Cornerstone Curriculum, Official Certification Edition - Mentor's Guide

M E N T O R N O T E S / 1 7 3

to Revelation, as the ‘one-flesh-ness’ of human marriage, sacred but provisional, points forward and upward to the eternal spiritual union of Christ with his bride, the church. The symbolism inherent in earthly marriage lends the relationship greater dignity; its significance goes beyond the human and temporal to the divine and eternal.

~ R. C. Ortlund, Jr. “Marriage.” The New Dictionary of Biblical Theology. T. D. Alexander, ed. (electronic ed.). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000.

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Here Ortlund rightly and concisely summarizes the power of the marital imagery to get at the dignity and majesty of the divine marriage, the result of the sacred romance that God has been cultivating with his people since the beginning of time. What Jonathan Edwards refers to as a “eternal wedding feast”, and what Ortlund refers to as a “eternal spiritual union” is the referent behind the marriage metaphor. However we are to understand this striking metaphor, we know that the people of God will in fact enjoy intimacy forever with the Lord, and that this relationship is typified in the romance and marriage of earthly wedlock. We get at the depth of the relationship through the symbol, not in spite of it. God invites us to ponder the meaning of the relationship in the light of the symbol, and, by doing so, we will come to appreciate at new levels the significance of our union with Christ as a member of his body, the Church. These case studies (as all of them in this lesson reflect) are designed to help the students grapple with issues that either came from real situations, or are fictions based upon situations that informed them. In one sense, the case studies offer the students an opportunity to apply directly and powerfully their insights on the material, and to experiment in the kind of thinking necessary to take truth from a theoretical environment to a practical one. Spend good time with the students hammering out the issues that these studies represent, and remind the students of their purpose in their overall learning environment.

U r b a n M i s s i o n

& 3 page 394 Case Studies