The last piece of the oratorio is called simply “Finale,” and it is a wedding — full orchestra, full choir. That is not a composer’s flourish. It is where the Bible itself ends, and there are more people at this wedding than most of us have counted.
A study in Song of Solomon and Ephesians 5 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 17 min read
Why It Ends With A Wedding
Notice how the Bible is bookended.
It opens in a garden with a marriage. God makes a woman, brings her to the man, and the first recorded human speech is a bridegroom’s. Genesis is barely two chapters old before there is a wedding in it.
And it closes the same way. Sixty-four books later, after the flood and the exodus and the kings and the exile and the cross and the seals and the trumpets and the plagues, the last thing the story does before the new earth is throw a wedding.
“Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.”
Revelation 19:7, 8, 9
So a finale scored for full orchestra and choir is not an embellishment on the Song of Solomon. It is the correct ending, and it is the ending Scripture chose for itself.
Which raises the question this study exists to answer. If there is a wedding at the end of the world — who is at it? The Bible names the parties with more precision than we usually notice, and one of them is a genuine surprise.
The Bridegroom
Start with the one figure nobody disputes, and notice that He chose the title Himself.
Asked why His disciples did not fast, Jesus answered by calling Himself the bridegroom and His followers the wedding party — can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? It is not a title anyone conferred on Him. He used it of Himself, casually, as a thing already understood.
And John the Baptist, asked about the crowds leaving him for Jesus, reached for the same picture:
“He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled.”
John 3:29
There is one more moment worth having. Jesus began His public work at a wedding, in Cana, and stayed to keep the party going when the wine ran out. Ellen White reads His mind at that reception:
“To the mind of Jesus the gladness of the wedding festivities pointed forward to the rejoicing of that day when He shall bring home His bride to the Father’s house, and the redeemed with the Redeemer shall sit down to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 151
He was at somebody else’s wedding, thinking about His own.
The Father, Who Arranged It
“The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son.”
Matthew 22:2
This is the player most often left out of the picture, and Jesus puts Him first in His own parable. The wedding is not the Son’s idea carried out with the Father’s permission. The king made a marriage for his son. It is the Father’s undertaking, and the Son is the one being married.
That has one consequence which is easy to miss and impossible to unsee afterwards.
“But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”
Mark 13:32
The Bridegroom does not name the date of His own wedding. The Father does.
That verse is usually handled as a puzzle about how much Christ knew. Set it inside the marriage picture and it stops being a puzzle and becomes a courtesy: in this wedding the day belongs to the One who arranged it. Which is also the plainest answer Scripture gives to every attempt to calculate a date — the information is not being withheld from us as a test. It is not the Son’s to give.
The Bride, And A Question Worth Asking
Here is where the picture gets more interesting than the usual telling of it, and it is worth walking through carefully rather than settling it in a sentence.
The straightforward answer is the church, and it is Paul’s, stated outright and not left to inference:
“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it… That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing… This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”
Ephesians 5:25, 27, 32
Paul says the same thing to Corinth in the language of a father giving a daughter away: “I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:2). So the marriage figure for Christ and His people is not something readers have imposed on the Song of Solomon from outside. The New Testament states it plainly, twice, and calls it a mystery it is deliberately disclosing.
But Revelation does something unexpected with the word. When John is offered a look at the bride, he is shown a city.
“Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife. And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God.”
Revelation 21:9, 10
And in the same book God’s people are described not as the bride but as the people invited — “blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). Ellen White presses exactly that point:
“Clearly, then, the bride represents the Holy City, and the virgins that go out to meet the bridegroom are a symbol of the church. In the Revelation the people of God are said to be the guests at the marriage supper. Revelation 19:9. If guests, they cannot be represented also as the bride.”
Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, p. 427
So which is it? It is both — and they are not rival answers to be chosen between, because of why the city exists in the first place.
Ask what a bridegroom does between the betrothal and the wedding, and Scripture answers without hesitating. He goes and builds somewhere to bring her.
