You will no longer be called, “Abandoned,” and your land will no longer be called “Desolate.” Indeed, you will be called “My Delight is in Her” and your land “Married.” For the Lord will take delight in you, and your land will be married to him. As a young man marries a young woman, so your sons will marry you. As a bridegroom rejoices over a bride, so your God will rejoice over you.
The next two, indeed the final two, messages in this Kingdom of Heaven series that we’ve been working through are a bit special. In them, I plan to focus on what I consider to be the two most significant images found in Scripture that tell us what the citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will be like. These are also the two images that got me started thinking about doing a series on the Kingdom of Heaven. So if you’ve enjoyed this series, you can thank these two images for giving me the idea!
What are these images? They are the Bride of Christ and the Body of Christ.
These images are special in another way as well. Over the course of this series, I have always focused on one particular passage of Scripture, teasing out what that passage might be teaching us about the Kingdom of Heaven. I can’t do that with these final two images, because there is no one passage that I can solely focus on while still doing any justice to what Scripture tells us about these images.
All of this means that these last two messages might be a little bit longer than usual. And they might feel a bit more rambling as well, as I go through several passages of Scripture, in order to examine what God has said about each of these images.
For today, as you can see from the title of this post, I’m going to focus on the Bride of Christ. And one of the main passages that I want to point to regarding this image is the one you’ve seen above, Isaiah 62: 4 – 5.
However, before we begin, I need to clarify a few points. First, the image of marriage and the Bride is pervasive throughout Scripture. This is one of the many ways that God describes His relationship with the people of Israel in the Old Testament, and it is a common image used by Christ and the New Testament writers to describe Jesus’ relationship with the Church. So in this post, we are only going to barely scratch the surface of how this image is used throughout Scripture. There is so much depth to this idea within God’s Word that fully exploring this image could be a series all on its own. In this post, I’m simply going to hit what I think are some of the highlights, a few of the significant ideas that are wrapped up in this image throughout Scripture.
Second, the original Scriptural audience had a particular idea in mind when they spoke about marriage, bridegrooms and brides. Specifically, they would have had in mind the practices and traditions that surrounded marriage within the community of Israel from the time of the Patriarchs on down into the first century. So in order for us to fully understand what Scripture means when it speaks of marriage or brides, we need to understand what marriage meant to the Hebrew people in the context of their history.
This means that I am going to be referring to ideas and concepts of marriage that may or may not line up with modern views of what marriage is or ought to be. Please recognize that when I reference these traditions, I am not arguing or even suggesting that this is the “correct” view of what marriage ought to be. Such an argument lies far beyond the scope of what I’m trying to do in this post. If you want to engage in that discussion, I would suggest that you head over to my friend Von’s substack, where he discusses these issues at great length. But for me, here in this post, I’m simply trying to articulate what the images of marriage, bridegrooms and brides meant to the original Scriptural audiences, so that we can get a clearer picture of what God is trying to communicate to us about our relationship with Him through these images.
With those caveats clearly understood, let’s get started.
A Brief History of Hebrew Marriage
As I said before, to understand these images from Scripture we need to understand what marriage meant to the original Hebrew audience. And, as you can probably imagine, these ideas meant something rather different to the Jew who originally heard them proclaimed by the prophets and, later, by Jesus Himself, at least as compared to what we generally understand them to mean today.
First of all, almost all marriages in Jewish culture were arranged. Generally, either the prospective bridegroom or his father would go to the prospective bride’s father to negotiate the match. Though the woman’s opinions about the match were not completely ignored, they were considered of secondary importance in the whole process. One of the primary focuses of this negotiation would be on cost. The two fathers had to negotiate what was called the mohar, the gift that the bridegroom would give to the bride’s father. Biblical experts disagree about what, exactly, the mohar represented. Some feel it was a kind of bride price, while others suggest that it was more of an insurance policy, held by the woman’s father to support her in case her new husband died before her. For our purpose here, however, it doesn’t really matter what, exactly, the mohar represented. The important principle here is that marriage came at a cost; taking a bride required something of value from the bridegroom.
Once the fathers came to an agreement, the first of two significant ceremonies would take place. This was the betrothal ceremony, called the kiddushin. In this ceremony, the bridegroom would publicly proclaim that he was taking the woman as his wife. And as a visible symbol of their betrothal, he would give her something of value, often a ring. This was something that would set her apart from other unmarried women, that would mark her as betrothed.
I think it is important to note that the kiddushin was more than what we would call a betrothal today. After this ceremony, the couple was legally married. If they decided to separate after this ceremony took place they would need to get an official, legal divorce. This is why Scripture says that Joseph, when he discovered that Mary was already pregnant, intended to divorce her privately.[1] They had already gone through the kiddushin ceremony, making them betrothed, as it says in verse 18 of this chapter. But they had not yet gone through the actual marriage ceremony.
Because even though they were technically married at this point, the newly betrothed couple did not begin living together as husband and wife at this point. After the kiddushin, the woman went back to her father’s house. This is because after the kiddushin, the bridegroom had to begin preparing the home that he would share with his new wife. These preparations could be long or short, simple or very elaborate, depending on the wealth and desire of the bridegroom’s family. But the significant thing is this: the bridegroom made the preparations but the bridegroom’s father decided when the preparations were complete. It wasn’t until the father said things were ready that the next step of the process could take place.
That next step was the final ceremony, called the nisu’in. This ceremony would begin rather suddenly; once his father declared that the preparations were complete, the bridegroom would immediately go and take his betrothed from her father’s house. That meant that this ceremony could happen pretty much at any time of the day or night, so the bride had to be ready to go basically at a moment’s notice. Remember the parable of the Ten Virgins that we discussed several weeks ago[2]? In that parable, the virgins were waiting for the nisu’in ceremony to begin.
