Marriage Sermons
The Mystery of Marriage
By Albert Mohler
We are living in one of those hinged times in history--one of
those incredible transitional moments when the whole process and
context of societal change is raising more fundamental issues
than any previous generation ever had to face. It is like we are
on a great expressway where issues and events and people and
truths and lies are being sped along. As we as believers in the
Lord Jesus Christ engage this dominant mass culture, it is easy
just to get on the entrance ramp to this great expressway of
confusion and be swept along so quickly that we forget to ask
the most important questions of life. We fail to look at things
as God would have His people to see them. We are living in a paganized time. But this isn't new: Read the Old Testament. Read
the Book of Deuteronomy. It isn't a new thing, but there are
many Christians who are being newly awakened to the fact that we
live in a paganized age.
I want to give you the symptoms of a paganized age. Pagans speak
of holy things as if they were lowly, and pagans speak of lowly
things as if they were holy. Therein lies the confusion. The
pagan world, the pagan mind, and the pagan culture worship lowly
things and disparage holy things. That is the essence of
paganism.
When we talk about sex and gender and marriage; therefore, we
are going to be speaking about things the world talks a lot
about. The problem is the world takes the lowly and calls it
holy. The world doesn't know what to do with sex. It either
corrupts sex into the lowest form of human expression or it
elevates sex to the level of worship--as if sex was the greatest,
highest, purest thing in all the world--which it is not and never
has been. As God's people, however, we are not going to talk
about lowly things in a holy way or holy things in a lowly way.
We are going to talk about holy things in a holy way. Quite
simply, we are the last people on earth who can talk about sex
and know what we are talking about. We are the last people on
earth who can have a sane, healthy, holy conversation about this
incredible thing God has given us.
Today, marriage is a flashpoint of cultural confusion. Americans
still marry, many of them again and again. Marriage is an
opportunity for a festival or a party, but it has also been so
humiliated and so redefined that it bears little resemblance to
what we find in Scripture. Feminists hate the idea of marriage.
It is seen, as Betty Freidan said 40 years ago, as a "prison of
domestic captivity." Gloria Steinham, one of the most famous of
the feminist theorists, said, "A woman needs a husband like a
fish needs a bicycle." She got married in her sixties.
Evidently, that fish decided she needed a bicycle.
The sad reality is that the world looks at marriage and says it
is about limitation. To the heterosexual who thinks in a worldly
way and with a paganized mind, marriage says "one" when no one
wants to say "one." The homosexual also sees marriage as
limitation, because marriage says of the union of man and woman,
"This is norm; this is purpose; this is design." Thus, when you
look at what is happening in the courts, in the culture, in our
political conversation, you understand that marriage is a
battleground. The world isn't sure it knows what to do with it,
but it knows it is important: when we define marriage, we are
defining norm, expectation, design, and purpose.
Where should we as Christians look for a holy conversation about
this holy reality? I would suggest we turn to Genesis 2. If all
we had for our conversation about marriage was the first two
chapters of Genesis, we would basically have all we need to
understand that God is doing something of urgent and eternal
importance in marriage, and that marriage concerns His original
design in creation for His glory.
Now that last word is all-important here. Our conversation about
marriage is going to center on the fact that marriage is one of
God's central means of displaying His glory in this world. So
when we talk about sex or gender or marriage or any of these
related issues, the basic questions always are, "Where is God's
glory? How will God's glory be demonstrated? How must we order
our lives and rearrange our thinking so that our greatest
concern is to see the glory of the one true and living God
demonstrated in His creation for His good pleasure and as a
witness to His greatness?"
We will begin in Genesis 2. It is an incredible passage. Most of
you probably think you already know the story, and you probably
do. But there is something here I think is often missed.
Beginning at verse 18:
Then the Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone;
I will make him a helper fit for him. So out of the ground the
Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the
heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call
them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that
was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the
birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for
Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God
caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept
took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the
rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a
woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at
last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be
called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man
shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife,
and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were
both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:18-25 ESV)
Here we have the historical narrative of the creation of woman
and of the establishment of marriage, and it begins with God's
sovereign declaration that it is not good for man to be alone.
This was not Adam's self-realization. Adam did not come himself
to the understanding that it was not good for himself to be
alone. He did not know any better than being alone. It was God's
sovereign authority and God's purpose in creation to declare
that it was not good for Adam to be alone. Man's aloneness was
by God's design; it anticipated His creation of woman.
But here is the interesting thing that is often missed. God
declares that "it is not good that the man should be alone," (v.
18) and then He reveals his purpose as Creator: "I will make him
a helper fit for him, a complement. I will complete the man in
the helper I will create for him" (v. 19). In our imagination,
we tend to move immediately to the creation of Eve. But that is
not what happens in the text. Notice the next verse: "So out of
the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and
every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see
what he would call them." What in the world is going on here?
All of a sudden we have zoology. We have the story of Adam the
animal-namer, and this seems disjunctive. What is going on here?
