Author’s Opening Note:

The following is the beginning of a new book on the Song of Songs that I have felt strongly impressed to write. There is a lot of fresh revelation here, but also a more mature articulation of what was previously written in The Song of the Ages series. It is also written to reach more people with the message by putting it into a more compact volume instead of three long expositions.

The plan is for the book to follow five musical “movements” – essentially five different parts that first explain how the Song is a key that unlocks identity and destiny. Below is the opening four chapters…

Reminder: Elisha’s Riddle is sharing this openly with our subscribers. Please do not share this with anyone as it has not yet been copywritten. Also, your feedback is always welcomed. Whether words of encouragement or editing suggestions, please feel free to type in a comment below (or you can email us at info@elishasriddle.com). Thank you!

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Movement One: The Map

Chapter One: Revelation

 

God conceals the revelation of his word 

in the hiding place of his glory.

But the honor of kings is revealed

by how they thoroughly search out

the deeper meaning of all that God says.

(Proverbs 25:2 TPT)

There is a royal calling, a kingly quest, each of us are invited into. It is the scavenger hunt of the ages, an adventure of the spirit that take us to a treasure beyond anything found in the greatest works of fiction. This treasure is waiting for each one of us, and it calls to us from beyond the veil.

The treasure, very simply, is revelation. 

But it’s important to know what revelation is and what it isn’t. It is not head knowledge. It is not some big, newfound fact. Revelation is an uncovering of something so profoundly true that it activates things deep inside of you, bringing about real transformation. Another way to describe revelation is to compare it to a type of heavenly currency that allows you to purchase spiritual riches. This isn’t a perfect analogy because the riches are already yours by inheritance. They are freely available. But revelation is an inner awareness enabling you to realize your access.

Revelation is valuable beyond measure and the way to find it, according to the wisdom of Solomon, is within “his word.” This is where our adventure begins. The word of God will be our treasure map to find an absolutely life-changing revelation.

But what is his word? Many think the word of God refers to the holy scriptures…

God has transmitted his very substance into every Scripture, for it is God-breathed

(2 Timothy 3:16a TPT)

…and they would be right. Like the wooden manger that held the precious infant Christ, the scriptures are made from the frail wood of humanity and yet hold wonders within. Accordingly, this is what most people think of when they hear the phrase “the word of God.”

But there is more to the “word” than this. This map we’re unfolding is way more expansive, for it involves anything breathed forth by God’s Spirit with divine purpose. That enlarges the proverbial treasure map significantly, because we know God also breathed the very cosmos into existence:

All he had to do was speak by his Spirit-Wind command,

and God created the heavenlies.

Filled with galaxies and stars,

the vast cosmos he wonderfully made.

(Psalm 33:6 TPT)

Creation itself is a word from the Father. Indeed, there is revelation-knowledge hidden within the chambers of the created order:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

And the firmament shows His handiwork.

Day unto day utters speech,

And night unto night reveals knowledge.

(Psalm 19:1-2 NKJV)

But there is even more to this map. For just as the scriptures and stars received a special release of inspired breath from heaven, so did something else…

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

(Genesis 2:7 NKJV)

Yes, you too are a word from heaven. Each of us were formed in our mother’s womb by the same Spirit that fashioned gravity and wood. Within each human conception is a unique release of holy Breath. And so, just as there are rich mysteries held within the Bible and creation, there is a mystery hidden within you as well. The unlocking of this mystery is the treasure of eternity and it is the purpose of the journey we’re embarking upon.

To begin, we will go very far from here, on the other side of the universe, in a galaxy (or, multiple galaxies) far, far away.

Before we do that though, let’s pause. This journey is long and there’s a blessing we’ll need activated in our hearts before we proceed. This blessing is found in the following words of divine inspiration. As you read them, receive these words as though someone who really loves you—and who has amazing faith—is praying this on your personal behalf…

I pray that the Father of glory, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, would impart to you the riches of the Spirit of wisdom and the Spirit of revelation to know him through your deepening intimacy with him. I pray that the light of God will illuminate the eyes of your imagination, flooding you with light, until you experience the full revelation of the hope of his calling—that is, the wealth of God’s glorious inheritances that he finds in us, his holy ones!

(Ephesians 1:17-18 TPT)

You are loved beyond imagination. Right now, take your stand against any orphaned thinking, any fearful voice that says there’s never enough treasure to go around; the nearsightedness that claims adventures with treasures at the end are only for the movies (or, at best, the sweet by and by after we die). Quiet down those biting interruptions and remember that you are loved and chosen.  

There is treasure indeed, and you are invited to crack it open and unload its riches upon yourself, your family, and even on the generations to come.

