When the Bride Leaves Home
“(9) Kings’ daughters are among Your noble ladies; At Your right hand stands the queen in gold from Ophir. (10) Listen, O daughter, give attention and incline your ear: Forget your people and your father’s house; (11) Then the King will desire your beauty. Because He is your Lord, bow down to Him.” – Psalms 45:9-11 LSB
The first half of this beautiful psalm is all about the Bridegroom King where the psalmist addresses Him most eloquently with adorning praise and words of adulation ending the final observation spoken of Him by acknowledging the queen standing at His right hand. Then from verse ten, the address is made directly to the Bride, and as a most emphatic precursor to all that follows, the psalmist instructs three times with the words “Listen”, “give attention”, and “incline your ear”. It’s a literary ploy to highlight the importance of what is about to immediately follow: “forget your people and your father’s house”. In the context of this series ‘THE BRIDE HAS COME OF AGE’ there comes a time when the Bride must leave her guardians, in this case her father’s house. But look at what happens when the Bride forgets her guardian in verse eleven. It says, “then the King will desire your beauty”. I love the cause and effect we find in these verses. Note the emphasis is not upon whether the Bride is beautiful or not, but upon her desirability. She would be desirable when she comes of age and forgets her guardians. To clarify, forget here does not reference the inability to remember but rather no longer consider or reflect upon. The instruction therefore is not to look back or reminisce on what once was instead look forward to the promise of what shall be. There’s something irresistibly attractive to the Lord when the Bride’s thoughts turn away from all she had once known in her upbringing to a diverted gaze now solely upon Him. It’s an activation point, a transitional moment that ushers her into a new posture before Him. The second half of verse eleven also makes this point, “because He is your Lord, bow down to Him”. The word bow down is šāḥâ (H7812 sha kha) and means to prostrate in homage to the Lord, to reverence, bow down, honour, worship. The NET translation writes “Then the king will be attracted by your beauty. After all, he is your master! Submit to him!“
Let us take comfort in knowing our Bridegroom asks nothing more of us than what He has already done. “(24) Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.” – Genesis 2:24 HNV (also Ephesians 5:31). Yeshua left His Father’s House and humbled Himself becoming obedient even to death upon a cross to pay the ransom for His Bride, to deliver us from the enslavement of sin so we could be free to follow Him. Since the Bride is perfectly compatible with the Groom, what is true for the Bridegroom is true for the Bride, and in this way the reciprocation in the manner of love affirms the covenant relationship. The principle of the Bride leaving home is repeated throughout scripture. First of all, there was Abraham.
“(1) Now the LORD had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, From your family And from your father’s house, To a land that I will show you.” – Genesis 12:1 NKJV
“(8) By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. (9) By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. (10) For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” – Hebrews 11:8-10 NIV
Interesting isn’t it, that Abraham left his father’s house, not knowing where he was going, because he was looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God, which is of course the Bride, the New Jerusalem. Since the Bride Israel would come through Abraham and Sarah, the principle of the Bride leaving her father’s house is inherent within the Bridal paradigm from the outset. I believe we can extend this concept of the father’s house to include guardians also, as when Rebekah left the home of her brother Laban (Genesis 24:58), or just one generation later when Rachel and Leah also left Laban (Genesis 31:14-16). Then there was the time when Esther left her guardian Mordecai to become the wife of king Ahasuerus (Esther 2:7-17), or when the Shulamite left her brothers to go up from the wilderness leaning on her Beloved (Song of Songs 8:5) but perhaps this principle of the Bride leaving her guardians is most powerfully demonstrated in the exodus of Israel from Egypt. Four hundred years had passed until Yahweh determined she had come of age and commissioned Moses who was out in the back end of the desert tending sheep to return to Egypt and decree on His behalf.
“(1) And afterward Moses and Aaron came and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel, ‘Let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me in the wilderness.’”” – Exodus 5:1 LSB
As we have seen in previous Quick Bites, the guardians will not readily release the Bride who they have benefitted greatly from, and of course we know very well the vehement refusal of Pharoah to allow Israel to migrate, which ultimately led to the death of his firstborn son and all firstborn males throughout Egypt when the Passover Angel visited that dreadful night. Interestingly, at this onset of their journey with Yahweh they were not yet aware of the marriage covenant they would soon enter into on Mount Sinai, only that the Lord had wrought such mighty deliverance to procure their freedom from slavery and exodus from a land they had sojourned in for four centuries. This is an important point, because even though the Bride has reached the age of majority, does not necessarily mean she has yet understood or received the revelation of her Bridal identity. Nonetheless, it is who she is whether revealed or not, whether accepted or not. Developing this thought further, when I consider any form of exodus or migration of the church today, I’m always asking where are they headed? Because for Israel it was to Mount Sinai to enter into a marriage covenant with Yahweh and for us today it must be towards the Bridegroom.
When the Bride comes of age, there is a journey she must make because the familiar surroundings of life as she once knew it will no longer suffice to provide the conditions necessary for her final preparations. Ultimately she cannot get ready for her wedding whilst still at home under the ward of her guardians. There is an attraction only attainable in the wilderness, an uninhibited charisma only acquired once the Bride abandons herself in full assurance of faith to the One who is calling her to come away with Him. All of our ecclesial fabrications will fail to produce a glorious church without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish (Eph 5:27), our hope cannot rest therefore on denominational reform, but a far more revolutionary axe must be laid to the root of the tree (Matthew 3:10). I do not suggest we should henceforth depart from our denominations, merely to point out there must come a paradigm shift so radical it will threaten the very existence of all we have come to rely upon in the past. New alignments and Holy Spirit order are necessary to position us where we need to be, a re-calibration of the corporate mindset to align with our spiritual DNA and Bridal identity must supersede all that has gone before. Ultimately we cannot have a church-oriented or denominational mindset because in so doing it will paradoxically exclude the very One to whom we are betrothed. We need an upgrade into the mind of Christ and allow His thoughts to permeate our own. We must embrace how the Bride defies all attempts of designation; she has no name other than the one bestowed by Her Bridegroom.
If the Bride must leave the comfortability and familiarity of all she has known before, naturally we might ask, to where should she go and how will she get there? If there is one final venture beyond the walls of where she has resided until now how will she know the way? And that’s where I’ll continue next time.
