the upward call
The call to bridal preparation. That’s you and me, folks. Will we be ready?
On 29th August this year I received a very special e-mail. I was out in Jerusalem at the time. The e-mail contained the question, “Will you marry me?” Immediately I clicked ‘reply’ and wrote the words, “Yes, I will!” I believe that the Lord is putting out His call to us, His sons and daughters,“Will you be ready to marry me? Will you prepare yourself for when I come?” What is our reply going to be?.
My friends in Israel rejoiced with me and one couple invited me to their home. In their joy for me they invited me to try on the three wedding dresses they had in their house from the marriages of their three daughters. One by one I tried on the dresses. It was fun, but a bit disappointing. Two of the dresses were far too big for me, and one was the right size but not at all my style. It wasn’t even really white. What was worse, each of the dresses had lots of large ugly stains on them from the wedding parties. They were not at all what I would want to clothe myself in to make my marriage covenant with my beloved.
When I consider how I would like to be clothed on my wedding day, in purity, beauty and honour, how much more should I be concerned to be properly prepared to meet the lover of my soul, who I will be bound to for all eternity?
Communication with our beloved
My beloved sent his proposal by e-mail because we were separated for a whole month by about 2240 miles. Our Lord is enthroned in the heavens, yet He communicates with our hearts through His Holy Spirit and through His Word. Now I am back home and my beloved and I communicate by phone because we are now separated by 170 miles. But when we are married we will share a home and our communication will be face to face. How wonderful will be the day when we see the Lord face to face, and live in His presence for ever more.
I have now entered a time of preparation for my marriage. What am I preparing? My thoughts, truly and honestly are not consumed with creating a wonderful wedding, important as that will be when the time comes. They are consumed with my beloved and my relationship with him! Surely this is how the Lord would have us prepare to meet with Him face to face. Our main preparation is to know Him and to know the Father. Jesus said, ‘This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom You have sent (John 17:3). I am called to know the Father, and the Son, Jesus. This is eternal life. This is the marriage, and the consummation – to know HIM.
How I love to hear my beloved’s voice on the phone! And how I love to hear the voice of my Lord speak to my heart. What is more, I know that my beloved, and also my Lord love to hear my voice too. We see this expressed in the Song of Songs where the Shulamite responds to the voice of her beloved, (Song of Songs 1:8). The beloved speaks and says, ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away,’ (Song of Songs 2:10). I love the times when my beloved drives 170 miles just to come and see me. He appears in the drive way of my home and at last I can see his face. In Song of Songs the beloved says, ‘O my dove, thou art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.’ (Song of Songs 2:14)
The dove in the clefts of the rock
This is an interesting image. Many people have been to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and seen the doves sitting in the clefts in the wall. More recently, sadly the beautiful white doves seem to have vacated the wall and pigeons have taken up residence. But there is something very beautiful about doves, which exhibit faithful courtship behaviours, and a sensitivity and tenderness not displayed by shameless pigeons.
I have a picture of a white dove in a cleft in the Western Wall in Jerusalem, along with this scripture from Song of Songs. However, in the King James version, the place the dove rests, is not a cliff or even a wall. It rests in the secret place of the stairs. The Hebrew word is ‘madrigot’ and this is also the Modern Hebrew word for stairs. Clearly the dove sits in secret places in the stairs.
The secret place in the stairs
Two days ago a prayer partner said that she saw in prayer my beloved and I ‘standing on stairs’. However, they were not ordinary stairs. They were a ladder that ascended to heaven. Then yesterday, someone gave me a book, and on the cover it had a picture of a stairway to heaven, actual stairs up into heaven. Could it be that the Lord is wanting to speak to us about what it means to rise up on the stairs and prepare for the day that the Lord will catch us up into heaven, the day that we will see Him face to face?
The call in the Song of Songs, is a call to rise up, to be like the dove, that finds secret places to sit in the stairs.She could get up and fly away, but she quietly sits in the secret places in the stairs.
So what are these stairs? I believe that the ascent that the Lord calls us to, up the stairs, is two-fold. There is the call to be like the dove, resting in our relationship with the Lord. This is the equivalent of our phone-calls and e-mails in the natural. It is that intimate connection with our Lord and our Father, while we as yet do not see Him face to face. The stairs are our place of communication, our times with God, when we rise up, surrendering to Him our earthly concerns, communing with Him in prayer and in the Word. Like the dove quietly sitting there, we abide in
His presence. This is a foretaste of what is to come when we see Him. In this place we get to know Him more, in preparation for the day when our Heavenly Bridegroom will come and catch away His bride to Himself, to be with Him forever.
Then secondly, I believe that the call is to surrender and obedience. There is the call to rise up above the worldly concerns and demands to choose a higher call, to hear the instructions of the Father and to obey them. It is a life of surrender, to laying down our own worldly level of living to the demands of self, the flesh and those around us. Our flesh would have us be active in many things, running around on the natural level. But it takes time and discipline to come up higher, to sit like a dove in the secret place of the stairs and abide in Him and communicate with our Lord and only do what He says.
What are the different stairs? I believe the Lord calls us up to higher levels. We can push through in prayer and revelation concerning the strongholds that hold us back in our lives. As we repent of our sins and pursue humility and obedience, I believe we come up to higher levels in the Lord. Maybe we push through to higher levels in revelation, then we sit on the stair for a season, learning to walk out the truths the Lord has shown us. Then He calls us up again, to take hold of more revelation,more wholeness, more holiness, more obedience, more sacrifice. We will reach higher levels of authority, anointing and holiness, as we ascend in the Spirit.
Perhaps on each level of the stairs we are also prepared to let go more and more of what would tie us down to human ways of thinking, pleasing people rather than God, and our own self-comfort and preservation. Perhaps on each level, we put on more of our pure clean wedding garments, to become clothed with the beauty of Yeshua, Jesus. The sweet white purity of that little white dove, sitting peacefully and quietly in her abiding place can become our own.
The challenge
May we take up this challenge, to respond to the upward call of the Lord, contained in the Song of Solomon. The call to respond to our Heavenly Bridegroom, to know Him, to love Him, to be purified from sin, and to become His pure, spotless Bride.