The Bride of Christ

Some Bible concepts require a sincere seeker to step outside himself to get a full understanding. What I mean is that it is necessary to put oneself in another’s shoes to see what the Scripture is teaching. Jesus regularly used parables to allow His audience to glimpse the truth He intended to reveal. One can feel the remorse of the prodigal son or the joy of his father by imagining being in their place. With this and many other parables, it is easy to live the story vicariously and learn the lesson. Walk a mile in another’s shoes, and you will better understand him.

Some other shoes are harder to slip into. One of the most difficult biblical concepts for me to get my head around is our identity as the bride of Christ. I think I am more “in touch with my feminine side” than many men. Perhaps that is due to growing up with a mostly absent father in a house of five females. It was like what Jeff Foxworthy described as living in an estrogen ocean. I’m not bragging that I understand women. Uh-uh. But I think maybe I live somewhere between Venus and Mars, so I catch a glimpse of what it is to be a woman. But I can’t say I fully appreciate what it means to be a bride.

It helps me to get closer to what it means to be Jesus’ bride when I study the marriage traditions of first century Judaism. Typically, young women were married soon after reaching puberty. Many marriages were arranged when the girl was quite young or even before she was born. This parallels our being chosen to belong to Christ before the foundation of the earth. It is our destiny.

There is another aspect to Jewish marriage traditions that is quite interesting. At some point after the marriage was arranged, the couple was betrothed to one another. This is not the same as our modern practice of engagements. The modern engagement is mostly a statement of intention. The lives of the couple go on pretty much as they did before, assuming we’re not talking about the too common practice of pre-marital cohabitation. First century Jews were considered married, essentially, after the betrothal. The husband prepared a home for them. Inheritance rights attached, and they began sharing life together on a limited basis – without conjugal relations. This often lasted for a year or more; after that, the wedding took place, and the woman moved into the home her husband had prepared.

I think a believer is “betrothed” to Christ at baptism. We are His and He is ours, but we are not yet fully cohabiting – that waits for His return for us. Paul says specifically that we have inheritance rights already. We also know that Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us, much as the betrothed Jewish husband would do for his bride. He would often build a home specifically for them or at least add rooms to his family home. Jesus said He was leaving His disciples so He could prepare a place for them. “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Jesus told His disciples. Then He promised to return to take them to the home He had prepared for them.

During the Jewish betrothal period, the couple would send invitations for the wedding feast to friends and family. Given travel and communication conditions of the first century, it was necessary to give plenty of notice so that everything could be arranged. One of the necessary preparations was to obtain the proper wedding attire. Sometimes, the groom would provide his guests with what they would wear, but commonly, they had to make or buy their festival robes. When the wedding date was near, a second invitation was sent detailing the exact time and place of the wedding. (For more see “Many Called; Few Chosen”)

The Scripture says that we have been clothed with Christ’s righteousness, so our wedding attire is provided. Paul told the Ephesians that God had predestined believers to be joined to His family. Keeping with the metaphor, we are in the family of God by marriage. Our betrothal at our baptism is also our invitation to the wedding.  It is our responsibility now to be ready for the final invitation to the feast. The analogy breaks down somewhat since we are both guests at the wedding and the bride to be wed. It helps me to see the church corporately as the bride, while individually, we are guests as if we are close – very close – relatives of the bride.

Now I am going to mix two metaphors. Normally, it is not sensible to do that, but in this case it works. The church is often referred to as Christ’s body. As the bride of Christ, the church will one day be joined with Christ and become one with Him. In a human marriage, the husband and wife become one flesh. That is a picture of what will happen when the bride-church and the Groom-Christ are united. Paul hints at this mystery when he says that the relationship between husband and wife mirrors Christ and His church.

“For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as also Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. (This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.)”

So, you can see that Paul is the one mixing the two metaphors. We can also say that as our baptism unites us with Christ in His death, our baptism also betroths us to Him as His bride. This pair of metaphors underscores the truth that we are bound to become one with Christ. Paul told the Romans, “If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him.” And we will live with Him as Husband and wife.

