There are no elephants in the bridal chamber

Got up this morning and in my quiet time with the Lord He told me the phrase that I have used as a title..."There are no elephants in the Bridal Chamber..." my first response was "Like Duh"...of course there are not...and so I began to think about what He was trying to tell me...and as I listened He told me about love...

Love...you remember love don't you? Its why we were created.


Just passed Valentines day again, its the "Love" holiday when we think about romance and love and of course remember and talk about Saint Valentine who was martyred on this day...OK...actually we never remember the martyr thing, but we probably should its a really cool story about Gods love, which I suggest you google since I'm not going to talk about it right now.

So what do elephants and bridal chambers have to do with love?

Well its obvious if you think about it...no one to my knowledge has ever house trained an elephant...


Did you ever wonder why? Its because you can't...oh I suppose there might be a way to do it, we are so clever as the rulers at the top of the food chain, we've trained the animal kingdom to do just about anything we want, recently I heard of dogs that had been trained to smell cancer cells, and they were 100% successful in sniffing out specific kinds on cancer on human subjects, but unfortunately we have not been able to house train elephants.


Whats the point?


Well its really kind of simple, the reason we do not house train elephants is because they have no real choice over when and where they do the dirty side of digestion, elephant business just happens and an elephant never thinks about it, never chooses, or withholds choice because they are not given that ability.


Elephants are not house trained because they do not have the same capacity for choice that other domesticated animals have...(or if they do the process of training them would be to inconvenient for the average home owner). 

An elephants lack of power to choose where it does its business determines the level of intimate luxury it experiences.


The Bridal Chamber is a polite way to describe a portion of a dwelling that is reserved for the most intimate of relationships, and normally it is valued and adorned with luxury because of the value we place on its purpose and design.


That is why elephants (and other undomesticated animals) are not allowed into the Bridal Chamber, the value we place on intimacy mandates that only those creatures who have the capacity and history of appropriate choice are allowed in there.


And just to ratify that this is normal human behavior, when two people have developed an intimate relationship based on some context of covenant (covenant guards intimacy), if one of the people in the relationship begins to exhibit behavior that proves that have somehow lost the capacity for responsible choice...well they get locked out of the Bridal Chamber...maybe not physically, or architecturally, but certainly emotionally, and almost always practically.


Your right to be in the luxurious and valuable relationship is always determined by the level of your responsible choices, where you refuse to control your choices, you forfeit the right to intimacy.


Of course there are other factors that determine your privilege and permission to be in a Bridal Chamber...but these other factors will not count at all where you have not made the appropriate choices to show your value for the luxury.


So yeah, pretty basic, but as I think about it, something profound begins to surface in my understanding...

We are created with an incredible capacity for choice...from the time we are toddlers until we shuffle off this mortal coil we always have some capacity to choose, and frankly the rest of creation is kind of locked into an automatic response with very limited capacity to choose anything higher than survival or moderate behavior modification...


But mankind always has some capacity to choose, Victor Frankl in his famous work "Mans search for meaning" demonstrates that freedom is possible even in the death camps of Auschwitz because no one can take away your ability to decide how you will respond, he calls it "the ultimate freedom", so even if all of your behavior is coerced and all other freedoms are stripped away, you will still have the ability to decide how you will respond to what is happening to you...you can give up, you can fight back, you can withdraw, you can do a number of things but the profound truth remains that your ability to choose can never ever be fully taken away from you...


Elephants don't have that level of freedom, and frankly neither does anything else in creation except another human being.


Which brings me to my final point...

The level of freedom a creature has, determines the level of intimacy it is truly capable of experiencing... an elephant is not allowed into places that require the capacity to choose how it will behave, however we as truly free creatures have the capacity to experience the deepest luxury and the greatest intimacy because we have a God designed hard-wired gift to choose, even in the worst possible environments.


Love is only truly possible where choice is exercised...so ultimate love is based upon the simple value of :

"I choose you..."


(Not I need you)


The Bible is full of these expression of Gods love toward us...He loves us not out of anything other than His choice, and He chooses us because He chooses us.




So we might want to begin trying understand the incredible power He has given us in our own freedom to choose, He has basically pre-approved our right to enter into His Bridal Chambers and experience the luxury of His intimate love for us.


One final thought about love and choice...we often talk about (especially around Valentines Day) people "falling" in love...but God has never ever, and will, never ever, "fall" in love...falling implies you did not plan to do it, and it is so true of two lovers who by accident or by evolutionary design (if you believe in fairy tales) find themselves the victim of affections and emotions that really are most poetically described as "falling in love". 

Falling is a description of something you did not plan on doing, if you plan on going off a ledge, you say you "jumped", if it happens TO you, you say you "fell", and love sometimes happens "to" us in the sense that we were not planning to have the emotions and affections that we get consumed by.


But God has never had anything happen "to" Him, everything in His world has happened because He chose it before to "happen", and then released the power to make it happen, but God has never fallen off or into anything, because He is not a victim he is God, that's why God is the "happiest" person in the universe because He has chosen all the best things to happen for Him all the time...


And one of the things He has chosen to make Himself happy is loving you...not because you deserved it, or earned it, no He loves you because it makes Him happy to love you...and the cool side of that is because He did not "fall in love" with you, He will never "fall out of love" with you...He loves you because it makes Him happy and its His choice and frankly there's nothing you will ever be able to do about it.


Seleh.