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Chapter Two: Strings

 

Our hunt begins at the furthest reaches of the cosmos with an image that flooded the news in the middle of 2022. I had just set my heart and pen to begin this book when the Presidential Office of the U.S. called a national press conference with the sole purpose of releasing a couple photographs.

These pictures were the first images captured by NASA’s James Webb Telescope. Released at this conference and then shared across millions of social media accounts, the inaugural photo captured the attention of the nations. The enthusiasm and fanfare surrounding it were not exaggerated. There was a genuine excitement happening in the release of these pictures because they were touching something deep inside the heart of humanity.

Telescopes such as the James Webb are designed to peer back as far as possible into the earliest moments of time. With its infrared scopes, this device looks through the veil of dust and darkness to gaze at what happened soon after creation’s onset. Billions of dollars have been invested into instruments like these and it all comes from this profound yearning to discover something about our own light-filled origin.

As you may know, this image is filled with entire galaxies—not stars. Each glowing point is its own ocean of starlight, each carrying titanic suns like bubbles of foam strewn across the sea, each bubble holding worlds upon worlds.

At the release of this image, astronomers stretched our imaginations further by explaining how much of our night sky this image captured. They explained that if you were to hold one grain of sand in your fingers and hold it up at the sky, that grain would obscure from your vision the amount of space this photo covers. (Maybe read that again.) As immense as it is, this swirl of celestial oceans, it is only a fragment of what erupted from the breath of the Almighty.

Scientists devise instruments like the James Webb to study the endless pages of creation, the God-breathed word of the heavens. With glass and metal, they peer into the book of the universe, study its chapters of galaxies, read through paragraphs of stars, dissect sentences of entire planets. They even look at the very grammar and syntax of things by examining the particles that allow this mighty book to exist in the first place. But in the last century, scientists have determined to go even further. They’ve asked the question, “What makes up the fabric of this divine word?” In other words, they’ve sought to understand the paper itself.

In this pursuit, some of our greatest minds have stumbled into a beautiful possibility about the paper God uses to write his word upon. For now, these ideas remain in the realm of theory, for there is no combination of glass and metal that can look that closely into creation. Nonetheless, with stunning mathematics to back it up, they have proposed that at the foundation of everything lies one-dimensional “strings” from which everything else is formed. As each string gets plucked, particular “notes” are played. These notes go on to give form, beauty, and substance to creation.

The math behind these ideas parallels the same mathematics behind violin strings. Fittingly, this has become known as string theory, though it has many other names and variations. The theory suggests that all matter and forces are the multi-faceted results of a vibration of energy playing the strings of the universe. Some mysterious force is causing power to be released and it moves these unimaginably small strings in different ways. Each movement giving birth to different particles, which then make up everything we see and experience.

Such an idea reframes our understanding of the treasure map of creation. It suggests that creation is more of a song sheet than a book. The One who breathed forth the cosmos really sang it forth. His word is music, and the spin of every galaxy is a dance.

Instruments like the James Webb are simply capturing some of the song’s earliest verses. By the time the galaxies in the preceding image formed, the opening notes had already commenced. The instruments were coming together to give structure and form to the larger music behind everything else. And thus, this was only the beginning of the song. But something greater and more delightful was about to emerge. A chorus was coming, beautiful beyond comprehension and bigger than every galaxy put together.

This is the first clue on our way to the treasure. To find the next one, we’ll have to look at a totally different part of the map.

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Chapter Three: Trinity

 

While scientists engineer devices to study the pages of creation, God has gifted us with people who make it their aim to study the pages of the written word. I got to hang out with one such individual when I was speaking in a country that is quite hostile to the inspired words of scripture. We were speaking with leaders of the underground church in an Asian nation, people who sing the songs of Jesus under the discord of a hostile government (somehow making their songs all the sweeter), when a pastor friend unpacked something significant about the moment of God’s creation. He took us a little further back than James Webb:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

(Genesis 1:1-3 NKJV)

Hidden in these first three verses of the biblical text is a treasure of revelation regarding the One who sang forth the cosmos. Like many other things in the Old Testament, we’ll require some special instrumentation, particularly from the New Testament, to help us see it.

In the gospel of John, we discover a kind of musical remix of Genesis 1. John also starts with the beginning, but he goes much further back than Genesis. He speaks of a relationship between Jesus, who is called the “Word,” and the Father of creation.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

(John 1:1-3)

As the book progresses, John builds on this foundation by quoting specific lines from Jesus where he speaks of his oneness with the Father (John 10:30). Even in the painful hours leading up his death, this union is put on display when we are given a glimpse into a conversation between Jesus and the Father as he talks about their intimate connection before creation itself (John 17).

This truth of union between Jesus and the Father is scattered throughout other books of scripture. In other places we also see the Spirit of God functioning as a unique Person within this intimate relationship between the Father and Son. This all comes together to unfold a great treasure—the reality that God is Three-in-One. Father, Son, and Spirit.

