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So far this week I have been thinking just a little upon what it means that the church is the bride of Christ. I think it began with preaching on Sunday where one of my points was that we are not to be yoked with unbelievers in marriage, because we are already married to Christ who we are united to by the Holy Spirit. And so it got me thinking of a verse that has been significant to me for as long as I can remember due to its association.
There can’t be many people who have a verse from Song of Songs written on their grave stone but my grandfather is one of them.
He doesn’t have the whole verse, just the banner part, but I love it anyway. The verse it references is chapter 2 verse 4:
‘He has taken me to the banquet hall and his banner over me is love.’
What does it mean to be taken to the banquet hall?
It means to be those with a real and certain hope of being with Christ: ‘tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner…’ Matthew 22:4. Everything is waiting!
It means to be those who are the bride of Christ. Not simply guests or onlookers, but those who are actually betrothed to the Lamb: ’Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen bright and clean was given her to wear.’ Revelation 19:7-8.
It means to be those who despite being wretched and unfaithful sinners are ‘given’ clothes of righteousness to wear, being made clean through being washed in Christ’s blood.
It means to be those whom Christ delights in and over whom he has lifted high a banner of love. It was a love that as we recall was displayed when he experienced the horrors of separation from his heavenly Father, betrayal, torture and death upon a cross.
One of the things that strikes me is just how precious the church is to Christ. He is passionate about us! And for those of us who are husbands, it reminds us of what a high calling it is to love our wives as Christ loved the church: ‘Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…’ Ephesians 5:25
But it also reminds us that we have a great day to look forward to when we will finally say with all the faithful- my Grandmother included since she died last year (running Alpha in her late 90’s)- ‘he has taken me to the banquet hall and his banner over me is love’. What a precious thing to be able to say!
In our last post on Abram we saw that Abram’s faith was directly in Christ. This post we are going to take a look in a bit more depth at the exact nature of that faith.
Genesis chapter 22 is interesting, because in it Abram (now Abraham) is often presented as a slightly crazy Father who blindly agrees to kill his son in a fit of rather ‘interesting’ parenting. And so in Sunday school and from the pulpit, we are exhorted to have faith like Abram. That is, a faith in God that is unwavering- even in adversity. Hence the fact that if you preach Christ from the passage it is claimed you are mistaken and that the passage is actually about ‘faith’, whatever that means and not about Jesus.
Now I understand that the passage is about faith. But I don’t think its the sort of faith that is often meant by those who make such statements.
Firstly, Hebrews explains to us that the reason Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son was because he knew that the promise was going to be delivered through Isaac and therefore God would have to raise him back to life. Not because he was a sandwich short of a picnic!
‘By faith, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.’ Hebrews 11:17-19
Abraham knew this was not about a random act of violence to his son. It is when we are released from seeing the passage in this way that we see the primary burden of the text is to teach Abraham about the substitutionary work of Jesus on the cross.
Let’s look at the facts, there is a son- an only son, verse 2- who will be sacrificed and approaches his death with wood upon his back, verse 9, which will be the wood upon which he is sacrificed. Surely this is a lesson in substitutionary atonement. Which would explain why Abraham says to Isaac in verse 8: ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son” Verse 8. He is looking to the Lord to provide the sacrifice and knows Isaac is not it.
Consider then, that they are left with the promise in verse 14 that ’The LORD will provide’ and they clearly grasp the point of this so deeply that they name the mountain after this fact ’and to this day it is said “On this mountain of the LORD it will be provided.’
This is not simply a meaning that is retrospectively awarded by New Testament readers as some would contend. This is what they clearly took their experiences to mean. (And I’ll leave you thumbing through the maps to see whether the mountain region of Moriah, verse 2, was the region where Jesus the only son carried wood upon his back.) Blind faith? No. Rather a wonderful picture for Abraham of the saving and substitutionary work of Christ.
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Jesus is the most important person who has ever lived. Around 10 years ago I took a step to investigate Jesus for myself. It was the most important thing I ever did!
If you would like to find out more about who Jesus is, why he came and what it means to follow him, I really recommend visiting the site below… otherwise feel free to ask me anything…
Its been interesting to be involved in a series on Genesis recently. One of the big questions for me has become, what is it that we learn exactly about Christ from the Old Testament and in particular the Father’s of faith? What does it mean that Abram ‘believed the LORD and it was credited to him as righteousness?’ Genesis 15:6. On what basis was he righteous? Was it a smoke and mirrors faith, as I’ve come to term it, where he trusted in some sort of general sign or God and through that was indirectly saved by trusting in Christ- even though he didn’t know it. I’m convinced not. I’m convinced in fact that he trusted directly in Christ, who as John Owen and others have so wonderfully commentated has always mediated between God and the church.
For as the Bible puts it: ’Salvation is found in noone else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.’ Acts 4:12.
‘For I do not want you to be ignorant brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptised into Moses, in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink: for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.’ 1 Corinthians 10:1-4
Take Genesis 15. Who was it that Abram trusted when the Lord made his covenant with him? Did he have some sort of pre-Christian pseudo faith that we have to learn from by basically discarding for the real deal? No, Genesis 15 presents Abram as trusting in the one who is known as the ‘word of the Lord.’
‘After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid Abram, I am your shield, your very great reward.” Genesis 15:1
John in his gospel prologue is very clear that we should understand Christ as being the Word of the Lord, who is, in the context of the passage, the eternal Word who predated John the Baptist and has always been at the Father’s side. This word is also visible, verse 1 of Genesis 15, as he came in a ‘vision’. So this is not just a spoken word. Additionally the Bible assures us that it cannot be God the Father, because ‘no-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side has made him known.’ John 1:18.
