The Bride Must Make Herself Ready

My Continuing Investigation

In my last post, I raised a question that many of you found unsettling: if the church is consistently called the body of Christ in Scripture, and never the bride, then who exactly is the bride of the Lamb?

I realized I couldn’t move forward and talk about how the bride should prepare for the wedding until we settled who she actually is. So I continued digging through the Scriptures, and what I found in the Old Testament prophets turned my understanding upside down.

Let me walk you through what I discovered.

The Wedding Dress Isn’t Just for Individuals

We read in Revelation 19: “Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.”

The phrase that keeps haunting me is “made herself ready.” This isn’t passive. This is intentional preparation.

But when I looked at Revelation 21 to see who the bride actually is, the angel told John: “Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.” And what did John see? A city. The holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven, with twelve gates bearing the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.

So the bride is a city. A land. A people with a specific identity.

Why I Stopped Calling the Church the Bride

I was listening to the radio yesterday, and a beautiful gospel song came on about “the church, the bride of Christ.” It was lovely music, but I had to shake my head. My friend Pastor Record calls this “book theology”—taking doctrines that aren’t in the Bible and singing them into our hearts until we believe them.

I’ve read Ephesians 5 carefully. Paul compares the relationship of a husband and wife to Christ and the church, but he never once calls the church the bride. He calls us the body of Christ. Over and over—in Ephesians, in 1 Corinthians 12, in Colossians—we are “members of his body.” If Paul meant to teach that the church is the bride, why didn’t he just say so? He had the perfect opportunity in verse 27. Instead, he called us “holy and without blemish.” Not once did he say “bride.”

The Land That Shall Be Married

Then I turned to the prophets, and the truth hit me like a freight train.

Isaiah 60 describes the same glorious city we see in Revelation 21. It speaks of a place where the sun and moon are no longer needed because the Lord is the everlasting light. It says, “Thy people also shall be all righteous: they shall inherit the land forever.”

And then comes the clincher in Isaiah 62: “Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.”

Beulah means “married.” The land itself is going to be married to God. Not just a group of disembodied souls floating in heaven. A physical land.

“For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.”

I had never heard anyone preach that before. God rejoicing over a land as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride. This is not the rapture theology I grew up with.

How Does This Righteousness Come?

Now, here is where things get really interesting. If the bride is a land that needs to be clothed in righteousness, how does that happen?

Isaiah 61:11 says: “For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.”

Did you catch that? It doesn’t happen in a twinkling of an eye. It happens like a garden growing. First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Jesus taught the same thing in Mark 4 when He said the kingdom of God is like seed sown in the ground that grows gradually, “he knoweth not how.”

This planted, growing kingdom is what I see when I look at the history of my own nation.

Comparing Two Beginnings

I know many preachers say that modern Jewish Israel in Palestine is the fulfillment of these prophecies. But look at the facts.

Israel was created by a vote of the United Nations—an organization that denies Jesus Christ. The first nation to formally recognize Israel and send an ambassador was Bolshevik Russia. They even supplied Israel’s first army with Soviet weapons. Does that sound like “the branch of my planting, the work of my hands”?

Now look at America. We began as a few hundred refugees fleeing religious persecution, landing on the edge of a vast, uncharted wilderness. We had no buildings, no government, no army, and no international recognition. We were less than the smallest of seeds.

Jesus said the kingdom of God is “like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth: but when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs.”

Which nation on earth fits that description? Which nation grew from almost nothing to become the greatest, most powerful nation in history? Which nation is the last bastion of Christian civilization, for better or worse?

Only one. The United States of America.

A New Name for a New Land

God said in Isaiah 62 that Zion would be called by a new name. Not the old name of Jerusalem. A new name.

I find it remarkable that the name “America” has no clear Latin or English origin. But in the ancient Gothic language, “Ammer” or “Aml” means “heaven,” and “Ra” or “Reich” means “kingdom.” America literally means “Heaven’s Kingdom.”

Even the old Chinese name for America translates to “the beautiful kingdom.” The very name of our nation fits the prophecy.

The Waste Cities Must Be Rebuilt

But let’s be honest. Look at our cities today. I read a newspaper article just yesterday about the explosion of arson across the nation—over 100,000 fires set last year, costing nearly a billion dollars. In Detroit, investigators traced 500 fires to a massive insurance fraud scheme. In New York, arsonists have been burning down neighborhoods for decades.

We are seeing the “waste cities” that Isaiah spoke of. “And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.”

We are living in a time of captivity, of mourning, of brokenness. The prophets said Zion would be brokenhearted and bound before the restoration comes. We are captives in our own land, under bondage to Babylon.

But that is not the end of the story.

How Big Is This Jerusalem?

Finally, let me address the measurements in Revelation 21. The angel measured the city as 12,000 furlongs square—about 1,500 miles on each side.

I’ve seen the charts and diagrams from popular preachers showing a literal cube floating down from heaven. But when I looked at Zechariah 2, I saw an angel measuring Jerusalem, and the message was that it would be inhabited as “towns without walls for the multitude of men and cattle therein.”

That little sliver of land in Palestine cannot hold 1,500 miles of city. It can’t hold a multitude of cattle—I checked the statistics, and all of Israel has only 80,000 head of cattle, while my home state of Arizona butchers over a million a year.

But place that 1,500-mile square over the North American continent, and it fits perfectly into the United States. God said He would “spread you abroad as the four winds of the heaven.” He said His cities would be “spread abroad.”

That is what I see here.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I’ve been teaching for years that America is the Israel of prophecy—the Zion that dwells with Babylon, the Jerusalem that must prepare herself for her husband.

If that is true, we have work to do. We are not ready. Our land is not yet righteous. Our cities are burning. Our people are divided.

But God has promised that He will cause righteousness to spring forth like a garden. He will rebuild the waste places. He will make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

And He tells us not to be silent. “Give him no rest, till he establish, till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.”

We are called to pray. To build. To prepare. The bride must make herself ready.

In my next post, I want to talk about what that preparation actually looks like in practical terms. But for now, I leave you with this question: If we are the land that is to be married, are we making ourselves ready?

Because the wedding is coming. And the bridegroom will not wait forever.