Have you ever heard about select companies that come out of the remnant? What is the Church? Is the Church a part of the Kingdom, or is the Kingdom something that comes out of the Church? Who are the sons of God? Do the sons of God come out of the Kingdom or out of the Church? Who are the two witnesses? Do they come out of the sons of God? Is the Bride a part of the Church? These are a few questions people might ask you. This passage from Isaiah, and what I will try to explain to you, is designed to end speculation.
For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not keep quiet, until her righteousness goes forth like brightness, and her salvation like a torch that is burning. And the nations will see your righteousness, and all kings your glory; and you will be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord will designate. You will also be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. It will no longer be said of you, “Forsaken,” nor to your land will it any longer be said, “Desolate”; but you will be called, “My delight is in her,” and your land, “Married”; for the Lord delights in you, and to Him your land will be married. For as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you.
On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen; all day and all night they will never keep silent. You who remind the Lord, take no rest for yourselves; and give Him no rest until He establishes and makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Isaiah 62:1–7.
First of all, this speculation, “Your sons will marry you,” is a strange statement, isn’t it? We have an illustration of this in the twelfth chapter of Revelation, where the woman clothed with the sun brings forth a man child and the man child is caught up into the heavens. The woman flees into the wilderness where a place is prepared for her and she is protected for a period of time. It is in this situation that you realize the man child who is born becomes the Savior and the head of the woman who bore Him.
And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was with child; and she cried out, being in labor and in pain to give birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven diadems. And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven, and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up to God and to His throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God, so that there she might be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. Revelation 12:1–6.
The passage in Isaiah is similar: “Thy sons shall marry thee.” We have certain set ideas of human genealogy that must not carry over in thinking of spiritual things. For a son to marry his mother would be so incestuous that we would condemn it completely.
But this Scripture, “Thy sons shall marry thee,” is the word that comes to Zion. That which comes forth will eventually be what fathers and husbands the Church.
In order not to become confused in this, we must understand that God is bringing forth a remnant out of the Church, and that remnant we could give many names, but that remnant is the Bride of Christ.
You wanted to know the difference between the Church and the Bride. There is no distinction, except that God has a way of interacting within His people until that which is an effect becomes a cause, and that which is a son becomes the father or mother. Do you understand? It may seem complicated, but this is the way God often does it.
Look at what is happening today in those who walk with God. We are probably the children of many movements in one sense, but in another sense, because we have come out, and we have been born out of travail and come forth from the traditional Church, we are going to turn and become the savior of the Church.
What has been a product, almost an effect of the Church (and not at the Church’s intention either) will turn around and become the savior.
Didn’t that happen in the New Testament? Didn’t most of the disciples come out of Israel of the Old Testament, and as they came out of Israel of the Old Testament, instead of becoming just a child of it, they became the father of the whole Church age and opened up the true spiritual Israel as fathers of it?
Stay away from speculation. There will always be those who come out and say, “We’re the ones. God brought us out, and we’re ‘this’ and we’re ‘that.’ ” But God doesn’t do that to end the thing in itself.
Paul tells how God brought him out. He was thrust out of Israel, but he could wish himself accursed from Christ for Israel, and he brings a prophecy in Romans 9 that all Israel shall be saved, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises. Romans 9:3, 4. How could Israel be saved? Certainly not the way they were going. It had to be that which they rejected that in turn came back and became their salvation.
You may find that the Church as a whole rejects us. That does not mean we are not going to become the savior of the whole Christian world. We can become that which brings forth new life and the Word to the whole Christian realm. They may not accept you now, but eventually you can father or mother a great deal that is coming forth in the world just by your faithfulness to the Lord. It sounds like a strange thing. God always brings someone out in order to make him a father. Abraham was not going to become the father of many nations until the Lord brought him out of Ur of Chaldees. He brought him out of Haran, and He kept bringing him out. He kept making more advances. “Now,” God said, “you are going to become a father of many nations.”
The future of the whole Church is found in that which it seems to reject. The remnant which comes forth out of the Church is what turns back and begins to redeem it. Have you ever thought about this before? I am bringing this truth to you so you will not find anything in your own heart to cause you to swerve from the simplicity of the teaching. We are brought out by God for a great purpose. Don’t play it down. God has been doing that for centuries upon centuries. He has been blessing people, and they have then been rejected, spewed out of the existing order simply to become the only salvation for the entire previous thing. God has no leverage as long as people are in something. But when He can get them outside of it there is a great deal of leverage. That is why we go “without the camp bearing His reproach” (Hebrews 13:13). Our leverage is entirely in the place of reproach and persecution from the existing Church order.
God always makes those who are called to come out a great blessing. There has to be a rejection, whether it is legitimate or whether it is something that people just impose upon you. There has to be a rejection before God can use you. I have been weighing this very carefully, and I look at the story of Moses. Moses was raised up to be a savior of his people, but first he had to be almost rejected by them. This happened after he witnessed an Egyptian guard smiting a Hebrew and he hit the Egyptian and killed him, which shows that Moses wasn’t always the most meek man on the face of the earth. The next day he went down and saw two Hebrews fighting. When he tried to stop them they said, “Are you going to kill us too?” Moses thought, “Oh oh, they all know what I’ve done,” and so he fled from Egypt to Midian, way out to the backside of the desert. He thought he was lost, but it was there that God met him and told him he was going to go back and lead the children of Israel out. God did not meet him in Egypt. When Moses set about to be a savior and a deliverer, he had first been rejected.
