Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 14 · January 14
Strong as Death
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.”
“O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee.” George Matheson wrote that at Innellan on the Scottish coast in 1882, on the evening of his sister's wedding, and by his own account it came in minutes, out of severe distress. He was blind. Whatever he rested on that night, the first thing he found to say was that it would not let him go.
The Song's last word on love is spoken by a woman asking to be held onto: set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm. A seal was a signet, the mark that made a document yours, worn at the chest on a cord or on the hand, and the last thing a person parted with. Jeremiah has God warn a king that even were he the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence, and the threat lands because everybody knew you do not take the seal off.
Her reasons are not gentle. Love is strong as death. Jealousy is cruel as the grave. The coals thereof are coals of fire. This is a love poem between two people, printed in Scripture without apology, and the fire in it is real fire.
Bless God for making it that way, because he did not have to. What he did was put the heaviest force in human experience, the one that ranks with death, into the hands of two people to give each other. And he uses that vocabulary of himself without embarrassment: the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it, and a man offering all he owns for it has the offer treated with contempt. Praise him for a world with that in it.
You can be sealed the way she asks, on a heart and on an arm, by somebody who does not take it off. The flood, when it comes, will find it cannot put the fire out. What only gets given is not for sale. And the love you were given, real fire and never enough on its own, is doing its work when it sends you toward the one it was modelled on.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 14 is The Path of Life (Psalm 16:11).