Isaiah 62:5: “For as a young man marries a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee. And as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.”
This is an interesting poetic expression. In the first part of this verse in Isaiah it appears that Israel is playing the role of a bridegroom rather than a bride if we consider the word sons as male. Then in the second part he is addressing Israel as if they were to be a husband to God, as this second part of the verse declares that the ones he is addressing are now the bride to God who is in the role of the bridegroom.
The word bridegroom here is katan which is another word for marriage. This word for marriage has the idea of joining together in complete truth and honesty. When God as the bridegroom is married to us He is joined to us in complete truth. They that worship God must worship Him in Spirit and in truth.” John 4:24.
Ok, that is God’s side of the deal, he is the bridegroom, but what are we as the bride or kallah. In it’s primitive form the word Kallah has a double lamed which represents prayer with uplifted hands. This word is a picture of reaching up to your lover with an open empty heart asking him to fill your heart with his presence. The root word is a little strange because it means both a filling or completion and a wasting away. However, the sages chose this word to represent a bride because a bride is to fill her heart with the desires of her bridegroom while her own desires waste away. I know this flies in the face of our modern thinking, but hey, I’m just the messenger.
I was recently reading in Jewish literature a rather interesting thought. The sages teach that there are three types of prayer. There is the prayer of a child to a parent. That seems to fit the majority of us. “O God, I know I don’t go to church as much as I should, I know I don’t read the Bible as much as I should, I know I only pray when I am in trouble, and boy am I in trouble now, but if you answer this prayer I promise….”
The second type of prayer is as a wife to a husband. Now much has been written about how we related to God as His bride. When I present this to my Hebrew classes for their opinions one response which seem to be quite popular is that a husband would seek for his wife to accept the leadership role that God has established a man to take in the household.
As the bride of Christ, He is also wanting us as His bride to accept His leadership, to understand that what He does He does because he loves us and it is done in our best interest. Even if we do not like His decision, as His bride we must be support His decisions 100% and be willing abide by whatever decision He makes in answer to our prayers.
It is this third type of prayer that seems to have eluded Christians. This is for good reason as we do not like to think of God as being vulnerable in anyway. He is, after all perfect and complete in everything. Yet, He has chosen to make Himself vulnerable to those He loves and love Him in return. You see there is another gift that comes with salvation. If we picture our salvation as a marriage ceremony then we follow this motif into our relationship with Him. In a marriage relationship that is truly successful, the wife has given her heart to her husband. That is a secondary gift that we, in Christianity, do not often consider as, unfortunately, many husbands do not consider. When a woman gives her husband the gift of her hand in marriage she is offering another gift, a sacred gift, one that she can only give to one person, she is giving her husband the gift of her heart. Unless a man really understands and appreciates the true nature of this gift, he cannot hope to possess this gift very long. I have often discussed this in my Hebrew classes and many of my students have come up with some interesting thoughts about what this gift of God’s heart real means to us.
A husband wants to protect and provide for his wife. Now how do we protect and provide for the Master of the Universe? Well one thing is to protect the feelings of God. You know, as men can be just a bunch of dumb oxen. We will tread over a woman’s feelings and then scratch our heads wondering: “What’s wrong with her?” So too, we can tread over the heart of God and wonder: “Why don’t I feel His presence?” To pray to God as a husband to a wife we are seeking to understand the heart of God. Like a husband will spend a lifetime seeking to understand the heart of his wife. He will take his wife’s heart in the palm of his hand, examine it, protect it, care for it and gently caress it. So too as we pray relating to God as our wife. We take the heart of God, understanding it, protecting it, caring for it and gently caressing it. I know that sounds a little weird in our cultural setting, but once you get used to the idea you grow comfortable with it. God gave us a marriage relationship to help us understand our relationship with Him. It cannot be just one sided looking to God as a bride to a bridegroom, there is another side of the coin to consider, our beloved God has a heart similar to the heart He breathed into us. Just as our hearts can be broken, so too can we break His heart.
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