The BrideGROOM

During midweek last week, one of my favorite guest speakers from our sister Church in the Dominican Republic was visiting with us.  He preached a great sermon as always, reading from John 3:22-30.  John's disciples were feeling some kind of way about the fact that Jesus, a man who John himself baptized, was also baptizing people, and was beginning to become more popular than John.  He used John's response to illustrate how we must allow Jesus to become greater in our lives, putting our own glory and will aside.

A few brothers and I were discussing this again last night, reiterating that when we choose to follow Jesus, it is no longer about us, but about him.  As we went over that passage of scripture again, I noticed that John used the analogy of a bride and bridegroom --how "the friend who attends the bridegroom" (the best man) is happy for him on his big day instead of being jealous-- to emphasize the point.  Throughout our discussion, my mind kept wandering back to the term "bridegroom."  I'd seen it in the Bible several times before, so it didn't shock me that the word was used, but I actually stopped to think about it this time.

We normally hear of a bride and groom at weddings.  I never gave much thought to the word "groom", but realizing that it is a shortened version of "bridegroom" got my gears turning a bit.  As I thought of the word bridegroom, I thought "groom of the bride".  I looked up the word "groom" to verify the meaning, and it was pretty much what I thought.  To groom is to tend carefully; make neat or tidy.  It also means to prepare for a position or election.  The idea that a bridegroom could possibly mean one who "grooms the bride" reminded me a lot of Ephesians 5:25-26:  

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word

So I began googling and wiki-ing the word "bridegroom" to see if there was a legitimate connection between the roots of the term and my little epiphany.  All I could find was that bridegroom simply was a word given to the husband to be.  The best I could find was that the word groom was also used to mean "servant", which still falls in line with the point of Eph 5:25-26.  A husband's duty as the groom of his wife and bride is to serve her, putting her needs before his, keeping her in-tact, presenting her back to God in perfect condition.  Of course, this had taken me on a huge tangent away from the original discussion, but it was a nice reminder of what I'm going to need to be prepared to do when I finally find my missing rib.