DAILY DEVOTIONAL – May 17, 2021
“Till Death Do We ____”
Prayer: God, our Father, all of our love here on earth is but a reflection and a foreshadow of Your perfect love that has been given to us in Christ; a love that we will experience in full only once this life has given way to eternal life with You. Sustain us faithfully to the end, dear Lord. Amen.
Scripture Reading – Matthew 19:4-6
“ 4 Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Devotional – “Till Death Do We_____.”
“Till death do us part.” No faithful wedding vow is complete without those words. Why is that particular phrase so important in a wedding vow? Because of what Jesus taught and said in Matthew 19 when he answered a Pharisee’s question about divorce, saying, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” With these words of our Lord in mind, the Apostle Paul would later write to the Roman church saying in Romans 7, “2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.”
In 1948 Joseph and Clara Gantt stated their vows to God and to one another, including those words, “till death do us part.” Not too long after they married, Joseph was deployed with the US Army to Korea to fight in the Korean War. US Army First Class Sergeant Joseph Gantt was captured and thought to be killed in action in 1950. But his body was never found, and his death was never confirmed by the North Koreans.
His wife, Clara, waited for decades for her husband to come back. She regularly went to meetings with government officials seeking information about what had happened. Clara even bought a house and had it professionally landscaped so all Joseph would have to do when he came home was go fishing.
She was ninety-four years old when his remains were finally brought home for a military funeral with full honors. It wasn’t the homecoming she dreamed of, but she finally knew his fate. Clara told a reporter who interviewed her, “He told me if anything happened to him, he wanted me to remarry. And I told him ‘No, no.’ Here I am, still his wife, and I’m going to remain his wife until the day the Lord calls me home.”
Clearly, it was Clara’s knowledge of God’s love for her in Jesus Christ her Lord that compelled her to remain faithful to her husband not only until he died, but even until she was called home by her Lord. There certainly would have been nothing Biblically wrong if Clara did remarry. The Word of God allows for that as we read earlier from Romans 7. However, just because it says a person can remarry, it doesn’t say they have to. I think it is a beautiful thing that Clara considered her vows to include not just her husband’s whole life, but hers as well.
In many places, the Bible refers to the Church as the “Bride of Christ.” The Church is comprised of all who put their faith and hope in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Jesus Himself used marriage as a way to teach us about the nature of our relationship with God through faith in Him, and Ephesians 5 says, “25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”
Though there is certainly a lot we can learn about God and His love for us through the human experience of God’s institution of marriage, there is one big difference between our marriage with one another and the eternal union we have as the Church and Bride of Christ. Human marriages end when we die. Our union with Christ, who is our first love, never ends because Christ is risen from the dead, and so too are all who believe and trust in Christ for eternal life. As our heavenly bridegroom, Jesus made us a vow of perfect love and faithfulness…and He promised us this even before we were alive to hear it! Jesus promises in John 14, “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yes a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.”
Clara Gantt spent decades faithfully waiting and preparing for her bridegroom to come home and be with her again. Unfortunately, because of the sinfulness we have all brought into this world, when Joseph Gantt was finally able to make it home to his bride, he came in a casket. That is the ultimate reality for all of us. We will die in this life because of sin, however, the Good News of the Gospel is that if we die in faith, trusting the words of our Lord Jesus, and if Jesus alone is our first love above and before all others, then there is no “till death do us part.” Christ is risen from the dead, and because He was faithful to His promise then, we can know and trust He is faithful and true to His promise that because He lives, so do we. As He told Mary and Martha in John 11 just before He raised their brother Lazarus from the dead, “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”
Unlike Clara Gantt, we know what has happened to our bridegroom, Jesus. We know why we cannot see Him right now. He has risen and ascended to go and prepare a place for us, and we will live and see Him face to face. Till death does eternity start!
Thanks for joining me for another daily devotional, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today, and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