So this word is a person, which is confirmed further, when in verse 5 we read that: ‘He (that’s the word of the Lord) took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars…’
In verse 6 and this is the crux really, we are then told that ‘Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.’
So where is Abram’s faith and what is the basis for his righteousness that is always praised in the Bible? Well, he believed the word of the Lord. The word of the Lord, Christ the second person of the Trinity who has always mediated the affairs of the church. Which means that Abrams faith is not ‘trust here and believe some vague thing and indirectly you will be saved by faith in Christ.’ No his faith is in Christ directly.
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sometimes you just can’t say it like a cartoon can!
‘A sedate middle-aged lady next to me is transformed into a wailing ecstatic. As the prayers flow, her voice rises to a near scream. Stretching out her arm, she begins to rub her hand up and down my back. ‘Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!’ she screams. The pressure from her hand increases and it moves up to my head, ruffling my hair one way then the other. ‘Halle-LU-JAH,’ she crescendoes, leaping to her feet, arms flung wide above me, eyes tight shut. ‘PRAISE…THE…LORD!’ (Micael Palin in his book Himalaya)
I did laugh when I read this but I must admit it got me thinking. Part of me was saying internally ‘Oh no what a nightmare!’ and the other part was left slightly jealous of the worship in that church…not the head rubbing bit you understand!
You see I’ve been mulling over worship recently and I’ve come to the conclusion that we may not have worship licked quite as we imagine when we say succintly that worship is not what we do in church, but what we do out of church. Now of course, those of us who know our Bible’s want to say ‘Amen!’ worship isn’t just what we do in church. We are clearly to offer our bodies as ‘living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God’ because we are to have a whole life approach (Romans 12:1). But I wonder if we have gone too far.
As Wayne Grudem reminds us in his exccellent book Systematic Theology, ’worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices and hearts’ (he knows also that worship is whole life).
Two of the results of genuine worship are according to Grudem…We delight in God: ‘in your presence there is fulness of joy, in your right hand are pleasures for evermore’ Ps 16:11. God delights in us: ‘The LORD, your God, is in your midst…he will rejoice over you with gladness…’ Zeph 3:17. He makes a number of other points we don’t have time to go into here such as it being a time when God can draw near to us.
We aren’t only to sing, but we are to sing and praise the Lord: ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, and sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God’ Col 3:16.
We love the word of God and treasure its preaching in the reformed tradition, but we must remember that there is immense value in musical worship. Its not merely something to be glossed over, so that we can get to the ‘good bit’. It is to be uplifting and passionate, in the spirit and in truth, in confidence as we praise Christ for granting us divine access through his death on the cross. It is to be a time of intimacy, delighting in Christ ‘in spirit and truth’ and uplifting his name as we will one day for all eternity. All of this is also worship- ask the lady!
Recently I have been struck by how often my problems are solved by ‘looking’ to Jesus and focussing my heart and mind upon him. Over the past few years a concern of mine has been to strive to be more Christ- centred. That sounds strange from a Christian I guess, but it seems to me there has been a subtle shift towards being God-centred in modern day conservative evangelicalism that is for want of a better way of putting it…leaving behind Christ.
So we will talk about God until the cows come home, but we are less happy to talk about Jesus. We will preach the Old Testament and we will make only concluding remarks about how all this refers to Jesus if the congregation are fortunate enough. We will talk about our walk with God and how our relationship with God is doing and all the time Christ is getting very little mention. And we forget how the pulpits of our land have for centuries had incribed upon them the words of sober reminder to the preacher of his task ‘Sir, we would see Jesus.’
Which is odd, considering that faith in Christ is necessary to be saved and have eternal life. ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me…’ Matthew 14:6. It is also odd because Christ says ‘If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink’ John 7:37, ‘Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’ Odd given the fact we are spiritually grafted into Christ as believers, ‘I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.’ John 15:5. And odd given that Christ says that ‘all things have been committed to me by my Father’ Matthew 11:27.
Then there is the matter of the scriptures. Who are they actually about? Christ seems pretty insistent that the scriptures testify specifically to him: ‘And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself.’ Luke 24:27 In other words his Old Testament exposition was rather, well, him focussed! (Then there is the matter of the object of true saving faith in the Old Testament which we will come back to another day. We learn it has always been Christ. Who else and how else? 1 Corinthians 10:1-4.)
Now there are of course grounds for talking about the Trinity as ‘god’ in general terms. The Apostle Paul does so after all. As ever there are dangers of throwing the baby out with the bath water. But let us be clear we are talking about an entirely different ‘god’ to the philosophers of this age and be concerned as to how far we have strayed! Let us remember that God is unknown and invisible apart from in Christ Jesus. He is ’the image of the invisible God’ Colossians 1:15. We don’t stand together with other monotheistic religions because Christ is the only revelation of God.
So this is a plea to be Christ-centred and not just God- centred. He is the one who Colossians tells us everything was created by and for, which is a serious claim. Seriously amazing! So lets be more for Jesus. As we talk Jesus in evangelism people will see how it is they are to be saved, as we meditate more on Christ we will become less introvert and more amazed by the gospel as we see the one who has justified us at the cross and is our righteousness. As we meditate more on Christ, we will come to know more about the Biblical God who reveals himself in the face of Christ.
As one hymn writer put it:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.
