Service Title: Song Of Solomon: The Royal Wedding | Pastor Jonathan Suggs
Date: 2026.02.22
You’ve been to weddings where everything was perfect. The anticipation was electric, the ceremony was sacred and weighty, the reception was an extravagant celebration. Maybe you even cried during the vows. But when it was all over, it was just a really fun night. Something was still missing.
What is it about a wedding that gives us something to walk away with, whether we’re single or married? What sustains us the next morning, or ten years down the road, when we wake up face to face with our spouse and realize they might not be exactly the person we thought we were marrying?
Song of Solomon 3:11 gives us a surprising answer: “Go out, O daughters of Zion, and look upon King Solomon with the crown with which his mother crowned him on the day of his wedding, on the day of the gladness of his heart.”
Four Ingredients of a Healthy Marriage
Throughout this passage, we see a progression. The bride has been drawing our attention to something in the distance. First it’s Solomon’s entourage, then his men, then his carriage, and now she points our eyes directly to King Solomon himself. She’s been counseling the daughters of Jerusalem from early in chapter one, and here she is saying to them: take a good, long look at this King. This is the kind of man you want. This is the kind of marriage you want. Don’t settle for anything less.
Three elements have already been established. Anticipation, because marriage is worth waiting for and being excited about. Gravity, because marriage carries a holy seriousness. And extravagance, because marriage is worth celebrating with everything you have.
But the last thing she wants them to see about Solomon is his joy. His gladness. And this is the fourth ingredient, the one that is the beginning of every healthy marriage.
Why Joy and Marriage Are Inseparable
This is the only verse in all of Song of Solomon that contains the words “wedding” or “gladness” or “joy,” and they are placed right together. “On the day of his wedding, on the day of the gladness of his heart.” In Hebrew parallelism, these two lines are equated with one another. The day of his wedding is the day of the gladness of his heart.
This tells us something profound: the telos, the goal of romance, is marriage. It’s not sex. It’s not dating. It’s not the thrill and passion of young love. It’s the covenant.
But that raises a question. How do you actually have that kind of joy?
The Fastest Way to Kill Joy in Marriage
Maybe you’re someone with no prospects on the horizon, wondering if you need to get married to find joy. Maybe you’re someone who has messed up, living with a boyfriend or girlfriend, trying to cultivate the intimacy of marriage outside of it. Maybe you’ve been deeply hurt by someone you were in love with. Can you have that kind of joy?
Let me flip the question. Do you know the best way to make sure you don’t have joy, whether single or married? Make marriage everything. Make it bear the weight of all your hopes and dreams and expectations. Make marriage your salvation. That is the surest way to guarantee you won’t actually be able to enjoy it.
All of us approach marriage, or the idea of marriage, with a kind of story in mind. It might be a story of romance: “If I can just get married, I’ll finally have the romance or the intimacy I’ve been looking for.” It might be a story of satisfaction: “I’ll finally be satisfied because I’ll have the company of another person.” Maybe it’s a story of security: “I feel so insecure in life that I’ll finally be secure if someone takes care of me.” Or maybe it’s a story of significance: “I can finally be somebody because someone else wants to spend the rest of their life with me.”
What Happens When the Story Breaks Down
When marriage becomes your salvation, you will face stumbling blocks every single day. What happens when your wife or husband lies to you for the first time? What happens when you find out the intimacy is not as satisfying as you imagined? What happens when you’re ten years in with a house full of kids and you realize this person doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore?
If marriage is your salvation, one of three things will happen. You will despair because your spouse could not bear the weight of your hopes, dreams, and expectations. You will crush your spouse by continually demanding they meet those impossible standards. Or you will cheat, trying to find another person who can satisfy the deepest desires of your heart.
Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the famous book Eat, Pray, Love, put it well: “In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
She’s spot on. Her advice, however, is terrible. She abandoned her husband and went searching for happiness across the globe, eventually landing in an exotic relationship with a man from Bali who was apparently her soulmate. But she has had several more soulmates since then, so that can’t be the answer. That can’t be the joy or the gladness of heart that Song of Solomon is describing.
Where Does Lasting Joy Come From?
So where do we find it? This couple would counsel us by looking us in the eye and saying: you need a different story. You need a story that you’re not at the center of. And that has been the secret to their happy marriage the whole time.
In the background, this couple has actually been reenacting an entirely different story. Something coming up out of the wilderness, led by a pillar or column of smoke. Men carrying on their shoulders poles that held a tent-like structure filled with precious wood and metals, burning fragrance as they come up out of the south into the land.
It sounds like the Exodus. It sounds like when God rescued His people out of Egypt, led them through the wilderness with a cloud of smoke, gave them His tabernacle and the ark of the covenant, and brought them into the Promised Land. That is exactly what this couple is doing. They are acting out the drama of their national identity, their national redemption.
Why Would They Go Through All This Trouble?
Because they want everyone who is watching to know that their marriage and their wedding is not ultimately about them. And that is the best news in the entire world.
Every single wedding you have ever been to is like this. It’s a reenactment. It’s a drama of another story, a cosmic story of redemption, a story of God sending His Son to rescue His Bride, to redeem her, to purify her, and then to present her to Himself.
What Every Wedding Is Really About
Revelation 19:6-9 says, “Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give Him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His Bride has made herself ready. It was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure,’ for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.'”
This is what every single marriage is pointing to. When you see the bride walking down the aisle, she represents the Church being presented pure and blameless before her Spouse, the Groom, Jesus Christ. And she wears beautiful white not because of her own purity, but because of the purity of Christ that He has given her.
This is why, when you sit at a wedding, you feel like you’re on the edge of something transcendent. It feels bigger than just a Saturday afternoon ceremony. There is something beautiful and otherworldly happening, and that’s because every single wedding is a window. It’s a window to a world that we are all invited to: the world of the marriage supper of the Lamb. Our hearts lean toward that. They ache for it.
Unless you see that, you won’t know the kind of joy described on this wedding day. But if you do see it, if every time you sit in a wedding and watch the bride come down the aisle, whether it’s you or someone else, if every time you look up and see the groom and wish it were you or it is you, and you have the eyes to see that something transcendent is happening here, then you understand. It’s a reenactment of the Church being presented to her beloved Spouse, Jesus Christ. And that is where the gladness of heart comes from.
Full sermon available on YouTube.