“In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”
John 14:2, 3
That is not a general promise about the afterlife. It is the language of a man engaged to be married — prepare a place, come again, receive you unto myself. And Hebrews says the same thing about the city in the plainest possible terms: the faithful “looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God”, and God “hath prepared for them a city” (Hebrews 11:10, 16).
For them. The city is not a competitor to the church for the title. The city is what the Bridegroom built because of the church — His love for her, made architectural.
Which is why John’s description of it reads the way it does. The holy city comes down “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). Adorned is jewelry language — the city is described the way you describe what a man gives the woman he is marrying. And the very next verse says what the whole enormous structure is for: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people” (21:3). Every wall and gate and foundation of it exists so that two parties can live in the same house.
So the two pictures fold into one another rather than competing, and Hebrews puts them in a single breath: ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God… to the general assembly and church of the firstborn (12:22, 23). A city in Scripture is its citizens — and this one was prepared for the bride, by the bridegroom, before she arrived.
Ephesians tells you who is loved. Revelation shows you what the love built. So sing the Ephesians 5 truth without hesitation — Christ loves His people as a husband loves a wife, and gave Himself for them. And when Revelation is read as prophecy, keep the roles straight, because the sequence depends on them: what is being handed over is a home, and the people it was built for are being seated in it.
The Friend Of The Bridegroom
John the Baptist gave himself a role at this wedding, and it is the humblest and happiest job in the building.
The friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. That is the best man — the one who makes the arrangements, waits outside the chamber, and whose entire reward is hearing the bridegroom’s voice and knowing the thing has come off.
He said it while his own congregation was walking away to follow somebody else. This my joy therefore is fulfilled — not diminished, fulfilled — and then the sentence that should be written over every pulpit and every website: he must increase, but I must decrease.
It is the one role in the wedding that anybody preaching or writing about Christ is actually offered. Not the bridegroom. Not the bride. The friend, who is glad about a voice that is not his own.
The Ten With Lamps
In the parable of Matthew 25 there are ten young women waiting in the dark with lamps, and the whole company is the wedding party going out to meet the bridegroom on the road.
Two things about them are worth saying plainly.
All ten were waiting for the right person. There is no group in that parable expecting the wrong bridegroom, and no group that has gone home. The difference between them is not doctrine and it is not sincerity. It is oil — something that has to be obtained personally beforehand and cannot be lent at the door.
And all ten slept. The wise ones are not the ones who stayed awake; the text says they all slumbered and slept. The one difference that survived the delay was what they had brought with them.
That parable is not incidental to Adventist history. The cry Behold, the Bridegroom cometh was the exact language of the 1844 movement, and the two classes the parable describes were, in Ellen White’s reading, sorted out in that year — one group “who looked with joy to the Lord’s appearing, and who had been diligently preparing to meet Him,” and another “satisfied with a theory of the truth, but were destitute of the grace of God” (The Great Controversy, p. 426).
The Guests
Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Notice what the blessing is attached to. Not to being impressive, or useful, or even present — to being called. The guest list at this wedding is an invitation list, and the invitations went out to people who had no natural claim on the family.
Jesus made that the whole point of His version. In Matthew 22 the invited guests refuse, some of them rudely, and the king sends his servants into the streets to bring in whoever they find, both bad and good, until the wedding is furnished with guests. It is the least exclusive party in literature, and it was assembled at the last minute out of people who were not dressed for it.
Which is exactly why the next thing in the parable is so sobering.
The Wedding Garment
“And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless.”
Matthew 22:11, 12
The detail that makes this story make sense is that the garment was provided. A king who drags people in off the street does not then expect them to have brought formal clothes; the robes were furnished at the door, as they were at any such feast. The man is not being punished for poverty. He is there having declined something free.
And he was speechless — which is the most damning word in the parable, because a man with any excuse would have given it. There was nothing to say. He had walked past the offer.
Revelation names the fabric: “to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints” (19:8). Note granted. It was issued, not woven at home.
“No fig-leaf garment, no worldly citizen dress, can be worn by those who sit down with Christ and angels at the marriage supper of the Lamb.”
