THE BRIDEGROOM MESSIAH
The Cross: Love’s Greatest Story
By Colin Hamer
Faithbuilders. 77 pages. £4.99
ISBN 978 1 912 120 604
This short book is a slimline version of a more in-depth study, also by Colin Hamer, Marital Imagery in the Bible (Apollos Publishing Ltd, 2015).
In his shorter work, Hamer demonstrates how the biblical authors use the metaphor of marriage to help us understand the beautiful story of God’s work in redemption.
Marriage metaphor
He begins by unpacking how Adam and Eve’s sin led to a kind of divorce in their banishment from the presence of God in Eden. This was repeated in the failure of Israel to live up to their covenant obligations laid down at Sinai. God’s people broke the old covenant and were banished from the land of promise. Hamer shows that humanity has chosen a relationship with sin over a relationship with God and that this comes with ruinous consequences.
As the book progresses he demonstrates how the OT prophets, notably Hosea and Jeremiah, offered hope by declaring that this banishment (divorce) would not be the end for God’s people. The book climaxes with the new day dawning for all humanity in the coming of Jesus, the ‘bridegroom Messiah’. Hamer helpfully unpacks Romans 7 to show how we are set free from our marriage to sin to belong to another, namely Jesus. He closes the main body of the book by showing how the biblical narrative crescendos with the church being presented as a bride to her bridegroom, Jesus.
The book is helpful as an introduction to the marriage metaphor, but in some ways it is more on the technical side. The author allocates a significant amount of space to the question of how God’s covenant with Moses relates to the New Covenant in Christ. For that reason I would commend this book to those wanting to engage more robustly with the question of how the covenants in the Bible fit together. This is certainly not a light read, but helpful for anyone wanting an example of a biblical theology of the marriage metaphor across the whole of Scripture.