This truth is strewn throughout the written word like stars in a galaxy. It is also secretly written as a testimony within the universe itself. For example, think of the three essential things that make up the fabric of our existence: time, matter, and space. Each has three distinct parts to it. Time has a past, present, and future. Matter comes primarily as solid, liquid, and gas. And finally, space is comprised of three dimensions: height, width, and length. These three “trinities” of creation were birthed simultaneously as the beginning of the cosmos, all coming from the heart of a triune Creator.

Now if you’re having a hard time seeing this truth hidden within Genesis 1, let me enlighten your search by underlining three distinct parts:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

(Genesis 1:1-3)

The easiest thing to see here is God, the One who is the Father of creation, overseeing the making of heaven and earth. Amid this creative work, in the next verse, we also see the Spirit of God who is described as a totally separate character. But the hardest thing to discover is what is found in the third verse where light bursts forth as God opens his mouth and speaks.

This is where the New Testament helps uncover buried treasure. Back in the gospel of John, Jesus is not only referred as the Word of God but also “the Light of the world” (John 8:12). Jesus is the very Substance bringing forth the cosmos. As it says elsewhere, all of creation is made through Him. Thus, in the first three verses of the Bible there is a hidden picture of God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Son co-creating the universe from an already established relationship. Incredible.  

However, what we must really come to terms with is that this co-creation was not some heavenly science project. This was not three highly intellectual entities writing up architectural designs and putting together particles in intricate patterns so they could place it on a bookshelf like a trophy in some boring room in heaven’s library.

No. This was a joyful collaboration of song and light. The greater mystery here is not that God is Three-in-One, but rather that he is “Three-in-Love,” as my friend Mo likes to say. To discover this in the map of the word we have to look at yet another passage from John’s writings. He is the one who gifted us with this beautiful phrase: 

“God is love…”

(1 John 4:8)

…which takes us into some stunning conclusions. Love, we know, is kind, hospitable, generous, and attentive. It puts the needs of others first. It is self-giving. Therefore, if God is love—and love looks like these things—that means there is a lot more to “God” than meets the eye. There is a deep relationship happening within his very being. And this is far more than even what the word “relationship” conveys. The Trinity was experiencing a joyful and dynamic interaction before the cosmic song sheet emerged. There was an ecstatic communion of deep friendship and intimacy that gave way for this massive building project. 

So, to put all of this in other terms … the creation around us was sung and birthed by a Divine Family.

This too is written into countless passages in creation’s songbook, for the reality of “family” pervades everything. Whether it’s families of human beings, families within the animal kingdom, families of plants and fungi, even the families of star systems and other celestial objects—all of it exists in a familial nature because of the One who kickstarted everything. The perfect unity of the Trinity, who exists in this distinct and yet unified relationship, speaks to the diverse and yet unimaginably cohesive universe around us.

The Dance

Many centuries ago, some of the early fathers and mothers of the faith came up with a special term in an attempt to describe this triune mystery. The word was perichoresis and it essentially describes a dancing circle. “Peri” is the root word behind perimeter and “choresis” is related to choreography. The word speaks of God as movement—a circle of unending fellowship and communion.

The mystery unveiled by Christ, the apostle John, and many others, is that the Father, Spirit, and Son exist in a blissful relationship charged with unimaginable joy and interaction. Within this circle of life-giving union is an adventurous friendship, and from this friendship flows the very rhythm by which the word (whether creation, scripture, or humanity) was inspired. 

We are peering further back now, beyond the cosmic dust, even beyond the singularity that no telescope can capture. We are staring into the face of a smiling, dancing God.

And we are surrounded not just by the word of God, but by the lyrics of God. Thus, this is even more than a song. Creation, scripture, and life itself is more like a ballad—a song and a story.

The idea for this story grew like a burning dream within the heart of the Trinity, one that came out of an already established rhythm. It was a song that each Person of the Trinity knew at once needed to be released.

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Chapter Four: Quartet

The week before I headed to Asia, a friend gave my wife and I a gift. Knowing we would be away from each other for a while, they handed us a bunch of cash and told us to enjoy a night out. They said the Lord told them to do so. We took the gift gratefully and decided to go on a boat ride in Manhattan. As we drifted around the Statue of Liberty, a trio of jazz musicians played at the front of our vessel providing an otherworldly night. We relaxed, soaked in the evening light, and watched three artists meld into one song. It was a magical time enhanced by the atmosphere of jazz, a style of music that has an uncanny ability to blend spontaneity and structure.

As I write this, reflecting on the gift of that evening, I’m reminded of how Jesus compared his Father to interesting individuals like farmers, businessmen, and judiciaries. Standing on his shoulders, I’d like to go ahead and compare God to that jazz trio. 

