Ahhh Harry and Meghan…what a beautiful picture of love. Their royal wedding was over the top gorgeous in every way, but my favorite part was the way Prince Harry looked at her, honored her, cherished her and protected her. I thought of my own wedding day, and the unbreakable bond my precious husband and I share.
The metaphor of Christ and His bride (the church) resonated in my heart as I drank in the beauty and significance of holy matrimony.
Ephesians 5:21-32 says:
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body.
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
The Divine Marriage by David Kyle Foster expounds on this profound mystery:
He wants us to be His lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward and forever more. And in the Upper Room, with a towel wrapped around Him and a basin of water in front of Him, God incarnate knelt down to propose marriage. And what God hath brought together, let no one put asunder!
And so we see why Satan is so intent in defacing and destroying human sexuality and marriage. He is trying to mock God. He is trying to mar the very image of God expressed on this earth through the marital bond, sexual and otherwise. He is trying to rob God of His deepest and most passionate intention—that of marital union with man—because if he can destroy the beauty of the earthly bond, he can destroy in us any desire for the heavenly bond.
You and I, and every believer, were created to live in marital union with God, both now and in the age to come. Everything about a healthy marital union on this earthly plane has been designed by God to be a reflection of the interaction that we are meant to have with God Himself:
*the covenant that is struck to bind us together eternally;
*the signs and symbols of that covenant that are a public declaration of that bond;
*the keeping pure of oneself for the other;
*the wedding party, with a host of invited guests looking on, rejoicing in the display of our mutual love and affection;
*intimate moments of sharing our deepest self with the other, resulting in new life being born and a oneness of body, soul and spirit;
*over time, the development of a oneness of heart that produces a unity of thinking, and even, appearance (cf Rom 8:29; 2 Cor 3:18; 1 John 3:2—”when He appears, we shall be like Him”).
The parallels are endless.
Today I encourage you and me to meditate on Christ’s love for us…we are His bride! And in return let’s worship Him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength! ❤