Revelation 11

Chapter 11. The Marriage of the LambLet us rejoice and be gladand give him glory!For the wedding of the Lamb has come,and his bride has made herself ready.Fine linen, bright and clean,was given her to wear.(Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.)Then the angel said to me, “Write: ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’” And he added, “These are the true words of God.” (Revelation 19:7-9)The events described in the preceding chapters have produced a profound impression in the heavenly world. As from the battlements of the skies the glorified beings there looked down upon the final destruction of the great system which so long defied God and oppressed His people, watching the smoke of her burning, there arose from the heavenly host a great shout, “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are his judgments. He has condemned the great prostitute who corrupted the earth by her adulteries. He has avenged on her the blood of his servants.” And again they shouted: “Hallelujah!” (Revelation 19:1-3) Next from the four living creatures and the 24 elders came echoing back the same response as they fell upon their faces and cried, “Amen, Hallelujah!” (Revelation 19:4). And then the chorus was taken up by all the voices of the heavens until, like the sound of many waters and the voices of mighty thunderings, it rolled along the heavens, “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns” (Revelation 19:6). The special reason for this sublime spectacle of triumph and rejoicing is given in the next verse. It was the undertone of the great organ of the skies thundering forth the notes of the wedding march of the Bride of the Lamb, and the chorus ends with the overture, “Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7).

A Supreme Event

A Supreme EventThere is a supreme event in every human life to which affection, hope and memory look forward or backward. It is the climax of life’s fondest anticipations and aims. It is not always the winning of a fortune or the attainment of some place of fame and honor, but more often some matter of the heart and the home—perhaps the wedding day when the fond bride at last reaches the accomplishment of her heart’s desire or the loving bridegroom comes to claim the one who is dearer to him than all his fortunes or his earthly honors. While this is true in this poor world of imperfect and oft-disappointed happiness, it is more transcendendy true in that heavenly world where hope and love are not Mere transient fires, Whose spark flies upward and expires. In the story of redemption and the history of heaven the supreme event for which the ages are waiting is the marriage of the Lamb. The Bible is one long love story and redemption a divine romance of the love of God. The picture of ancient Eden opens with a bridegroom and a bride typical of that greater union which our text portrays. Born out of His being and then given to His arms in wedded love, Eve was God’s first type of the true Church of Jesus Christ formed out of His heart and then given back to Him in everlasting love. All through the story of redemption the figure constantly appears. We see it in the marriage of Isaac to Rebekah, the one bride chosen from a foreign people and brought home by the faithful servant along that typical journey which foreshadowed at every step the waiting Church and her meeting with her Lord in the eventide. The marriage of Moses to his Midian bride; the story of Ruth and her espousals and the repeated references to this figure in the Psalms and prophets are all in keeping with this thought. The 45th Psalm is a love song for the Bride of the Lamb and the King of glory. The Song of Songs is the celebration of the love of the greater King to His chosen and beloved Church. Isaiah sings of Hephzibah and Beulah which just mean “married” and “beloved.” God pleads to Jeremiah for His wayward backsliding bride and cries, “Return, faithless people,… for I am your husband” (Jeremiah 3:14). “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert, through a land not sown” (Jeremiah 2:2). Ezekiel pictures the foundling girl left naked and friendless on the street and taken up by God’s loving heart, nursed and nurtured, clothed and cared for, educated and refined, and at last decked in costly raiment and adorned with richest jewels and then wedded to Him as His beloved, “You became mine” (Ezekiel 16:8); and then becoming unfaithful to her divine lover and Lord. Hosea continues the picture in still more vivid figurative language and brings it to a climax in those beautiful words that have become the very language of our heart’s deepest love to Christ, I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord. (Hosea 2:19-20) “In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’” (Hosea 2:16) Christ’s parables have frequent references to the same figure. He tells us of the marriage of the King’s Son and of the 10 virgins who went to meet the Bridegroom; and John the Baptist describes himself as the friend of the Bridegroom, waiting on the Bride, introducing her to her Lord, and rejoicing greatly because of the Bridegroom’s voice. And Paul, even in his most logical and practical epistles, falls into the same strain and sees in human love and earthly marriage only the imperfect type of that grander union, the mystery of grace, Christ and His Church. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:25). This is the heavenly secret, The love life of the Lord; The golden chain that bindeth The story of His Word. Christ is the heavenly Bridegroom; To seek His Bride He came; This is the consummation, The Marriage of the Lamb.

