Behold the Bride Groom Cometh

Renald E. Showers
Like the Jewish Bride Groom, Christ will return to claim His Church

It was a night of destiny. Jesus had gathered His disciples in the upper room. In a few hours, He would go to the Cross. For some time He had been forewarning them of His coming death, resurrection, and ascension. The disciples were greatly disturbed. To calm their fears Jesus gave them a promise recorded in John 14:1

"Let not your heart be troubled, you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions. Of it were not so, I would have told you. I go prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there you may be also."

This was a great promise, but you and I in Twentieth Century America do not catch its full significance. Why? Because in it Jesus was drawing a many-sided analogy based on Jewish marriage customs in biblical times.

WHAT WERE THESE marriage customs? The first major step in a Jewish marriage was betrothal or the establishment of a marriage covenant. Leaving the home of his father, the Jewish groom would travel to the home of the prospective bride. Upon arrival he would negotiate concerning two matters.

First he would ask the bride's father for the young lady's hand in marriage. If the father agreed , he would negotiate further concerning the price to be paid for the bride. (Jewish young men had to buy their wives from the brides father.) If the two agreed, the groom would pay the price, thereby establishing a marriage covenant.

Once the covenant had been established, the Jewish bride and groom would drink together from a cup of wine as a symbol of the marriage covenant.The young man and woman who had done this were regarded as having been married. However, they did not begin their life together immediately.

The groom would excuse himself from his bride, leaving her at home. He would return to his father's house to remain approximately one year. During this time he was busy preparing living accommodations to which he could later bring his bride. After the period of separation, on an unannounced night-the bride never knew that night it would be---the groom would call his best man and his other male escort. Together they would leave the groom's father's house and begin a torchlight procession through the streets to the home of the bride.

Bystanders, recognising that a groom and his wedding party were coming to claim his bride, would begin to shout, " Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" Others would take up the cry, passing it from block to block, until finally the shout would be heard outside the bride's home.

The ultimate purpose of that shout was to warn the bride that she should get ready quickly, because tonight would be the night her groom would come to take her to be with him. Accordingly the bride would immediately send word to her bridesmaids, " Come to my home as fast as you can. Get me dressed in my bridal garment, for my groom is coming to claim me."

Before the bride could be fully prepared, the groom and his male escorts would reach the brides home. But they would never enter; they would wait outside. When the bride was ready, she and her bridesmaids would leave her parent's home to meet her groom and his escorts in the streets.

Now the enlarged wedding party would return in a torchlight procession from outside the bride's home to the house of the father of the groom. On arrival they would find the wedding guests already assembled in a large room serving as a banqueting hall.

After the bride and groom had briefly greeted various wedding guests, they would excuse themselves and, with others of the wedding guests, they would go to the bridal chamber or huppah. Other members of the wedding party would wait outside as the groom and bride entered the bridal chamber alone. In the privacy of that room they would for the first time enter into physical union, fulfilling the covenant they had made the year before.

After a time the groom alone would leave the bridal chamber to announce the marriage's consummation to the other members of the waiting wedding party. They in turn would convey this word to the guests in the banquet hall. The announcement of the marriage's consummation would be the signal for the beginning of the wedding feast which would last for seven days.

During all this time of feasting and rejoicing, however, the bride remained unseen in the bridal chamber. So strongly entrenched was this custom that the feasting period came to be known as "the days of hiding" or "the days of the bridal chamber". At the very end of the seventh day of the wedding feast, the groom would bring his bride from the bridal chamber, with her veil removed, for everyone to see.

AGAINST THE BACKGROUND of such well-known marriage customs Jesus' words in John 14 take on a special meaning. The key to understanding lies in a fact that in New Testament the Church, the corporate body of born-again Christians, is portrayed as the Bible of Jesus Christ ( Eph. 5:23-32). Just as a Jewish groom would leave his father's house and go to the home home of the bride obtain her through a marriage covenant, so the Lord Jesus left His father's house in heaven. He came to planet earth, the home of His prospective bride, the Church.

The basis of Christ�s relationship with His Bride is what the Scriptures call the New Covenant. In the same night in which Jesus made the promises of John 14, at the end of the Passover meal in the upper room, He instituted what we have come to call Communion. Passing the cup to the disciples, He said, " This cup is the New Covenant in my blood (1Cor. 11:25). This was Jesus' way of saying that the wine in that cup represented His blood that He would shed on the cross of Calvary the following day.

In essence He was saying, When I shed My blood on the Cross tomorrow, I shall thereby establish a new covenant through which I shall obtain My bride, the Church. And this He did. The apostle Paul writing to Christians at Corinth, says, "What? Know ye that . . . ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your bodies and in your spirit, which are God's" (1 Cor. 6;19-20).

As a Jewish bride and groom symbolised their marriage covenant by drinking together from a cup, the Lord Jesus has given His Bride, the church, the cup of the Communion service symbolising the New Covenant by which we are united in him.

AS A JEWISH BRIDEGROOM would leave his bride and return to his father�s house, the Lord returned to heaven leaving his church behind. You and I are now living in the period of separation that will end with His return. Meanwhile, like the Jewish bridegroom would return unannounced for his bride, so Christ will come for his church. No one can know the time.

Paul tells us in 1Thess. 4:16 that, like the Jewish bridegroom, He will have a male escort ---at least one great archangel from the Father's house in heaven. As would happen when a wedding party set out, His coming will be prefaced by a shout. Perhaps that shout will even be,"Behold, the Bridegroom cometh!"as was the biblical custom.

Paul adds, " Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in their..."

Again the similarity is striking. Just as the bridegroom who await his bride outside her house, out Lord will meet His Church in the air, and the Church will be brought to the Father's house in heaven where wedding guests already will be assembled. These guests will be Old Testament saints, persons saved before the Church began and therefore not part of the Church.

As the Jewish groom kept his bride *HIDDEN* for seven days, the Lord Jesus will keep His Bride, Church in heaven for seven years while the Tribulation period runs its course on earth. After that time, Christ, like the Jewish bridegroom, will bring His Bride to earth for all to see. (see below)