Church/ Faithful With Him/ The Bride of Christ

The Song of Solomon

Church History, Song of Solomon November 20, 2015

It is good that one should intently study the Bible’s running theme of the Bride and our relationship with the Bridegroom who is none other than Christ Himself her betrothed husband and eternal Savior. There is no greater book for the understanding of this marriage offer than the epic poem called The Song of Solomon, AKA The Song of Songs.

The Bible clearly states that the greatest mystery of all mysteries is about Christ and His Church. Summed up in Ephesians chapter five it is stated as Christ loving the Church and his wife being absolutely one hundred percent submitted to Him as the head of all things. When this occurs Christ and that portion of the Church which is submissive becomes one, just as God had declared the purpose of marriage to be.

Then and only then can an eternal utopia living as One be firmly established. This is what Christ was getting at when He prayed at the Last Supper that He and His disciples would be one, even as He and the Father are One. Though this mystery of Christ and His Bride was not frankly stated in this manner until its mystery was fully opened in the New Testament epistles and finally revealed in Revelation 21, it had been alluded to throughout the parables of Holy Scripture, both Old and New.

When He created the heaven and earth and all the things in it he always remarked, “it is good ” Gen 1:4,10, 12, 18, etc…. The first time and only time He cited something as not being ‘good’ was when He looked upon Adam in his solitary state and said, “It is not good that man should be alone.” Gen 2:18 This turns out to be one of the most important statements ever directed at Man by God, with far-reaching prophetic implications that extend to the very last page of the Bible. Even though the Church has wrongly exalted the idea of being alone, as the most holy and pure of lives, such stupidity and perverse thinking runs contrary to the fluidity of the will of God to raise up a Bride perfectly compatible and fit for the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. It has done so much damage in the Church that it can hardly be calculated. (Could the pedophile plague be a judgment of this mistaken idea?) As one of the epithets which Jesus dubbed Himself, the Son of Man not only identifies Him with the ministry of the prophet Ezekiel and Ezekiel in turn as a Christ-like representative, it also shows Jesus identifying Himself with being Christ, the anointed one, which implies not just the one who provides what is needed, but the only man who could give man what he needed. The name Christ is reserved for a man. Christ must be a man and not exclusively God. Christ is a man able to identify in every way with the struggle of man. What the Christ brought and only He could deliver is rectification, a propitiation, a payment in lieu of a debt owed, a straightening out of things forever. A pure and holy God could not do this, being removed from the squalor, fear, and hate. Only the Christ, the Son of Man, as Jesus so identified Himself, could face man’s demons and defeat them without giving in to their powers. The debt owed, the wages exacted by sin, of course, was death; death for sin, every transgression, any single iniquity. The Christ, the Messiah must not be only God, but Son of Man, born of the seed of the woman, and if man, man who should not be alone. This is the point. If it is not good that man should be alone, then how could it ever be good if the Son of Man remains alone. Ergo, the Bride is sought for the Son of Man’s sake. Does it not make sense that he should be joined eternally with a Bride, a wife. One who will remain a perfect spotless beautiful Bride forever, never aging, never doubting, never recanting, never wandering, never losing pure rapturous love for her champion lover – only growing with passionate infatuation like a flower in a state of endless bloom filling the air of God’s home with new beautiful fragrances every moment throughout eternity to come. He must be one with a wife – and man is to be the wife of the Son of Man, the Christ, the Messiah, the Redeemer, the one who has given His life that we might gain life. Now we discover the purpose, the ultimate purpose of God creating Man. Both are resurrected into one in the Spirit to life immortal and incorruptible for all eternity. This is the Bride. Man is to be Bride of the Son of Man/Son of God. The Bride must be found, must be formed, must be given life, so that the Christ (a man) would not live in state of loneliness for eternity. For it is first stated: “It is not good that man should be alone”. Therefore, God took a part of His life and formed the Bride for Adam (Man). But recall He first put the Man to sleep (in the grave) and then woke Him up (resurrected Him) so he and his wife could have life together, that he not be alone, for his loneliness was not a good result of creation, the only thing which God had to do something about, and for this He had a plan all along which centered around Christ, the Son of Man who could redeem, rectify loneliness, by the giving of His life that another life could be restored.