The Supreme Event

The Supreme EventAnd so we reach at length in the Apocalyptic vision the supreme event. The obstacles have been removed. The great false church has been destroyed. The counterfeit bride has been put down, and now the true Bride is to receive her diadem of glory and her place by the side of her Lord. All heaven is waiting with suppressed and intense sympathy, while from the grand organ of the skies the mighty notes already begin to swell the wedding march of glory. “Hallelujah!… The wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:6-7). There is much about this stupendous event which we cannot explain. Just when and where it is to occur we may not fully know. Some time after the rapture and before the epiphany and glorious appearing of Christ to begin His millennial reign we know it will be. Somewhere in the air to which He has caught up His beloved ones and from which they have been watching the events of the stormy scene below will be the scene. But just what it will mean there is no language, there are no figures, and perhaps there are no sufficient faculties and capabilities in our human nature fully to understand. But this much is plain:

1. A Glorious Union It will mean some glorious union between us and our Redeemer. It will mean some joy surpassing all that we have ever known or dreamed of rapture and delight. It will mean some tide of love compared with which all human love is but as a drop to the ocean and a taper to the sunshine. Have you ever had even a taste of some exquisite joy? Have you ever had a touch of divine peace and love? Do you remember what it meant to know that you were pardoned and saved? Have you ever been comforted in some hour of sorrow by your Savior’s love? Have you ever got so near Him in the hour of prayer that His joy and even His glory perhaps but for a moment filled and comforted your heart until everything was cheap in comparison? Perhaps it has been interrupted. Perhaps it has alternated with doubt and fear and many a sorrow, but can you remember some gleam of heavenly sunshine, some taste of heavenly wine? Oh, beloved, there is at least the alphabet with which to spell out the significance of heaven. That is enough to start with in measuring the meaning of this transcendent ecstasy. Just take the sweetest, brightest, gladdest moment you have ever known of the love of Jesus and multiply it by eternity and you can form some conception of the exquisite and transcendent rapture of the marriage of the Lamb.
2. A Perfect Union It is to bring us into perfect union with God. It is the pouring into the earthly vessel of all the fullness of His being who is love and joy and blessedness in Himself and must impart it to every soul into which He comes. Union with God is the end and object of salvation. “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3). “That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:21). This is the supreme prayer in the 17th chapter of John. It does not merely mean to be one with each other in some method of Christian union but it means to be one with God as the bridegroom and the bride, as the soul and body, as the branches and the vine.

The Bride Groom

The Bride GroomWe know who He is. It is the Lamb, not the Father or the Holy Spirit, although each of these is brought into mysterious and glorious union with us in the experience of redemption. But the marriage of the Bride is with the Lamb because He is the only being that could come into such intimate and perfect union with a human Bride. He is not only the Son of God but He is the Son of man. By His mysterious incarnation He has become one of our race. He has a body, a soul and a nature as perfectly human as ours. He has lived among us in simplicity and perfect oneness with our race. He has left the story of His life, and it is so natural and complete as to win our confidence and attract our sympathy. We see Him as a babe at Bethlehem, as a boy at Nazareth, as the man of Galilee, in the home at Bethany, in all the experiences of human joy and suffering, in all the little touches of a real human life; and it makes us feel that He is bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh and heart of our heart. If some great prince came down into a peaceful valley of his empire to woo and win a peasant maiden, he could never do it if he stood off in his dignity and majesty. He could only impress her with awe. She might respect and admire him but she could not come near enough to love him. Therefore he must woo her by simple tenderness and meet her on a common plane. He must make her feel that he understands her simpler life and is so within reach and touch of her perfect trust and confidence that she can come to him as freely as to her nearest, dearest friend. Therefore Christ stepped from the throne of His majesty and came to our level that He might woo us and win us and thus become to us not a Lord but a Lover and a dear intimate Friend. He is the Bridegroom. There is something in His heart that wants our love and that is fitted to clasp around His heart the tendrils of our affection. It is not irreverent to sing, “My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine.” The very object of His coming to us in human flesh is to win this closer confidence and this deeper love expressed by the figure of the bridegroom and the bride.

