Get to Know the Bridegroom

G (GOD)-mail: From the Heart of the Bridegroom to His Bride

Friend, God is madly in love with you! He is in hot pursuit of your heart, and wants you to be His Bride forever! Before you were ever conceived, He dreamed of doing life alongside you in the here and now and for all eternity. 

He wants you to be His Beloved!

Surprised? 

Maybe you’re thinking there’s no way God could love someone like you. You have too many bad decisions in your past, too many unhealed wounds, too many broken relationships, a past of ill-repute, or life just hasn't panned out the way you planned and you feel like a failure.

Beloved, you are exactly His type!

God sees you through grace goggles! He sees you as pure and perfect through His finished work on the cross. In fact, He has called you both flawless and beautiful in His eyes.

You’re a real gem in the spiritual realm!

Did you know that your Creator designed you to His exact specifications? Or that He personally selected which family you’d be born in and hand-picked each of your ancestors?  Do you realize that from the moment you were born He has used every event and circumstance of your life (the good, the bad, AND the ugly) for His gorgeous plans and purposes?

Of the billions of people on this planet right now, God has set His beautiful eyes on you, Blessed One!

I’ll let you in on a little secret as one of His closest friends. 

He’s planning to ask you to marry Him! 

But, He wants you to know beforehand what He is really like before you consider His proposal.

His enemies have been telling lies about His nature and character. They want you for themselves, but they do not have your best interest at heart. Rumors have spread for years that portray Him in a negative light. He asked me to dispel those myths before He approaches you to pop THE question.

You see, before I got to know Him I believed the lies I’d heard about Him. It took me a long while to realize I had been deceived. But, as I’ve gotten to know Him over the past couple of years, I can tell you that He is absolutely divine (pun intended)!  

I want you to get to know him for yourself. If you’ve heard (or believed) any of the lies about Him, it’s important to know what He is really like at the core of His personality.

Keep reading for the inside scoop on your potential beau-to-be, King Jesus!

What Jesus, the BRIDEGROOM is Really Like

A few months ago I began reading through the entire Bible beginning with Genesis. As I was reading each book, chapter, and verse, I was only looking to answer only one question for the Lord’s potential Bride: What is God really like? 

The Bible tells us that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” in Colossians 3:15 and “the exact imprint of [God’s] nature in Hebrews 1:3. Jesus and the Father are one (John 10:30), so that means that the God portrayed in the Old Testament is the exact same God revealed in the New Testament. 

Thankfully, God left you an important self-portrait in Exodus. Let’s take a closer look.

In the following passage, God had just agreed to reveal His glory to Moses so that he could get to know Him better. So, He hid Moses in the cleft of a rock, covered Him with His hand, passed by, and proclaimed: 

“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.” Exodus 34:6-7

Now I don’t know about you, but I grew up around lots of Church people that claimed to know God and be close to Him. Because they talked about Him so much, I really thought I knew Him too. But, all I really had was a collection of intellectual facts about some of his characteristics. Holy. Righteous. Just. A Judge of Sin. My key takeaways were “Fear the Lord…and be fearful of Him”. 

Those were certainly accurate descriptions of aspects of God’s nature, but was it a true depiction of His character in its entirety?

Not by a long shot!

You see, if you listen to and believe the lies of God’s enemy like I did, then the lens through which you see Him can alter what He looks like to you. If you’d like to read about my personal battles with distorted images of God, you can read that here, here and here. 

Friend, King Jesus really wants you to know the truth about Him. 

He sent me ahead of Him to make sure you, the love of His eternal life, have 20-20 vision and know what He is really like. Whether you are aware of it or not, your history, experiences, upbringing, culture, and many other factors greatly influence how you view and experience Him. 

I never conceived that the Prince of Peace would ever want anything to do with me. Because I found myself believing that He was unapproachable, demanding, tyrannical, impossible to please, unkind, and unsafe, He had to take a scalpel to my spiritual eyes over the past year to correct my eyesight. The corrective surgical tool He used to get my eyes adjusted was His Word, in particular the Old Testament. 

After my spiritual surgery procedure, otherwise known as reading the Bible, I was absolutely astonished by what I discovered about the Bridegroom! 

To my great surprise, it wasn’t through well-known characters that God revealed His heart to me. It was not the lives and stories of the patriarchs, prophets or heroes of the Bible, people like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David or Daniel, through which this profound revelation came. It was through lesser known, and oftentimes, disobedient and overtly sinful people that I began to truly see mercy rather than judgment is at the center of God’s heart.

So, let me take you, Beloved, on a journey through the pages of the Old Testament and look more closely at His character and nature. I want to show you His heart not through the viewpoint of the faithful, blameless and righteous but rather through the perspective of the faithless, shameful, and guilty. 

It’s been said that how someone treats others says a lot about their character.

Over the coming days, you and I will take a deep dive at how God treated those people who were the most deserving of judgment and wrath.

If you have any misgivings about God’s great love for you, this peek into his dealings with people you’d probably avoid if they passed you on the street will set your heart at total ease.

Ready to get started?

You can check out the next post here.