Lovemaking God’s Way: What Song of Solomon 4 Teaches Us About the Marriage Bed

Somewhere along the way, the church got quiet about sex. Not because the Bible is quiet about it (it isn't), but because we decided this was a topic best left to late-night sitcoms and awkward locker-room jokes. Meanwhile, the world talks about it constantly, couples fight about it more than almost anything else, and an entire chapter of Scripture sits there, largely unread, explaining exactly what sex is for and how it's meant to be done.

That chapter is Song of Solomon 4.

If you’ve studied Song of Solomon, you know the background. Solomon, the aristocratic prince, falls for a simple field worker. We've watched their banquet scene, where she arrives and he's awestruck. We've watched them dating through the spring, riding out to the countryside, talking through the lattice. We've watched the wedding itself: the sixty mighty men, the royal procession, the vows. And every time we've gotten close to the bedroom, we've had to pause. Do not awaken love before it pleases.

Not this time. This time, love awakens. 

The two of them are alone in the bedchamber, and Scripture pulls back the curtain, not to titillate us, but to teach us. This is sex God's way, and it unfolds in four movements: compliment, comfort, craving, and consummation.

1. Compliment in the Marriage Bed

The chapter opens with Solomon looking at his new bride and doing something a lot of husbands are terrible at: talking.

"How beautiful you are, my darling, how beautiful you are! Your eyes are like doves behind your veil; your hair like a flock of goats that have descended from Mount Gilead" (4:1). He keeps going for several more verses: her teeth, her lips, her cheeks, her neck. 

Seven compliments in all.

Now, before you go stealing his material for date night, a word of caution: please use your own words. "Your hair is like a flock of goats" was a knockout line in an agrarian society where goats streaming down a hillside was a genuinely beautiful sight. Try that one on your wife tonight and you'll get a look, not a kiss. The point isn't the specific images. It's what they're doing. Solomon is looking at his bride's eyes, still soft and full of that first-date twinkle. He's noticing that she's let her hair down, literally (Jewish women kept their hair covered in public, so this is an intimate, unveiled moment). He's noticing her smile, her teeth clean and even. He's noticing the color rising in her cheeks like the inside of a pomegranate. He's noticing the dignity in how she carries herself.

And then, in verse 6, he says something easy to miss: "Until the cool of the day when the shadows flee away, I will go my way to the mountain of myrrh." Translation: I'm not rushing you. We have time. This is a lesson in patience before it's anything else.

Here's why this matters for every marriage, not just theirs. If you're single, understand that God designed sex as the external expression of an internal possession, a soul-deep commitment made visible. The world tries to run relationships on sex alone, but sex without that commitment is a battery, not a power source. It runs out.

If you're a wife, understand that most men are not naturally good with words. The wisest man who ever lived, a man with a thousand songs to his name, looked at the woman he loved and compared her hair to goats. God didn't make men eloquent; He made them put their love, their devotion, their loyalty into their eyes and their fingertips. Watch how he looks at you and touches you, not just what he says.

And if you're a husband, hear this plainly: if you want her body, start with her heart. You're a microwave; she's an oven. You want things to happen fast. She needs time to heat up. I know a guy, we'll call him John, who came home one night frustrated that his wife wasn't interested. She finally got honest with him: "You only say nice things when you want to go to bed!” John got the message, and he got a lot more complimentary. Not as a strategy. As a habit.

Compliment each other. Your mouth speaks out of the overflow of your heart, and it will speak either blessing or cursing. The intimacy of the evening starts with the kindness of the morning.

2. Comfort in the Marriage Bed

Verse 7 shifts from admiration to assurance: "You are altogether beautiful, my darling, and there is no blemish in you." Then Solomon invites her to come with him, and he says it twice: "Come with me from Lebanon... may you come with me from Lebanon" (4:8), journeying down from mountain summits where lions and leopards prowled.

That repetition matters. He's not just describing geography. He's making a promise. I am your protector. I will never mock you, never ridicule you, never make you feel nervous about your body. This bed is a safe space.

Ladies, you already know how vulnerable this moment is. Even a genuinely beautiful woman can stand in front of a mirror and find a hundred flaws, and then pile on top of that whatever abuse she's carried, whatever pornography has warped her husband's expectations, whatever airbrushed image she's been measured against her whole life, the toll of having kids, the exhaustion of just being tired. The bar gets set impossibly high, and it isn't even a real bar.

I think of a couple we counseled once, married seven years with no intercourse the entire time. He'd come into the marriage with honeymoon fantasies built up over years of waiting. She'd come into it carrying abuse from her past, and every attempt at intimacy triggered flashbacks instead of closeness. What she needed wasn't pressure. She needed comfort.

We often hear the word "foreplay" and think it's about mechanics. It's better understood as loveplay, and loveplay isn't about getting her body ready. It's about getting her heart ready. It's the sense that the bills are paid, the roof is secure, she is safe, and no matter how hard the day was, she is loved and she is seen as beautiful, not by the world's standard, but by his eyes.