When this ceremony began, the new bride would be taken by her groom with great fanfare and celebration, often involving what amounted to a great parade through the town. Eventually, they would arrive at the bridegroom’s father’s house, where another series of blessings would be pronounced on the couple. Afterwards, they would go to the place that was prepared for them and begin their lives together as husband and wife.
Some Observations
I hope, after that rather long history lesson, that you are all still with me here! But as I said before, understanding what marriage meant to the people of Israel is crucial to understanding why God used this image so often to describe His relationship to His people.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the Hebrew ideal of marriage sheds a great deal of light on how God feels about His people. First, there is the idea of cost. Taking a bride, being a bridegroom, cost you something. You had to be willing to make some kind of sacrifice in order to win the right to call her your bride. So taking a bride wasn’t something to be done lightly or on a whim. The bride had to be someone special, someone precious to the bridegroom; someone he was willing to make a sacrifice for in order to win.
The connection here is, I hope, quite obvious. Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice, giving up His life in an agonizing death on the cross, so that we might be won as His bride. That means He saw us as precious. Winning you, winning me, was worth the price to Him, worth the sacrifice that He made. He counted the cost, and He decided, “Winning them as My Bride is worth the price I will have to pay!”
So the first element of this image is that we are bought with a price,[3] a price Jesus thought was worth paying because we are precious to Him.
The next idea I see in this image is the element of rejoicing. Both of the marriage ceremonies involved great celebration and rejoicing. They would hold a huge feast for both the kiddushin betrothal and for the nisu’in wedding. There would be food and wine and music and dancing, as well as gift giving, making speeches and the pronouncement of blessings on the new couple. These ceremonies were joyous occasions which were likely a highlight in the lives of everyone involved.
What I find significant here is this. The terms “bride” and “bridegroom” only really apply to the wedding ceremonies. Though of course they can be (and sometimes are) used in other contexts, generally you hear them most in connection to these celebrations and ceremonies. After the ceremonies are completed, the two people involved become simply the wife and the husband. But during the wedding feasts, she is the Bride and he is her Bridegroom!
When Jesus refers to this idea or mentions this image, He almost always refers to the Bridegroom coming for the Bride. In other words, He consistently builds an image of this time of great celebration, the joyous time when the Bride and Bridegroom are first joined together, surrounded by all their friends and family, feasting and celebrating the love that has brought the two together to become one flesh.[4] To me, that implies that Jesus is really looking forward to this celebration! He is eagerly anticipating the time when He can celebrate with us as we become one with Him forever.
And that leads into the final idea that I see in this image, at least the final idea that I’m going to discuss here today. That is the idea of intimacy and joining[5]. God makes clear throughout Scripture that marriage involves two people, a man and a woman, being joined together as one. Such a joining together introduces tremendous intimacy into a relationship. When my wife and I were dating, we spent a lot of time together; basically every moment that I could, I would spend with her. Throughout the time we were dating, and through the time that we were engaged, there was a great, and ever growing, sense of intimacy between us. The more time we spent together, the more intimate, the more joined, our lives became.
And then we got married, and I realized that the intimacy we had shared before only scratched the surface of the kind of intimacy that was now possible between us. Before, we shared parts of our lives together. Granted, we shared all that we could, but they were still only parts of our lives. After our marriage, every part of our lives was joined together. We experienced a depth of intimacy that was never possible before we were joined in marriage.
That is the kind of intimacy, the kind of joining, that this image of the Bride implies. God does not want merely a part of our lives. He wants all of us, complete intimacy, every bit of what we do and who we are. Imagine the kind of marriage we would have if my wife and I had limited our intimacy, our joining, to what we had before we were married. There were so many parts of our lives that we didn’t share then, and if we had kept those parts of ourselves separate, I’m pretty sure our marriage would have been doomed.
That is what I hear Jesus saying when He calls us His Bride. Just as a married couple must join every part of their lives together, He desires to share in, to be joined with, every part of our lives. I think that is why this image shows up repeatedly at the end of the book of Revelation,[6] where John prophetically describes the final culmination of God’s plan for redemptive history, where His Son and His people are joined forever in complete, total intimacy.
I believe that it is this intimacy, this ultimate joining, that Jesus is joyfully anticipating when He refers to us, His people, as His Bride.
Final Thoughts
As I said before, we’ve only just barely scratched the surface of what this image means in Scripture; there is just too much contained in this image to even begin to plumb its depths in one post! But as we come to the end of our Musings for today, I would encourage you to spend some time meditating on this image.
Consider what it means that the Holy Son of God thought you were worth the terrible price He had to pay in order to win you. Consider the amazing celebration that He has in store for us when He comes to take us from this world and bring us to His Father’s House, claiming us as His Bride forever! And consider the kind of intimacy He is eagerly anticipating having with each of us: a life that is completely intimate, totally joined to His.
This is such an amazing image, something that the God of the universe has repeatedly said in His Word that He desires to have with each of us. Why don’t you spend some time in prayer right now, adoring the Bridegroom and thanking Him for claiming you as His Bride.
[1] Matthew 1:19
[2] You can find it at https://kevinchilton.substack.com/p/oil-for-our-lamps if you need a reminder.
[3] 1 Corinthians 6:20; 7:23
[4] Genesis 2:24; Malachi 2: 14 – 15
[5] Yes, I know, technically that’s two ideas. So sue me…
[6] Revelation 19: 7 – 9; 21: 1 – 2
How encouraging to know that this is what awaits followers of Christ! I needed to read this today. In my own writing, I have had a bit of a heavy focus on sin. I think I have been swinging the pendulum a bit far in an over-correction effort. It's great to remember that someday there will be no more sin. What a great day will be this Marriage Supper of the Lamb!
Learning the history of Hebrew marriage makes so much fall into place.