Friday Freelance: MARRIAGE, PART III

Opposites attract—a fascinating principle with magnets, in man and wife, or between God and people.

His timetable is eternity; we crave immediate gratification. He came as humble Servant; our nature is pridefully self-serving. He is holy, the epitome of goodness and love; we are hollow, willing to fill our God-shaped voids with the deficiency of the world.

Contrasts abound. It defies reason that any one of us, let alone all of us, are chosen to be His very own. Yet Christ finds His church irresistible, calling her His bride.

Paul speaks of man and wife becoming one as a great mystery. Paul does not make human marriage a metaphor for abstract divine. Marriage is concrete reality between Christ and church.

God often uses the palpable physical to portray less tangible spiritual. We grasp the physical intimacy of marriage resulting in a child's conception. Stretch a bit to recognize union of physical and spiritual in Mary's consent to receive the Holy Spirit and conceive God's divine Son. Stretch a bit more and comprehend the spiritual intimacy of the Holy Spirit, who enters the believer and instills the eternal life of Christ.

As any baby, Jesus grew in His mother's womb until He became too great for her to contain and emerged to become visible. Spiritual life in a believer should likewise grow until too great to contain, emerging as the visible fruit of the Spirit.

Human marriage between one man and one woman in life-long commitment is sealed by physical union exclusive to the relationship, and naturally results in new life. The Bible refers to this intimacy with the word "know," as in "Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived." No one else will know a man or woman the way spouse does. And no matter how it is described, the inexperienced cannot comprehend such intimacy.

Marriage is consummated when virgin bride surrenders herself to her husband. It is a point of no return to a former way of life. Those who are in Christ have crossed a line of surrender and union and knowledge from which there is no going back. Those who do not know Him cannot understand it.

Infinitely more might be said. Of God being entirely complete without us, yet needing us to be wholly who He is. Of the seed of His Word. Or of the future, when physical and spiritual meld in resurrected bodies, when a bride united as one receives divine Bridegroom and becomes one with Him.

Details are in the Bible.

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