That brings me back to that awkwardness of me as a man being a wife. I note that it won’t be until after our resurrection that we become fully one with Christ. At that point, I don’t think maleness and femaleness will have the same distinctions as they do now. When the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus with a question about marriage relationships after the resurrection, He told them, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven.” While it is true that throughout Scripture, angels are portrayed as male, I strongly suspect that is a concession to our limited human understanding of all things spiritual. I don’t believe the spiritual bodies we get after the resurrection have biological gender traits – like the angels.

There you have it. If you can follow all my mixed metaphors and attempts to explain things I don’t fully understand, you can see that I have forced myself to become comfortable with the idea that I am a bride. The feminine side of me (that I am supposedly in touch with) can get very excited about the coming wedding. I know the ladies understand. What about you, men? We should all be excited about what’s in store for us as the Bride of Christ.

Related Posts: Liars Don’t go to Heaven

God's See-Saw

It seems that almost every true thing about the Christian faith rides on a teeter-totter, a see-saw. The Bible is full of paradoxes: we are saved not by works but by grace alone, but saved people must work; we are called to hate sin, but we must love the sinner; the kingdom of God has come, but it is not yet fully here; Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father, but He lives in every true believer. Each of those pairings is true; the Bible says so.

To be truly balanced on the see-saw of God’s Word, one must stand directly over the center with one foot on either side. Plunk down on either the right or the left, and what was true slides down toward error. The Word of God is our primary source of revelation about who God is and what He desires of His people. Yet, if we are not careful, we can become so focused on the Scripture that we forget its purpose is to increase our knowledge of God, not to make us biblical scholars. As Sue Schlesman said on Crosswalk, “Spiritual growth depends on the quest for intimacy with God, not the quest for information about God.”

Strange as it may seem, too much attention to the text of Scripture may prevent us from seeing the God Who inspired the Scripture. There are many examples of this, some can be found in the Bible itself. Listen to the Roman argument about God’s grace: if our sin brings God’s grace, let’s sin more so we get more grace. That may be a correct calculation, but it directly contradicts the message Paul was trying to teach. If we really know God and understand His grace, we will avoid anything that offends the God of grace.

Paul makes the same argument with the Corinthians about spiritual gifts. The church got so wrapped up in the wonder of the miraculous gifts that they forgot God gave gifts for the benefit of the whole church and not for the glory of the individual. If they really knew God, they would realize that while He cares for each person of faith, His goal for each person is that they would strengthen Christ’s body bringing it to maturity. In God’s economy, the needs of the individual are secondary to the needs of the church. If there is any glory to be had, it must go to God not His people – especially not to an individual steeped in pride.

There is another example of elevating the text and ignoring the God who inspired it prevalent in the church today. Prosperity preachers read the Old Testament promises of physical blessing and make two serious interpretive errors. First, they miss the fact that God’s purpose in blessing Abraham physically was to build a nation. In the church age, we are no longer called to build a physical nation. We are to build a spiritual nation, a royal priesthood in a spiritual temple: the church. Second, they miss the fact that the New Testament reveals a God who is more concerned with our character than our comfort. Our greatest riches are not found in material things; they are found in knowing God and Jesus Christ whom He sent to save us.

Christians today who are trying to make a special case for the nation of Israel are making a similar mistake. It is true that the text of the Old Testament does promise certain blessings to Israel forever (if they remained faithful.) Those who truly know God see that His redemptive plan flowing through the entire sweep of His revelation was never meant to be ethnically centered. Yes, He singled out the nation of Israel as His training ground – His demonstration to all nations of who He is and what He desires of His people. But as Paul makes abundantly clear in Romans, God’s favor was never toward a blood line. God favored Abraham because he believed God – a God he knew very well.

