Genesis 2:4-25 | Marriage Part 3
Introduction
How many of you know who this guy is? If you don’t know, he’s the Ikea instruction guy. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this little guy. If you haven’t had the joy of buying Ikea furniture, then you probably haven’t dealt with this guy. As a multinational company, Ikea has largely chosen to use instructions without words. Just images of this guy trying to guide you on how to assemble their items. How would you know you should put the screwdriver into the screw to turn it without an image?
I showed Katie this picture this week and asked her if she knew this guy. She guessed a bit, and when I finally told her what it was, she said (and I quote), “Well, I should know him better than you. You never look at those instructions!” And I would agree with that assessment. Where we might not agree is on my ability to get it done without those instructions. I would give myself a solid B, maybe even an A-, for being able to put it together and intuitively DIY items. Now, regardless of whether that is optimistic or not (you should ask Katie), that 10% or so failure rate still really hurts. What you gain in buying cheaper Scandinavian modern furniture that you put together yourself, you lose if you don’t do it right the first time, because that furniture really doesn’t like to be taken apart and put back together again. Once you have stuck those little dowels into a hole or tried to lock those little metal cam-locks into place, they never quite hold the same the second time around.
Being off just a small amount can affect many areas of life. In fact, it is almost terrifying how having just a few degrees off in your understanding can cause a huge problem. In 1979, 257 people left New Zealand on a sightseeing tour over Antarctica. Sadly, the pilots had a 2% error in their flight coordinates. Only 2% off—that doesn’t seem like much. These two pilots had never done this trip before, and as they began their descent through the clouds to get down low over the Antarctica coastline, they didn’t know that their 2% difference put them 28 miles off course, and they tragically crashed into Mount Erebus, a 12,000-foot active volcano on the continent. No one survived. That tragedy only resulted from a 2% failure.
I’m sure some of you work in industries where that kind of careful tolerance and small changes are a big deal. Having your mortgage off by 1% is a big deal over 30 years. Computer parts fitting together, auto maintenance, construction of buildings—many industries know that following the plans and instructions matters a lot, and even a slight deviation can cause real problems. We want to be just as careful with marriage.
Review
That is what we have been doing over these last two weeks—looking carefully at God’s instructions, God’s description, and God’s plan for marriage in Genesis chapter two. We want to make sure we understand marriage rightly and not get off on the wrong foot from the very beginning. A small tweak can make a big problem down the road. And most of those tweaks happen when we don’t understand where the instructions are taking us and make assumptions about the final product.
We started in Genesis two with the overall picture. Like looking at the final product on the outside of the box, we noticed that God’s real plan for human marriage is to image his intimate love with his people.
Marriages were created BECAUSE OF and TO IMAGE the relationship God has chosen to have with us.
Marriage is a picture of the intimate relationship God had with his people (Adam and Eve), in his place (Eden), with his very presence (walking in the garden with them), on his purpose (to have dominion over the earth). It is the same desire he has for his relationship with you and me. Marriages are meant to point us all to the amazingly close, loving, and enduring relationship we were created to have with our God.
And yet, most all of us know the story of Scripture and what happens next: mankind’s intimate relationship with God falls apart because of the sin of Adam and Eve. But God knew that would happen. And knowing that the original relationship would break apart because of sin, God also chose to embed within the marriage of the man and the woman a picture of a very specific future marriage—the marriage of Jesus with his church. God’s solution to overcoming the problem of our broken relationship with him was already encoded in human marriages before the problem even occurred. We talked about all these very specific images in the creation of the man (Adam) and the marriage of the man and woman (Adam and Eve).
As Adam is created first and alone with God, we see some amazing images of Jesus. Images pointing to Jesus as the greater Adam: Jesus, the firstborn of all creation, the son of God, the very Word of God himself. And we saw that when Adam and Eve were brought together, we get a view of how Jesus relates to his church. Eve is brought out of Adam’s side, an image of how Jesus, in his perfection, would birth the church, his people, from his wounding—from his death on a cross. Eve was brought to Adam to help him with this project of having dominion, just as God made all humans, and especially his church, to come alongside his project of spreading his glory over all the earth. Adam sings in love over Eve at first sight, just as God sings in love over you and me through faith in Jesus.