If you want to be a blessing to the Church, you are approaching it right; you are entering into this walk with God where the existing church order rejects you. With fear and trembling and a great deal of venom they will reject you. Now you are positioned in a place where you can possibly help them. You can begin to prophesy to them. The leverage is found outside the camp. The leverage is found in the place of rejection and persecution, in the remnant. Then that remnant can turn back and father and mother a great movement. It can do a great thing in the earth.
The Lord tells us, in Isaiah 62:4, … you will be called, “My delight is in her,” and your land, “Married”; for the Lord delights in you. The Spirit kept speaking to me about this word “delight.” We have one side of the picture in the First Psalm of the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law he doth meditate day and night, and how he is going to prosper, and how blessed he is going to be. The idea of us delighting in the Lord is commonplace in the Scriptures: Delight thyself also in the Lord; and He will give thee the desires of thine heart. Psalm 37:4. But the other side of the picture of the Lord delighting in us is related to the remnant which Isaiah 62 is talking about. It is talking about that which God is going to do. Instead of our just delighting in the Lord, it is reversed. The Lord delights in us and He is going to say, “My delight is in her.” This is what we have to understand in what God is doing, and this interprets it a great deal.
The whole issue in the Church is the virgin or the whore, and there is nothing else in the Scriptures which explains the course of the Christian world in the end time. Revelation 17:5 says of the great harlot Babylon, And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. Her prostitutions, her many lovers, her many interests, the many things she is pursuing after are because she loves the world. James 4:4 says, Ye adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?
And on the other side is the virgin. Revelation 19:7 says that she hath made herself ready. And to her it was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. She is concerned about one thing: to please the Lord.
The best wives are not best because of their figures, or their brains, or anything of that nature. Those things are not what makes a good wife. Girls don’t believe that, and most of the boys don’t believe that either, but it is true. In fact, many of the very beautiful women make the poorest wives because they are so absorbed with themselves. They can’t lose their self-focus to love someone else. Such a woman may be excellent in her beauty, but condescending toward the man: “Look what a special thing you have.” A beautiful woman is more often frigid than one who is plainer in her appearance, because she is so concerned with herself that she cannot lose her self-consciousness to give herself in love to her husband. Though she seems to be special, she is always a little inadequate. What makes a woman excel? What is an excellent wife? Proverbs 31:26 says that the law of kindness is in her mouth. Something emanates from her spirit, something which she gives of herself until her husband would say, like this Scripture, “My delight is in her.” She is a continual delight to him. He cannot wait to see her. It is not because of her beauty, but because of some inner glow. It is some mystical quality, the way she loves her husband and the way her husband loves her.
This is exactly what God is trying to say will happen to the people of the Lord in the last days. It will not be because you have excelled your brethren in natural attributes, but because of some focus you have had upon the Lord. It is more than a loyalty. It is more than saying, “I’ll not be tempted to be unfaithful to my Bridegroom.” It is delighting to do the will of the Lord. It is delighting to be faithful, to be loyal, to give yourself completely over to the Lord, and the Lord knowing you are absolutely His. There is no question about it. As Proverbs says of the woman, The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. Proverbs 31:11–12. This is the picture of the Bride of Jesus Christ.
He trusts her. He knows she will not betray him. He knows she is not going to wonder, “Well, should I have married this guy or not? Maybe I could have done better.” That never enters into the picture. She is completely devoted. She delights in her husband and tells him she has the most wonderful person in the world. He does not doubt it. He knows because she says it, that means it is absolutely true of him.
This is what the Lord is doing for us. We delight in Him. He is everything to us. We magnify Him. We love Him with all of our heart. We have no intention of being unfaithful to Him. We do not want to go out in the world and sin against Him. We would abhor anything that was disloyal to the Lord. We do not want to be a part of mystery Babylon, the mother of harlots, or any of her daughters. We do not want to play around with the world. We have only one desire: “I want to please You, Lord. I want to really belong to You.” I am looking forward to this that Revelation 19:7–9 tells about, “… the marriage supper of the Lamb,” and, “His Bride has made herself ready.”
And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure. I John 3:3. We are anxious to be cleansed by the washing of water with the word, that as the Bride of Christ we may be presented to the Lord without spot or wrinkle or any such thing; holy and without blemish we will be presented to the Heavenly Bridegroom (Ephesians 5:26, 27). This is the desire of our heart.
