The Patriarchs / Being Meditations upon Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job; The Canticles, Heaven and Earth.

by J. G. Bellett

This is the mystery of the Divine Bridegroom. All human tales or fables fall short of this, let the imagination that wrought them up be as fervent as it may. This is the mystery of a love that passes knowledge between Christ and the Church. She must love Him for the service He has shown her; He must love her for the cost she has put Him to. She will find herself for ever by the side of One who so loved her as to die for her. He will see one by His side who so engaged Him that He was willing to go through with His affection, though the cost of loving her would take (to speak after the manner of men) all that He was worth. He cannot but prize her supremely, and so she Him. This only difference may be observed--that His love was proved ere she became His, for He had beforehand counted the cost of loving her--her love, later and more backward, and only in the second place, began on her knowing His love for her. For Christ, as the Bridegroom (as in everything else, whether of grace or glory, Col. i.), is to have "the pre-eminence." In the character of His love He entirely outshines the love of the bride, and leaves hers, as it were, no love at all, by reason of the love that excelleth.

But having thus looked at the Bridegroom, I would, in like manner, see the Bride for a moment or two. But I must limit myself, and will, therefore, only trace her as reflected in the Book of Genesis.

Eve is, of course, the earliest type. In her we see the personal characteristics of the bride: she is formed by the Lord for Adam. Adam's joy in a helpmeet was what the Lord proposed to Himself when He began to form Eve. He had respect to Adam's need and joy in this work. And when Adam receives Eve from the hand of the Lord, his words express his satisfaction in her, vindicating the Lord's workmanship, that His hand had accomplished the design which His love had undertaken. Eve was fitted to Adam. This was her full personal beauty. He owned her bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. All in her was attractiveness. She entirely answered the expectations, and satisfied the heart, of him for whom she had been formed. He took her and clave to her (Gen. ii.); and this, we know, is a type of Christ and the Church. Eph. v.

Sarah is the next distinguished female in that book; and she is a mystic person also. But it is not the Bride whom she expresses, but the Mother. So that I will not particularly notice her. For Abraham is "the father of all them that believe"--and Sarah is "the free woman" or, in an allegory, "the mother of us all" (Gal. iv.), linked with the family of God in the place of the mother, rather than with the Lord as His Bride. So that I pass her by.

Rebecca comes next in this holy line, and in her we have the Bride again, as in Eve. But great and blessed truths connected with the Bride are told in Rebecca. She is separated from Isaac. He is far away, and has never seen her. But Rebecca is the father's choice, and Eliezer's care, till Isaac receives her. Isaac longed for her. That is shown by his going forth in solitariness to meditate at eventide. But beyond the sense of this loneliness, we do not see Isaac doing or suffering anything for her. The council about the wife is taken between Abraham and Eliezer. They settle the whole plan. And Eliezer, in beautiful, self-denying service, goes on toil and travel to secure this elect Bride for Isaac. And he does secure her. And he prepares her for him. He not only separates her from her kindred and her father's house, but conducts her across the desert; on the way, doubtless, telling her many a tale of him whose she was so soon to be--till at length he gives her safely into Isaac's hand, and Isaac, like Adam, is comforted in his Bride.

This is a beautiful light in which to look at the Bride; the one who is brought home to her lord from the distant land, having been the object of the father's choice, and of the servant's care. This is a mystery. And in it we get the Lord receiving His Bride at the hand of the Father and of the Holy Ghost, chosen for Him, and given to Him, He having nothing to do but to take her at their hand, and to find in her, as Isaac found in Rebecca, the relief of his solitariness, the inmate of his tent, and the companion of all his joys.

Rachel, next in order, shows herself to us. And in her we get the Bride again, though in a different character. Here we find the one who was to own and enjoy her, travelling and toiling for her. And this is just as true, in the mystery, as the other. For, in one sense, Christ has only to receive His Bride at the hand of the Father and the Holy Ghost, the gift of the one and the workmanship of the other--but, in another sense, He has Himself gone into the distant land, and (as I have already been observing on the Bridegroom) laboured and been put to reproach and wrong for her. In all this, Jacob sets forth the true Bridegroom. The Lord Jesus personally has borne the heat of the day all alone. He had not where to lay His head, like Jacob--absent from His Father's house, and the place of His inheritance--wronged again and again in a world which, like Laban and his house, ever seeks its own; and yet, enduring all this, and willing to endure all this, for the love that He had to her whom His eye had rested on; as Jacob's seven years of service seemed to him but as a few days, because of his love for Rachel.

This is as striking a picture of the truth as we have yet seen; here the same mystery of the Bride is still published to us, though still in a distinct part of it. In Eve, we had her full personal fitness for her Lord--in Rebecca, we had her as the object of the Father's election and the Spirit's care, in order to give her to Christ--in Rachel, we see her as the prize, whom the Lord sets before His own eye, for the sake of which He will give Himself to exile and toil and wrongs. As reflected in Isaac, He has nothing to do for her; as reflected in Jacob, He has everything to do for her.

Asenath closes these wonders. She is the woman of the fourth generation of the Patriarchs. There is the Sarah of Abraham, the Rebecca of Isaac, the Rachel of Jacob, and the Asenath of Joseph. She now in her turn takes up the same mystic tale. She was a Gentile, and in nowise, like the rest, connected in the flesh with Joseph. The enmity of his brethren had cast Joseph among her people. And he is honoured there, and with these strange and Gentile honours gets a Gentile bride and family; and in the bosom of this unexpected joy he is willing to forget, for a season, his father's house, and to account himself fruitful or happy, though among strangers.

This, in its season, is as full of meaning as any of our previous pages in this tale of the Bride. For here we get the Bride in her Gentile, heavenly character. Here we are told a great secret; that this same personage, whose beauty and personal characteristics we saw in Eve, whose election by the Father and conduct under the hand of the Spirit we saw in Rebecca, and whose purchase for Himself by the personal toil and sorrow of Christ we saw in Rachel, is a Gentile, a Stranger, one brought into union with the Lord, after His own kindred in the flesh had refused Him.