"The voice of my beloved; behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains; skipping upon the hills," "My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away." The Song of Solomon will never be understood in its completeness until Jesus comes, and gathers His elect saints to the marriage supper of the Lamb. In the second chapter of the Song of Solomon, we have a prophetic vision of Christ's second coming and gathering out His bridehood saints unto Himself. Let us notice in detail the various points in the vision.

I. The voice of the Bridegroom. The power and sweetness of this voice are referred to many times in Scripture. "Let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is beautiful." "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me." John the Baptist said that he was the friend of the Bridegroom, and rejoiced when he heard the Bridegroom's voice. The Apostle John heard the voice of Jesus in the Isle of Patmos, and said it was like the sound of many waters.

Jesus, referring to the omnipotent penetration of His voice, says that "the dead which are in their graves shall hear His voice, and come forth." We are told that Adam heard that voice walking in the garden of Eden.

Jesus is emphatically the voice of the Father; the eternal outspoken Word from the inner bosom of the Father. The voice of Christ to the soul includes all methods by which He awakens, and wins, and woos, and communicates His will. His knowledge His fellowship to the obedient believer. He may speak to the soul by a thought, or a vision, or a spiritual sensation, or a spiritual articulation of His word to the inner senses; but whatever form the voice may assume, it penetrates to the depth of the inner spirit, and is recognized as something above the earthly, and the human, and as a divine communication whose power and authenticity are never questioned by the loving, trusting heart.

In every generation, those servants of God who have been entirely yielded to Him, have distinctly recognized the Bridegroom's voice in the depth of their souls. And in every generation, those who have been called into the bridehood of Christ, have had sweet words of such divine relationship spoken in their heart, and have had great premonitions of Christ's return to this earth, and of unutterable joys and honors which will then be conferred upon those who in this life have entered into a real, living union with God.

2. Christ's special manifestations to His bride. ''Behold He standeth behind our wall; He looketh forth at the windows, showing Himself through the lattice."�

If we group together several expressions in this Song of Solomon, we get a picture like the following: King David has a palace on a high hill overlooking the surrounding country. Beyond the city wall the king has a large vineyard, in which many men and maidens are working. Among the maidens working in the vineyard, and getting sunburnt, is the humble, beautiful daughter of an honorable Jewish family, whose sisters taunt her for doing such humble labor, and getting sunburnt and neglecting her own selfish interests at home. But the prince, Solomon, is in love with her, and when he walks on the veranda of his father's palace, he signals to her through the window lattice, and as the margin indicates, flourishes his hand in love tokens, which she perceives and sweetly responds to, while at work in his father's vineyard. This explains all those expressions when the bride says, ''They made me the keeper of the vineyards, but mine own vineyard -- my selfish interests -- have I not kept." "I am sunburnt -- for the word "black" would be translated "sunburnt" -- but beautiful, O ye daughters of Jerusalem." "Frown not upon me" (the word "look" signifies to frown, or to look with a scowl). She says to her proud sisters who scowl upon her, because she works in the vineyard and bemeans herself with such humble service; "frown not upon me because I am sunburnt, because the sun hath frowned upon me * my mother's children were angry with me." How true it always is that unsanctified church members, who. cultivate their own selfish vineyards, look with angry scowls upon the humble sanctified ones, who go forth beyond the city walls, and sectarian fences, to bear the heat and burden of the day, and endure the sun-scorching of persecution, ostracism, and various trials, which timid and selfish Christians are not willing to bear.

But the King's son, the Divine Solomon, from his Father's palace on high, looks out upon the humble, sunburnt saints at work in His Father's vineyard, to whom He is secretly espoused, and through the lattice of the skies manifests Himself to them in such vivid tokens of love, as to cause them a joy, notwithstanding their trials, far surpassing the comforts of other professed Christians, who are not utterly abandoned to a love-service for the glory of their Lord.

3. The translation of the bride. "My beloved spake, and said unto me. Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away." As the bride must first know the voice of her beloved, and then the private personal manifestation of his love, so in the next place there comes the time when he calls the bride to depart from her old home, and go with him to his own mansion. All these steps are carried out, both in Christ's dealing with the individual soul espoused to him, and also in that great body of elect saints that constitute the perfected bride of the Lamb. And so these words are to be fulfilled when Christ comes in the air, and with His omnipotent voice calls the bodies of His dead saints to rise up from their graves, and calls the living wise virgins who have the oil of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, to rise up from the earth, and go away with the Bridegroom into that mansion of pure gold which He has built for them. When Jesus returned to Bethany, after His absence across the Jordan, He called for both the living and the dead; for Martha said to Mary, ''Arise, for the Master is come, and calleth for thee'"; and then in a few moments, He called unto Lazarus to arise and come forth from the grave.

