It's the one place where above all else we must "walk softly": the holy Son of God who has become the new Head of the human race, intimately close to us in His humanity yet "in the beginning … God" and forever will be God, He is in love.
In trying to understand, the only analogy we can turn to is our own human experience: a pure youth on the threshold of manhood has discovered a girl who answers to his heart longings. They are human longings but holy, even angels can't know or understand; this youth has been created "in the image of God," which even angels cannot claim to be.
His love for this girl (who is on the threshold of womanhood) is a faint intimation of the plight that Jesus the Son of God finds Himself in: He is in love with a "woman" and He is captive to that love. As true love always does, it possesses Him and drives Him. The old saying is that all the world loves two who are in love; all of God's universe watches the unfolding of this love affair that the Son of God is caught up in.
The church is a human organism, a "body." How can Christ love a church as a man loves a pure young woman, a virgin, who gives herself to him in answer to his love for her?
A hint is in Revelation 3: the sixth church of history, Philadelphia, has responded to Christ's "wooing" in that she has been a "church" that has welcomed every ray of light brought to her by the Holy Spirit regardless of ostracism or persecution to suffer. Christ promises her that He will "make" her persecutors "to come and worship before your feet, and to know that I have loved you" in that rarest of heavenly intimacy (vs. 9).
Can the time ever come when that same "woman" resists and condemns "light" that Jesus brings her? More tomorrow.
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: June 20, 2006.
Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.
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