Comfort each other. Safety isn't the opposite of passion in a marriage. It's the soil it grows in.

3. Craving in the Marriage Bed

Now the tone changes again. Verse 9: "You have made my heart beat faster, my sister, my bride; you have made my heart beat faster with a single glance of your eyes, with a single strand of your necklace." In the original Hebrew, the phrase carries the sense of "you have stolen my heart" or "you have melted me." Solomon lifts her veil, looks her in the eye, and admits, out loud, how much power she has over him.

That's vulnerability from the husband's side, and it matters. Verse 10 tells us where the phrase "lovemaking" comes from in this text; the verb appears twice, describing soft kisses along the neck, the fragrance of her perfume filling the room. Verse 11 mentions kissing directly; this isn't some 21st-century invention. Three thousand years before anyone coined the phrase "French kiss," couples were doing exactly this, a practice as old as Eden itself.

Then comes verse 12, one of the most tender lines in the whole book: "A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a rock garden locked, a spring sealed up." She has been sealed, a virgin, pure, having guarded herself from the hands of every other man for the better part of two decades, saving that gift for this exact night.

Why does God give us sex at all? Scripture answers that question more thoroughly than most sermons ever do:

• He gave it for bonding: Genesis 2:24, "they shall become one flesh," the knitting together of two souls.

• He gave it for babies: Genesis 1:28, the sheer joy of reproducing and filling the earth.

• He gave it for knowledge: Genesis 4:1 uses the word yada, "the man knew his wife," the same word used for deep, personal knowing. One person coming to know another entirely, the birthmarks, the giggles, the tears.

• He gave it for comfort: after Sarah dies and Isaac grieves, Rebekah comes into his life, and Genesis 24:67 tells us he brought her into his mother's tent, loved her, and was comforted.

• He gave it for purity: 1 Corinthians 7:2, a protection against temptation, a call to drink from your own well.

• And He gave it for pleasure, plain and simple: Song of Solomon 4:10, "how beautiful is your lovemaking." Some traditions throughout history have acted as though this last one doesn't count. It does. God wrote an entire chapter about it.

Crave each other. Don't let comfort with one another become an excuse to stop pursuing one another.

4. Consummation in the Marriage Bed

The chapter closes where it's been heading all along. Verses 13 through 15 use intentionally poetic language (an orchard of pomegranates, henna, nard, saffron, cinnamon, frankincense) to describe an intimacy too sacred for blunt description and too important for the writer to skip. 

Having complimented her from the top down, Solomon now moves from the bottom up. He now begins to touch and compliment her legs. 

Then verse 15 calls her "a garden spring, a well of fresh water," poetic, but unmistakable. This is Scripture's own language for a man's and a woman's bodies, and it's in the Bible for good reason. Solomon has caressed her patiently until she’s anatomically excited for intercourse. 

Then verse 16 turns a corner nobody expects: it's her voice we hear now. "Awake, O north wind, and come, wind of the south; make my garden breathe out fragrance... May my beloved come into his garden and eat its choice fruits!" After all that compliment, all that comfort, all that patient craving, she lets herself go. She says it plainly: it's time. My body is yours.

Three things are happening in this final movement. First, he's in tune with her, like tuning a guitar, listening, turning, holding, adjusting. God designed men to be real lovers, not simply satisfying their own urge and moving on. That means going slow, fighting against instinct, waiting until she's the one asking. Second, she's responding, and men need that more than they usually admit. A husband can't fully step into his wife's emotional world; he can't fully fathom what vulnerability costs her. Her responsiveness tells him he's succeeding, that this is safe, that this is good. Third, and this is the whole point, God gets the glory. He designed this. It's a little slice of Eden restored, a husband and wife enjoying one another exactly as intended, and Scripture itself pronounces the blessing over it in 5:1: "Eat, friends; drink and imbibe deeply, O lovers."

So how can we implement this beautiful guide?

Practice bedroom language. Solomon speaks in poetic symbols, not slang and not medical terms. Whatever feels crude or clinical tends to trip your conscience; find language, even playful code words, that belongs only to the two of you.

Dress for each other. Ask yourself honestly: would I want my spouse to see me looking like this before we were married? Somewhere along the way we start saving our best for comparative strangers and giving our spouse the leftovers. Ask what they actually like. Stay a magnet, not a habit.

Get creative. Women, in particular, are like plants: they need sun and water to blossom, not a single grand gesture years ago that you're still coasting on. Keep writing the notes. Keep showing up with the small surprises.

Here's your homework. Plan an actual date. Invent a code word that's just yours. Let this be a place where God is glorified precisely because you're both willing to be vulnerable with each other, and let that vulnerability start well before the bedroom, in something as simple as a text message in the middle of an ordinary day.

And if there’s hurt, images, or turmoil that get in the way of intimacy, pull the gospel of grace down over your marriage. Forgive and commit to beginning God’s way.