There are so many beautiful images and pictures here, like a fully illustrated instruction manual, to guide us to rightly living out our marriages (if we are called to that) in all the right ways. This morning, I hope there is much that will jump off the pages of Genesis chapter two for us when we think specifically about human marriage and how this image applies to us in marriage, or when praying for a marriage. The benefit is that we have already read the instructions well. We have the help of Paul, who told us the key to these passages in Genesis:
“This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”
(Ephesians 5:32 ESV)
The image of marriage in Genesis is THE image that is meant to help us in this in-between moment as we wait for God’s true marriage with us again in Jesus. This is THE image that the rest of Scripture relies on to guide us to healthy marriages. And even though our marriages today are marred by sin, this original image shows us how it should look. This won’t be a sermon that answers all questions about men and women and marriage, but it will tackle some of the main issues in Genesis chapter two about our marriages as men and women and the reasons behind them. I pray that what we see this morning is this grand view of marriage:
Marriage is the covenantal relationship between one man and one woman joined as equal yet complementary partners living out God’s purposes together.
Covenantal
This may seem obvious to some of you, but marriage is a covenantal relationship. As we said multiple times throughout Genesis one and two, the language God uses with his people here and throughout Scripture is the language of covenant. God is giving us regulations and stipulations on how our relationship with him should work, as simple as don’t eat of the tree. And even though there are consequences to not following what God has said, God is promising to stay with us and draw us back to Himself, no matter how hard this relationship gets. Amazingly, as we continue through Scripture, we see that God promises to take on all the difficulty of our sin and brokenness himself so that he can ensure we have this intimate relationship again. He will bring us back to himself at great cost.
Marriage is meant to be an image of exactly that type of love. Adam and Eve probably wouldn’t have known the extent of how amazing that kind of love and commitment was without seeing the grand scope of the problem that was coming, but God was promising to be with his people and solve their problems even in Genesis. Because God embedded the image of his marriage to his people (Jesus with the church) within our marriages, this means our marriages should image the same committed love and the extent to which we should go to care for one another. That will not be easy. That will take God’s power and love in us to walk out.
Equals
As we think further about marriage as a joining of one man and one woman, that means many different things. Let me start with a phrase from Genesis chapter one:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
(Genesis 1:27 ESV)
While Jesus and his church are not equals (at the very least they are of very different types, one the God-man, the other just man), men and women are equals. Before giving us the image of Jesus and his church embedded within the marriage of a husband and wife, God is gracious to FIRST let us know that men and women both bear the very image of God. We are equally image bearers. That is true outside of marriage and is still true within marriage. Men and women rightly image God in many ways, and God is using all our image-bearer qualities to show his grand and glorious image.
That is not a small idea to just gloss over quickly. Nothing in Genesis two or the rest of Scripture should ever make us think that any of the distinctions between men and women, especially in our roles to image Christ and his Church in a marriage as a husband or wife, has anything to do with an inherent deficiency or “lessness” in one gender or the other. And let’s be honest, those kinds of statements have historically been made against women. That women are given the roles they have been given in marriage (and even their role in the church) because of their “lessness” than men. But stop and think for a moment. How can that be true if we are all made in the image of God?
Take stature for a moment to consider stature. Men and women differ in stature, size, and strength. Peter even comments on this in 1 Peter 3:7, where he speaks of wives as “the weaker vessel,” referring to their (usually) weaker stature compared to men. There are many exceptions to that statement, and I know some women who whip me in many feats of strength. Yet this idea of women being “weaker” than men physically is often brought up as though that distinction makes women less than men, especially in marriage. Yet why would a stature that is weaker than another stature mean someone is less? We read in 2 Corinthians 13:4:
For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but in dealing with you, we will live with him by the power of God.
(2 Corinthians 13:4 ESV)
Without the weakness of God shown in Christ, we would not have our salvation. We all, compared to Christ, are weak. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:27:
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;
(1 Corinthians 1:27 ESV)
We are said to be the weak ones, used by Christ, to shame the world. Weakness is not inherently bad, but reminds us of a way that God chooses to love others by withholding or not using the strength he has. It is also a reminder that, in many ways, we are all weak and need a strong, capable God to save us. It is a reminder of the gentleness we often need in life.
Or take another example. I have heard wives derided for being the “helper” to Adam as though that makes them less. The man is the real one doing the work; the wife is “just” the helper. Yet it is God himself who is our very “helper!”
