Transcript
It’s time to begin our service today. I am so glad to have you here with us. I send special greetings today to our friends in Norway who have reached out again over the past week. I always enjoy hearing from you. There were some ministering brothers from Norway here in the US about a month ago that I had an opportunity to visit with, and things are moving forward among the brothers and sisters there. I would just encourage everyone to pray for friends there. There truly are more for us than against us at this point, and we just pray that God continues to move on the hearts of His people to wake them up to the truth.
I also want to greet all our friends here who are local to Indiana and Kentucky. So many people in this area have made their way out of the message, even some preachers, and some who have managed to bring their whole churches out of the message. We send you our love and greetings. We are always praying for you. I generally don’t say anyone’s names because I hate to bring trouble to anyone, but I am praying for you all.
And I ask you also to pray for the different ministers who are exiting the message. It takes time to get your bearings, and it can be easy, when first leaving the message, to get sucked up into just another cult somewhere. And there are plenty of them in the world, and that is a very real danger until you get your grounding. To everyone who has exited, I just encourage you to take your time and not jump too fast into anything new. Take the time to examine what you were part of. Take the time to figure out what it was that allowed the message to become a cult and what gave it its power over people’s minds. Get grounded back in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I highly recommend everyone do that before jumping into something else. Otherwise, you are very much at risk of just going out and looking for something that feels comfortable, something that is similar to what you have come from, but maybe they have a different prophet, or they still carry on most of the latter rain teachings, so they feel familiar. But beware of that, because the entire latter rain movement is poison, and all the churches it influenced are risky places to be part of. That includes all these new apostolic reformation sort of churches. The truth is, all these churches have a form of religion that was influenced by the same corrupt men who launched the cult that you and I have escaped, and you are very much at risk in those sorts of churches. It benefits us to really get grounded before we jump into bed with one of those sorts of groups.
If this is your first time joining us, and you wonder who we are and what we are up to, my name is Charles Paisley. I and most of our listeners here are formerly members of the cult following of William Branham known as The Message. The Message is a global doomsday cult with millions of members. The truth is, The Message is one of the main branches of the latter rain movement. The Message started here in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and spread all over the world. I am formerly associate pastor of the second oldest message church in the world, right here in the Jeffersonville area. This is a little mission we operate to offer encouragement to those leaving the message and to take a look at the plain reading of scripture as we seek to wash out of our minds what, for most of us, has been a lifetime of indoctrination.
Today we are resuming our study of the book of Ephesians, and I have chosen to study this book because the way it is interpreted is foundational not just to The Message, but to the latter rain movement in general. Getting some of these things sorted out can really help us to reset our thinking back to the plain reading of scripture.
I went back and counted, and I believe this is our 42nd lesson since we started this series. I did a little math, and we are getting through about 2-3 verses each lesson, on average. I hope you are all enjoying the pace that we have been going. It’s been nice to just take our time and examine each piece as we come to it.
Today, we are looking at the same verses we looked at last week. If you recall, last week we looked at what these verses have to say about the married relationship between a man and a woman. Today we are going to look at these same verses and see what they have to tell us about the relationship of the church with Jesus Christ.
I invite you to open your Bibles and follow along with me as I read from the fifth chapter of Ephesians. I will start in verse 23, and I will read down to verse 32. Paul writes:
“23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”
Let us pray. Lord God, as we examine these wonderful verses of scripture today, I pray that You open our understanding to see these things more clearly than we have in the past. You know how often these verses were misused and abused by the preachers many of us have known during our lives. I pray You can help us to clear up our understanding by the power of the Holy Spirit. Bless the hearers, I pray. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Introduction
Well, brothers and sisters, we have arrived again at a passage of scripture that is very, very important in the doomsday cult we have escaped from.
There are a couple of different things here that are among the most repeated Bible verses in the circles we come from. So, I want to make sure we take our time here and really unpack what Paul is telling the Ephesians.
Before we examine these verses, let’s first remember our context. Paul is in the second half of his epistle to the Ephesians here. In the first half of the book, he focused on doctrine, and here in the second half, he is focusing on conduct. We are in a section where he is speaking specifically about conduct within marriage.
