1888 for almost Dummies

Is Jesus in love with a “woman”? Yes, He is!

It was He who invented sexual love and marriage. The story has been in the Bible from the beginning. When Adam was in desperate loneliness in Eden, the Lord brought Eve to him; He also foresaw the time when He would comfort His own loneliness with the “marriage” of a “bride” taken from His beloved world. Jesus is alone, lonely Man in heaven; He wants to be with His people.

No woman on earth could be so tall, so beautiful, so wise, that she could be the bride of the divine Son of God; the “woman” with whom He is in such desperate love is a “corporate” woman—a “body” of humans composed of redeemed sinners from “every nation, tribe, tongue, and people” (Rev. 14:6, 7). “She” has grown up from her infancy “in Christ” through all the stages from childhood in which a woman grows up; she has come at last to a place of maturity where she will be ready to stand by His side as His “help-meet.”

In Revelation’s picture, she will share with Him the administration of His new kingdom of which He has just been crowned “King of kings and Lord of lords,” for He invites her to sit with Him on His throne (Rev. 3:21). He can’t rule there alone! He has to have someone “sit” with Him whom He can love and trust and respect as a king regards his queen who shares his reign.

The story through history

When God’s people had wandered away from Him, Isaiah assured them that God stands toward Israel as a “husband” (54:5). When Israel rebelled against Him, he described their infidelity as “harlotry” (1:21). Jeremiah likens Israel’s infidelity to a “wife” treacherously departing from her husband” (3:20). The husband’s brokenheartedness is implied.

Ezekiel spends an entire long chapter discoursing on Israel’s youth being a time when she was so charming and beautiful and innocent that He, wanting to be her husband-to-be, fell in love with her (16:8; that’s quite a chapter!). Paul likens Christ’s relationship to His church as that of a Lover being betrothed (2 Cor. 11:2).

Like a surrealist painting, these vivid scenes portray the whole of human history and especially that of God’s people, as a divine-human love affair, a husband wooing a wife. It’s the back-in-the-shadows reality that informs Scripture, Old and New Testaments. In Ephesians Paul shocks Christians of all ages with the declaration that agape-love is sexual love: “Husbands, love your wives [with agape] even as Christ also loved the church” (5:25); so Christ’s love for the church is a conjugal love, that of a Lover for the girl who arouses Him!

This is so shocking that Charles Wesley’s famous hymn “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” has extracted criticism through the years. “Bishop Wordsworth in the nineteenth century once said it was ‘inexpressibly shocking,’ and should not be sung in Westminster Abbey.” Even his brother John excluded it from his 1780 Large Hymnbook, “and in other hymnbooks ‘lover’ has been altered to ‘refuge’ or ‘Saviour.’”

This fear of the humanity of the Savior is probably due to the widely popular Dogma of the Immaculate Conception which deprives the Virgin Mary of a genetic link to the fallen Adam and thus separates her Son from true identity with humanity. The reticence even in Seventh-day Adventist churches to sing Charles Wesley’s hymn probably derives unconsciously from the same.

Hosea’s painful frustrated love

The prophet dramatically represented a man’s love for a woman as an example of the love of Christ for the nation of Israel (2:1-5; 3:1-5). The tortured prophet stands in history as the preeminent example of the disappointed but steadfast love of man for a woman, because he still loved Gomer after she played the harlot on him. Hosea could not forget his love for her, notwithstanding. There must have been something in her personality, in her eyes, her soul, that won his devotion throughout that stormy relationship.

What kept him in love? We say, love, that is, something in her. But the New Testament word for such love, agape, is by nature a love that is not dependent on the goodness, value, or beauty of its object; how then could Hosea “love” a woman for any reason but such a “spiritual” non-emotional reason? But he did; Paul insists that agape is sexual as well as “spiritual.” Hosea’s love for her was conjugal, man for woman; it had to be.

He illustrates Christ’s love for His church that keeps His commandments in the last days. Why does He single her out to love her, like a man singles out one from all the world of women to love?

There must be something about that “body” of believers that Revelation designates as “the remnant,” which “keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ,” that has called forth or has released the conjugal love of Christ. He wants to marry “her”; and that desire is a burning one, not to be turned aside. The disappointment of that love in “1888” was to Him “beyond description.”

Ezekiel vis-à-vis “1844”

Following Ezekiel’s pattern story of the lifelong love of Christ for “young” Israel, we could say that the little group who went through the Great Disappointment of 1844 were deeply beloved of Him in this special sense. The “remnant” refused to give up their faith, confident that the true Holy Spirit was working in the Midnight Cry. They were especially dear to His heart (Jesus describes them in His message to “the angel of the church of the Philadelphians,” Rev. 3:9, 10).

When new truth came to them such as the closing of the First Apartment of the heavenly sanctuary and the opening of the Second and they believed, there was an endearing loyalty in His eyes; then when Rachel Preston brought them the seventh-day Sabbath truth, they welcomed it instead of resisting and fighting it (as they did precious truth forty years later). Then when the first principles of health reform came, again they eagerly accepted. On down through the early history of this people, a special heavenly love affair was developing. Not since Pentecost has Jesus found such a group of believers loyal to Him.

Then comes our sad history of “1888.”

And here the Song of Solomon 5:2-8 comes on stage

The Lover (Christ) has come “home” to His beloved after a safari; He is tired, lonely, hungry, wet from the rain. He longs to be with her intimately. He “knocks” (the Hebrew speaks of it as banging on the door), and knocks some more. The woman who is the object of His love disdains Him, thinks she is too relaxed, having gone to bed for the night; why does He bother her now? (The world is too comfy a place as it is, says the Bride-to-be of the Lamb.)

Finally, she forgets about her own selfish comfort and begins to think about Him out there in the darkness and in the rain, hungry and alone; it is true, He loves her!

She belatedly gets up and goes to let Him in, but when she opens the door, He is “gone.”

I slept, but my heart lay waking:
I dreamed—ah! There is my darling knocking!
“Open to me, my own,” he calls,
“my dear, my dove, my paragon [my perfect one].
My head is drenched with dew [rain],
My hair, with drops of the night.”
But I have doffed my robe; why should I don it?
My feet are bathed; why should I soil them?
Then my darling put his hand in,
his right hand at the door,
And my heart yearned for him.
How my heart fainted when I heard him!
So I rose to let my darling in,
my hands all moist with myrrh,
my fingers wet with liquid myrrh,
that dropped on the catch of the bolt.
I opened to my darling,
But my darling, he had gone.
I sought him, but I could not find him,
I called, he never answered.
—Moffatt

Increasingly, thoughtful people are coming to see here the story of “our” disdaining the Lord Jesus in the most precious message of the beginning of the latter rain. In rejecting it, says the Lord’s servant, we disdained Christ, just as “the woman” did her Lover in Song of Solomon 5:3.

Christ’s pathetic appeal in His message to “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans” (“be zealous therefore and repent,” Rev. 3:19) is connected with the Song of Solomon, for His parting appeal is a direct quotation from it, not from the Hebrew text but from the ancient Greek text, the LXX: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If a certain one [tis, Greek] hears My voice and opens the door,” … then comes the intimacy.

A yearning Bridegroom longs for the marriage to come.