Eros

"And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." ~Revelation 21:2-4 (KJV)

"Within Eros [sexual desire] is rather about the Beloved. It becomes almost a mode of perception, entirely a mode of expression. It feels objective; something outside us, in the real world. That is why Eros, though the king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product.....Anyway, whose pleasure? For one of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving." ~C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

For the last several years I have been fascinated over the idea of love between a man and a woman. That is because over the last several years I have been seeking the woman who will be my wife. I am thankful to God that He has brought me this woman, and we are engaged to be married on the first of July. My fascination over the topic has a lot to do with my pursuit of marriage, but the more I grew in my knowledge of what marriage is really all about, the more it fascinated me.

You may wonder why I used the quote from Scripture that I did. That is because I have the understanding, as does most of the Christian world I presume, that marriage is a picture of the relationship of the church to Jesus Christ. The church is the bride, who formerly was ugly and rejected, a wretch laying on the side of the street waiting to die, who Christ in His loving mercy reached down and picked her up, made her beautiful and adorned her for a wedding in which He would be the groom. In all of eternity, from the day when the church will be resurrected in the new flesh and the creation redeemed from the clutches of sin, "baptism by fire," the bride and the groom, church and Christ, will have the Eros in which the church praises and submits to her Christ, and Christ glorifies and loves His church.

When I seek marriage, this is what I seek. A relationship in which my Lisa and I will have a foretaste of this everlasting relationship that the church as one organic whole will experience with Christ. My earthly marriage will be brief, ending with the death of one party. But the eternal marriage of ultimate bliss in submission to our Lord will be, as I said, eternal! What a glorious and humbling thought.

By the way, when I described the church as being wretched and filthy and fully miserable before Christ's spirit entered her, I did not mean to suggest that this is paralleled in our earthly marriage. Lisa is a very beautiful young woman to whom I an extremely grateful to be engaged.