The Fire That Burned Beneath the Floodwaters

In 1962, a coal seam beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania caught fire. Engineers tried everything — trenching, flooding, backfilling with clay. The town pumped thousands of gallons of water into the mine shafts. Steam hissed from cracks in the hillside, but the fire would not die. Sixty years later, the town is largely abandoned, the roads buckled and split by heat, and geologists estimate the fire could burn for another 250 years. The whole Susquehanna River could not extinguish it.

When Solomon writes that love is "as strong as death" and that "many waters cannot quench" it, he reaches for the most extreme language available. He is not writing a greeting card. He is describing something terrifying in its permanence — a flame that laughs at floods, a grip that tightens when everything else lets go.

This is what distinguishes covenant love from mere affection. Affection fades when circumstances shift. But the love Solomon describes — the love that mirrors how God pursues His people — operates like that Centralia fire. Betrayal cannot smother it. Distance cannot cool it. You cannot purchase it with "all the wealth of one's house," because it was never a commodity to begin with.

The seal pressed over the heart in Song of Solomon 8:6 is not decoration. It is a brand. It says: this fire was set on purpose, and nothing on earth will put it out.