Behold, God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life.
(Psalm 54:4 ESV)
Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”
(Hebrews 13:5–6 ESV)
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
(John 14:26 ESV)
There is nothing ungodly about helping—it is a very Godly trait! If God is not our helper, then what is our hope? We should all strive to be more like God as a helper, especially in our desire to help others walk rightly with God, as we are commanded in Galatians 6:2, Hebrews 13:16, and 1 John 4:11.
One difference we see between men and women in marriage is the way they raise children and the role of women in rearing them, especially when children are very young. Some have acted as though women are supposed to mother because they are not as good as men to go out and provide for their family. That is a horrible statement! The image of mothering is really meant to make us think about God and our relationship with him!
Let me take something as intimate as a mother nursing her child. Think for a minute about what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3 or what the author of the book to the Hebrews says in Hebrews 5:
But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.
(1 Corinthians 3:1–2 ESV)
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.
(Hebrews 5:12–13 ESV)
Paul’s frustration here is not that people needed milk at one time, but rather that they haven’t moved on and matured. A mother nursing a baby is a beautiful image that points to God’s grace, sustaining us with what we can handle when appropriate. What a beautiful image of God that wives as mothers get to represent for us, even in something as tender as nursing a baby.
We could spend our whole morning simply looking at a variety of ways that men and women, especially in marriage, are both imaging the beauty of God to one another. Equality is an image-bearer quality even outside of marriage, but it is not diminished within marriage. We must start a discussion of marriage, remembering that we are equal image bearers and that we BOTH image God in everything we do. We are equal, fully image bearers, each of us, displaying the glory of God in our lives and in our marriages in many ways.
Application
Women, I’m sorry. I know at times that many Christian churches have acted like we need to explain the differences between men and women with claims of what is more important and what is less important. That is not only wrong but also damaging. It demeans your full value as an image bearer, and I’m sorry. I pray you never hear at Main Street Church anything other than the beautiful truth that both men and women are full image bearers of God, and our differences have nothing to do with being more or less than one another. Those differences are simply different opportunities. In our created differences, women fully represent God to all of us in magnificent and beautiful ways, no different than men. I pray you will forget and forgive the ways the church may have made you feel inadequate or less than because of those differences.
Marriage is the covenantal relationship between one man and one woman joined as equal yet complementary partners living out God’s purposes together.
Complementary
To be honest, we have to say anything about equality because we naturally notice the distinctions. We notice the differences. We notice how we are complementary, not identical. If we were to examine men and women without makeup, clothing, hairstyles, or the cultural connotations that accompany them, we would still notice basic biological differences. Those biological differences are embedded in us by God so that we might know him more. We were created male and female. And beyond our biological differences, we have also been given distinct roles as men and women in imaging God in marriage.
That is what we mean when we say that marriages are about equal and yet complementary partners. Something can be equal to something else and still be complementary to it. Equality does not mean identical. We would not value one puzzle piece as more important than another, and we are glad they all have different shapes and colors, or the picture would never be complete and a joy to behold. Another example is thinking about God himself. We know God as three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All of them are God—they are equal. Yet each plays a distinct part in the grand play of God’s love and interaction with his people. They are complementary to one another. The same is true with men and women. Their equality does not mean they need to be identical and interchangeable.
As we look at marriage, if Genesis one is meant to help us see the equality of God’s image bearers in marriage, Genesis two is meant to help us see that men and women are complementary: equal but distinct. Equal but not interchangeable. And we see that, even here in Genesis, starting.
We can lump the ways men and women complement one another into two main groups—we are complementary in gender and complementary in roles.
Complimentary Genders
Marriage, as demonstrated in Genesis chapter two, is meant to be for one man and one woman. A complement of genders. The entire tension of Genesis 2:18–22 stems from the man’s inability to find someone suitable among the animals to be his companion in carrying out his mandate from God. He notices they all have partners, but he doesn’t have a partner. It is clear what is missing is man’s complement. Or as Genesis 1 says again and again, his “according to his kind” (Gen 1:12, 21, 24). Everything else from trees to animals had a kind—a compliment—and Adam finally found his in Eve.
