All hail, (I must again repeat it) thou Lamb’s bride! for thou art all glorious within, and comely, through the comeliness thy heavenly bridegroom hath put upon thee. Thy garment is indeed of wrought gold; and, ere long, the King shall bring thee forth with a raiment of needle-work, and present thee blameless before his Father, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing. In the mean while, well shall it be with you, and happy shall you be, who are married to JESUS CHRIST: for all that CHRIST has, is yours. “He is made of GOD to you, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and eternal redemption.” “Whether _Paul_, or _Cephas_, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours.” All his attributes are engaged for your preservation, and all things shall work together for your good, who love GOD, and, by being thus married to the LORD JESUS, give an evident proof that you are called according to his purpose. What say you? When you meditate on these things, are you not frequently ready to cry out, What shall we render unto the LORD for all these mercies, which, of his free unmerited grace, he hath been pleased to bestow upon us? For, though you are dead to the law, as a covenant of works, yet you are alive to the law as a rule of life, and are in, or under the law (for either expression seems to denote the same thing) to your glorious husband, JESUS CHRIST.
Pass we on therefore to the
_Second_ general head, under which I was to shew, what duties of love they owe to JESUS CHRIST, who are so happy as to be able to say, “My Maker is my husband.”
I say, duties of love. For being now married to JESUS CHRIST, you work not for life, but from life. The love of GOD constrains you, so that, if there was no written law, or supposing JESUS would set you at liberty from his yoke, so far as grace prevails in your hearts, you would say, we love our blessed bridegroom, and will not go from him.
And what does the LORD require of you? That we may speak on this head as plainly as may be, we shall pursue the method we begun with; and, by carrying on the allegory, and examining what is required of truly christian wives, under the gospel, infer what our LORD may justly demand of those who are united to him by faith, and can therefore say, “our Maker is our husband.”
And here let us go to the law and to the testimony. What says the scripture? “Let the wife see that she _reverence_ her husband.” It is, no doubt, the duty of married women to think highly of their husbands. From whom may husbands justly command respect, if not from their wives? The apostle’s expression is emphatical. “Let the wife see that she reverence her husband;” thereby implying, that women, some of them at least, are too prone to disrespect their husbands; as _Michal_, _Saul_’s daughter, despised _David_ in her heart, when she tauntingly said, 2 _Samuel_ vi. 20. “How glorious was the king of _Israel_ to-day, who uncovered himself to-day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamlessly uncovereth himself.”