Well, just ponder with me for a moment what Adam learned from
naming the animals.
One of the crucial things here is the demonstration of Adam's
authority in creation. The authority to name a thing is a huge
power. It was of course a designated authority, a delegated
authority, but it was authority all the same. Human beings
therefore are not mere animals in the company of other animals.
We are the bearers of God's own image, given responsibilities of
dominion and stewardship. We are unique in creation.
But what do you think Adam learned from naming the animals?
Well, he must have noticed there is a he and there is a she--a
he-cat and a she-cat, a he-dog and a she-dog, even a he-eagle
and a she-eagle. You see, Adam must have learned from this that
although he had an authority over these animals, they had a
completeness he did not have. We are just not reading that into
the text; the verdict is explicit here in Genesis 2:20: "But for
Adam there was not found a helper fit for him." There was not
found a complement for him. He saw every animal. He looked at
the entire animal kingdom and found no fitting helper for him.
He was not completed in any of them. It was only at that point
that, in verse 21, the Bible says, "The Lord God caused a deep
sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his
ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the
Lord God had taken from the man he made into woman and brought
her to the man."
How did Adam respond when he saw the woman God had created for
him? He says, "At last." You see, through this whole lengthy,
incredible process of naming the animals, Adam had come to the
conclusion that it was not good for him to be alone. So he says,
"This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This is
me, this corresponds to me, this complements me. She is not me,
but she is like me." This is not just a matter of "flesh of my
flesh and bone of my bones." Adam sees a fellow image-bearer of
God. He has found the one that God has created especially for
him, the helper who completes him. The text concludes:
"Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold
fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." And then the
divine verdict: "And the man and his wife were both naked and
were not ashamed."
This is one of the most powerful verses for our contemporary
consideration. How in the world was it that Adam and Eve were
naked and not ashamed? That is what we want, isn't it? Isn't
that what we desire--to be before our Creator as naked and not
ashamed? I want to promise you today that in the midst of a paganized world, in the midst of a confusing age, in the midst
of so much corruption and confusion, we need to recover the fact
that in the sanctity of Christian marriage, we come as close as
we can get to being naked and not ashamed before our Creator.
There is God's purpose.
Gender and marriage then are not incidental. They are vitally
important. Gender is a part of God's original design. The
difference between male and female is God's glory. Their
sameness is God's glory. Their need for the other is God's
glory. The satisfaction of the man in the woman is God's glory.
The satisfaction of the woman in the man is God's glory. The
satisfaction of God's people in the pleasures of marriage is
God's glory. The reproduction of God's people, the gift of
children, is God's glory. Living life together as husband and
wife in sickness and in health, till death they do part, is
God's glory. This whole one-flesh relationship--that is God's
glory.
The importance of marriage is not confined to Genesis. The
entire Bible shows that God's glory is displayed in the covenant
of marriage. Through narratives, commandments, laws, proverbial
words of wisdom, the Song of Solomon, and the teachings of
Jesus, we see the importance of marriage in God's plan to
declare His own glory. How do we pull all these things together?
In 1 Corinthians 7, the apostle Paul by the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit deals with marriage and helps us to understand these
things. He begins in verse 1 of chapter 7:
Now concerning the matter about which you wrote: It is good for
a man not to have sexual relations with a woman." But because of
the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his
own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give
to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her
husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body,
but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have
authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive
one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time,
that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together
again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of
self-control. Now as a concession, not a command, I say this. I
wish that all were as myself am. But each has his own gift from
God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and
the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I
am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry.
For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. (1
Cor. 7:1-9)
Embedded in this text are precepts and principles meant for us
in our own sexually confused day. I want to make a statement
which I know you are likely, at least in your spirit, to want to
reject. I want to suggest to you that there is no biblical
category of enduring singleness as an aspiration. There is no
biblical category of enduring singleness, except for the gift of
celibacy for God's glory in gospel service. Now, this is
counterintuitive because we live in a day where we cherish our
ability to define our own existence and to choose our own
lifestyle. We live in a day of confusion in which marriage has
been so marginalized that it is now merely one option among
others. In society and even in many churches, enduring
singleness is seen as one more lifestyle option. And this is
especially true of men, particularly the high number who
conveniently self-rationalize that sex before marriage is
biblically okay, often with the high-sounding cover that, of
course, this is true only as long as it's in the context of a
"loving relationship."
I believe the Scripture does not leave that option open to us,
except in that extraordinary circumstance of God giving the gift
of celibacy to certain individuals for His glory and for gospel
service. Paul was very concerned about this. "I say this," he
says in verse 6, "as a concession, not a command. I wish that
all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one
of one kind and one of another." Celibacy is a gift, and
marriage is a gift. You have to know which is yours.
To some of you, God will give a divine mission in life for the
cause of His glory, for the furtherance of the gospel, for the
health and the holiness of the church--the gift of celibacy,
rather than the gift of marriage. That does not mean that you
are any less a man, or any less a woman. It means that God, for
His glory, for His church, is going to complete you in this life
in a different way than He completes us in marriage.