In our last lesson, we examined how Paul directed the Ephesians to look at the example of Jesus Christ and to let His example serve as a model for their relationships with each other. Paul pointed out that Jesus was a servant who submitted Himself even unto death to save the church. Paul is calling on married couples to let that example of love and care inform the way in which they conduct themselves in marriage. We will not go through that all again, but we see that Paul is holding up Christ’s sacrificial love as the model to be followed.
The Bible tells us that we love Him because He first loved us. It was His sacrificial love that caught our attention, and it was His sacrifice for us that endeared Him to us. In light of that love and respect for Christ’s sacrifice, we are submitted to Christ. We are not submitted to Christ because He is a bully, or a tyrant, or a harsh overlord, but because we love Him. We love Him because He first loved us and gave Himself for us. He won us over, so to speak.
That is what we are seeing conveyed by Paul in these first two verses we have read today. Let me read verse 23 and 24 again to you. Paul said:
“23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”
We submit to Christ as our loving Savior who has made personal sacrifices for our benefit.
That is the aspect on which verses 23 and 24 are focusing. Now, of course, there is more to our submission to Christ than that, but that is where Paul places the focus in those two verses. I think Paul places the focus there because he is making a comparison between the marriage of the church to Christ and the natural marriage of a man and a woman.
Now, besides that, in these two verses, Paul is also introducing the idea that the church is like a bride and Christ is like a groom. Paul is going to build on that analogy in the next few verses.
But before we go on examining how Paul lays that out, I want us to first think a little more deeply about the basic elements of this comparison that Paul is making.
Paul is comparing the church to a bride, and he is comparing Christ to a groom.
Where Did This Comparison Originate?
And so, let’s ask ourselves a question: where might Paul have gotten the idea to compare the church to a bride and Christ to a groom? Where did that idea come from? Because we don’t want to ever look at these symbolic sorts of metaphors in a vacuum. If the Bible has more to say about these metaphors and these symbolic things, we want to make sure we consider that to shed more light on the topic.
If you recall, if you went back to the start of the Gospels, you might remember that this comparison of the church to a bride goes back to John the Baptist. When John the Baptist was preaching, teaching, and baptizing people, he was telling his listeners about someone coming who was mightier than him. John the Baptist became the first one in the New Testament to make this comparison of the church to a bride. He did it after Jesus appeared, and the big crowds who had been listening to him started to move on and follow Jesus instead of him.
John had been teaching them, he had been baptizing them, but his ultimate aim was to see the people he had been preaching to have a relationship with Jesus Christ. John didn’t make all those converts to keep them for himself. He did all that so he could introduce them to Jesus. As the crowds started to shift away from him and start following Jesus, someone asked him if that bothered him, if he was upset that the people went to follow Jesus instead of sticking with him.
John responded by saying he was like the best man at a wedding. Christ was the bridegroom, and the church was for Him. John said he was happy, like the bridegroom’s best friend would be happy. John was happy to see the church going into a relationship with Jesus.
In that little exchange, we get the first time in the New Testament that this language is used to compare Jesus to a groom and the church to a bride. Let me just pause there and say, the preachers in the message we come from are nothing like John the Baptist. They do not want to set you free into a relationship with Jesus; they are hanging onto you, and they don’t want to let you go.
John the Baptist, the greatest prophet there ever was, according to Jesus Christ, didn’t try to hold onto the people. He was glad to see them move on and walk with Jesus. When you follow Jesus, you don’t need to follow a prophet anymore. When you follow Jesus, you no longer need a mediator—you have Jesus. The very first use of this analogy, of the church as a bride and Jesus as a groom, was used in that way by John the Baptist. It was used as an analogy for John the Baptist to say, the people don’t need me anymore. The people no longer need the greatest prophet of all time because now they have Jesus. They are like His bride.
John compared himself as the best man, who was happy to see the bride and groom united. That uniting happened, in John’s analogy, as he handed his followers off to Jesus 2,000 years ago.