The Bride

The BrideBut who is she? Perhaps this question is not quite so clear. We know in a general sense she is the Church, but how many in the Church; and how far is the Church as a whole able to meet and fulfill the place of the Bride in the intimacy and love of Jesus? In the first place in the nature of things the relationship of the bride and the conditions which it requires and expresses are essentially exclusive. A man may have many friends who are deeply attached to him but the affection he expects from a wife is different from all other. A woman may be devotedly attached to many of her relatives and associates, but to one her heart goes out with that tenderness and oneness which every true human instinct recognizes as peculiar and exclusive. Such love cannot be forced by the will of the subject or object of it. No man can compel it by force or even persuasion unless it springs spontaneously in the heart of the loved one. No woman can render it at will. It is part of its very nature that it must be wooed and won by long processes often of kindness, affection and fellowship. If the language means anything as applied to Christ it means that there are those who cherish toward Him a love intensely personal, peculiar and exclusive, and a love which must be won and developed by relationships and experiences such as all human analogies would suggest. May it not therefore be true that Christ has friends who love Him sincerely and serve Him faithfully, but who have not yet entered into that closer place of intimacy expressed by this figure of the Bride? Are there not differences among all Christians as varied as all degrees of human friendship and social life? Are there not many who know Christ only as a Savior, as a Master, as a Helper, and in some measure as a Friend but they have never yet come into perfect touch with His heart? They do not know His voice, they shrink from His closer communion, they have chambers in their hearts that are shut out from His eye, they are conscious of things that they know He would not approve, and there is perhaps as much of fear as there is of love in the respect they bear to Him. How can they be in any full sense part of the Bride of the Lamb? They are not harshly excluded by any decree of election or reprobation. They are invited to the innermost chambers of His heart, but they must pass through an experience that will fit them for the place of deepest love. They must receive those spiritual capacities and quickened senses which will know Him, respond to Him, receive Him in all the tenderness of love. They must have not only the bridal garment, but the bridal heart. Do our Bibles reveal any intimations of these different classes among the friends of Christ? In the 45th Psalm, which is the love song of this theme, we find not only the bride who is brought unto the king in all her beautiful raiment but we also find the Queen Mother who stands at her right hand in the gold of Ophir, and “her virgin companions follow her” (Psalms 45:14), who are also brought unto the king but not in the same place as she is permitted to enter. May they not represent Christians true to Christ and near to His beloved Bride but who have not come so near as she, while perhaps the Queen Mother may represent the Jewish people, the mother church of Israel, standing in her place in the glorious day of manifestation? Again, in this very Apocalypse have we not read in one of our recent studies of two classes of people who are to have a part in the coming of the Lord and a blessed part? They are described in the 14th chapter of Revelation. First, there are the 144,000 who are described as the firstfruits unto God and the Lamb. These have been redeemed from among men. They are a called-out company. Their lives are spotless and undefiled. They follow the Lamb wherever He goes and even on earth they have learned the song they sing in heaven. Their ear is quickened to a closer intimacy with the things of God than others. But later in the same chapter we have a second company described as the harvest of the earth. The others were the firstfruits. These are the full harvest. Surely the figures themselves determine the classes here described. The one represents those caught up first to meet the Lord in the parousia, the second the full harvest finally gathered at His great epiphany as He comes to begin His glorious reign. If these things be so it may shed a solemn light on the parable of the 10 Virgins in the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew, and these represent, not the Bride who is already returning with her Lord, but her friends who go out to meet her and go in to the marriage supper of the Lamb while she goes in to the marriage of the Lamb. But if further light were needed to confirm this view, it would, we think, be found in our text. It is where we see two distinct parties represented. First, there is the Bride herself described in connection with the marriage and in her beautiful garments of spotless white and surpassing glory. Then, after she has been presented and described in the seventh and eighth verses, in the ninth verse there is an entirely distinct statement: “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). This is not the marriage of the Lamb but the supper that follows it. To represent the Bride as called to the marriage supper would be out of keeping with all propriety. The Bride is the one who gives the supper with her Lord. Those that are called to the marriage supper are the friends and companions who are to share with her her joy. But, oh, how different the joy of each! They have the marriage supper. She has the Bridegroom. Beloved, if these things be so, how tender and sacred is the obligation they lay upon us to emulate the spirit of Paul, who, in speaking of the highest prize of the Hope as something not cheaply won, uses this stirring language, What is more, I consider everything a loss. (Philippians 3:8) I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:10-14) God forbid that we should narrow down the blessed company of those who shall sit with Christ upon His throne to any little exclusive circle of our own electing. God give us the largest-hearted Christian love and unity. Does it not speak to all the instincts of our being that it would somehow be impossible for the self-indulgent, time-serving professor of religion—saved perhaps, but saved by the skin of his teeth, wanting only enough of Christ to keep him out of danger, and sacrificing as little as he can for his faith and his Lord—that he should share the place and the same reward with the martyr who lays down his life at the stake or the equally faithful soldier of the cross who lives out a life of self-denial and loving service for Jesus? There is a difference here and there will be an awful difference there. Just what it is all going to mean the day alone can declare. But beloved, let us take no risks, let our watchword be I want to stand when Christ appears In spotless raiment dressed; Numbered among His hidden ones His holiest and best. Give me, oh Lord, Thy highest choice, Let others take the rest. Their good things have no charm for me, For I have got Thy best.

