There is only good news when you consider Jesus, for what you see is that the most wonderful person loves you like a husband loves a wife. As great as your sin may be, it is swallowed up by the greatness of your husband’s love. He has committed himself to you, and he has sworn to be yours forever.

A Relationship with God

How do we carry out a relationship with God the Son? While John Owen argues that we live out our friendship with the Father with his love at the center, when it comes to the Son, it’s all about his grace. That isn’t something that Owen came up with on his own; we often see the grace of Jesus highlighted in Scripture as a particular gift to be experienced on a regular basis by his people (e.g., Rom. 16:20; Gal. 6:18; 1 Thess. 5:28; 2 Thess. 3:18). As believers we have communion with Jesus when we delight in the grace of his person (who he is) and when we live in light of the grace he has purchased for us (what he has done to save us and make us his own).

Owen continues his meditation on that first aspect of Jesus’s grace—the grace of his person—by unpacking the Bible’s use of marriage imagery to describe the way Jesus and his people relate to one another. The New Testament speaks of Jesus as a groom and his people, the church, as a bride (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:25–27).

You don’t have to work too hard to get the sense of what that word picture is meant to describe—marriage is supposed to be the most intimate and personal of all our relationships. Owen describes the way Jesus and his bride (that is, us!) relate to one another by saying, “There is a mutual resignation, or making over of their persons one to another. . . . Christ makes himself over to the soul, to be his, as to all the love, care, and tenderness of a husband; and the soul gives up itself wholly unto the Lord Christ, to be his, as to all loving, tender obedience.”¹

We would never dare to think about Jesus this way if the Bible didn’t tell us that we should. It is hard to imagine that Jesus would love us this much, that he would give himself to us in the way that a perfectly loving husband would give himself to his wife. But just because it’s hard to imagine doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. Jesus is a husband to us. That means that our communion with the Son of God begins with him moving toward us in tender care and personal affection. He looks at us like a smitten man looks at the woman of his dreams.

Now, if a friendship (or marriage, in this case) is a two-way street, then what is expected of us? You can see why that is an important question. Jesus is always a perfect husband to us; his love and care never fail or diminish. That means that if we are not enjoying a happy relationship with him, we can be sure that the problem is on our end. But what are we to be looking for in our response to him? Owen lays out two ways that Jesus’s people should respond to his love: “the liking of Christ, for his excellency” and the “accepting of Christ by the will, as its only husband.”² As we commune with him, we learn to see Jesus in all his beauty, and we begin to increasingly prefer Jesus over every other thing in the world. We turn our backs on everything that competes with Jesus for our affection, things like the promises of sin, the pleasures of the world, and the allure of self-salvation through religion and hard work.

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