Brides of Christ is a study of professed nuns and life in the convents of colonial Mexico.

Right from the very beginning in eternity past, God had planned history with His Son having a bride, a companion that would co-reign with Him and enjoy Him forever. That is the eternal purpose of God in creating a bride for His Son. If you read the Scripture from cover to cover, you would discover that God teaches us in a variety of different ways. Sometimes God uses powerful word pictures, sometimes He uses symbols, sometimes He uses examples of people both good and bad. Sometimes God uses a direct word, an authoritative word, sometimes He uses examples from nature, like a tree planted by the rivers of water that will not cease to bear fruit. This book highlights how God gave us an example of an ancient Jewish wedding ceremony that correlates with Christ, the Bridegroom, and His bride the church. From the father choosing a bride for his son, paying the bridal price, the bridegroom snatching his bride and bringing her to the bridal chamber, and then finally co-reigning with him in their household with him as the head. It is absolutely amazing the correlation between the two. What was a mystery to the Jews has been revealed. The mystery was that both Jew and Gentile called the church would be the bride of Christ. The bride of Christ is describing the kind of relationship we can have with Jesus. God is seeking willing lovers, who would voluntarily seek His heart, voluntarily surrender to Him, and voluntarily love Him with all their heart, soul and mind, and strength.

The early Christian writer Tertullian first applied the epithet "bride of Christ" to the uppity virgins of Carthage as a means of enforcing female obedience. Henceforth, the virgin as Christ's spouse was expected to manifest matronly modesty and due submission, hobbling virginity's ancient capacity to destabilize gender roles. In the early Middle Ages, the focus on virginity and the attendant anxiety over its possible loss reinforced the emphasis on claustration in female religious communities, while also profoundly disparaging the nonvirginal members of a given community. With the rising importance of intentionality in determining a person's spiritual profile in the high Middle Ages, the title of bride could be applied and appropriated to laywomen who were nonvirgins as well. Such instances of democratization coincided with the rise of bridal mysticism and a progressive somatization of female spirituality. These factors helped cultivate an increasingly literal and eroticized discourse: women began to undergo mystical enactments of their union with Christ, including ecstatic consummations and vivid phantom pregnancies. Female mystics also became increasingly intimate with their confessors and other clerical confidants, who were sometimes represented as stand-ins for the celestial bridegroom. The dramatic merging of the spiritual and physical in female expressions of religiosity made church authorities fearful, an anxiety that would coalesce around the figure of the witch and her carnal induction into the Sabbath.

Secrets of the Brides is a provocative study in typology which will introduce readers to the inner dimensions of Scripture. Typology was the predominant method of study in Jesus' day. Rabbis applied four levels of study to the Word of God. They are peshat (the simple meaning of the text), remez (allusion to something more), derush (inference and application) and sode (secrets). This book applies these principles to explore the accounts of seven biblical brides and their bridegrooms. Their lives were living allegories performed under the careful orchestration and gaze of the Holy Spirit and their stories are laced with prophetic codes for the Bride of Christ. From the first chapters the reader will be progressively led out of the shallows into deeper more complex revelations buried in the etymology of the Hebrew words, the Feasts of the Lord, the Millennial Week and the book of Revelation. The casual reading of the stories of these brides is like viewing the tip of an iceberg. It is beautiful on the surface of the water, but underneath that shining tip the enormity of its foundation sitting there in the deep stillness invokes a disquieting reverence. This book will introduce those who have not been exposed to the beauty of the types to another satisfying and exciting level of hermeneutics and interpretation. The investigative journey will not ask the student to subscribe to a certain eschatological scenario but will cause him to reconsider how he relates to the Word of God and how he worships its author. The author has been a student and teacher of Old Testament and Hebraic Studies for three decades. She waits for the midnight call in Texas with her husband of thirty - nine years, her two children, their spouses and six grandchildren. Maranatha!

This volume argues that ancient Greek girls and early Christian virgins and their families made use of rhetorically similar traditions of marriage to an otherworldly bridegroom in order to handle the problem of a girl’s denied or disrupted transition into adulthood. In both ancient Greece and early Christian Rome, the standard female transition into adulthood was marked by marriage, sex, and childbirth. When problems arose just before or during this transition, the transitional girl’s status within society became insecure. Walker presents a case for how and why the dead Greek virgin girl, depicted in Archaic through Hellenistic sources, in both texts and inscriptions, as a bride of Hades, and the life-long female Christian virgin or celibate ascetic, dubbed the bride of Christ around the third century CE, provide a fruitful point of comparison as particular examples of strategies used to neutralize the tension of disrupted female transition into adulthood. Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ offers a fascinating comparative study that will be of interest to anyone working on virginity and womanhood in the ancient world.

In this story based on true events, sixteen-year-old Eva and her female friends become obsessed with a charismatic young man who comes to Corvallis, Oregon, in 1904, claiming to be a Christian prophet.

The Church in God's Program is a biblical study covering the entire scope of the church - its beginning, government, ministries, and the new covenant.

The Bride of Christ: Being Rapture Ready is a 6-week Bible study that parallels the ancient wedding customs with today's Church, Christ's Bride. God is setting things up for the return of His Son. Believer's hearts are being stirred. The Bridegroom is coming soon to retrieve His Bride, the Church. Still, there are many lingering questions: When will these things happen? What can we expect? Are we in the end days? How can we be ready? What specific things does the Bible teach us about the Rapture and the events that follow? In this Bible study, we seek to answer these questions and provide believers with biblically-based details of the end-day events. The purpose of this Bible study is to help Christians get prepared for their Groom's arrival, while illuminating certain features and events still in the future.

From the grandeur of Creation to the glorious union of the Savior and his bride, God's love sweeps through eternity in the greatest of all love stories. A book of power, beauty, and grandeur. Rarely has a piece of Christian literature combined the simplicity of the storytelling art with the profound depths of the Christian faith.