cry for me. She said, I'm in the place of life where I'm getting closer and closer to heaven.

It's part of what God has for me, and don't be sad because it's going to be beautiful. I've never forgot, you know, that woman's faith, it was great faith, right, something to marvel at, that there she was with half of her face paralyzed. She had such a beautiful smile, too. And I told Tim, the man that was in the wheelchair, I said, your mother had the most beautiful smile. And he said, how blessed are you that you got a chance to share that with his mother?

So there was some old fruit that I got a chance to see today. And of course, Tim told me that he was blessed to share those things, and we get to share memories. And it was all because Jesus was there then, he was there in his mother, and Jesus is there now and is there in Tim. And so I think about, you know, really, how beautiful is it that because of our relationship with Jesus, we get to take part in all this fruit that is stored up in the gates.

And hopefully, you know, we get a chance to see this in so many different ways. And the idea of Mandrakes, again, that dalet vav dalet, it has to do with serving continually our love, right? And that the last verse in the dalet section of the 119 Psalms just speaks to the dalet in my mind in so many ways, which has to do with Mandrakes again, is that idea, I will run in the path of your commandments when you enlarge my heart. In other words, David was a man after God's own heart. His name was dalet vav dalet. And so I'm guessing he knew the dalet well. He talked about the miracle verse, that the idea is with our whole heart, we can run after him with exactly this idea of how we can serve him with our whole heart and to run in the path of that, which is just pure delight, which is the beloved in so many different ways. And Mandrakes, you know, their smell is telling us what? There's a lot of fruit to be had. Thanks for listening.