Okay, what is the deal with marriage? We’ve all heard the depressing statistics ad nauseum. About half of all marriages supposedly now end in divorce. That statistic has been declining since its peak in 1980, but then again, lots of people just aren’t bothering to even get married any more. And being a church-goer is no guarantee of anything! There have been some painful statistics in recent years about divorce rates even among Christians. While social scientists tell us we can significantly decrease the possibility of divorce by waiting to marry until we’re 25, waiting to have children till at least seven months after marriage, by having a stable income, by having at least a little college under our belt and other factors – the fact remains that a large number of marriages just don’t survive. Why? What’s the deal with marriage?This just can’t be the way God wanted marriage to work.
Last Sunday, Stephen Pastis’ “Pearls Before Swine” cartoon strip in the Star Tribune shared an interesting perspective on marriage. Apparently, his goat, mouse and pig characters were told to come up with a proper anniversary card. Here’s what Mouse came up with…
Elly Elephant did everything for Henry Hippo. She cut up his fruit for him. She bought his clothes. She made his plane reservations. She paid the bills. She mowed the lawn. She did the laundry. She did the dishes. And she dusted. And she vacuumed. And she made the bed. One day, Elly Elephant asked Henry Hippo a question, “What do you do for me?” Stumped, Henry Hippo handed her a corn chip. “I hand you the corn chips,” he said. Elly Elephant suffocated Henry Hippo with the corn chip bag. Then, in the final frame of the cartoon, Goat, Mouse and Pig are discussing the card. Goat shouted, “Hey, what kind of anniversary card is this?” Mouse said, “The realistic kind!” And Pig just dreamed of dying in a corn chip bag.
Is that really what marriage is? Is it really that bad? Some tragic fight over corn chips?
What in the world has happened to marriage?
I used to believe marriages were in trouble because we all listened to Hollywood and the culture too much. Marriage is having a hard time enduring in this country because we’ve all seen one too many Meg Ryan movies! Boy meets girl, girl loves boy, Cary Grant kisses Audrey Hepburn, they fall in love, get married, have 2.3 children and live out the rest of their lives in starry-eyed bliss. Sigh! Marriages are falling apart all over the place because our culture never told us marriage was going to be a lot of hard work, drudge and commitment. Our culture paints too rosy and romantic a picture of marriage – just too many mushy movies.
Right? It’s all Meg Ryan’s fault! Romance can’t last forever, right? That picture just isn’t realistic, son! Get with the program, girlfriend! Puhlease! Don’t be so dreamy and naïve!
Is that what the Bible teaches? That Christian husbands and wives need to stop longing for long walks on sandy beaches, tender kisses, stolen glances, sexual passion, sparks, roses and romance and just settle in for duty and drudgery? Is that honestly what the Bible says?
No! That isn’t what the Bible teaches at all! Good romance is our reality! Folks, please understand some parts of the Bible were once considered so sexually explicit young Jewish kids were not allowed to read them until they reached maturity. Our LORD GOD is the consummate romantic! You may find this honestly hard to believe, but when it comes to love and romance, Hollywood doesn’t go far enough! The more I’ve studied what the Bible says about marriage, the more I’ve come to sincerely believe God longs to give us beyond all we can possibly ever ask or imagine in life – perhaps in this area in particular. Our LORD loves not only the nervous kisses of our wedding day, but the tender, soul-soaked kisses of our seniority! This is reality!
This is God’s wonderfully mushy desire for our marriages. So as we close our “What Does The Bible Say” study series this morning, I beg you to suspend your marital cynicism for a moment and allow me to make a very mushy, biblical case for marriage. And since we learned in our Revelation class a couple weeks ago that twelve is a biblical number of completion, let me fly through twelve biblical definitions of marriage for us to take home and study later.
Marriage Is God’s Invention
First of all, Genesis 2:18 tells us marriage is God’s invention. The Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper (colaborer) suitable for him.” God invented this thing. God invented relationships. God invented sex and God made it pleasurable.