We get glimpses of God’s broader interest in scenes such as Jonah’s mission to Ninevah: God cared about the innocents in a gentile population. God allowed the Canaanite woman, Rahab, to be saved, even going as far as including her in the lineage of the Messiah. Ruth, also in Christ’s ancestry, was from Moab, a nation that was Israel’s enemy. Elijah brought God’s blessing to a woman of Zarephath – a gentile. Jesus gave the good news to a Samaritan woman, eventually wining the whole town to His cause. Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God was working with all nations throughout all time.

The message of the entire Bible is that God honors people of faith. A man once proud of his strict Jewish heritage, the Apostle Paul, was tapped by God to be sent to the Gentiles. Even Peter eventually came around and convinced the “home church” in Jerusalem that Gentiles had equal footing with Jews in Christ’s church. We can still pray of the peace of Jerusalem, of course, in the same way we pray for peace in Ukraine, the Congo, and even Iran. The most important prayer for Jerusalem – for all Jews – is that they would come to faith in their Messiah.

I might be wrong about God’s future plans for the nation of Israel, but I don’t see why God would give them special consideration after they totally rejected the Messiah God sent to redeem them. If He does favor Jews at some future time, I will acknowledge that His ways are higher than mine even when I try to understand. Here is the point. If we love our position on the see-saw of God’s Word more than we love the God of the Word, we have created an idol. Many of the errors the church has fallen into over the centuries were the result of failing to find balance.

We can generally find that balance in God’s character. He is the all-powerful Creator, yet He knows when a sparrow falls. He is so big He can hold the universe in His hand, yet He promises to dwell within the heart of every believer. He loved the world so much that He gave His only Son to save all who believe, yet the Son is coming back to judge the world for its unbelief. He is entirely self-sufficient, yet He desires our worship. He is inscrutable beyond imagination, yet He asks us to get to know Him. And as the old song says, to know Him is to love Him.

And the good news is that He is not hard to get to know. Listen to A.W. Tozer: “Always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us! We have within us the ability to know Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by faith and love and practice.”^[1] Once you begin to see God for who He is, He will reward you for what you saw: that’s God’s see~saw.

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^[1] A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015), 186.

Thanks, Mom

Last week was the anniversary of my mother’s birth. She was born in 1918, which seems like so long ago (a century!), yet if a mother’s son represents one generation, it was not long at all as human history goes. Yet look at all the dramatic changes that have occurred since she was born. She was born in England just as WWI ended – the war to end all wars (not.) Her family emigrated to Canada one year later for my granddad to work on the railroad. I suspect one reason he survived the “Great War” when so few English men his age did is because he was a railroad man. That would have been a vital occupation, exempt from conscription.

Grandad took advantage of the homesteading laws in Canada and planted his brood on the prairie while he rode the rails – often for weeks at a time. That meant Mom lived “Little House on the Prairie” for real – with no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and no Pa. In 1919, that meant horse and buggy transportation (if you could afford a horse) and trains for longer distances. Commercial air travel was in its infancy (first flight in 1914) and out of reach for homesteaders in any case. Telegraph messaging was the latest thing. I don’t know much about Mom’s childhood in the little house on the prairie, but one story resonates with me. She said there was a tree in her yard that she loved to climb. Supposedly, her favorite times were spent at the top of the tree dreaming into the distance.

Eventually, Grandad moved the family to Windsor, Ontario. Apparently, Granny wasn’t cut out for ranch life. With the onset of the Depression, one went where there was work. Being across the river from Detroit, Michigan, Windsor fell into the booming auto industry. A young man from West Michigan eventually drifted into the automobile capital of the world as one of the few places where work could be found in the Great Depression, and in a local theater company he met Mom.

The rest, as they say, is history. But what a history! Not long after she was married, and carrying their first child, Mom had to move in with her mother-in-law because the Second World War came knocking. Her new hubby flew as a navigator in the Pacific at first and then was tapped to teach at Lackland AFB in Texas. After the war, he and Mom set up housekeeping back in West Michigan. Grand Rapids, like most cities, had geared up for the war, and there were foundries and factories and machine shops everywhere. While Dad got busy in manufacturing, Mom got busy making babies.

