Let me share a bit of my heart. I love Jesus! I love the Father. And I love the Holy Spirit. Richard Sibbes picking up on Martin Luther picking up on the Apostle Paul, picking up on Hosea, picking up on this primary theme of scripture (found in crescendo and climax in the book of Revelation) portrays our relationship to Jesus Christ as his bride. This is given most explicit articulation in the epistle to the Ephesians (chapter 5), which, again, as I just noted is really a nested restatement of what has been made clear in the TaNaKh (OT) over and again by the prophets by Yahweh to his Covenant people. The picture of marriage is really more than a picture, it is an ontological (being) reality; we have been brought into the banqueting table of God in Christ’s love in a way that is best described as a loved one coming into the lovers presence in the most intimate of ways. I have no idea why–other than I believe it is the Spirit’s presencing of the Son in spiritual ways–that when I contemplate this kind of marital reality between Christ and his bride (of which we are all apart as his Covenant people), there is a sense of purity and chastity about this that I really can’t explain. The Song of Solomon comes to mind, many of the Puritans, like Sibbes, interpreted Songs of Solomon through this kind of marital mystical lens; and again it conjures up this sense of purity inherent between the bride and the bridegroom that is just as sure and real as the the divine and human are in the person of Jesus Christ; of which the Holy Spirit is the bond of union between the two. This is obviously a vision that is knocking on the doors of a certain mystery that finally can only envelop us in worship and adoration of our bridegroom, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Lamb of God, slain before the foundations of the world for his banqueting people.

It is this concept, this motif of God’s relation to us in Christ, by marriage that presents us with the most capacious and sensuous way of understanding the way that God has chosen to relate to us; through who he is as a marriage of persons, through who he is as Father loving the Son, Son loving the Father, both loving each other by the loving bond of the Holy Spirit.

I hope you too have experienced this kind of intimate conception of our God. A God who says he is love. A God who does not relate to us by regulations, decrees, and laws; but a God who loves us in self-effacing ways most clearly realized as we see him in the manger, penultimately at the cross, and finally at his second coming where he welcomes us into the marriage supper feast of the Lamb. It is good to rest in the everlasting arms of our bridegroom God who is love. I hope you know God this way, he knows you this way; that is, in love.