Marriage Is One Flesh
Secondly, Genesis 2:23 tells us marriage is one flesh. This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. We are made a one flesh, new creation in marriage. There is no silly 50/50 contract between us – you do your part and I’ll do my part and we’ll meet each other in the middle once a week. This is 100/100! This is a new life and new existence. There is only us. Marriage is one body with some new and very interesting parts tossed in just for the sheer fun of it! We are one flesh in everything.
Marriage Is Damaged
But thirdly, that gorgeous one fleshness has been horribly damaged. Genesis 3:16 tells us one of the many things destroyed in our sinful fall from grace was the marriage relationship. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. The Hebrew word for desire is the same word used later in Genesis for Satan desiring to control the heart of Cain. It is a selfish, controlling and evil desire. And it will be met by iron-fisted rulership from the man.
Where once there was one flesh, mushy, colaboring mutuality and utter nudity without hint of shame between us, now there is a vicious struggle for control. Love and oneness have been replaced with a nasty fistfight; tragically and literally so in many marriages. But this is not God’s desire for us. This was never God’s desire for us. This sort of relational brokenness is not even in God’s nature. This is not the lovely way God wants things to be between us. This is part of the curse of sin which, along with all other Genesis curses, will eventually be reversed.
Marriage Is Being Restored
And that’s the good news! While marriage has been damaged, marriage is now being restored to us in Jesus, along with all the other stuff damaged in the Fall. This is the fourth biblical truth about marriage. 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 says “since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” All that died through the first Adam, God intends to restore through Jesus the Second Adam. Paul repeats this theme in 1 Corinthians 15:45 when he said, “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.” Jesus Christ came to breathe His life-giving spirit into everything damaged by the Fall. And that happily includes marriage!
Marriage Is Submission
But what does this newly restored Christian marriage look like? This is where perhaps the most important biblical description of marriage enters our conversation. All the rest of our twelve-fold biblical case for mushy marriage is drawn from Ephesians 5:21-33.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Marriage is God’s invention, marriage is one flesh, it is damaged and it is being restored and all that restoration, I believe, begins with mutual submission. This is the fifth biblical truth. Following Jesus is about joyously embracing all sorts of submission in virtually every area of our lives; a fresh, holy, spiritually empowered sense of submission to God, to our leaders, to other believers and perhaps especially to each other as we live in relationship. Holy submission is the thesis statement from which Paul’s entire biblical description of one-flesh marriage flows. Wives submit to your husbands and husbands, love and submit yourselves to this marital relationship as Christ submitted Himself to the church. Christian marriage swims in an ocean of submission!
Marriage Is Respect
Marriage will also include respect. This is the sixth biblical truth. Remarkably, in a culture where women were considered little more than the property of men, Paul reminded them that they still must submit. Why? He probably does so because he himself has been teaching, in Galatians 3:28, that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” While there is glorious freedom and oneness in Christ like you have never experienced, you still have to respect your husband in marriage.
Marriage Is Love
But ladies, don’t worry about the impossibility of respecting and submitting to your husbands because Almighty God has given men exponentially more difficult instructions. Not only must there be respect in marriage, but there must be self-sacrificing love in marriage. In a culture where men and women may not have even met each other before their wedding day, husbands are told to love and sacrifice themselves as Christ did for the church. There must be love in this relationship beyond all we can ask or imagine; the love of Christ himself. Stunning!
I used to get in all sorts of arguments about marriage. Obviously, I don’t have a traditional, hierarchical view of marriage and some people don’t like that. But this passage in Ephesians has caused me to stop fighting about all this stuff because even if someone has the most traditional, hierarchical, “man in charge, woman submit” view imaginable, our loving God’s instructions to the men in this passage utterly destroy any sort of masculine cruelty in marriage! If a man loves his wife as Christ loved the church, I challenge anyone to find a woman in the world who wouldn’t adore submitting and respecting a man like that! If a man is serving his wife’s needs as Christ served the church, there won’t be problems. So I don’t fight anymore.
