Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
The Bible seems clear: Christ the eternal Son of God became the "last Adam," the new Head of the human race (1 Cor. 15:45-47). Being of the human race, Christ loves a bride-to-be and wants to be married to "her" (Rev. 19:7, 8). That "bride" is the corporate body of His people who respond to His wooing love, it's the church (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:23-27, 32). Christ's corporate body of believers who respond to His nuptial love seem to be the population of the "New Jerusalem" (Rev. 21:9, 10).
Christ loves sinners, for He gave Himself for the world; but there must be something special about His love for His bride-to-be--a nuptial love. They must be a people who have grown up "to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:12, 13) in order to stand at His side as a "bride" stands by her husband.
The Holy Spirit is "the Spirit of truth, [and] He will guide [His church] into all truth" (John 16:13). Any church that is not totally devoted to "the truth [as] in Jesus," "the truth of the gospel," "rightly dividing the word of truth," which is not itself "the pillar and ground of the truth," that does not hold "the truth in Christ"--such cannot be the "bride" whom the Savior loves with that nuptial love (Eph. 4:21; Col. 1:5; 2 Tim. 2:15; 1 Tim. 3:15, 2:7). The true Holy Spirit specializes in convictions of truth, and truth brings the true church into blessed internal harmony and unity.
The "wife" mentioned in Revelation 19:7, 8 corresponds to the "woman" of 12:17, the last-days "remnant ... who keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ" (King James Version). A bridegroom has no eyes for millions of other women: there is his one and only. Christ must turn from churches of "Babylon," although He fervently loves true individuals who are still in "Babylon" who wait to hear that "Voice from heaven" calling them to "come out of her, My people" (18:4). Obviously they take their part at last as individual members of that "remnant" church.
Let's stay awake. Something is going on.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: April 30, 2006.
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