All hinged on the power of God the Father to resurrect the sacrificed life that the life of the guilty could resurrected in purity, so they could become one, the Son of Man and Man would never be alone. Pure genius is the mystery of the Bride, Christ and His Church. Even this drama of creation, the Son of Man to pay the debt owed for Man, was a living sort of parable pointing to the ultimate and ‘great’ mystery of Christ and the Church (Bride). As Son of Man working the works of the Christ God was working His mystery of salvation, that it was to provide an eternal Bride for His Son. This plan was not declared outright from the beginning but ‘leaked’ in actions and parables as the story of man and His ultimate marriage with God unfolded through the ages. This is why it is the ‘great’ mystery. The story of the bride and Christ (the Son of Man who gave what was needed) has had its twists and turns and in the parables of the Old and New Testament the great love and romancing of Man by God are revealed, not just events but what has been in the hearts of God and Man.

The parables of the bride cannot be told without first establishing the heartbreak God has endured as the often rejected suitor of Man. He has endured rejection from those He loved, far more than He has enjoyed submission or love requited. No one could endure just heartache as the Son of Man has endured. We all know that He was despised and rejected, mocked, beaten and killed by those claimed to love God. Even in this age of Grace, the age of the Bride, the time for her to come to Him, He has suffered rejection more often than not. But the espoused husband endures and believes and hopes and bears all things for love’s sake that he might present unto Himself a perfected Bride.

He has even endured divorce. It is clearly stated in a parable given to Ezekiel (the classic Son of Man representative among the prophets) how God divorced His Bride for infidelity. In spite of the modern day Christian who says God would never do or allow such a thing, this is not even debatable. Nor has he ever thought that celibacy and being alone was the ultimate aim or the ultimate in holiness for man. The mystery declares that Christ will have a holy Bride, one without spot or wrinkle. He will divorce the unfaithful woman. It is simply not good for man to be alone; thus, the Bride is the only good thing for the Christ, but she must be pure and holy, without blemish. God declared that he would not stop at divorcing a wife who was committing fornication against Him.

“And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of DIVORCE; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also.” Jeremiah 3:8

When decrying divorce among God’s people, Jesus Himself even recognized that fornication of any sort was one thing worthy of divorce. “But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.” Matt 5:32 In His unrelenting quest for a worthy wife, God will not settle for anything but ‘perfection’. The perfection of the Bride of Christ will be brought by His own hand. Only God has the power to change a person through and through, only He is able to convert the soul and perfect us by giving us a new Spirit and a new heart that can have love’s truth written upon it in indelible ink. Because a perfect Bride could be raised up from sin’s darkness and ignorance, from an idolatrous heritage and from prostitution, God would not, and will not, accept anything less than a virtuous woman who would be a devoted and faithful wife.

God opens His heart with emotion concerning His feelings for the Bride. In an extremely heart-wrenching parable God pours out His heart to the prophet Ezekiel concerning the betrayal and disappointment of His unfaithful espoused wife. It not only tells the pain which God is willing to endure in order to find a faithful wife, it shows that He will only accept a faithful and devoted wife, the only acceptable standards of a worthy wife, which He considers the ‘Perfect’ wife.

In the parable of the divorced wife, He says He had found her alone and abandoned in the gutter, covered in her own blood, unwashed, wallowing in filth. He picked her up, washed her and saved her from enslavement and a lonely death. He turned her into the most beautiful of young ladies. He had lavished every beautiful gift upon her so she could become His beautiful Bride. He loved her with passion and purity. But she had turned on Him, despised Him for no reason other than to fuel her own lust, went looking for other lovers, and shamed Him with her open lewdness. She one continuous stream of adulteries, prostituting herself with every neighbor she could woo. In the parable God reveals His heartbreak to Ezekiel.

The prophet could understand the pain of losing the love of His life, for Ezekiel too had been required by God to suffer the loss of ‘the desire of his eyes’. The pain which Ezekiel was required to suffer (as a prophet must identify with some part or parts of the sufferings of Christ) was to show God’s willingness to cut off even the apple of His eye, the desire of His eyes, if she was discovered to be a harlot without true love for Him. His divorce of an inferior Bride of infidelities proves in an antithetical way that God’s true intentions have always been to create a Bride for His Son Jesus Christ, but it must be a faithful and perfect Bride.

Why would God put himself through a divorce if He were not intent on the prime importance of not being alone but having a beautiful, perfect Bride for the Son of Man?