Friday
Friday
The Wedding
I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
Revelation 21:2
According to Jewish custom, a marriage took place in two stages, the betrothal and the wedding. The betrothal included an exchange of promises and gifts and was regarded as being almost as binding as a marriage. The betrothed couple could be called husband and wife, and if a separation took place, it would have to be a divorce. The wedding followed some time after the betrothal and was essentially a public social occasion. It began with a festive procession, accompanied by music and dancing, in which the bridegroom and his friends went out to fetch his bride, who would have made herself ready. He would then bring her and friends and relatives back to his home for the wedding feast, which might last as long as a week. During it the bride and bridegroom would receive a public blessing from their parents and be escorted to the nuptial chamber, where they would consummate their marriage in the intimacy of physical union.
The Bible betrays no embarrassment about sex and marriage. It is uninhibited in its use of the marriage metaphor to depict the covenant between God and Israel. Yahweh’s love for Israel is portrayed, especially by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea, in bluntly physical terms.
Jesus himself implied, in a daring statement, that he was his followers’ bridegroom, so that while he was still with them it would be inappropriate for them to fast. Then Paul, though much maligned as a misogynist, developed the metaphor further. He pictured Christ as the bridegroom who had loved his bride the church and sacrificed himself for her in order that he might present her to himself unblemished and radiant (Eph. 5:25–27). When Paul added that “this is a profound mystery” (Eph. 5:32), he seems to have meant that the one flesh experience in marriage symbolizes the union of Christ with his church.
For further reading: Ezekiel 16:7–8