Ellen G. White · Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 311
Fig leaves is precisely chosen. It is the first garment in the Bible, sewn in a hurry by two people who had just discovered they were exposed, and it is what human beings have been making ever since — a covering of our own manufacture, adequate to the neighbors and useless in front of God. In Eden He replaced it with skins, which cost an animal its life. At this wedding He replaces it with linen, which cost rather more.
When The Wedding Happens
One more thing belongs in a study of this wedding, because it is where Adventists read the scene differently from most Christians, and it hangs on a single sentence in Luke.
Most preaching treats the marriage of the Lamb as another name for the Second Coming. But Jesus told His followers to be like “men that wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding” (Luke 12:36). They are not at the wedding. They are waiting up for a man who is coming back from one.
Put that beside Daniel’s courtroom, where the Son of man comes to the Ancient of Days — not to earth — and receives “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom” (Daniel 7:13, 14), and the pieces fit.
“The marriage represents the reception by Christ of His kingdom… At the appointed time the Bridegroom came, not to the earth, as the people expected, but to the Ancient of Days in heaven, to the marriage, the reception of His kingdom.”
Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, pp. 426, 427
So the order runs: the Bridegroom receives the kingdom; the guests are examined for the wedding garment, which is the work of judgment going on now; and then He comes back from the wedding, and the supper is eaten on a made-new earth with the guests present in person.
Which means the Finale is not the whole of it. The vows, as it were, are already exchanged. What we are waiting for is the reception.
Set Me As A Seal
The Song of Solomon has its own finale, and it is the one place in the book where the lovers stop describing each other and say what love is.
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.”
Song of Solomon 8:6, 7
A seal is a mark of ownership pressed into wax, and she asks to be worn as one — on the heart, where it is felt, and on the arm, where it is seen. It is the same request the Bible answers in Isaiah 49:16, where God says the name is not pressed into wax but cut into His hands.
Love is strong as death. That is not a compliment; it is a measurement, and death is the strongest thing the writer can name. He is saying love holds on with the same grip. And then, at the cross, the comparison was tested directly and love turned out to be the stronger of the two.
Many waters cannot quench love. Water is what puts fires out. This one it cannot touch.
And the last line is the economics of the whole thing: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned — offer your entire estate for it and you would be laughed at. It is not purchasable. Which is why the invitation in Isaiah 55 is addressed to people with no money and tells them to buy.
What It All Means
Stand back from the cast list and look at what has actually been arranged.
A Father plans a wedding for His Son. The Son is delighted about it — Song of Solomon calls it “the day of his espousals, and… the day of the gladness of his heart” (3:11). A friend makes the arrangements and is thrilled to be nobody. Guests are dragged in off the street and dressed at the door. And the date is kept by the Father.
The astonishing part is not the ceremony. It is the bride’s history.
Isaiah has already described her, and he does not flatter: “a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused” (54:6). Hosea was told to marry an unfaithful woman so that the nation could watch what it looked like. Ezekiel described her as an abandoned infant nobody had washed. This is not a match anyone would have arranged.
And the cost is stated in the same verse that tells husbands how to behave: “Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). That is the bride price, and it is the reason there is a Finale at all.
So what does it mean? Three things, and the third is the one that costs something.
It means God is not merely willing to forgive us; He intends to marry us. Every lesser picture — judge and pardoned criminal, master and servant, potter and clay — is true and is not the last word. The last word is a wedding, and a wedding is about wanting somebody.
It means the relationship is exclusive, and that is not a technicality. The Song says jealousy is cruel as the grave in the same breath as love is strong as death, because they are the same fact seen from two sides. A love that did not mind rivals would not be worth having, and the commandment that says thou shalt have no other gods before me is a marriage vow, not a rule of etiquette.
And it means He is not going to be talked out of it. He was told the bride had been unfaithful and He came anyway. He was told what it would cost and He paid it. He has gone to prepare a place, on the terms of a betrothal — and the place He is preparing is the city itself, built for her. That is the whole reason Revelation can hand John a city when he asks to see the bride.
That is the Finale, and the orchestra is the least of it. The whole book of Song of Solomon has been rehearsing it; Ephesians 5 states it in prose; and Revelation puts the date in the Father’s hand and tells the rest of us to be dressed and awake.
Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.