I say that because I want you to be encouraged. It’s not a preacher and not a prophet that saves you—it’s Jesus. The people who left John to follow Jesus made the right choice. If you are choosing to leave the message to walk with Christ today, you are making the right choice too. Preachers who keep you trapped and never want to let you grow into your own independent relationship with the Lord are bad preachers. Preachers who tell you that you can’t make it without them are of the devil. They are putting themselves into the role of the savior, which makes them an antichrist. This analogy of Christ as a groom and the church as a bride contains that truth in it. The church, as the bride, can walk directly with Jesus. She doesn’t need a middleman. The bride goes directly to her husband. She doesn’t need someone else as a go-between.
So, coming back to our question: where did this idea of comparing Jesus to a groom and the church to a bride come from? Well, we have already mentioned John the Baptist. Next, we have the parables of Jesus. There are multiple parables where Jesus presents Himself as a groom figure. We have that in the parable of the ten virgins and in the parable of the man who came to the wedding dressed in the wrong clothes. I mention those two because as we read on here, we will see Paul saying some things that could be linked to those parables.
So, my chief point here to you is this: Paul is not saying these things about the bride of Christ out of the blue or off the top of his head. He has in his mind things that were taught by Jesus Christ Himself and the prophets who came before, like John the Baptist. Paul is leaning into what others have already said on this topic as he makes his illustration here.
A Symbolic Analogy
Now, there is a second thing I want us to think about and consider before we read on in this passage in Ephesians. I want us to acknowledge that this comparison is symbolic. It is an analogy, or a way of comparing two things. This is also, in some ways, a metaphor.
The members of the church are not literally the wives or brides of Jesus Christ—not in a physical, natural sense of the word. Half of us are men; we are not even women. A man cannot be a bride—that is an oxymoron. We men, obviously, are not Christ’s bride in a literal sense. The same is true for women. Jesus is not going to have a million wives and live with them as a husband would. Being the bride, in this way, is a metaphor or an analogy. It is symbolic, not literal.
The point being, you and I are not literally the wives or brides of Jesus Christ. It is very important for us to recognize that this is something symbolic. We do have a relationship with Jesus, and there are aspects of it that can be compared to a marital relationship, but it is not a literal marital relationship. The analogy, or the comparison, only goes so far. There are aspects where our relationship with Christ is like a marital relationship, and then there are aspects where it is not.
It’s important that we always stick to the comparisons that come with scripture—comparisons the Bible itself makes. Otherwise, we can end up in weird places, and the message has taken this bride of Christ symbolism into some really weird places that are not actually in the Bible at all.
But it is always important, when we are interpreting symbolism and analogies from the scriptures, that we stick with the plain reading of the scripture. Stick with the comparison made by the Bible itself, because there are limits to how far you can stretch these sorts of analogies and comparisons.
Very sadly, in the places we come from, the comparison has been stretched by many people to a place that has departed from scripture. I think there are a lot of people in the message who have totally lost sight of the fact that being the bride of Christ is a metaphor.
So don’t lose sight of that. The church is not literally the bride of Christ in the earthly, natural sense. This is symbolic language to help us understand.
You have heard me say many times that the message is built almost entirely on the interpretation of symbolism. The message is not built on the plain reading of the Bible, but instead, it is built on the leaders of the message interpreting symbolism.
More often than not, we find that their interpretation of symbolism actually contradicts the plain reading of scripture. If we are interpreting symbolism in a way that contradicts the plain reading of the Bible, we can be sure we are interpreting it wrong.
We are going to find that to be true again today as we examine these scriptures about the bride of Christ.
Washing of the Water by the Word
Now, let’s pick up our reading here at verse 25. Paul writes:
“25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
Here, we have a very clear command to husbands to love their wives sacrificially. Paul uses the example of Christ sacrificing himself to save the church. As we move on to verse 26, Paul is going to tell us why Christ sacrificed himself for the church, and I want you to catch how Paul says this. Verse 26 tells us that Christ sacrificed himself so…
“26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”
So, that is why Christ sacrificed himself. He did it so that he could sanctify the church. When you sanctify something, you make it holy. It’s really the same thing—being sanctified and being holy are the same. These verses are telling us that Christ sacrificed himself so he could make the church holy.
