"And upon His head were many crowns." (Rev. 19:12.)
(Continued from page 65.)
CHAPTER XIII. Bridegroom.
It is not of the Bride that we are now desiring to speak, but of the Bridegroom; but the one so implies the other that we are compelled to the course we have been pursuing. The recurrence of the type so frequently in the Old Testament, even from the beginning of the history, is full proof of how dear to Him is the thought of the relationship. Assuredly we shall not give these up from any preconceived idea that they ought not to be there. They are there, and speak so plainly for themselves, pictures though they may be only, that no unprejudiced mind can avoid seeing them.
Take Rebekah:and if Isaac be a type of Christ, and, in the twenty-second of Genesis, received back "in figure" from the dead (Heb. 11:19), how is it that we find next Sarah, the mother (Rom. 9:5) passes away, and then Rebekah takes her place in Sarah’s tent as bride of the risen heir. Of the kindred already, she is called by a special messenger (as the Church by the Holy Spirit) to cross the desert in his company to meet her yet unseen Lord.
Take Asenath; and Joseph too is betrayed by his brethren, brought down to the prison-house and brought up out of it to be the Saviour of Egypt (the world); and then he must have a Gentile bride, while his brethren are strangers to him.
Take Zipporah (the "bird"-the heavenly bride); and again Moses is away from and rejected by his brethren when he finds her by the well-a Gentile too-and marries her.
Are such things, so fit in themselves, so fitting to their place in the history, mere casual happenings, which we may use, if we will, for illustration, but must not seriously press as having any design from God? Surely if design may be recognized anywhere without a label, we may recognize it here.
Now it is not contradictory to all this, and cannot be, to find that Old Testament saints looked for a city which has foundations; or even to believe, as I have long done, that this city and the New Jerusalem, the Bride of the Lamb in Revelation, are the same thing. Once let us realize that the "city," however identified in some sense with its inhabitants, is yet in fact the habitation and not the inhabitants, and the difficulty begins to clear. The Bride-City may contain more than the Bride, as even the writer whose views I am referring to allows. The throne of God and of the Lamb are in it; and the twelfth of Hebrews distinctly shows us "the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem," apart from both "the church of the first-born ones,"and "the spirits of just men made perfect."* * In the tract to which I have been referring the names of the twelve tribes on the gates of the city and those of the twelve apostles on the foundations are taken alike to show the Israelitish character of the city itself, and the "portion " of the twelve as judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:28) shows these to be " separated off from the Church," the body of Christ. He even declares that " the Lamb is the special title of the Lord Jesus in relation to Israel, and the elect of Israel"! No wonder that it should be also discovered that "the Gospels are the conclusion of the Old Testament history, and not the commencement of Church teaching; except, of course,"-and how important the exception!-"so far as Christ crucified is the foundation of all blessing."*
"God has prepared for them a city" does not in this case imply necessarily what it is quoted for; and we may adapt the writer’s own words otherwise than he would allow. "This holy Jerusalem may contain"-the saints of the Old Testament; "but it is not necessary on this account that we should identify them."
Turning from all this now, how blessed to think of this Bridegroom character of the Lord Jesus! It should be plain that it expresses His personal joy of love, in a way that the " Head of the Body " cannot, because it expresses a very different thing. A whole book of the Old Testament has been given to the expression of this relation of the Lord Jesus,-no doubt, in the first place to Israel; but capable of application all through to the higher and heavenly. Perhaps we have not a New Testament book of this character, for the same reason that we have not a New Testament psalm-book. It would rather belittle than truly represent it; if it were not, at least, to be a book too large for human handling. Christian psalmody finds in all else that has been written its material of praise. Its "song of songs" must also transcend utterance. And perhaps must be learned otherwise than any book of this kind could avail for.
Thus it is, after all, that one can say so little of what the Lord’s Bridegroom character means. We see that all the nearest, sweetest human relationships are taken up to image forth these more wondrous spiritual ones. And Bridegroom and Bride, always remaining in the first freshness of the sabbatic morning of their beginning, speak of a mutual abiding for one another, which is the revelation of a sufficing love, such as we are surely learning by the way as we go to meet Him, but which in the first moment of His presence will manifest itself as it had not been before.
In the moment of her presentation to Isaac, Rebekah took a veil and covered herself. We can but do so in the anticipation of that time.