Understanding something of the Old Testament preparations for marriage can illustrate this, as in the story of Esther. Esther was a beauty queen, a little Jewish girl chosen as being the most beautiful out of one hundred and twenty-seven countries. She was to replace Vashti as the queen. She went through twelve months of preparation for that. Six months of anointing were with oil of myrrh, and six months were with sweet odors and cosmetics. Myrrh was used as part of the embalming oil to anoint corpses. That is quite a preparation for a bride, isn’t it? For six months she went through a ritual in which she considered that everything she was and everything of her life was dying, and she was going to become the extension of one man, a part of his very being. For six months she was anointed with myrrh, and for the next six months she was anointed with sweet spices.
We do it in that order. We do not make her attractive until we let her die. And the Bride of Christ has to die out to all these other interests, all of these other things of the world. You young people have to reach the place where you no longer care about the world. You don’t go by the movie marquee saying, “Oh, I’d like to see that X-rated picture!” You think, “Ugh!” You don’t find yourself saying “Ah, I’d like to go down into a real rock session again,” when you are listening to the radio. Rather, you say, “That used to turn me on, and now it just makes me nervous. It bothers me, what’s the matter with me?” You have been anointed with six months of myrrh. You are going through the death. You are dying out to all of that. You wake up to the fact that you used to resist temptation, but now you just don’t want those things. The desire changed. You died to it. The tempter knocks on a tombstone, saying, “Here is what you want.” You don’t care. You’re past it. You come to the place where you say, “I’ve been anointed to death. I’ve been anointed with myrrh; I’ve died to the whole thing because I’m going to be the Bride of Christ, and I’m going to be pure. Everything is going to be right.”
I have ministered to people who have come out of so much that they didn’t seem to even have a conscience. They had been conditioned. It bothered them that they did not have a conscience about things, but the Lord helped to bring them through things until they died out. The Lord brought them a new birth, and they began to yearn after the Lord. They would no longer do certain things, not because of some old morality sense of conscience, but because they would not displease the Lord for anything. That is when the Lord starts putting on the sweet spices and they begin to smell good.
The Bride is beautiful. She is adorned. She has made herself ready. She is going to see the Bridegroom. Don’t mistake it, preparation is the most important thing that is taking place today. Saving wheat or brown rice and getting ready for survival is secondary. The important thing that is taking place is the preparation of the Bride, the beautifying and the purifying of the Bride. That is what we are in: that love of righteousness, that desire to please the Lord.
One day the Lord will look at you and say, “My delight is in you. I delight in you.” He will make it so plain that it will reach you. There is nothing in all this world like the precious fruit of the earth that is coming forth to the Lord. He is loving you; He is drawing you. You are preparing yourself for Him, not with your own individual qualities, your natural attributes, but with something different. It is that real devotion to the Lord. We have all seen couples in love who adored each other so much that they would not tolerate anyone saying, “This is not the most handsome man in the world”—“this is not the most beautiful girl in the world.”
Don’t you like the fact that the Lord is taking that attitude toward us? People can say, “They’re nothing; these people are nothing,” but the Lord says, “My delight is in them. I delight in them. I love them.” We are beginning to realize what the Lord really thinks of us, and we are finding our hope and affections set on Him. The Spirit of God is brooding over our lives to bring out that desire to be purified before the Lord; that desire to be ready for Him, to see Him, to love Him, to get rid of the filth, to get rid of the unclean thing and just be found in Him, robed in that fine linen, clean and white, the righteousness of the saints. If you have a problem or two, repent. The blood cleanses from all sin. There will be no spot or wrinkle or any such thing (Ephesians 5:27).
“I’m doing pretty well, but there’s just one spot. How do I get rid of it?”
The blood of Jesus Christ is a glorious spot remover. Just ask the Lord to forgive you; ask Him to cleanse you and take it out. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I John 1:9. Work at it; stay with it. This is speaking of a basic hunger, and your hunger is increasing. You want to be right. You want to be clean. You want to be pure, but you don’t want to slip back into that old sanctimonious religious rut. What a phony thing it is to act and look pious and try to be something that you know down in your heart you are not. Bring it all out; let God cleanse you and make you what He wants you to be. Please the Lord in every way. We want the Lord to delight in us because of that purity of the Bride.
Isaiah 53:2 says that when we see the Lord there is no comeliness, no beauty that we should desire Him. There is nothing the world sees in Jesus that makes them think He is nice, that He is lovely. But we take a look at the Lord and He is beautiful. He has redeemed us, and we make ourselves ready. The world looks at us and we are nothing. But the Lord looks at us and He says we are beautiful.
That’s the way it’s going to be, isn’t it? Whenever our relationship to the Lord stops being one of love, it becomes very monotonous. But we are going to have a honeymoon for about a thousand years. The marriage supper of the Lamb is coming up next. And the Bride has made herself ready. She’s going to be beautiful.
Say to yourself, “I am going to be beautiful; by the grace of God I’m going to be beautiful. I am going to be beautiful to the Lord. He is going to delight in me.” Yearn for it. Want it more than anything else. Hate the filthy thing. Hate the defilement of the flesh. Abhor it with all of your heart. Despise it. Have love for the purity. I have noticed this among the young people who come in from a pretty rough life: that it isn’t long before God does something in them you can’t understand. It is a drive for righteousness. You have to have it.