Old/New Testament
4 King Solomon: “How beautiful you are, my love, how beautiful! Your eyes are those of doves. Your hair falls across your face like flocks of goats that frisk across the slopes of Gilead. 2 Your teeth are white as sheep’s wool, newly shorn and washed; perfectly matched, without one missing. 3 Your lips are like a thread of scarlet—and how beautiful your mouth. Your cheeks are matched loveliness[a] behind your locks. 4 Your neck is stately[b] as the tower of David, jeweled with a thousand heroes’ shields. 5 Your breasts are like twin fawns of a gazelle, feeding among the lilies. 6 Until the morning dawns and the shadows flee away, I will go to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense. 7 You are so beautiful, my love, in every part of you.
8 “Come with me from Lebanon, my bride. We will look down from the summit of the mountain, from the top of Mount Hermon,[c] where the lions have their dens and panthers prowl. 9 You have ravished my heart, my lovely one, my bride; I am overcome by one glance of your eyes, by a single bead of your necklace. 10 How sweet is your love, my darling, my bride. How much better it is than mere wine. The perfume of your love is more fragrant than all the richest spices. 11 Your lips, my dear, are made of honey. Yes, honey and cream are under your tongue, and the scent of your garments is like the scent of the mountains and cedars of Lebanon.
12 “My darling bride is like a private garden, a spring that no one else can have, a fountain of my own. 13-14 You are like a lovely orchard bearing precious fruit,[d] with the rarest of perfumes; nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, and perfume from every other incense tree, as well as myrrh and aloes, and every other lovely spice. 15 You are a garden fountain, a well of living water, refreshing as the streams from the Lebanon mountains.”
The Girl: 16 “Come, north wind, awaken; come, south wind, blow upon my garden and waft its lovely perfume to my beloved. Let him come into his garden and eat its choicest fruits.”
5 King Solomon: “I am here in my garden, my darling, my bride! I gather my myrrh with my spices and eat my honeycomb with my honey. I drink my wine with my milk.”
The Young Women of Jerusalem: “Oh, lover and beloved, eat and drink! Yes, drink deeply!”
The Girl: 2 “One night as I was sleeping, my heart awakened in a dream. I heard the voice of my beloved; he was knocking at my bedroom door. ‘Open to me, my darling, my lover, my lovely dove,’ he said, ‘for I have been out in the night and am covered with dew.’
3 “But I said, ‘I have disrobed. Shall I get dressed again? I have washed my feet, and should I get them soiled?’
4 “My beloved tried to unlatch the door, and my heart was thrilled within me. 5 I jumped up to open it, and my hands dripped with perfume, my fingers with lovely myrrh as I pulled back the bolt. 6 I opened to my beloved, but he was gone. My heart stopped. I searched for him but couldn’t find him anywhere. I called to him, but there was no reply. 7 The guards found me and struck and wounded me. The watchman on the wall tore off my veil. 8 I adjure you, O women of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved one, tell him that I am sick with love.”
The Young Women of Jerusalem: 9 “O woman of rare beauty, what is it about your loved one that is better than any other, that you command us this?”
The Girl: 10 “My beloved one is tanned and handsome, better than ten thousand others! 11 His head is purest gold, and he has wavy, raven hair. 12 His eyes are like doves beside the water brooks, deep and quiet. 13 His cheeks are like sweetly scented beds of spices. His lips are perfumed lilies, his breath like myrrh. 14 His arms are round bars of gold set with topaz; his body is bright ivory encrusted with jewels. 15 His legs are as pillars of marble set in sockets of finest gold, like cedars of Lebanon; none can rival him. 16 His mouth is altogether sweet, lovable in every way. Such, O women of Jerusalem, is my beloved, my friend.”
3 Oh, foolish Galatians! What magician has hypnotized you and cast an evil spell upon you? For you used to see the meaning of Jesus Christ’s death as clearly as though I had waved a placard before you with a picture on it of Christ dying on the cross. 2 Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by trying to keep the Jewish laws? Of course not, for the Holy Spirit came upon you only after you heard about Christ and trusted him to save you. 3 Then have you gone completely crazy? For if trying to obey the Jewish laws never gave you spiritual life in the first place, why do you think that trying to obey them now will make you stronger Christians? 4 You have suffered so much for the Gospel. Now are you going to just throw it all overboard? I can hardly believe it!
5 I ask you again, does God give you the power of the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you as a result of your trying to obey the Jewish laws? No, of course not. It is when you believe in Christ and fully trust him.
6 Abraham had the same experience—God declared him fit for heaven only because he believed God’s promises. 7 You can see from this that the real children of Abraham are all the men of faith who truly trust in God.
8-9 What’s more, the Scriptures looked forward to this time when God would save the Gentiles also, through their faith. God told Abraham about this long ago when he said, “I will bless those in every nation who trust in me as you do.” And so it is: all who trust in Christ share the same blessing Abraham received.
10 Yes, and those who depend on the Jewish laws to save them are under God’s curse, for the Scriptures point out very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who at any time breaks a single one of these laws that are written in God’s Book of the Law.” 11 Consequently, it is clear that no one can ever win God’s favor by trying to keep the Jewish laws because God has said that the only way we can be right in his sight is by faith. As the prophet Habakkuk says it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.” 12 How different from this way of faith is the way of law, which says that a man is saved by obeying every law of God, without one slip. 13 But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself. For it is written in the Scripture, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed” (as Jesus was hung upon a wooden cross[a]).
14 Now God can bless the Gentiles, too, with this same blessing he promised to Abraham; and all of us as Christians can have the promised Holy Spirit through this faith.
15 Dear brothers, even in everyday life a promise made by one man to another, if it is written down and signed, cannot be changed. He cannot decide afterward to do something else instead.
16 Now, God gave some promises to Abraham and his Child. And notice that it doesn’t say the promises were to his children, as it would if all his sons—all the Jews—were being spoken of, but to his Child—and that, of course, means Christ. 17 Here’s what I am trying to say: God’s promise to save through faith—and God wrote this promise down and signed it—could not be canceled or changed four hundred and thirty years later when God gave the Ten Commandments. 18 If obeying those laws could save us, then it is obvious that this would be a different way of gaining God’s favor than Abraham’s way, for he simply accepted God’s promise.
19 Well then, why were the laws given? They were added after the promise was given, to show men how guilty they are of breaking God’s laws. But this system of law was to last only until the coming of Christ, the Child to whom God’s promise was made. (And there is this further difference. God gave his laws to angels to give to Moses, who then gave them to the people; 20 but when God gave his promise to Abraham, he did it by himself alone, without angels or Moses as go-betweens.)
21-22 Well then, are God’s laws and God’s promises against each other? Of course not! If we could be saved by his laws, then God would not have had to give us a different way to get out of the grip of sin—for the Scriptures insist we are all its prisoners. The only way out is through faith in Jesus Christ; the way of escape is open to all who believe him.
23 Until Christ came we were guarded by the law, kept in protective custody, so to speak, until we could believe in the coming Savior.
24 Let me put it another way. The Jewish laws were our teacher and guide until Christ came to give us right standing with God through our faith. 25 But now that Christ has come, we don’t need those laws any longer to guard us and lead us to him. 26 For now we are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, 27 and we who have been baptized into union with Christ are enveloped by him. 28 We are no longer Jews or Greeks or slaves or free men or even merely men or women, but we are all the same—we are Christians; we are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And now that we are Christ’s we are the true descendants of Abraham, and all of God’s promises to him belong to us.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.