I made the eminently reasonable claim that God has one body. A commenter over on one of my Instagram posts opened a rebuttal against my claim with this very first point:
“1) First, Israel is the wife of Jehovah (Isa 54) while the church is the bride of Christ (Eph 5:22-33).”
Often, dispensationalists are extraordinary embarrassed of C.I. Scofield’s conclusion that God simultaneously has a wife and a bride (p. 922, S.R.B.), and they have every right to be. Because it is an embarrassing and wrong conclusion. But this commenter embraces it with open arms.
Through the vast majority of church history, the vast majority of believers understood the body of Christ, the bride of Christ Ephesians 5, and the wife of God in Isaiah 54 to be exactly the same thing.
The fact that the people of God are described as God’s bride in Isaiah 54 and Jesus’s bride in Ephesians 5, actually beautifully illustrates the Biblical view of the anti-dispensationalist, that the body of Christ and the true members of Israel are one and the same. God’s people have always been God’s people, and they are God’s people by faith, and not by blood. And God, under no circumstances, is a polygamist with two wives.
I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.” They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did
John 8:37-39
Many dispensationalists today, perhaps inconsistently, and in disagreement with their own founders, agree God only has a singular bride/wife. Thank God.
So just for kicks let’s examine the problems with the view that God simultaneously has both a wife and a bride.
The Three Positions
If someone wants to hold that God actually has, they’ll have to make one of these concessions:
- God is a polygamist and polygamy isn’t actually wrong.
- God is a polygamist and polygamy is wrong.
- God is not a polygamist because the Father and Son are two distinct beings.
As for the first option, I won’t argue against polygamy here, and I don’t actually think any dispensationalist would argue (hopefully) that polygamy is morally acceptable. Hopefully the first option is obviously crazy.
If God is a polygamist and polygamy is wrong, then this creates a contradiction in the very character of God. God is guilty of something that he has decreed is wrong. God sins. And of course, God can’t sin. So either God is evil, or there’s no God. This seemingly innocuous view destroys the very foundation of Christianity itself. God cannot exist and have two wives is polygamy is wrong.
The third option is to claim that it’s not actually polygamy for the Father and the Son to each have wives, because they’re separate beings, thus destroying the doctrine of the trinity. This post is much to small to get into the necessity of the doctrine of the trinity. But if a dispensationalist denies the doctrine of the trinity in order to maintain a separation between Israel and the church, they believe a heresy and must immediately abandon their fake Jesus and repent and believe in the real Jesus.
The other option would be to attempt the impossible task of arguing that a wife and a bride aren’t the same thing. I don’t know about you, but I have a wife and a bride. And she’s the same person.
Hopefully we can all see that the view that God has two wives is unbiblical, dangerous, and approaching heresy, if not jumping in head first. I highly recommend the Biblical position instead. 1) Polygamy is wrong, 2) God is not a polygamist, and 3) God’s wife and bride are the same entity – the people of God, who are his people by faith.
As a side note, do you know who else believes God has multiple brides? Mormons. Do you know when Joseph Smith first founded Mormonism? 1830. Do you also know when Darby started teaching dispensationalism? Also in the 1830s.
Interesting coincidence.
I don’t like to claim that dispensationalism is heresy. But anyone holding this view is wading pretty deep into heretical waters. To those people, get out, abandon dispensationalism, and never look back.