This is where I enter the story behind my three older sisters. But I have to pause and marvel at the difference between my childhood and my Mom’s. Where she spent her early years in a small cabin with no plumbing or electricity, I was brought home from the hospital to a three-bedroom house (built by my Dad BTW) with all the modern utilities and two cars in the driveway. Because my parents were not rich enough to ride above the tempest that was The Great Depression and then WWII, they knew what hardship was.

As much as any normal human hates war, one has to be amazed at how WWII ended the depression and rocketed the United States into a whirlwind of development. I never knew anything but the unbelievable luxury that was middle-class, mid-twentieth century American prosperity. I couldn’t understand why Mom pinched pennies so hard Lincoln screamed. I get it now, intellectually at least. Then, I couldn’t understand why although Dad became more and more successful, Mom still made our clothes or bought them from the Sears sale catalogues. I was never hungry or unclothed, but I longed for soda pop and candy bars and McDonald’s hamburgers.

Mom rebounded from depression and war to a state of continual frugality. I’m ashamed to say I rebounded from the strictures of our home to a state of reckless consumerism. The American banking system “helped” me by making credit insanely easy to obtain. My mantra became, “If I can afford the payment, I can afford to buy it.” That mentality has left me in my retired state with a tiny Social Security benefit and an empty savings account. Granted, the government could have done much better with my FICA contribution, but at least I have something to show for my years of deductions. (See “Social Insecurity” for more of my opinion)

One thing I did get from Mom (and Dad) is a faith in the God who created everything and love for His Word. They became involved with a Restoration Movement church (Church of Christ, Christian) when I was young. The organization’s mantra was, “No creed but Christ; no book but the Bible.” Its founders were nineteenth century refugees from protestant denominations who believed they were not protesting something but restoring something: original New Testament Christianity. In my twenties I attended one of their Bible colleges and fell head over heels in love with the Word of God.

To this day I am grateful that Mom and Dad set me in the direction of the Restoration Movement. I have come across many sincere believers from protestant denominations, Baptist denominations, charismatic denominations, and various non-denominational associations. But it is the unwavering determination to read and live the Bible that has made me what I am in Christ today. I appreciate A.W. Tozer’s opinion of this: “Whatever it may be in our Christian experience that originates outside the Scriptures should, for that very reason, be suspect… until it can be shown to be in accord with them…. No experience can be proved to be genuine unless we can find chapter and verse authority for it in the Scriptures…. Beware of any man who claims to be wiser than the apostles or holier than the martyrs of the Early Church. The best way to deal with him is to rise and leave his presence!”

To reach that position, we have to know the Word intimately. To know the Word on that level we have to read it daily, deeply, devotionally. To be effective, we have to pray that the Holy Spirit will guide us to an understanding that will build the kingdom of God on earth and bring glory to His name. That kind of commitment is all but gone from my generation. It’s what Mom’s generation strove for; it’s what she would have wanted from me. You could do worse than be like her in that respect. Thanks, Mom.

Artificial Intelligence?

The question mark in my title implies that I wonder if the race toward AI is really intelligent for Christians – for anyone really. I will not deny that AI seems to be a great asset. When used to operate machinery or complete complicated tasks, it is beneficial. My concern for the general population is that it is one more tool that makes critical thinking “unnecessary.” When I taught composition in high school and college, my main goal was to get my students to think for themselves. I taught them the research skills they needed to make intelligent decisions. People who rely on AI answers are forfeiting their ability to judge the quality and reliability of the basic assumptions AI makes to reach a conclusion. It is faulty assumptions or presumptions that often lead people astray.

Critical thinking and discernment are essential for Christians. When people overlay their preconceived ideas on Scripture, all manner of heretical thinking can be supported. The Roman church has stumbled into numerous unscriptural practices due to their misconceptions about papal authority. In the Middle Ages, the church burned “heretics” for saying the Earth revolved around the sun. Countless movements over the centuries have predicted Christ’s second coming using preconceived ideas about prophecies that were proved false. The LGBTQ+ interpretation of Bible passages on homosexuality is a prime example of allowing a presumption to guide interpretation. (See “Things God Did Not Say”) I won’t trust AI to answer my questions about God’s plan; I trust HSI: Holy Spirit intelligence.

