Sermon Notes

It was a betrothal, and today we have all but lost the prophetic significance of such customs. Once the image was diluted, it did not take long before the tradition was replaced by something much less meaningful. Marriage today is most often preceded by engagement, an offer of marriage, and a loose promise between two people, if accepted, to get married one day. And why would that event be anything significant when all the benefits of marriage are readily available outside of marriage and being shared already—including sexual intimacy and cohabitation? Gone are the binding commitments, and isn’t that most obvious by how often marriages end, as if they are disposable inconveniences that have run their useful course? Why own when you can rent? Why buy when you can use someone else’s property, for a while, and just walk away when something breaks or upkeep becomes too much work?

Betrothal is different, but in order to even begin to grasp why, you must learn to see marriage differently. Marriage was the one institution, the only institution, designed by God to indicate mankind was created in His image. Adam was created, and even before Eve was pulled from his bones, Adam already had within him everything that represented God—man, woman, and child. But we could not see the woman and child, so next God took the woman (her DNA) from within the man and presented her to Adam (and us). That is when we recognized the family that was inside of him all along—God’s invisible image.

And then came marriage. God instructed, “Let Me assure you that even though I took her from you, she is still one with you.” Marriage is simply, but profoundly, God’s way of telling us that we are one with Him, created in His image. From here on, every married man should look at his bride and think, “It’s supernatural; the woman I married is really part of me; she was, in God’s design, the female DNA that I was born with. And my marriage to her is the covenant that revealed this reality. As a man, I was born with both male and female DNA; she is literally my female DNA, and thus, as Y’shua said, nothing can separate me from her because she is me!”

When you consider this idea, does it not make so much more sense now when we read in the Scriptures that marriage is about Christ’s oneness with His bride? The church is His DNA? Yes, His bride but yet to have arrived at the altar of marriage. His bride, but presently His betrothed, bound in a covenant as strong as marriage, but not quite married. All the permanence minus two things: sexual intimacy and cohabitation. But He promised, “I’m going away to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare, I will come again and receive you, at the marriage supper of the Lamb; so where I am, there you may be also.”