A Collection of Quotes Quotes from a New Saint Andrews graduate

Foreplay

God moves in a mysterious way. Very often, in the midst of hardship, we don't understand why God is "so far off." Why does He come, and then seemingly go?  We know that we are pilgrims on earth, groaning for Christ's final return when all creation will be made new. Perhaps this is God's foreplay. He is preparing to return, and indwell the earth. In that day, Christ will know his bride.

From Peter Leithart's exposition of the Song of Songs:

"Why didn’t the Son come in the flesh just outside Eden?  The erotic theology of the Song of Songs provides a possible hint.  Throughout the Song, the lovers admire each other’s bodies and express their longing desires to be together.   Union comes at the end of reciprocal arousal.  ”Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” the bride says at the outset.  ”How beautiful you are, my darling, how beautiful you are!” says the bridegroom.  But the bride doesn’t get her winekiss until later, until he takes her to his “house of wine” (2:4) and until his enters the locked garden and drinks of the wine, milk, and honey of her lips and mouth (4:11-5:1).  A period of intensifying desire precedes tasting and touching; distance, approach, distance, approach, repeated again and again before consummation.

The history of Israel is God’s foreplay with His bride, bringing her to a pitch of desire before He takes flesh and dwells with her.  Perhaps too this provides a way of describing the frenzy of Messianic excitement that Israel was undergoing in the first century.

God waits to send His Son because He is a good lover."