Last Updated on : Saturday, October 11, 2014
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Chapter 4 The Bride of Christ |
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MANY beautiful figures are employed in the scriptures to describe the close and affectionate relationship between Christ and his people, but there is none more beautiful than that of marriage. What is marriage? For an answer we must turn, not to the many unhappy alliances which obtain on all hands but to God's ideal of the institution. God made "male and female" that they twain should be "one flesh." Where this oneness this divinely intended unity exists, men nourish and cherish their wives, they love them as their own bodies. Thus it is says Paul, with Christ and the ecclesia He allowed himself to be cruelly slaughtered for her sake, he now yearns for her well-being as the Scriptures teach. As we think upon the revealed mystery we feel that we miserably fail in our appreciation of Christ's love, of his deep down fondness for us and of the joy which little acts done in his name and for his sake must yield to him. But he doubtless bears with us. He knows well the deadening influences of sin which press so heavily upon all of us. Our deficiencies are not to last for ever. O Lord "Increase our faith" and forgive our shortcomings. Exaltation to spirit nature will right matters. The Kingdom of God will see a perfect multitudinous woman as we now behold in Christ a perfect man. Then will come the time for a complete antitype of human marriage only in the antitype the excellences will exceed the type as the light of the sun exceeds that of the moon. -A.T.J.
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