What is more beautiful and festive than a wedding feast? The bride and bridegroom have looked forward to it for days, weeks, months, maybe years, and then the day arrives! The bride has put on the most beautiful wedding dress she can find and the bridegroom is wearing a splendid suit. The ‘guests’ look just as smart, with their festive attire. The wedding celebration can begin shortly! Everyone is happy and joyful. Sad faces are forbidden. Everyone shares in the happiness of the bride and bridegroom. Who is the bride here? Paul writes to the Church at Corinth: “I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.”1 Christ’s Church is His bride. She is to become His wife. Our earthly marriage is to be a reflection of this, and Paul calls upon men to love their wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her (by dying on the cross) to make her ‘holy’, ‘set apart’, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word – the divine acquittal of every sin and unrighteousness He grants her. John 15:3 “You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.” 1 Peter 1:22-23 “Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” His blood cleansed us, and His dying on the cross sets us free from the power of sin. And so He presents her to Himself as a radiant Church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but ’holy and blameless’.2 And Paul goes on to compare ‘leaving your father and mother’, and ‘joining your wife’ (or your husband) and becoming ‘one flesh in marriage’3 to the unity between Christ and His Church. He calls this a great mystery.4 Christ calls Himself the bridegroom: How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while He is with them?5 The wedding feast appears to take place at, and is connected with His Coming in Glory.6 The Lamb (Christ) marries His bride after the downfall of the whore of Babylon, who had ‘a relationship in sin’ when joined with the ‘beast’. There is no doubt as to the identity of the bridegroom: He is the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, who has accepted the Kingship and, as the triumphant King and Messiah, is about to defeat the last enemies and begin His reign over the nations. Identifying the bride is somewhat more problematic. She is the Church, certainly, but is she also Israel? We see them joined together when John sees the bride, the Lamb’s wife, and then he sees the Holy City, Jerusalem, descending from Heaven.7 The twelve names of the Lamb’s apostles who are all Jewish are on the City’s twelve foundations,8 and the twelve names of the twelve tribes of Israel are on the City’s gates.9 There will also be some discussion about the wedding guests: “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!”10 The Lord Jesus says of them: “Many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places (as usually happened at an Eastern meal) at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven.”11 After the downfall of the ‘woman’, the ‘whore of Babylon’, there is now the highest honour for the true woman, the true wife, for the ‘New Jerusalem’ coming down from Heaven to earth. The Bridegroom is finally celebrating with His bride, His wife. All hindrances have been removed. The bride’s long wait for the Bridegroom is over. He has perhaps stayed away longer than the Church had thought and hoped. She has passed through many tribulations,12 but she has matured as a result, and grown to full adulthood, sanctified and purified. Everything comes to perfection in the Book of Revelation, including the Church. She is fully grown—in numbers of the elect as well, and the wedding feast can begin! Everyone who has accepted Jesus as his or her Saviour and Redeemer13 belongs to the bride! Do you too?
• The bride has made herself ready. John writes: “When Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as he is. All who have this hope in Him purify themselves, just as He is pure.”14 The purified life is the preparation for the meeting of the bride and her Bridegroom.
• We should not overstretch the pictures and comparisons in the Bible, by asking too many questions in trying to identify who is who. Israel is the bride and the wife and the Church is the bride and the wife. God married Israel, and Jesus married His bride.
• Let’s focus on what this comparison with love and marriage means. Marriage means loving and taking care of each other, to be faithful and inseparably and forever connected with each other, for good days and bad days, in richness or poverty, in health and in sickness, ‘until death do us part’.
• God is faithful to all the promises He gave to His wife. Despite how unfaithful she sometimes was and is, Jesus is faithful to His bride, despite how unfaithful she sometimes was and is. That’s what ‘marriage’ is all about.
• ‘Man’ was created as ‘man and woman’. Individually as persons we are a unity of body-soul-spirit. One in ‘spirit’ we are with our brothers and sisters in Christ, in faith. One in ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ we can be with Christian friends with whom we feel a special relationship and attraction so that we sometimes also share some personal matters and feelings. One in spirit-soul-body we are only in the unity of all three levels, as husband and wife.
Bible References:
1.2 Corinthians 11:2 KJV 2.Ephesians 5:25–27 3.Genesis 2:24 4.Ephesians 5:31– 32 5.Matthew 9:15 6.Matthew 25:1–10 7.Revelation 21:9–10 8.Revelation 21:14 9.Revelation 21:12 10.Revelation 19:9 NIV 11.Matthew 8:11 NIV 12.Acts 14:22 NIV 13.John 1:12–13 14.1 John 3:2–3