Her Raiment

Her RaimentWe have already seen that the imagery of clothing simply represents the character and habit of life. The Bride is therefore described by her garments. First we are told that they are “given her to wear” (Revelation 19:8). She did not have to make them or buy them but they were given unto her by the grace of her Lord, and she simply put them on and wore them in fitting form and becoming style until they became the very habit of her life. Christ will clothe us with all the grace and holiness that we will wear; and as Isaac’s bride received her outfit from his generous servant and met him in the veil that he himself had sent her, so we can best please our Lord by being nothing, pretending nothing, claiming nothing, expecting nothing of ourselves, but putting on Christ Jesus and living a life of sweet and constant dependence on His all-sufficient grace. We can have from Him all the grace, all the patience, all the unselfishness, all the gentleness, all the love, all the sweetness that we will wear through the tests and trials of life. Next, we may notice that her garments were of two classes. They were “clean and white” (Revelation 19:8). The word “white” here literally means bright. It is a word used to describe the transfiguration robes of the Lord Jesus. First, our garments must be clean, free from all the defilements of sin, but secondly they must be beautiful, lustrous, glorious. The difference between these two words may be perfectly expressed by the difference between linen when taken from the clothesline and when taken from the laundry. The linen on the clothesline is clean, but the linen that has passed under the hot iron and been rubbed and polished is bright as well as clean and shines with radiant luster. So Christ is preparing His Bride not only to meet Him without blame but to meet Him refined, beautified, glorified by the whole experience of Christian life and the glory that comes from sanctified trial and the tests of life triumphantly borne, through His all victorious grace. To change the figure Many a hard and biting sculpture Polished well those stones elect, In their places now compacted By the heavenly Architect, Wherewith God hath willed forever That His palace should be decked. In conclusion we notice the other call: “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!” (Revelation 19:9). Happy are they who will inherit this blessedness; but far more supremely, eternally blessed are they who will know Him and sit down with Him on His throne as His Bride. Speaking of the parable of the 10 Virgins and the fact that the Bride does not appear there suggests the beautiful incident in the life of a well-known Christian woman. One of her friends one night dreamt that the Lord had come and that the glorious company of the beloved ones were gathered around Him. She recognized herself as there and many that she knew, but she looked in vain for this dear friend, the sweetest Christian she had ever known. She could not see her. Her heart was very sad and she asked an angel who was standing by where her friend was and how it was that she could not be seen in that company. “Oh,” replied the angel, “that is very plain. Why, the rest are all around the Bridegroom but she is hidden in His heart and therefore cannot be seen by other eyes.” Blessed be His name! There is room for us all even in His heart! Let us aspire to the nearest, highest place both while we walk with Him here and when we will sit with Him there.