The Ultimate Wedding

The imagery here of a wedding is to convey the message of the marvelous joy of the uniting of God and man in this ultimate and intimate way. God and man actually get married and become a couple. You could very well get locked up for saying it, but the fact is, a single Christian could say, "I'm not married now, but someday I'm going to be married to God and be Queen of the universe." It sounds like delusions of grandeur, but what it is, is the promise of God. It is what heaven is all about. It is about a marriage that finally fulfills a universal dream of being married and living happily ever after.

This Wedding of the Lamb is a great day, not just for the Bride, but for the Lamb and for the Father. God has had a lot of marriage problems, and this marks the end of all those problems with a happy marriage forever. God has not exactly been what we call lucky in love. In the first place he picked a lemon for a bride. He chose Israel to be His bride and she turned out to be a harlot going to bed with every sweet talker who came down the pike. God finally had to get a divorce. Jeremiah describes it in Jer. 3:6-8. "Have you seen what faithless Israel has done?

She has gone up on every high hill and under spreading tree and has committed adultery there. I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me but she did not..........I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries." If you are unforgiving to divorced people, then you are one who refuses to forgive God, for He was divorced, and that is not a very comfortable position to be in.

God is not faithless to His bride, however, and He goes on courting her, and in 3:14 He says to her, "Return, faithless people, declares the Lord, for I am your husband." God pursued His bride like Hosea pursued his faithless wife, and in Hosea 2:19-20 he declares, "I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord." Isa. 62:5 records the same optimism: "As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you." The marital battle of God continues with the new Israel, the church, but at last the battle is won, and all rivalry is defeated, and God finally reigns supreme. Now at last He can enjoy a faithful wife who loves no other but Him. The marriage of others is minimized in heaven because the focus is on God finally having a loyal loving bride. There is marriage in heaven. In fact, there is nothing else but marriage. It is in hell where there will be no marriage, and all will be an existence of isolated aloneness with no relationships whatever.

All of history is God's battle to woo and win His bride, and all of eternity is the honeymoon. History begins with a marriage of Adam and Eve, and eternity begins

with a marriage of God and man. The creation of a wife for Adam was a snap. A little nap and a little surgery, and Adam had his wife. Getting a wife for the second Adam was a much more radical process. Jesus, the second Adam, did not just go to sleep, but had to die and have his side split open by a spear. His wife was far more costly. He had to give His life to purchase her, and then give many hundreds of years of guidance, forgiveness, and intercession to get His bride prepared. Marriage is no secondary theme. It is the theme of life for time and eternity. It is the alpha and omega of relationships. It is the foundation for history and heaven. Everything we do either helps or hinders our temporal or eternal marriage. Even singles are perpetually involved in that which enriches their relationship to Christ, or poisons it. Nobody can escape the need for marriage enrichment, for that is what life is all about.