See the Bride of Christ series here
Friends,
If you received an invitation,
To an ole friend’s wedding reception,
For the couple, would you be excited,
Plan on attending, and be delighted?
Or would you send your friend some emails,
Pushing to learn the wedding details??
Or would you just be deeply insulted,
That, to the wedding, you’re not invited?!
Moving on…
If I noted a few similarities between two things,
Would you automatically assume they must be the same things??
Or would you just ponder their similarities,
And not get lost thinking about their differences?
Jesus sent to saints an invitation,
To His up-coming wedding reception. 1
We are His friends, for whom He died.
Yet most of us think …we’re His bride!
Paul said a husband’s love for his wife is akin,
To Christ’s love for His church, since He died for our sins. 2
Ergo, most of us seem to think we’ll be His wife,
Forever on the new Earth, in the afterlife!
We seem to have struck out what, not who, an angel called,
‘The Lamb’s wife’, about which Apostle John was enthralled. 3
Thus, we insult Paul, the angel, and maybe The Lord, as well,
Because to what they clearly meant, most of us have …bid farewell.
Jesus prayed that we ‘may be one’, of one accord. 4
In salvation, we become one with Him, The Lord,
Members of His body, spiritually,
Paul refers to this as a ‘great mystery’. 2
With ancient Israel, The Lord was ‘betrothed’,
Though most folks refused to be ‘threads in His cloth’.
They rebelled against His ‘Return to me’ pleas.
Thus, He gave her a divorce decree. 5
Considering all the points on our ‘bride of Christ platter’, 6
The angel’s words are The Bible’s last point on the matter.
The New Jerusalem that John saw, was ‘as a bride’. 7
The angel knows what, from us, The Scripture of Truth hides. 8
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1 See: Revelation 19:9. NB: This chapter does not reference the actual wedding ceremony. Some might think we become 'eternally wedded' to Christ once we have proven our fidelity to Him to the point of either our death, or are raptured alive. Others might think we are wedded to Him at the point of our salvation. The latter notion is suspect, since throughout the Bible, the 'once saved, always saved’ concept' is proven to be wrong. The best proof of this may be what Jesus said in Revelation 3:16.
2 See: Ephesians 5:25-33.
3 See: Revelation 21:9.
4 He mentioned this 4 times in His priestly prayer prior to His crucifixion.
5 This notwithstanding, The Lord promised, once again, to draw Israel back to Himself in a unique, eternal relationship. Evidently, ‘she’s not yet there!’ See: Jeremiah 3, Isaiah 59, and Hosea 2.
6 Elaborated in Parts 1 and 2 of this series.
7 See: Revelation 21:2.
8 See: Heaven’s Animating Holy Scripts (Poem). This incredibly UNIQUE book is only referenced once in The Bible – by an angel in Daniel 10. He then quotes extensively from it from Daniel 11, to the first 3 verses of Daniel 12. From his quotes, we can deduce this book might be an exhaustive, pre-written account, either of the totality of human history, or at least some key aspects of it, e.g., related to Israel. Knowing Who created and who governs His entire creation, I intuit The Lord may have commissioned its writing, based on His foreknowledge of EVERYTHING! Believe what you will…
