Jesus said that anyone who is healthy doesn’t need a doctor (Luke 5:31). It would follow likewise, that any married couple who know what love is don’t need a marriage counselor.
But we live in a fallen world where the healthiest sometimes need a physician and the happiest of couples sometimes need some encouragement and reproof.
What a blessing when that Physician is Christ Himself and that Counselor is our Savior. In each instance, He is the One of whom it is said, “Unto us a Son is given” (Isa. 9:6); Christ became one of us, a member of the fallen human race who was Himself never sick and who never sinned. Yet whenever He healed the sick, He took their sickness upon Himself: “He ... healed all who were sick, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet saying: ‘He Himself ... bore our sicknesses’” (Matt. 8:16, 17). A supremely healthy Man bore sickness in His own body! (Let anyone who is sick ponder this.)
As a Marriage Counselor He is also “unto us a Son is given,” One of us. The most painful experience a good man can suffer is to be despised, rejected, hated by the one woman in all the world whom he truly loves, and Jesus has had that experience—in an infinite dimension. Because the “woman” is the “church” on which He has bestowed His supreme regard.
“Church” isn’t necessarily synonymous with the word “denomination,” but it is distinguished in Revelation 12:17 and 14:12 as the one that stands out distinctly different in that it “keeps the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.” Thus it is different from “Babylon” which is “fallen” (14:8; 18:2). If this church keeps the commandments of God, it has had to “follow the Lamb wherever He goes,” and “in whose mouth there is no guile,” who is “without fault before the throne of God” (14:4, 5). There has been something in its earthly history that is different: there was a time when it eagerly and sincerely accepted every ray of truth that God permitted to shine on its pathway. No resistance; a betrothal that brought joy to the heart of the Son of God who is still and will be forever a human being as well, but “God with us.”
And then as “she” grew to maturity, “she” turned on Him in “cruel” rejection. “Impossible,” you say? It’s portrayed in Scripture in the Song of Solomon chapter 5. It’s the love story of the ages. And the alienation must and will be healed in at-one-ment, reconciliation, repentance. Don’t “divorce” yourself from the church. It is to become the bride of the Lamb when it learns to appreciate what the Lamb has suffered and given for it.
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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