It's impossible to escape the fact that one man and one woman were the original definition of marriage. That is the only definition of marriage that God gives us in Genesis chapter two, and that is the definition God continues to uphold in the image of marriage throughout Scripture. As Adam says in Genesis 2:24:
Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
(Genesis 2:24 ESV)
That is a marriage. The joining of a man and woman to leave their original family unit to become a new thing as the two together become one—a marriage. And we see that reiterated throughout Scripture. Jesus says this in Matthew 19:4–6:
Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.
(Matthew 19:4–6 ESV)
This is how it always was, Jesus said, and how it should be. As we have already seen, the distinctions of male and female are core to the image of Christ and his church. We must be complementary in marriage, or the image falls apart. This speaks to so many aspects of our marriages.
This is not popular to say in our culture, but marriage in Scripture is not something two men or two women or one man with many women or one woman with many men can do. Marriage cannot be homosexual, nor polygamous, nor polyandrous (one woman and many men). Marriage is one man with one woman. That is not at all trying to delve into the complicated question of whether two men or two women could feel deep love and affection for one another. That is not at all trying to make a statement about Same Sex Attraction and why it is something some people experience. It’s not trying to answer what we should encourage someone in polygamy or polyandry to do if that is their state before coming to Christ. We simply note from God’s instructions that marriage is not anything other than one man and one woman because it breaks the image. It is against the instructions we have seen.
That is because Jesus is not trying to show us how much he loves himself in marriage. We are not trying to see in marriage how much the church should love herself. Rather, we are to see how much Jesus loves his church and how much the church loves Jesus—that is what the image shows us. And a marriage with anything other than one man or one woman breaks that image. We lose the intensity of Jesus’s singular focus to his church and his church's loving gaze to her great savior. We lose the distinctness of love amidst differences and distinctions. Anything other than one man with one woman significantly and irreparably breaks the image.
Sexuality
We also see something about our sexuality in this complementary gendered marriage. First, we see that sexual union is meant to be safe and beautiful, and in marriage, as we see at the end of Genesis 2:25:
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
(Genesis 2:25 ESV)
We talked about how this idea of being naked and unashamed is a picture of how we can all stand before God and know that he sees every broken part of us and still loves us in Jesus. We can stand before him in Jesus and be unashamed. But this is also an image of human sexuality. The nakedness here in Genesis two clearly points us to where sexuality is meant to be expressed—in the loving, committed covenantal marriage of one man and one woman. And again, we wouldn’t expect it to be any other way because of the image and instructions we have seen.
Sexual intimacy is meant to remind us of the real intimacy that only happens when God and his church are found as one in faith through Jesus. God wouldn’t want us to image or imagine that we can find that kind of intimacy without him, or that he chooses to express that type of love with anyone other than the church—his people. Therefore, throughout Scripture, we are told that marriage is where we are to have sex, and that sex is meant to be between one man and one woman. If sex and intimacy between one man and one woman is meant to image God’s love for us, where else would it be allowed than in THE image of a man and woman together pointing to Christ and his church? Within a marriage. Therefore, sex outside of marriage—homosexual sex, bestiality, adultery, and every other means of non-married one man, one woman sexuality—breaks the image of sexuality God intended.
Application
God’s creation of humanity in equal but complementary genders helps us rightly protect many aspects of a Godly marriage. Marriage is meant to be between only one man and one woman, as an image of Jesus and his church. Marriage is meant to be where sexuality is expressed as an image of the intimacy we are all meant to experience as we become one with Christ through faith and in the power of the Holy Spirit.
All other versions of human pairing (homosexual unions, polygamy, polyandry) and all other versions of sexuality (homosexual sex, bestiality, sex outside of marriage, adultery) miss the mark of the image we are creating within a marriage. Those other forms are not true marriages or the rightful place for intimacy, and they miss the role we are meant to see marriage play in imaging God and our relationship with him.
Failure
Let me pause for a moment. In hearing about the beauty of what marriages were meant to be, you may find yourself feeling sad or feeling guilty. Perhaps the type of marriage I am describing is very different from your experience. Perhaps you experienced a broken marriage as a child, or your marriage broke down, and you have lived through a divorce.
