This commandment that I lay on you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, 'Who will go up to the heavens for us to fetch it and tell it to us, so that we can keep it?' Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross the sea for us to fetch it and tell it to us, so that we can keep it?' It is a thing very near to you, on your lips and in your heart ready to be kept" (Deut. 30:14).
Jesus is the Word Made Flesh and dwelling among us -- He is the entire Pronouncement, Plan, Promise, Provision, and Power of God revealed to us. But even before His incarnation, the Word of God, the Plan of God, the Promise of God, the Provision of God, and the Power of God was made flesh in the people of God -- the Fathers of Israel, the Prophets, the Judges, the women -- God incarnated His Word in the flesh of all these before Jesus.
The Bible is a book of stories: "this is what God looks like; this is Who God is; this is how God acts." The prophets were called not just to "say" the "Word of the Lord," but to enflesh it in their bodies, their lives. Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern and left to die because of the Word of the Lord. Isaiah was sawn in two because of the anger of the kings of Israel. Hosea married a harlot and had to go after her time and again to redeem her from her "empty way of life." Again and again, he took her back, forgiving her infidelity --- as a living sign of God's response to Israel's faithlessness. Being a prophet in Israel was not fun at all.
But we, too, are called to enflesh the Word of God in our lives. It is not enough to know the Scriptures; they must work their way through our lives down to the cellular level -- the "law of the Lord," the instruction, the teaching, the guidance of God must fill our hearts and our minds and our mouths until it spills out of us to a world beyond us. It is not enough to read, "Sing and make music to the Lord" unless we wake up each morning singing psalms of praise and thanksgiving.
Paul called marriage "a great mystery," a great sign of Christ's love for the church. The Book of Genesis begins with a wedding and ends with the marriage supper of the Lamb. In between, we have the Song of Songs and the Wedding at Cana. It was not accidental that Jesus' first 'sign' was at the Wedding at Cana: for this cause, a man shall leave his mother and father and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. Now, in Hebrew, the word translated into English as "one flesh" actually means "a new creation," or "an entirely new species." Paul tells us that if anyone be in Christ Jesus, "the old has gone and the new has come; he is a new creation."
The marriage bond between husband and wife is the enfleshment, the concrete and living sign, of God's union with us in Christ Jesus. We are no longer what we were -- sons of Adam-- but a "new creation," a new species, -- sons of God. We are joined to Christ body, soul, spirit. We have His body given to wash us with the water of the Word -- cleansing us from all imperfection. We have the mind of Christ (I Cor. 2:14 ff.) and we have the Spirit of Jesus dwelling in us. We are married to God, one flesh with Him. His law in written in our hearts and in our minds and in our bodies, according to the promise given to us in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Joel.
The Word has been made flesh and dwells among us -- not only in the human body of Jesus Christ, but in us who are in Him. We live the Word of God, the union of God and man --- and marriage is the great mystery, or the great sign of that mystical union.
After 45 years of marriage, my husband and I have discovered that when one thinks a thought, the other verbalizes it. We have begun to laugh about it because it occurs on a daily basis. Is this not yet another sign that when we are united to God in Jesus Christ, we begin to think the thoughts of God?
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