Skip to main content

ONE BRIDE FOR SEVEN BROTHERS


The 1954 musical film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, directed by Stanley Donen, and starring Howard Keel and Jane Powell tells the story of a backwoods man named Adam and his new bride Milly who marries him after knowing him for only a few hours. On returning with Adam to his cabin in the mountains, Milly found out that Adam is just one of seven brothers (Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank and Gideon) living in the same cabin. And through a chain of hilarious events, Adam’s six brothers decided to have their own brides by kidnapping six girls named Dorcas, Ruth, Martha, Liza, Sarah and Alice. One Bride for Seven Brothers is really nothing more than a short narrative from the Bible but the lesson in it could turn out to be a blockbuster.


As the story has it, some Sadducees came to Jesus in what was apparently a premeditated attempt to justify and support their own belief and said, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘if a man dies childless, his brother should marry his widow and have children for his brother.' There were seven brothers among us. The first married and died. Since he had no children, he left his widow to his brother. The second brother also died, as well as the third, and the rest of the seven brothers. At last the woman died. Now, in the resurrection, whose wife will she be? All seven brothers had been married to her” [Matthew 22:24-28]. Jesus simply discarded their thinking as spiritual ignorance as evident in his words, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures or the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” [Matthew 22: 29, 30].


The basis for the Sadducee s’ belief was a mindset that the resurrection was a fallacy on the grounds that the idea of seven brothers being married to one woman at the same time was against the Law of Moses as well as counter-cultural. Theirs was driven by a thinking error that since all the seven brothers were married to this one woman in life at different times, and if there was really a resurrection the seven brothers would have to be married to her all at the same time. Jesus held the position that marriage is for this life only and not for the afterlife. The detail of Jesus’ position on the issue is that the husband ceases to be the husband to his wife once he dies and the wife also ceases to be the wife to her husband when she dies. And if that is the case, then Paul’s statement “For the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is living; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband” [Romans 7: 2] reaffirms Jesus’ position. But the Christian marriage is unique in the sense that God has compensated it with a dual-linear nature in which the husband is not just the husband to his wife but a brother in Christ as well, and the wife is also not just the wife to her husband but a sister in Christ as well. Both the Christian husband and wife could spend eternity together, but only as brother and sister in the Lord.


If there is one lesson at all that we could learn from the Sadducees’ One Bride for Seven Brothers hypothesis, it is that no human relationship extends beyond the grave. They are all compromised by death. And in case you have not figured it out yet, the only connection between Stanley Donen's film and the Bible story is just the number seven. I pray that you discover life the way God intends.


K. George Olubodun

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE MIRROR OF TRUE TRANSFORMATION

      We are used to looking at life l as if we are looking in the mirror. What we often see in the mirror is not reality but rather a reflection of it. The mirror does not reflect the true self, but only reflects what it sees. And when you do not like what you see then you begin to distort your reflected self. Then the reflection gradually becomes a distortion of your true self.         The above phenomenon is known as self-delusion. Self-delusion does not bring true transformation. It actually takes you farther away from it. It is hard to achieve true transformation if you are living in the state of self-delusion.         It should become clearer why the makeup and cosmetic surgery industry is a multi billion dollar industry and still climbing.  You do not have to look at it too hard to notice that many of our popularized celebrity cosmetic transformations still have situations in their lives that leave them untransformed....
Post a Comment
Read more

The Greatest Gain

Discontentment is an emotional disease that takes away one’s joy and peace. Paul told Timothy, “But Godliness with contentment is great gain” [1 Timothy 6: 6]. The Hebrew writer instructs, “…be content with such things as you have” [Hebrews 13: 5]. Contentment has little to do with not getting what you want, but everything to do with wanting what you already have. It has been said that, “contentment makes a poor man rich, yet discontentment makes a rich man poor.” The poor man said to the rich man, “I am richer than you are.” And “Why is that,” asked the rich man? “Because I have everything I want and you don’t.” It just might be that the poorest person in the world is the one who has plenty of money and material goods without contentment. Sometimes we want things we do not need, yet need things we do not want. Two tear drops met along the river of life. One tear drop said to the other, “Where did you come from?” “I am the tear drop of a girl who loved a man and lost him,” replied the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

HILLTOP MANSION

What is a chateausque-styled mansion built between 1889 and 1895, nestled on 175,000 square feet, 8,000 acres estate in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, and featuring 250 rooms and considered the largest privately - home in the United States? It is none other than George Washington Vanderbilt's home, the Biltmore. The Biltmore Estate is worth unimaginably between $1.2 and $1.35 billion dollars. This includes the value of the mansion, which is worth between $200 and $350 million dollars, and the 125,000 acres of land that comprise the rest of the estate, which are worth around $1 billion dollars. The current global economic crisis is one that has provided common people with a glimpse into the world of finance and economics, especially with the fact that the value of homes and properties is somehow tied into the dynamics of the economy of a nation. One lesson that many of us have learned from the current economic crisis is that somehow the value of real estat...
1 comment
Read more