Marriages will fail. Even for those of you who feel like your marriage is going well today, that is a good thing to remember. Every marriage will fail to live up to the image. The question is not if, the question is when. Like every human endeavor, we will sin and cause the image to break in many ways. If that is you, know God’s grace is big enough to cover that in your life. The real marriage to our God was bought by God himself, Jesus Christ, so that we would not need to worry if THAT marriage—our union again with God—would ever fail. It won’t. For those of you who know how much marriage can fail and how much that hurts (which sadly may be most people in this room), and for those of you who haven’t yet seen that hurt in your life, know we will always need to look to the real thing, not the image, for our true joy. We will all need to know Christ’s forgiveness and grace for the ways they break into our lives. Find comfort there in Jesus this morning. Know that in any way you see or experience marriages failing, your true union with God in Jesus will never fail!
Complimentary Roles
As we look back at marriages again, it is not just complementary genders but also complementary roles that distinguish us from one another within marriage. A role assigned to husbands and a role assigned to wives. We have already seen this in the image of Christ in husbands and the image of the church in wives, but what does that really look like in our marriages today?
Again, it is helpful to go to Ephesians chapter five, where we have already seen that Paul tells us that our marriages are meant to image Jesus and the Church. There, he also expounds a little more on what this will look like. Listen to just a couple of verses from Ephesians 5:
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.
(Ephesians 5:22–23 ESV)
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
(Ephesians 5:25–27 ESV)
We briefly touched on this idea of headship last week—that we all desperately need someone like Jesus to represent us rightly before God and to take initiative and responsibility for us. Here, Paul says that the husband is meant to be the “head” of the relationship with his wife, just as Jesus is the head of the church. We are going to tackle that aspect of the marriage relationship more when we get to Genesis chapter three, where we see Adam’s and Eve’s sin breaks their relationship—their marriage—to God. We see more about headship there.
But notice that the image of husbands as a type of Jesus and wives as a type of the church means they will approach their relationship from different angles.
Husbands, if you are to image Jesus to the church in your relationship with your wife, as Jesus loves the church, you will love your wife as Jesus loves the church. That is no small ask. Husbands, you are called to give of yourself and give up your prerogatives so that your wife might benefit. So that she might see and know God more and love him more because of and through your loss. Husbands, you are called to a self-forgetting initiation and to the responsibility of pointing your wife and your family to God.
Wives, you are called in these areas of Godly love in your marriage to allow your husband to lead in these ways, especially because, as we will see in a couple of weeks, he is going to be held responsible as a representative for your family and your marriage. We will all stand in single file before the Lord to claim that our only hope is faith in Jesus for our salvation, but husbands will also have to answer for how they tried to initiate and care for their wives and families, pointing them to God. As wives image the church, they are to follow their husband’s initiation when it points to God, especially in areas of preference, so that both the husband and the wife might know God more.
And there is no way that either of these roles is lesser than the other! Just because husbands image Jesus and wives image the church, one is not better than the other!
We are ALL part of God’s church, trying to learn to submit to him in every way in our lives. That means the wife’s role to image the church is not lesser because everyone is doing this, it is just a specific place and moment to practice and demonstrate that aspect of ALL OF OUR LIVES with God in relationship to her husband.
Similarly, we are ALL called to live and be more Christ-like as we grow and are sanctified in our walk with God. Which means husbands AND WIVES are both trying to grow in this way. It is just that being a husband is a specific place and moment for a man to practice that role and relationship within marriage.
This is also why singles, divorcees, and widows and widowers, you are not off the hook in this discussion this morning. We are ALL called to image these roles in our lives—to have Christlike responsibility and sacrifice, as well as church-like submission and self-forgetfulness, in different ways. Singles, divorcees, widows & widowers, you are called to live this way as well. Marriage is just a PLACE and a way to demonstrate these images, but we are all called to live out and pursue those images in our lives.
In fact, while there are differences in initiation and responsibility between men and women that we will talk about more in Genesis three, there is much that is similar here. Husbands and wives, but also all Christians, are called to a life of self-denial and dying to our own desires. That is the image embedded in both Christ’s love for his church and the church's submission to God. Both are submitting to others’ needs and desires before their own. As we see in Philippians 2:3:
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
(Philippians 2:3–7 ESV)
The complementary roles of men and women point in the same direction—to a love that dies to itself, to a love that submits, to a love that wants others to see more of Jesus and his love for all of us than our own selfish desires. That is what a marriage is meant to do.
Marriages were created BECAUSE OF and TO IMAGE the relationship God has chosen to have with us.
