Marriage

   Jesus is not looking and longing for a bride who wants primarily to be rescued from her challenges and responsibilities as a body of individual believers called to impact their own generation and their own times, as previous generations have been faithful to do each in its own turn.  She must first show that she can pull her own weight as her predecessors have.  But even more than that,  a bride shows that she is in love with the groom.  She reflects His own love beaming toward her back to Him.  Too much of an emphasis on a nick of time rapture/rescue aspect of end time events in our contemporary theology detracts from this radiant love and in-love ness that is blind to what tribulation must be endured to actualize the wedding union. Remember how Jacob served his uncle Laban seven years for Rachel and it seemed like only a few days because of the great love he had for her.  (Genesis 29, v.20)

  There tends to be a lack of respect for the bride or the groom that sees their mate as an escape hatch from and a cure-all for current difficulty.  Each needs to enter the union more from a position of strength and what each has to give and bring to the marriage and less from a position of weakness and what one is determined to gain from it.  Of course I am speaking from my own cultural perspective, and there are differences from culture to culture in regard to marriage and wedding customs.  There are indeed prearranged marriages, for example, that often have a better success rate than marriages in Western cultures.  That being said though, and for the purpose of our analogy, the bride ought not to marry because she hates her parents or roommate or even her lonely present living situation,  but because she loves and is in love with the man who is the groom, and the same ought to be true for the motive of the groom.  (There is a glow about a couple who are truly In love, as we have probably noticed. )  In the case of the Heavenly Groom we need have no reservations or misgivings about His loving motives, it's the motives of the soon to be Bride that are in the process of being purified.