Royal Weddings

I love weddings.  From the engagement to the altar there is much excitement, planning, and stress, too.  Once the day arrives, joy, hope and happiness seem to take center stage in this theater of emotions.  How true this was for the last several Royal weddings!  It takes something very important, or very special to get me up at 3:00am or 4:00am.  My memories of watching (before the crack of dawn) Lady Diana Spencer walk down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then viewing her son admire his bride traverse the aisle at Westminster Abbey, are priceless and treasured.  Sharing the Anglican tradition of worship made the ceremonies all the more meaningful to me.

s Kirsty Wigglesworth via Getty images

God loves Weddings, too

God uses a wide variety of literary devices to capture our attention and illustrate who He is to us.  One of my favorite analogies is marriage as an example of how He feels, cares, and is committed to us.  After all, the first miracle Jesus performed was at a wedding!  Jesus describes Himself as the Bridegroom in Matthew 25:1-13 in the Parable of the Ten Virgins.  This is a lesson in being ready for His return.  Revelation 19:7 tells of the wedding between the Lamb and His bride who has made herself ready. Then, in chapter 21 of Revelation the bride of the Lamb is identified as the ‘Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.’  The apostle Paul understood this relationship analogy from his time with Jesus.  To the church at Ephesus Paul wraps up a marriage instruction with, “This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church.  However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”  (Ephesians 5:32-33)

The Old Testament lays the foundation for Jesus being the Bridegroom to the church (believers).  Isaiah says in 62:5 “As a young man marries a maiden, so will your sons marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will God rejoice over you.”

Ancient Hebrew Weddings

His chosen people, the Hebrew nation, had laws and customs given directly by God to order their daily life, as well as rituals throughout their lives in order to draw them closer to Him. There is much symbolism and great detail to the Hebrew Wedding Marriage Proposal process.  Here are a few of the most obvious analogies:

A suitor would bring something of great value in order to marry a certain maiden (Christ gave His life for us), he would then offer her a cup from which to drink.

To signify her acceptance of the marriage proposal, she would drink from the cup, thus legally binding herself to him.  Christ offers us the cup of salvation, as we drink it we are binding ourselves to Him.  (Matthew 26:18 & 26:27-28, Mark 14:13 & 14:23, Luke 22:8 & 22:20)

The bridegroom would leave his bride with some gifts for her to remember him by while he is away.  Christ left us the Holy Spirit and His many gifts by which to remember Him. (Luke 24:49, Acts 1:4-5, Galatians 5:22-23)

Once the bride accepted the marriage proposal the bridegroom would go back to his father’s house to add a room where they would live after the wedding.  The bridegroom would continue to work on the room until his father said it was ready.  Then, and only then, he could go back to his bride’s home, marry her, and bring her home to live at his father’s house in the room he prepared for them.  Christ is doing the same thing for us!  He has gone back to His Father’s house to prepare a place for us, and only the Father knows the time when He will tell Jesus to come back to get us, His bride! (Acts 1:7, John 20:17, John 14:1-3, Mark 13:32-33)

There are more symbolic details to this process, but these are the highlights that might spark an interest to dig further.

Don’t you feel loved like a new bride?