To the chosen of God, the radiant wife of the Lamb, purchased by His blood, and sanctified together with Him in the Heavenly realm, may you know with increasing certainty and assurance of faith, the unfolding mystery now revealed to us through the Eternal Spirit, that which our Father purposed before the foundations of this world, that we should be one with Him through Jesus Christ our Lord and glorious Bridegroom King.
Today I want to begin a new series which I shall call “The Gospel According to the Bride”. In this series I want to once again draw upon the parallels between the Bridegroom and the Bride, for they are indeed to be completely compatible with each other. As Christ is, so also we must be. Jesus’ life and ministry underwent very deliberate, necessary and identifiable stages. We won’t go into all of these today, but these stages will become the focus of our studies, and we’ll take time to discuss them in more detail later, learning in particular, how the stages of Jesus’ life must become the stages of preparation for the Bride to get ready for the Bridegroom’s return. But as a quick peek, some of the things we’ll explore include His baptism, crucifixion, death, burial, resurrection, glorification and ascension.
As Christ is, so also we must be. All that Jesus went through and all that He accomplished, we are able to be partakers of, to participate in and therefore benefit from such wonderful and glorious blessings exerted through the Eternal Spirit and power of God. We live because He lives, we shall overcome, because He has already defeated all the power of the enemy, we shall rise again because He has conquered death, we shall be glorified because He is glorified, we shall ascend because He has gone before us, ascended now on high, and seated at the right hand of the Father. We may know these things as applied to the individual believer, but I go beyond talking about that here. I refer not only to the individual believer, but the corporate man, the One New Man, the collective body of Christ incorporated into one new reality, the Bride.
If I were to say the Bride must be baptised, we would most probably find that a strange or even incomprehensible statement. That is because we are conditioned and so used to considering our salvation, experience and relationship with God on an individual level and not with a corporate mind. An individual mind considers only the individual and therefore salvation is singular, and preparation for the wedding is singular. A corporate mind considers itself part of something greater than itself, a collective body, and therefore salvation is plural, and preparation for the wedding is plural. Here’s an important principle for us to grasp and aspire to – the Bride has a corporate mind and not an individual one. The Bride thinks on the basis of corporate oneness, because it is the essence of who she is. She cannot think as an individual, she cannot live as an individual, she cannot do anything as an individual because she is not an individual she is One New Man. I do not mean to undermine our individuality and personal responsibility to be ready, but I point out that ultimate preparation is more than individual but is corporate. There is an essential place for personal intimacy and preparation. When we consider our individual preparation for the Lord’s return and the wedding, we are like the wise virgins in the parable of Matt 25, who interestingly are not referred to as the bride in this parable, the bride is not explicitly mentioned here. But when we consider our corporate preparation for the Lord’s return and the wedding, we are like the New Jerusalem getting beautifully dressed for her husband.
It is with this understanding of the corporate mind, that we shall look again at the essential Gospel message, this time not as individuals, but through the lens of the Bridal paradigm. This is the Gospel According to the Bride.
Rom 6:5 “For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection”.
