Emmanuel 2.0: The Bride of Christ
The Bride Of Christ
Preface
It is a time of love. Not an earthly love but a heavenly love between those of the Body of Christ. My current essays about spiritual connections flow from being united in spirit with a sister in the Lord. We are experiencing God’s Divine love through one another even though we live thousands of miles apart. I write about what I am experiencing with her and through her.
To the natural man, this may be difficult to grasp because it bears little resemblance to anything on earth. This makes sense because the love that unites us is a foretaste of a world to come: The New Heavens and New Earth. In fact, that is why God says that these things must be spiritually discerned.
Spiritual connections, like the one I am currently experiencing, are the manifestation of God’s love. Spiritual unions are meant to unite the Body of Christ in a holy matrimony of the spirit. Jesus said,
“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”
John 17:20,21
It is my prayer, that these essays bring some clarity, hope, and comfort to those who are entering into the fulfillment of the verses above. Know that God is with you and others have gone before you. Rejoice, for it is a time of love, joy, peace, and happiness in the presence of our Heavenly Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. We are the Abishag of the greater Solomon!
To Begin With
We are conceived by the Holy Ghost
At the core of everything we do as Christian believers is the idea of God with us, or Emmanuel. It is the union of God and man, Jesus being the perfect example of that fusion.
Have you ever considered why it was important for Jesus to be born of a virgin? Why did God want to impregnate a virgin girl? Does it not seem unusual that the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and she became pregnant? Moreover, Mary was found to be with child when she was betrothed to Joseph.
Natural creation of a child between a man and a woman involves complete intimacy. Many times you hear the word “carnal knowledge” associated with the act of procreation. The man and woman unite in the flesh to form a new life and that new creation is a part of both of them. It is written,
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Genesis 2:24
Therefore, the man and woman become “one flesh” in their offspring. What they create is a fusion of both of them.
Emmanuel: the union of God and man
Likewise, when God united with Mary, they became “one flesh” in Jesus. Our Father desired to show, in the most intimate way possible, His passion to unite with mankind. Jesus, the son of God, is the result of His desire. Christ was literally both God and man at the same time. Therefore, when the scripture calls Jesus “Emmanuel” or “God with us” it speaks of the fusion of man and God in Christ.
Paul says,
“And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.”
1 Corinthians 15:45
The first Adam brought forth after his kind. Through the act of earthly marriage, all children are born after the flesh in the image of the first man. In like manner, we are born again, through the will of the Spirit, after the image of the last Adam; Jesus Christ. As Christ was born of the Spirit (literally) we are born of the Spirit of God through adoption. Through that same Spirit, we are Emanuel: God with us.
When we accept Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior, that same Spirit which raised Christ from the dead opens the way of salvation for us. When we ask for and receive the infilling of the Holy Spirit, God indwells us as He indwelt Jesus. We are born of the Spirit. That seed of faith, implanted deep within us, grows until we are born again into newness of life. We are literally born again when we are glorified and step onto the shores of eternity in the New Heavens and New Earth.
We are Emmanuel 2.0
The upshot of all this is that we are Emmanuel 2.0. As a body of believers, we are to be “God with us” to our generation. Likewise, as God revealed Himself to the world during Jesus’s ministry, we are to reveal God to the world as the Body of Christ in our day. As we yield to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to flow through us, we become the manifested sons of God just as Jesus was the manifested son of God.
Spiritual intimacy with God and each other
The topic of spiritual intimacy is an uncomfortable issue for many Christians. We have built a whole series of doctrines around the topic of procreation to somehow make it holy and acceptable to our natural minds in the midst of this sinful world. In truth, though, our intimate natural has been veiled since we put on aprons made of fig leaves back in Eden.
The children of God
God, who made sex, has no such hang-ups and uses his greatest creation to show us how much He wants to unite with mankind. In fact, all of creation is about procreation because that is the very reason that He spoke the worlds into existence. That is why we are called “the children of God.”
Adam named the animals in the Garden of Eden and, after noticing that each were male and female, conclude that he was missing a mate. Only after that revelation, God created Eve. The picture God paints with this story is that our Father, just as Adam, realized that He had no counterpart either. Of all that God created there was no helpmate suitable for Him. Therefore, YHWH created mankind a little lower than the angels but destined us to be crowned with glory. Our heavenly bridegroom desires to unite with us in holy, heavenly matrimony characterized by intimacy beyond earthly comprehension. The bride of Christ is God’s future lover and wife. We are the antitype of the marriage bed here on earth. Earthly passion, namely the explosion and gratification of complete surrender, points towards the bliss of oneness with God forevermore. Amen.
God manifest through our flesh
In conclusion. the purpose of all mankind is to be God manifest in the flesh to each other and God. Though we left our first estate, God is (through Jesus) bringing us back into His image and likeness. We are going to be “born again” into a new world where God recreates everything Adam destroyed through sin. We’ll walk in glorified bodies in a New Creation, a New Earth, and a New Jerusalem. The whole earth will be “Emmanuel” as we live with Jesus, united together in Divine Love, forever. Amen.