Paul repeatedly refers to this relation between Christ and his church: “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.”[[590]] “The husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church.... Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it.... He that loveth his own wife loveth himself: for no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh. This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church.”[[591]]
In the Apocalypse, the inspired seer looking into the future, at the consummation of the present age, tells of the glorious vision before him, when Christ shall come to claim his own: “I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunders, saying, Hallelujah: for the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigneth. Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And it was given unto her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright and pure: for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”[[592]]
And again he says: “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.... And there came one of the seven angels; ... and he spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: ... having a wall great and high; having twelve gates. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof.... And the gates thereof shall in no wise be shut by day (for there shall be no night there): and they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it: and there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”[[593]]
A closing declaration of the seer is, that the church as the Bride, with the representative of the Bridegroom until his coming, waits and calls for his return: “The Spirit and the bride say, Come.... Come, Lord Jesus.”[[594]] And so, from the Pentateuch to the Apocalypse, the Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian, recognize and emphasize the primitive Threshold Covenant as the beginning of religious rites, and as symbolic of the spirit of all true covenant worship.
4. SURVIVALS OF THE RITE.
Survivals of the primitive Threshold Covenant are found in various customs among Oriental Christians, and Christians the world over. Thus Easter is still looked at in some regions as the continuance of Passover, and the blood on the threshold is an accompaniment of the feast. Among the modern Greeks, each family, as a rule, buys a lamb, kills it, and eats it on Easter Sunday. “In some country districts the blood [of the lamb] is sometimes smeared on the threshold of the house.”[[595]] Easter, like the Jewish Passover, is the threshold of the new ecclesiastical year.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, a principal incident in the Easter festivities is the bringing down of fire from heaven at the opening of the new ecclesiastical year.[[596]] This ceremony seems to be a survival of the primitive custom of seeking new life, in its symbol of fire, at the threshold of the home and of the new year, in the East and in the West.[[597]]
In the sacredness of the rite of the primitive Threshold Covenant there is added emphasis to the thought which causes both the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Church to count marriage itself a sacrament. And thus again to the claim that a virgin who is devoted to a religious life is a “spouse of Christ,” and that her marriage to an earthly husband is adultery.[[598]] Many another religious custom points in the same direction.