The Bride of Christ as Proof of His Deity

In Isaiah 54:5, we read, "Your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is His name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth He is called." This verse comes right after the Prophet's beautiful description of the suffering and humiliation of Christ as the basis for our justification. This verse appears right after it because it is the Father, in the intra-Trinitarian covenant, who decreed that this would be that the church would be saved from the judgment earned by our sins.

Yet we read of the marriage supper in Revelation 19:7-8: "Let us rejoice and exult and give Him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His Bride has made herself ready; it was

granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure' — for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints." Here is the Bride of Christ, explicitly identified with the "saints," that is, believers.


And, again, consider Revelation 21:2, 9-11, "I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, 'Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.' And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal." The church is again identified, this time by the epithet "the New Jerusalem" (compare Hebrews 12:22), as the Bride.

As most people are aware, one of the distinguishing doctrines of the Jehovah's Witnesses is their Arianism, that is, the belief that Christ is not to be identified with God, but is, rather, a lesser, created being. These verses directly counter that error. In Isaiah, it is Jehovah (the LORD) who is the husband of the church. In Revelation it is the Lamb, i. e., Jesus Christ (see, for example, John 1:29). Since no bride can have two husbands, then the transitive principle tells us that these two Grooms must be the same being: Jesus is Jehovah in the flesh!