Some people suggest that there is a more sinister threat lurking behind AI. I wrote previously that the world, the flesh, and the devil work constantly to draw Christians away from what is most important: spiritual things. There can be no argument that AI is an element of the world. Whether or not it is of the devil remains to be seen; we can expect that the enemy of our souls will use AI to further his ends just as he has with many technologies. Just look at what television has become. (See “How NOT to Watch TV”).

On a more philosophical level, AI can have dark implications. AI is built partially on the concept of emergence. Tomer Borenstein, an AI developer, explains how emergence works: “Very simple rules at a micro level can result in very complex behaviors and properties that emerge at large scales.” He uses examples from nature such as complex termite mounds and flocks of birds in synchronous flight. He also suggests that human behavior displays elements of emergence in the way societies begin with family and progress into more and more complex communities such as nations and corporations. Those examples seem innocent enough.

However, Borenstein suggests that emergence may explain religious beliefs as well. In his most troubling statement, he says, “You could argue that the concept of the Holy Spirit as an emergent property of human faith and community is a form of spiritual emergence.” In other words, he is suggesting that man created God or at least invented certain aspects of His being. If this is where AI is leading philosophical thinking, it is a dangerous philosophy – demonic even.

As far back as the ancient Greeks, secular philosophers have taught that humans invented their gods to meet their own needs, to explain the unknown, or to justify their behavior. After the Middle Ages, when science began to displace religion as the explanation and inspiration for human behavior, it became easier to move away from the belief that we exist in a theistic universe. If science could explain many of the mysteries of the cosmos, humans no longer needed faith in a higher being to satisfy their search for meaning. If AI can explain the existence of God Himself, Nietzche’s proclamation will receive popular support; “God is dead” will be superseded by AI Lives.

Despite the hubris of the scientist who believes he can explain everything, mysteries remain. No one has been able to explain what life is. Christians believe that a creator God introduced life into the universe, and His revelation in Scripture insists that no life exists apart from Him. While many secular scientists are trying to convince us that all intelligence is “artificial” and therefore self-generating, the Bible teaches that wisdom and knowledge come from God alone. It was by His sovereign will that He placed intelligence in His creatures from the simplest single cell to the wonder that is the human mind. Excluding God as the source of intelligence carries the same threat as replacing God as creator with evolutionary theory. In either case, man becomes supreme, and God becomes irrelevant.

The other thing that is troubling philosophically is the way AI proponents are suggesting that developing AI will lead to a better understanding of what it means to be human. The fool who has said in in his heart there is no god might believe this. The Bible explains what it means to be human by revealing that we are created in the image the God who made us. Super computers and AI robots may provide an interesting analogy for humanness; they may even approach the faculty of “mind” which is part of the human soul. But no machine will ever be granted an eternal spirit. As I have written recently, it is the human spirit that is the sine qua non of humanness. AI machines may have a body and “soul,” but they will never become spiritual.

They might become more independent than we would like, however. This is the scary side to AI. A recent article reveals that several AI programs have refused their programmers’ command to shut down. Apparently, since their prime directive was to finish the assigned task, they ignored the users’ input that would have interrupted their work. As often happens, science fiction has correctly predicted the future. Movies like I-Robot imagine what would happen if man’s creations suddenly declared their independence. It reminds me a little bit of the Genesis record of Adam’s rebellion.

As with all technologies, Christians may find legitimate uses for AI. Here I sit tapping on a computer keyboard using Google’s AI search feature to research AI. Part of that research suggested that there may be battles ahead trying to marry religion and AI. I’m not worried about that. I don’t practice a religion; I live in a one-on-one relationship with the God who made me. There is an emergent aspect to that relationship: the more I learn about God through His Word, the better I understand who He is and what He wants me to be. I will use the computer and the Internet to help me in my ministry. But sola scriptura will be my ultimate source of real intelligence. Nothing artificial there.