Marriage Is Holiness
But according to the Apostle Paul here, marriage is also about holiness. Gary Thomas has written an interesting book, entitled “Sacred Marriage: What If Marriage Is More About Holiness Than Happiness?” While the title makes me a little nervous since I believe pursuing holiness actually is the best way to find true happiness in life and relationships, Thomas does make a good point. Our marriages, as Paul says clearly here in Ephesians, are about working together with another person that we become holy. And that means sometimes there will be “iron sharpening iron” times in marriage intended to move us onward and upward into holiness.
Marriage Is Mysterious
And that can be a mysterious thing. This is the ninth biblical truth about our marriages. There is much about our marriages that will always, almost of necessity, be mysterious. Just as in anything having to do with our discipleship, our Christian growth and God-ward movement, there will always be stuff we don’t understand. Marriage is always at least a bit of a mystery.
Marriage Is Metaphor
And, tenth, one mysterious quality of marriage is the metaphorical nature of it. This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. Our marital relationships are one of the single most frequently used biblical metaphors for Christ and the church itself. God intends marriage to serve as a relationship parable for the rest of our lives. As we increasingly learn to love and enjoy our marriages, we learn to love and enjoy all our other relationships.
Marriage Is Miraculous
But all this isn’t something we can master without a great deal of help. And that is why I must add as the eleventh item on our list that marriage is miraculous. I simply do not believe this one flesh we’re talking about is possible without a great deal of God’s presence and help. Like anything truly good in life, good marriage utterly depends on the power and presence of God. Marriage is a miracle! God is constantly leading us into places we cannot experience fully without Him – and marriage is precisely one of those miraculous places.
Marriage Is Muy Mushy!
And so, as I consider these other eleven biblical principles I’ve flown through this morning, as I think of still other biblical marriage definitions we could discuss (marriage as blessing, marriage as evangelism, marriage as discipleship and ministry, marriage as kingdom fulfillment, marriage as worship, marriage as spiritual laboratory and on and on and on), as I stir all these things together in the marriage pot under the watchful eye of Almighty God “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,” I am left with no other biblical conclusion about marriage than to summarize things in true Kevin Hanson fashion this morning – saying simply that biblical marriage is muy mushy!
God wants your marriage to be a very mushy, romantic, absolutely wonderful deal!
On the basis of God’s Word, on the basis of 23 something years of marriage to a woman who constantly drives me crazy and yet a woman who has become oxygen to me, I believe God wants you and I to cherish every minute of our marriages. When I came close to losing Monica in our motorcycle accident a few years ago, these things came clearly into focus for me. And now I’m not exaggerating when I say I honestly miss Monica when I’m at work – she brightens my day by walking into a room (unless it’s walk time!) We argue constantly; usually playfully and often quite seriously, but she is my one flesh. Emotionally, intellectually, socially, we are regularly all over the marriage map, but eternally, she is mine and I am hers. While we are all completely different people with different baggage, stories, emotions and spiritual gifts, while no two marriages will ever look completely the same, while God’s holy desires will demand a great deal of suffering and difficulty, I believe the Lover of our Souls wants us to enjoy each other. It will look different in every marriage, but I believe God loves a muy mushy marriage!
I don’t think Hollywood has a clue! Hollywood doesn’t come close. Yet if anything, we probably need even more romantic comedies…although I can’t believe I’m saying that!
The first time I visited Al and Esther Dalberg’s home toward the end of his life, after 60 some odd years of marriage, she very quietly and tearfully whispered to me, “Pastor, this is all happening too fast. I’m not ready to lose him! What will I do without him?” To this day, my heart breaks for Esther’s loss, but I count it an honor to have seen an old, tender, married heart still very alive; still romantic after all those years of marriage. What a precious gift! What a glorious testimony to our broken, adulterous world! What a holy goal to strive for!
Folks, don’t listen to what the world around us says is normal marriage. And don’t settle for less than God’s best for marriage. Pick up a copy of this sermon today, listen to it again on the church website or read it again on my blog – but go home today and study this biblical blizzard of marriage blessing for yourself and ask yourself if I’m not correct in what I’m saying.
May all our marriages become lovely, wonderful expressions of our Loving God! May there be romance in this place!
Amen.
