May God bless you with new insights as you contemplate the mystery of Christ’s passionate love for His church.
Chapter 1: The Hidden Romance of the Bible
In Genesis 1 and 2, the Bible opens up with a woman and a man. In Revelation 21 and 22, the Bible closes with a woman and a man. The Bible opens up with a wedding, and it ends with a wedding. It opens with a marriage, and it ends with a marriage. It opens with a boy and a girl, and it ends with a boy and a girl. Your Bible is essentially a love story. (p. 25)
Chapter 2: A Woman Inside of a Man
Not only was Adam the only creature on earth who possessed no counterpart, there was something else about him that no other creature shared. Something inside of him desperately longed for liberation and release. Something pounding within his breast yearned to be freed. Do you know what that something was?
It was passion. God put within Adam’s beating chest and intense, all-consuming passion. An overwhelming love, if you please. But Adam was alone. So he had no outlet for that passion. Adam could not pour out his passion upon a life form different from his own. He desired a human companion, a complement, a creature like himself, who would be the recipient of his passion. The tragedy: Throughout the entire universe, no such being existed, and so the passion that was caged inside the depths of Adam’s bosom found no outlet. It had no release.
Adam, therefore, was profoundly frustrated… For in some unfathomable way, the Almighty could identify with Adam’s quandary. How do we know this? Because Adam was made in the mold of divinity. Thus it was no accident on God’s part that Adam was alone. It had the fingerprints of divinity all over it. (p. 29)
Recall that creation is finished. Day seven has passed. We are nearing the end of the eighth day–the first day of the week. It is evening. And God does something extraordinary: He puts His man into a deep, deathlike sleep. This may be the first time that unfallen man had ever slept. If so, a deep sleep was no small thing for Adam to experience. Behold, I show you a mystery: There was a woman hidden inside of Adam. (p. 30)
This woman is not part of the first creation. She appears after creation, on the eighth day. Consequently, she is a new creation. (p. 30-31)
From where did the woman acquire the capacity to passionately love? The answer: from Adam, for she came out of him. Did the woman force herself to love Adam? Not at all. Her passion was simply the natural response to Adam’s passion for her. In fact, it was his own passion returning back to him. The first woman had her husband’s passion returning back to him. The first woman had her husband’s passion pounding within her chest and coursing through her veins. For she was made from Adam himself. (p. 32)
Chapter 3: A Close-up of the First Eve
– Eve was Adam in another form, for she was taken out of him (Gen 2:23)
– She took Adam’s name. According to Gen 5:2, God called the man and the woman “Adam.” After the fall, Adam would name his bride “Eve.” But before the fall, she took her husband’s name.
– Eve was Adam’s body. She came out of his side. She was taken from his own anatomy. Therefore, she possessed the same life as Adam. She was inseparable from him, yet different.
– Eve was interdependent upon Adam. God puller her out of Adam’s side. God “split the Adam,” and took out of him the kinder, gentler part, thus making the woman his “better half.” Together, they bore the complete image of God.
– Eve was Adam’s glory. In 1 Cor 11:7, Paul says, “The woman is the glory of the man.” This means that Eve reflected Adam. The woman was the glorious expression of the man. When you saw her, you saw him.
Chapter 4: The Mystery of the Ages
In the timelessness of eternity past, the Father had someone upon whom to pour out the passion of His being. It was His Son. The Father was the Lover; the Son was the Beloved. The Father was the source; the Son was the recipient and the responder. Consequently, the Father loved the Son, and the Son reciprocated that love to the Father (John 17:24; 14:31). The Son, however, had no creature upon which to pour out the passion of His being. That is, there was no one to whom He could be the source of the torrential passion that flooded His own heart. While the Son certainly poured out His passion upon the Father, the Son was not the source of that passion. To put it another way, the Son Himself had no counterpart… In this highly specific sense, God the Son was alone, just like Adam was alone. (p. 38)
Deep within the beating heart of the Son of God was an intense, all-consuming passion. Like God the Father, God the Son desired to be the source of that passion for another. He desired to be the Lover, not just the Beloved. Yet no such being existed. Because Adam was made in God’s image, which is Christ, Adam felt the intensity of his Creator in his loneliness. Adam had lived out the same drama that God the Son had lived out before time. Truthfully, the first man had touched something of the unfulfilled love of God.
So when God made man, there were two beings in the universe that were vibrating with an insatiable passion: the Son of God in heaven and Adam on earth. The frustrated passion of a love-filled God and the frustrated passion of a human made in His image. Then, on one non-day in the dateless past, God the Father conceived a plan. It was a staggering plan. It was to give His Son a companion, one would match Him perfectly. One who would be just like Him, yet not Him. That being would be the Son of God in a different form. That being would also become the object of the Son’s passion, a wife worthy of deity. I want you to contemplate this passion-filled God of yours. Truthfully, God is perfectly adequate within Himself. But because God is love, He is not content to be adequate in Himself. (p. 39)
The Son’s desire for a counterpart was not rooted in any deficiency within Himself. It was instead rooted in the overflowing excess of divine love. (p. 40)
“He who has the bride,” (John 3:29-30) announced John the Baptist… He remained a bachelor. Yet He had His bride. But how? Behold I show you a mystery, the bride of Christ was inside the Bridegroom while He was standing on this earth. She was a mystery hidden inside of His rib cage.
Consider this: The way that Adam obtained his bride was a living reflection of how Christ obtains His bride. Like Adam, your Lord was put into a deep sleep. There were two main reasons for this. First, through death, Jesus Christ destroyed everything that would stand in His way of winning the hand of His beloved bride. To wit, He destroyed the Law that would suffocate her under a mountain of religious bondage and a pile of crushing condemnation. He destroyed the power of the Evil One who would seek to take her life. He destroyed the world system, which would lure her heart away fro Him. He destroyed the old creation, which would defile and corrupt her. But most importantly, He destroyed death itself; for He would ensure that the object of His passion would never taste death. Your Lord made sure that He removed all that could harm His lovely bride before she came into existence. (p. 43)
He had waited for ages to have His counterpart, so He guaranteed that once the romance began, it would never end. Therefore, when it comes to your Lord and His much-longed-for bride, He conquered the last enemy so that “death shall never do them part.” (p. 43-44)
Behold the mystery, your Lord died to bring His beloved bride out of Himself. Jesus Christ “endured the cross” by beholding the “joy set before him” (Heb 12:2). And that joy was His bride. (p. 44)
The first day of the week, the day after the Sabbath. It is the eighth day, the day of resurrection, the day of a new creation. (p. 45)
Where did Eve come from? She came forth out of the side of Adam. Where did the bride of Christ come from? She came forth out of the side of the Last Adam, Jesus Christ. This gives new meaning to the final moments of Calvary. When the Lord Jesus died, a Roman soldier pierced His side. Here we have echoes of Adam’s side being opened as he was put into a deep sleep. After Jesus Christ was put into His deep sleep, His side was opened and blood and water poured forth from His sinless body (John 19:32-35). The blood represents the cleansing from all sin. Your Lord died to cleanse His beloved bride from all defilement (Eph 5:25-27). The water represents the living waters that flow from Christ Himself (John 4:10; Rev 21:6). It represents divine life–the very life that the bride would live by. (p. 45-46)