I want you to really take notice of how Paul has worded that. Catch the plain reading of this verse, and try, for a minute, if you can, to ignore everything the message ever told you about this verse. Just for this lesson with me, try to look at the plain reading of this verse.
I want you to notice, as we plainly read this verse: Who is it that is going to make the church holy?
Is the church going to make itself holy? Is the preacher going to make the church holy? Is the dress code going to make the church holy? Who does this verse tell us is going to sanctify the church and make it holy?
The answer is Jesus. He is going to sanctify the church and make it holy. This is a personal act that Jesus Christ performs.
You don’t make yourself holy. The preacher doesn’t make you holy. Your dress code doesn’t make you holy. Jesus makes you holy—plain and simple.
And if you recall back to chapter 2, Paul told us something very similar. He talked about how the church is a holy temple, and he said that in Christ, the temple becomes a holy dwelling place for God. It’s God in us that makes us holy, and we see that same allusion here in these verses. It is Jesus Christ who is making us holy. He is making us the holy dwelling place of God. This work is being brought about by Jesus Christ.
Let me read verse 26 again. Christ sacrificed himself so…
“26 that he [Jesus] might sanctify her [the church], having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.”
So once again, who is washing the church with the water of the word?
It is Jesus. Jesus is the one who is washing the church with the water of the word.
There is one more thing I want you to catch in verse 26. Let me read it to you again because I want to catch the tense that Paul is speaking in. Let me start with verse 25 again:
“25 Husbands, love your wives [that part is present tense], as Christ loved the church [that is past tense] and gave himself up for her [that is past tense],”
“26 that he [Jesus] might sanctify her [the church], having cleansed her [that is past tense again. Having cleansed her…] by the washing of water with the word.”
So, is this washing of the water by the word future tense or past tense? Is this verse something we are waiting on, or is it something that already happened?
The plain reading of this verse tells us that this is something that happened in the past. Jesus Christ already did this. He already washed his church by the water of the word. He did this before the apostle Paul wrote this verse down, which is why Paul is writing in the past tense.
It’s simple to figure out when that happened.
Remember what Jesus prayed in John chapter 17, just before he went to the cross, in his high priestly prayer. Jesus prayed and said:
“I have given them your word, and they have come to believe that you sent me.”
When Jesus prayed in John 17, he prayed that anyone who believed he was the Savior would be sanctified, made holy, and made one with him. It’s right there in John 17. That is where Jesus prayed the prayer in which he united himself with the church. As part of that prayer and event, when Jesus united himself with the church, he prayed that the church would be sanctified by believing in him as Savior. He then sealed that prayer by going to the cross and dying just a few hours after he prayed.
In that prayer, the word the people needed to accept and believe to become washed, holy, and sanctified was the word that said he was their Savior. Whoever believes that word—that Jesus is the Savior, the Messiah sent to the world by the Father—anyone who believed that word would be united with him and sanctified through his death on the cross.
I encourage you to read John 17 and see if what I’m telling you isn’t so. All the promises Jesus made in that prayer were based solely on people believing he was sent as the Savior. That was the only condition.
Jesus prayed in that prayer, “Sanctify them—make them holy—by thy word.” And who was Jesus? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” The Word was Jesus, and the Word is still Jesus. That’s what verse 26 is talking about. You cannot separate verse 26 from John 17. Jesus is the Word.
The reason I’m pointing this out is that I want you to notice that Paul speaks in the past tense here. This does not fit with the idea of what this verse is about in the doomsday cult we’ve escaped. In The Message, we believed that being washed with the water of the word was something ongoing—that this word was still coming forth and still washing the church.
So, when James Allen brought forth the revelation of the restoration of polygamy in the millennial age, we had to accept that revelation. By accepting it, we were supposedly being washed by the water of the word. Or when they preached that the week of Daniel would start in 2005, we had to accept that because doing so supposedly washed us by the water of the word. Or go further back to William Branham—we had to accept all those different things he preached, which were not in the Bible. By accepting those things, which are not in the Bible, we were supposedly being washed by the water of the word. The symbols were in the Bible, yes, but what those symbols meant was not.
