i have seen the unequally yoked argument a bit on this site and a thought popped into my head; "who is man that thou art mindful of him? could an awesome God find common ground with him?" what communion does light have with darkness? yet the holy of holies .. yes GOD sent his son to die for us while we were yet his enemies and live in our hearts. i would like to hear some thoughts on this please as i see it as a direct contradiction in the conventional light, but through the lense of God's grace, mercy and love it looks totally different. your point of view would be greatly appreciated.
I understand where you're coming from, Nyanda, but I must disagree with the extent of your analogy.
Yes, it is true that believers must not marry unbelievers. A couple must share a deep, passionate, convicting love for the Lord in order to have a Christ-centered relationship that exalts the Lord and that gives the world a bit of an idea of the love that Christ has for the Church. A good marriage is a good testimony, both because of the portrayal of the relationship between Christ and Church and because of the sanctification that comes about when 2 God-fearing yet very different people live under the same roof. I think that those things are the spirit of that verse.
Now, as we've established, marriage is meant to be a picture of Christ's relationship with the Church. And so I do see where you're going w/ your analogy... But the comparison falls short in at least 2 ways:
x Only believers will spend an eternity with God. Believers are justified, meaning that, because of Christ's work on the cross, we're declared "not guilty." And Christ's righteousness is imputed to us. Additionally, we become glorified at the consummation of our redemption. So, believers, while we certainly start out awful, will hardly be an "evil bride."
x God's ways are higher than our ways. Asking how Christ could die for people so unworthy is an unanswerable question. We know that such immense capacity for love is part of the character of God. But being that we have but a taste of that perfect love in this life, I don't think we can know why a righteous, holy God would create people so capable of hurting Him... and then, why He'd want to redeem them. Any explanation goes beyond reason. The appropriate response to that kind of love is one of humility and surrender and gratitude.
If we now attempt to pull the analogy back into the human realm, we can see that it's faulty because a believer does not have the ability to impute Christ's righteousness to their spouse. Quite simply, we don't have the same abilities that God does to justify, glorify, etc. And we aren't sovereign and we don't create divine plans for redemption or love people perfectly. We cannot accomplish, through marriage, what Christ accomplished on the cross.
Marriage is a very imperfect, incomplete picture of Christ's love for the Church. And so we can't take a comparison involving 2 imperfect people and try to fit God into that. This would be like standing on the shore and making a very sloppy impressionist painting of the ocean... and then telling people that your painting is an exact replica of the ocean, when, in fact, it is but a glimpse of what the ocean really is. The painting wouldn't tell us what us feels like to have a wave wash over your feet or what the salty air smells like. It wouldn't tell you that there are plankton floating about. Or that you could freeze to death or drown in it. If all you ever knew of the ocean was from this picture, just imagine how incomplete and perhaps distorted your knowledge would be... And how silly it would be to presume that every analogy you involve your painting in should extend perfectly to the actual ocean...
We must remember that a glimpse of something is never the entire picture.