I tell you, the story of creation is like Three Musicians who, with joyful passion, brought forth one song with deep musical structure and quantum spontaneity. As this song poured out like breath from the Trinity’s mouth, an incalculable number of vibrations went forth. 

And that is where parable and reality lose their distinction because, as we’ve learned, God laid out the sheet-music of the cosmos and plucked the literal strings of creation to give form to everything around us. 

Within this surging melody arose a precious blue and green orb, like an aqua diamond in a sparkling sea of light. Here, the Divine Family began to prepare the way for the chorus of creation’s song. At this moment, they prepared to release a much more personal exhale of breath, like a saxophone player going off on a stunning solo or a beautiful soprano voice emerging like crystal on the waves of an orchestral procession that has just quieted down. 

This solo was powerful beyond measure and yet it came as a still small voice, a mere whisper in comparison to those first booming drums of creation. This is where we began to hear the real purpose of the music. This was the dream within the heart of the triune Creator coming into manifestation. 

From the dust of one small planet emerged extremely special beings created by the Trinity. But not just created. Oh, we must see this! A more appropriate term than “created” might be birthed. The classic clockmaker analogy falls quite short of describing this moment. God was not just constructing a complex piece of intricate clockwork. This was a Father releasing his seed—the very DNA of his life—into the burgeoning creation. 

That aqua jewel of earth became like a mother’s egg with which the sperma of God’s word (that’s a Greek term that shows up in your English Bible as “seed”) collided in an explosion of painfully creative joy. As we saw earlier, the Holy Spirit hovered over the waters of this jewel, surrounding it like a mother’s womb. 

A Classic Argument

I want to pause and address a de-harmonizing argument commonly used to drown out the beauty of the things we are discovering. An argument having to do with size.

Many argue against these life-giving truths by saying something along these lines: In view of how unimaginably small we are, how can we assert such “specialness” upon humanity? In the grand scheme of things, we are basically invisible! Isn’t this religious nonsense that elevates human beings above the reality of what we actually are? 

Ironically, this argument arises from the folly of prideful thinking. It is sourced from the same mindset that disdains all that is small and ordinary. We like the big, the shiny, and the grand, and so we fail to see the treasure hidden within the field of spacetime. 

We could address these questions by comparing the universe to a human body. You might be surprised to know that your body has more cells floating around it than there are galaxies in the observable universe. Yes, from the perspective of a cell, the human body might as well be an entire cosmos, one that would take eons to explore from that vantage point! Amidst the great forces of blood and marrow, the cells look out and see celestial structures of organs and entire planetary systems of tissue and cartilage. To some cells, the heart is like a pulsating giant in the deep of time. Indeed, the body is an entire universe in comparison to its smallest parts.

Now, did you know one of the tiniest cells in the body is the sperm cell? The very thing that goes on to create everything else—with the all-important help of the egg—is essentially invisible! In the same way, the “body” of the cosmos is indescribably expansive and yet, buried within it, almost invisibly, is a jewel of highest value. 

The Purpose of Creation

This jewel is the purpose of our search through the treasure map of God’s word. We’ve looked at both the word of creation and the word of scripture, each inspired and vocalized by God, but now we have come to the moment where God sang forth something that everything else had been preparing the way for. 

Understand that even the most atheistic theorists unwittingly acknowledge this when they describe our universe as being fine-tuned. 

This is a word used widely throughout the scientific world to describe how perfectly aligned and precise the universe’s properties are. Discoveries are being made all the time pointing to how the slightest, most microscopic changes to the properties of atoms and their inner workings would cause our universe to dramatically change.   

This universe is evidently fine-tuned because of its very specific purpose. And this purpose is hidden within the very meaning of the word “universe”—one song (from “uni” and “verse”).

Creation is indeed a fine-tuned instrument, hand-crafted to play a very particular melody. 

This melody is revealed even further when we examine something else from the map of creation, something that falls apart if you were to change the slightest properties of the universe around it. We call this thing “deoxyribonucleic acid.” Or, DNA for short.  

DNA is remarkable. It’s been compared to a written book, and for good reason. It’s comprised of a very particular language, a code we’re able to read and even rewrite with genetic technology. But to merge this with everything else we’ve learned, our DNA is not some informational bulletin. It is not a boring encyclopedia or a research document.  

No. It too is a songbook. It is the pathway through which God captures the greatest part of this song of creation. Yes, the very theme of the Trinity’s song emerges around the spiraling staircase of their children’s DNA. Human life is indeed a doorway for heaven’s love to invade this finely tuned instrument called the universe. It is the crown jewel of the creation. The chorus of creation’s music.

But this singing Trinity was not only making music . . . It turns out that they were preparing another musician to participate in their eternal glory. 

That heavenly jazz Trio was bringing forth a holy quartet.