This incident is prophetic of the time when He returns from His long absence, and will again speak to the living saints like Mary, and the dead saints like Lazarus, the words of our text, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away."

4. The Summer Age. "For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, and the flowers appear on the earth."

The long domination of Satan and sin, the protracted generations of corrupt human governments, with war, and whiskey, and oppression, and with all their attendant sorrows, constitutes the long winter of human history; but when Christ returns to reign on earth with His glorified saints, this long winter of wickedness will come to its close, and the reign of righteousness will bring the glorious summer to the nations of the earth. This Scripture, like hundreds of others, is to have a double fulfillment; first in the individual believer, and then in the world at large. Thus, when the believer is purified through the blood of Jesus, and the Comforter comes to abide, the spiritual winter, with the cold, wet rains of anguish and moral misery terminates; and the summer of pure love spreads itself abroad in the heart and life. But this is only a preliminary fulfillment of these precious words, for the great world is like a giant individual, and Satan is to the world what the carnal mind is to the soul, and when Satan is dethroned from the world, and chained in the abyss, and Jesus sets up His theocratic kingdom on earth, the summer of millennial glory will fill the world as the waters fill the sea. Christ often compares His second coming to the coming of summer. Luke 21:27-31.

5. The singing age. "The time for the singing of birds is come." The word "birds"� is in italics, which indicates that it is not in the original Hebrew Scripture, and the passage would be much better rendered "the singing age has come."� In this age, as well as all past ages, there is pre-eminently the fact of weeping and sorrow, and even the best saints of God find the words of Christ true that in the present world (or age) they should have tribulation. Human history in the present age is marked with sickness, pain and death.

Not only the wicked, but the wisest and holiest of men, must endure poverty, disappointment, temptation, sore trials, loneliness, persecution, and at the very best condition of things in the present age, there is much inevitable suffering and weeping. But there is a better age coming, and God's enemies on earth are to become a footstool for the peaceful steps of the King of eternal love, and there is to come an age of singing and worldwide gladness, in which universal joy and music will reign pre-eminent. The Scriptures abound with prophecies of that day. "For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."� It is well to note that these words are spoken in connection with the promise that Christ as David shall be a leader of the nations on the earth. See Isa. 55: 3-12.

The Apostle Paul refers to this singing age in the eighth of Romans, when he contrasts the "groaning of creation'' in the present age, to that blessed period when this groaning creation "shall be delivered from its present bondage, into the glorious liberty of the children of God." A great many of the Psalms prophesy an age of universal singing. "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all the earth; sing unto the Lord with the harp, with trumpets and cornets; let the hills be joyful together before the Lord, for He cometh to judge the earth; with righteousness shall He judge the world." Psalm 98. Please notice that this world-wide singing is distinctly mentioned as a consequence of the coming of the Lord to judge and govern the world. The bridehood saints that are translated or resurrected, after being received by the Bridegroom in the air, are to come back with Him, and through their dominion, under Christ, over the nations on earth, the whole world will be filled with anthems of praise, which is referred to about fifty times in the prophecies on that subject.

6. The world-wide fullness of the Holy Spirit. This is referred to by the expression "the voice of the turtle is heard in your land." The word "turtle" in this verse refers to the dove, and the dove is a synonym of the Holy Spirit. Hence, in the coming age, when the heavenly Bridegroom and His bridehood saints shall reign on the earth, the voice of the Holy Spirit will be heard everywhere in the land; and instead of a few feeble revivals, such as we have in the present age, where only a few scores, or at least a few hundreds, are regenerated against fearful odds of difficulty, then the Holy Spirit will inundate the world, and millions to be saved in those great millennial revivals, when a nation shall be born in a day. The words of Joel about the Spirit being poured out upon all flesh will then be fulfilled more perfectly than ever in the past.

Every successive age has been characterized by a great increase of the operations of the Holy Spirit. In the age before the flood. He strove with men, with very few results of saving power. In the Jewish age, the Spirit was manifest in more than ten-fold degree over the antediluvian age; and in the Christian age the Holy Spirit has been given in a thousand-fold greater measure than in the Jewish age; and in the same ratio, in the coming millennial age, the Spirit will be poured out on the nations in all the earth a million-fold more than in the present age, so that it will be emphatically true, the dove-like voice of the Holy Spirit will be heard in all the earth.