The Revelation of Christ as the Bridegroom

He that hath the bride is the Bridegroom: but the friend of the Bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the Bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled—John 3:29.

We approach today the consideration of the crowning mystery, and yet the most wondrous revelation of the Christian faith. It is at once a mystery and a revelation. Nothing but a revelation could have suggested such an idea to our minds, or have allowed us to entertain it without being guilty of irreverence, and even of impiety; but the revelation is made in language so distinctly figurative that St. Paul himself is constrained to say of the truth which it both manifests and conceals, “This is a great mystery.”

And well he might; it is perhaps the greatest of all mysteries affecting our present hopes and our future destiny, and St. John does not encourage the hope that we shall ever here enjoy much more light upon all its wondrous import when he tells us, “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” What will be the actual form of this mysterious relationship, which it is the revealed purpose of God to establish between His Divine Son and the ransomed and glorified Church, it is at present impossible to conjecture; but, on the other hand, it is absurd to suppose that the revelation, because mysterious, is illusory.

The Closest of Relationships

The revelation is contained in a figure; the Church is to be the Bride of the Lamb. An earthly relationship, with the conditions of which we are acquainted, is employed to shadow forth a heavenly relationship, with the full conditions of which we are and must remain unacquainted; but we must not therefore conclude that the one throws no light upon the other.

Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the heavenly relationship, foreseen by the Father from all eternity, is the archetype of the earthly, and that therefore the marriage bond is a copy rather than an illustration of that mysterious union of which we speak. At any rate this much is plain, there are plenty of other relations subsisting among ourselves, which