For example, he said the black horse rider was the power of the pope in the Dark Ages, and by accepting that, we were supposedly washed by the water of the word. He said the World Council of Churches was the image of the beast, and by accepting that teaching, we were supposedly washed by the water of the word. All these different things—the Bible does not say—we had to accept them because that was the word for our day, supposedly. We needed the word for our day to get washed by it, and by accepting all these teachings which are not in the Bible, we could be washed by the word and be the bride of Christ.
All the people who rejected the message were not the bride because they were not being washed by the water of the word like we were in the message.
I want to ensure you understand how that idea does not fit with the plain reading of this passage.
“26 that he [Jesus] might sanctify her [the church], having cleansed her [past tense] by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor.”
This verse is in the past tense. Paul is not talking about a new word for a new day. The word Paul refers to is a word that has already come, has already been applied, and the cleansing has already happened in the past. That’s how this verse is written.
I want to ensure you catch that. This has absolutely nothing to do with receiving a new word for a new day.
Using this verse in that way is an abuse of the Bible.
And not only is this not a new word for a new day, but it’s also not a special fivefold ministry handing this word out. It’s not a special end-time prophet giving this word. That idea doesn’t fit here either.
Because, once again, who is actually doing this cleansing?
Who is doing this? Who is washing the bride? Who is sanctifying the bride? Who is presenting the bride? It’s all Jesus doing this.
When preachers, so-called prophets, or anyone else puts themselves in the role of washing people by the water of the word, they put themselves in the role of the Savior.
It is the Savior who washes the church by the water of the word—Him and Him alone. Someone who takes that upon themselves is placing themselves in the role of a false Christ.
Christ’s Work in Sanctifying the Church
It is Christ doing this work—not an end-time prophet, not a fivefold ministry. Let’s read it again:
“27 so that he [Jesus] might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”
This is the work of Christ. It’s not our work, not the preacher’s work, nor anyone else’s work. It is Christ’s work that makes us sanctified and holy. From the moment we are saved, we are positionally holy and perfect in the eyes of God. It is a finished work in God’s eyes from the moment we are united with Christ.
In that relationship, we bear the holy fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Christ lives in us. One day—not in this life or this world, but in the world to come—we will be glorified. On that day, we will be a finished work, not just positionally but literally, in its fullness. And it is Jesus Christ who will do that too. He is the one who will glorify us when that day comes.
Now in verse 28, Paul returns to the comparison with natural marriage. Here, we pick up the next important point:
“28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body.”
So why is Christ doing this? Why is Christ making the church holy? Why is he presenting the church this way? Why is he washing the church by the water of the word?
The answer is that he is doing it because we are part of his body.
And because we are part of his body, he is caring for us, just as a man would care for his own body.
If a natural man had a part of his body that was dirty, he would wash it. If a natural man had a part of his body that was hurt, he would protect it and nurse that part of his body back to health.
That is why Christ is washing the church, nourishing, and protecting the church—because the church is a part of his own body. Then, verses 31 and 32 explain how this can be. Paul writes:
“31 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”
Now, this is something significant. This is how we are part of his body. Think carefully about what Paul is saying here.
Christ loved the church. Then, Christ died for the church. Now, he makes the church holy and cares for the church because it is part of his body. The church is part of his body because a husband holds fast to his wife, and they become one flesh.
This is how the fifth chapter ends. Christ is doing all of this—to make the church holy, to sanctify the church, to present the church to himself—because the church is part of his body, because he and the church are one flesh.
One Flesh
What I’m going to cover here is, I think, the most important part of this lesson. Here’s the key point:
Today, as Christians and as part of the church, you and I are already one body with Christ. We are part of Christ’s body right now, at this very moment. We are not waiting for anything to get us there—we are already part of His body. In fact, almost everything Paul has been saying here is based on the fact that you and I are already part of the body of Christ.