Marriage is the covenantal relationship between one man and one woman joined as equal yet complementary partners living out God’s purposes together.
Application
Equals in image bearing. Complementary in genders and roles. That is what marriage is all about, and importantly, it is about everyone seeing more of Jesus and his love for us, the church.
Broken Images
Let me take just a moment to speak to some other, tangential issues surrounding marriage this morning. Many of you may note and say, “But this is not how I see marriages lived out in Scripture.” To which I would say, “You are absolutely right.” God tends to show us his people and their lives, not to show us how well they did but rather to show us where they failed and how HE—and HE ALONE—was still faithful. Do not think for a moment that Abraham giving his wife, Sarah, to a regional king, knowing he would likely sleep with her—TWICE—was meant to be a good image of marriage. Neither was Abraham sleeping with Hagar. Neither were David’s and Solomon’s multiple wives, nor any other broken version of marriage that we see.
We do see glimpses of the beautiful marriage of God to his people in Esther and her kinsman redeemer, Boaz. We see beautiful images of marriage in the Psalms and the Song of Songs. We even see an image of a godly marriage in the prophet Hosea, who takes a harlot as his wife and loves her as God loves his people. But often we see the brokenness, not the beauty, in the image.
Don’t believe for a minute that most of the examples in Scripture are how marriage should be. They aren’t. They are the story of broken humans and their marriages, and how a loving God still tries to show us how his marriage is better. But God does better—much better—in his marriage to us in Jesus.
This Image Will Fade
Also, don’t forget this is JUST an image. We will not have marriage in the new heavens and the new earth because there we will have the real thing! As Jesus said to the Pharisees and Sadducees:
You are wrong [in asking who a woman would be married to in heaven], because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
(Matthew 22:29–30 ESV)
We will not need this image in the future because we will be living the real thing—our true, intimate, holy relationship with God, restored through Jesus and his work on our behalf, and through our faith in him. That is what will remain! We can expect that these images will be only partial this side of heaven until we see the real thing. Don’t despair when you notice the brokenness in the image. Hold on to what it points us towards as more important and lasting.
Marriages were created BECAUSE OF and TO IMAGE the relationship God has chosen to have with us.
Marriage is the covenantal relationship between one man and one woman joined as equal yet complementary partners living out God’s purposes together.
Conclusion
Marriage is an amazing relationship that God has given us to image his joy with the church in a renewed, intimate relationship. It is a joining of equal yet complimentary partners that God might be seen more clearly. That we might see and know Jesus more. That we might see and understand the church better. That we might see how we are equal partners as image bearers of God and see how, as men and women, we proclaim the uniqueness of the joining of differences in Jesus and the Church. That we might see an image of God’s covenantal love. An image of the joy of sexual intimacy, pointing to our forever intimacy with God.
Marriage is a specific image that some will join together in through the covenant of marriage. Marriage is also an image we all join in through our renewed walks with God every day.
Friends, treasure that God gave us such clear instructions here. Be thankful that we can know what marriages are supposed to do and how they should work to better image Jesus and the church. Imagine how lost we would be without these directions!
I’m going to invite the worship team up, and I want to leave you with one question:
Question: How do you encourage marriages like this?
Your answer is likely to differ a little depending on whether you are married.
If you are married, do you embrace your equal but complementary roles in pointing all of us and yourselves to Jesus? If I’m honest, I fail miserably at being Christ-like to my wife much of the time. Maybe you feel like you fail there, too. Maybe you feel that as a wife, you don’t have the kind of love the church should have for Christ in your marriage. Imagine what a watching world would see if they saw our marriages operating this way? Imagine what they would see if we acknowledged where they failed and used that moment to point them to our hope and theirs—our relationship with Jesus.
If you are not currently married, how are you encouraging your married friends to image this well? How can you, in your own walk with God, also help demonstrate what Christ-like dying to self and Church-like submission looks like as an example to married couples? Isn’t it amazing that you, too, can help us see those images and even encourage marriages to be healthier?
This morning, consider the beauty of marriage embedded in our marriages, and how we might better image Christ and his church in them. But more importantly, remember this is just an image that will fail because of our brokenness. Turn and rely on the TRUE marriage we all need—our relationship with Jesus.
Communion
Benediction
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
(2 Corinthians 13:14 ESV)
