Sex is a powerful drug – if we might be permitted to call it that. It is exciting, relaxing, comforting, and addictive; all the things we customarily associate with drug use.
That fact also makes it dangerous.
Though sexual addiction has yet to be recognized as a real psychological disorder, no one plagued with it can deny its awful and destructive impact on the afflicted’s life. And the writer of the Song of Solomon, though praising sexuality throughout, is also responsible enough to offer caution. Note 8:6 – 7 – “[L]ove is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned.”
Yes, I know that the word used is “love” and not “sex,” but in this book, they go together hand in hand. Sex, as God intended it, belongs in a loving relationship, and a loving relationship is not contemplated (in this book) without sex. Humans must be careful with sex, for God holds us responsible. Misuse of it can hurt and destroy. That is why the woman in this poem urges the daughters of Jerusalem “not to arouse love before its time” (2:7; 3:5; 8:4) and to beware of those things that destroy loves garden (like the little foxes – 2:16).
“Sex crazed” is an apt description of our world, for having lost all restraint and casting aside all God’s sexual boundaries, we have ruined what God intended to be a beautiful garden of love and turned it into a prison for the insane.