It is very clear that Paul is telling us the church is already one flesh with Christ, already part of His body, and already united with Him. If this were not the case, then everything Paul has said here would fall apart because Paul’s entire explanation is based on the fact that the church is already part of Christ’s body.
We are being made holy because we are part of Christ’s body. We are being nourished, cherished, and sanctified because we are part of His body.
We are part of the body of Christ because the church is one flesh with Him. That is the plain reading of this passage of Scripture.
So let me ask you this, really simply: does a man and woman become one flesh before they are married, or after they are married?
The answer is after they are married. In fact, it is that act of becoming one flesh that consummates the marriage.
We must connect this back to what Paul has said about unity in the previous chapters. You and I are united to Christ the moment we come to saving faith in Him. We are in union with Him from that very moment, as individuals.
We could go back again to the high priestly prayer Jesus prayed just before He went to the cross. In that prayer, Jesus said, “Father, I pray that we are all made one, just as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You. Let us all be one—I in them, and You in Me—that we may all be made perfect in one.”
That is exactly what Paul is describing here in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. We are already united with Christ from the moment we believe. And because we are united with Him, He is making us perfect, holy, and sanctified. It is because of that union—it is because we are one flesh—that Jesus Christ nourishes, cherishes, and makes the church perfect, holy, and without spot, wrinkle, or blemish.
As individual believers, brothers and sisters, we are already united with Christ in a way comparable to a marriage from the moment we come to saving faith in Him.
As we read what Paul is saying here, it is totally obvious that he is speaking of Christ and the church already being married. The marriage has already taken place between Christ and the church. There is no other way to read what Paul is saying here.
This passage in Ephesians is not looking forward to a future marriage of the church to Christ. The context is very clearly pointing to a marriage that has already taken place in the past.
And I think it is very important that we take notice of that.
On an individual level, we become united to Christ—our marriage is consummated, so to speak—from the moment we come to saving faith in Christ.
Now, there is a sense in which the church is not fully completed yet, as not every member of the body has joined. So in that universal sense, the church is not yet fully married to Christ because the church is not fully complete.
But for those of us who are already part of the church, we are already in union with Christ.
The Whole Church is the Bride
Now, before I end this lesson, there is one last point I want to make. It’s a simple one, but important, and I’ll highlight it by asking a few questions.
Can you be saved without being united with Christ? Can you be saved without being in union with Him? The answer is no. Is there salvation outside of Christ? Again, the answer is no.
To be saved, we must be in Christ. We must be united with Him. This is essential.
If you are apart from Christ, if you are outside of Him, you are lost. You are either saved and united with Christ, or you are separated from Him and lost. I think we can all agree on that—it’s very plain in Scripture.
Now, if we are united with Christ, doesn’t that mean we are one flesh with Him? If someone is united with Christ, isn’t that person one flesh with Christ? And wouldn’t that make that person the bride of Christ?
Let me ask it another way: How can someone possibly be saved apart from Christ? How could someone be saved and yet remain outside of Christ? How can someone be saved without being united with Christ? The simple answer is that it is not possible.
You are either united with Christ and saved, or you are apart from Him and lost.
Where I’m going with this is to help you see that everyone who is saved is part of the bride of Christ. Everyone who is saved is united with Christ, and therefore one flesh with Him, making them part of the bride of Christ.
There is no way to take what Paul, Jesus, or even John the Baptist has said and come up with the idea that some people can be saved without being part of the bride of Christ. If we read the Scriptures as they are written, it’s clear: we are either part of the bride of Christ and saved, or we are not part of the bride of Christ and lost.
There is no way to turn the bride of Christ into an elite or advanced category of saved people.
The act of being saved, the act of being united with Christ, is the same act that makes someone the bride of Christ. This is plain in the context of everything Paul says in Ephesians.
You and I are united with Christ the moment we are saved. We become the bride of Christ at that very moment. This is not an advanced or elite level of salvation—it’s the basic reality of what it means to be saved. The metaphor of being the bride of Christ is used to explain the mechanics of salvation itself.
The message preachers arrived at their false teachings by ignoring the plain reading of Scripture and misinterpreting the symbolism.
The plain reading of these verses tells us that we are united with Christ as His bride from the moment we are saved. We are either the bride of Christ or we are lost.
Brothers and sisters, the message has distorted the teachings on unity and the bride of Christ. The message preachers do not teach what the Bible plainly says. Instead, they teach an interpretation of symbolism learned from the false prophet William Branham.
I can hear them now: “What about this parable? What about that prophecy? What about this symbol or that type or shadow?” Maybe one day we’ll address those, but here’s what you need to know: If your interpretation contradicts the plain reading of the Bible, you are wrong.
If you interpret symbols, parables, or prophecies in a way that contradicts the Apostle Paul, you are assuredly wrong. We don’t need to answer every parable or prophecy today to prove that—though there are answers—because their interpretation of symbolism contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture.
The message preachers don’t understand unity. They haven’t a clue. They don’t know what the bride of Christ is. They haven’t a clue.
The truth is, being the bride of Christ is just one of many metaphors the Bible uses to describe someone who has experienced salvation. Let me repeat that: being the bride of Christ is just one of multiple metaphors that the Bible uses to describe someone who has experienced salvation.
It’s not an elite, advanced category. It’s the reality for anyone who has experienced basic salvation through saving faith, which unites them with Christ.
That is the truth. It has always been the truth. That’s what Paul is telling us in Ephesians, and what the message teaches about the bride of Christ is a lie with no basis in Scripture.
The message has wandered so far into the weeds that they’ve lost sight of the most basic and essential parts of the Christian faith. All their time spent in the book of Revelation will profit them nothing because the so-called deep things are worthless if you don’t even have the basics right.
The message preachers are just parroting the words of a false prophet, and in doing so, they openly contradict the Bible.
Closing
As I bring this lesson to a close, I recognize that I could easily preach a dozen more lessons on this topic. There are many points to consider, and we could delve into Revelation and the parables of Jesus to explore them further. However, for today, we will stick with what we have seen in Ephesians and leave the rest for another time, if the Lord wills.
I encourage you to spend some time reading the second half of Ephesians and see if what I’ve shared aligns with the text. There are four major issues that don’t fit with what The Message teaches about the bride of Christ:
- Verse 26: This verse refers to the washing of the water of the word in the past tense. You can’t fit a new word for a new day into that verse.
- The Role of Jesus: It is Jesus who performs the washing with the water of the word, not a prophet or a five-fold ministry.
- Marriage Metaphor: Paul’s explanation is built on the idea that Christ and the Bride are already married.
- Basic Salvation: When placed in the context of the entire book of Ephesians, being the bride of Christ is clearly a metaphor for basic salvation, not an advanced level of people with special revelations.
I encourage you to study these verses for yourself and see if this interpretation holds. If my understanding is correct, then how can The Message’s teaching about the bride of Christ be accurate?
Until we have time to digest these issues fully, I’ll hold off on exploring other Scriptures about the bride of Christ. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I’m glad we’ve reached the end of chapter 5 in Ephesians. Next week, we’ll start chapter 6, the final chapter of Ephesians.
God bless you all.
Prayer
Let me close in prayer.
Lord God, thank You for the Bible and the Holy Spirit that teaches us. Help us to reflect on these matters, not in a way that complicates or confuses, but by accepting the plain reading of Scripture. Help us recognize how far off The Message is when compared to the true interpretation of Your Word.
When William Branham ceased to be a trustworthy authority for interpreting Scripture symbols, The Message fell apart because it relies heavily on his interpretations. As we return to the plain reading of Scripture, help us clear out the wrong ideas that came from that false prophet. Forgive us for the years we were misled by those teachings, and help us ground ourselves on the solid rock—not the rock of revelation, but the rock of recognizing Christ as our Savior.
Help us see that The Message is not just a little bit wrong but very, very wrong. Guide us as we retrace our steps and get back on the right course.
Father, we humbly ask You to heal our hearts and help us understand what is right. We seek the truth because it will set us free. We knock, knowing You will open. Grant us the desire of our hearts as we ask in Jesus’ name.
Amen.