But Paul gives a critical tripwire here having to do with
self-control and passion. He writes in verse 9, "But if they
cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is
better to marry than to be aflame with passion." Let me be
brutally honest. If you have been given the gift of celibacy,
you will be able to say before your Creator and Lord, "I can
gladly live out my days without the pleasures of sex, without
the company of a spouse, and I can do so praising Your name,
trusting you for my every provision. I am ready to be deployed
in Your service to Your glory." If you can honestly say that,
and if other members of the body of Christ who know you well are
able to see that in you as well, then go and seize the mission
the Lord would give you, and fulfill it to His glory. I believe,
however, that celibacy is a rare gift. Most of you do not have
it, and you know that because verses 8 and 9 apply directly to
you. You are aflame with passion. You are living in expectation
and anticipation, and that should be holy too. Just as the
celibate need to trust God for every provision for their
completion, so must you.
My concern is that the sin of sloth has invaded the Christian
church on the issue of marriage, so that many young adults think
of marriage as something I will get to eventually. One day I
hope to be married, they think, but it will come after this and
after that and after the other thing. In the meantime, they
think that singleness comes with all kinds of pleasures and a
freedom from responsibility. The single life has no diapers. It
lacks responsibility that comes with marriage. It lacks
accountability. For most of us as Christians, marriage is one of
the most crucial issues of our accountability before God. It is
one of the most crucial issues in our discipleship, and so we
should first of all understand that our responsibility as a
counter-cultural people, claimed by God's grace, purchased by
Christ's blood, is not just to be men and women, whatever that
means in this society, but to be husbands and wives and fathers
and mothers. It means that you, in this generation, must
understand that marriage is not a lifestyle option. Marriage is
not something you should merely look forward to at some point in
your life when you think that you are ready for it and you have
made partner in the law firm. Marriage in Scripture is an
expectation. Without the gift of celibacy, adulthood equals
marriage. Obviously, that is not the definition honored in our
society.
I want to speak about four functions of marriage. The first is
partnership. This is directly revealed in 1 Corinthians 7:4:
"For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the
husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over
his own body, but the wife does." That is incredible. The
partnership between man and wife is so radical that we actually
forfeit autonomy, which is difficult for us to comprehend today.
We prize our autonomy, but marriage says, "You don't have any
autonomy." In marriage, there is no more "I," but only "we."
Marriage is a partnership.
The second function of marriage is protection. We all need more
protection than we would like to admit that we need. One of the
differences between men and women is that we need some
fundamentally different kinds of protection. Now, I know
chivalry is supposed to be dead, but not among God's people.
Among God's people we understand that a man is to protect a
woman--to protect her honor, her heart, her reputation, sometimes
even her health and her safety as well. Guys, that is our
God-given job. Just read the Bible. But there is also a very
important protection a woman gives a man in marriage--the
protection of his passions. Men, we need in humility to confess
that we need a wife to protect our honor, our passions, our
integrity. We need her there to remind us at every moment, "You
belong to me before God. You owe me all of your sexual passion.
You owe me all of your sexual interests. God has given us to
each other and you may not look outside this covenant of
marriage where your passions might lead you. I am your
protection."
Procreation is the third function of marriage. You wouldn't know
that from a secular conversation. We live in an age in which
babies are considered the accidental bi-product of sexual
passion. They are accidents. But there is in the Bible an
unequivocal message that from the very beginning, God's purpose
in our sexuality, in our gender, in the covenant of marriage,
was that children be born and that His glory be demonstrated in
the gift of children, the receiving of children, the blessing of
children, and the raising of children in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord. God makes us who we are to be by shaping
us and carving us and molding us and wounding us and healing us
in the context of marriage and parenthood.
I love Martin Luther, for so many reasons. He was a very large
man in every way. For one thing, Luther gives us a wonderful
recovery of the domestic life. His love for Katie and Katie's
love for Luther is absolutely magnificent. Luther loved the
family. He loved all the chaos of the family. In the Luther
household, the kids were running in and out. He was disciplining
them, teaching them, enjoying them, putting them on his knee,
holding them up before his friends. I love Luther also because
he was a seminary president, and he had such wisdom in dealing
with seminarians. When a young man would marry, Luther always
gave him an exhortation. He would take the young man aside and
tell him, "Understand this, my son, angels smile every time a
mother changes a diaper, but angels laugh every time a father
changes a diaper, and angels love to laugh!" "God is going to do
something in you," Luther would say, "and it isn't going to
happen any other way than through the changing of diapers and
the holding of hands and the process of being a father."
Procreation is an essential part of marriage. The separation of
passion and pleasure and all the other gifts of marriage from
procreation is a foreign, unnatural thing that ought always to
be called into question by the Word of God. I am not saying that
a Christian couple may never use any methodology of birth
control and timing--that is not my argument. But I want to make
the point emphatically that the rise of the contraceptive
mentality is a deadly thing to the glory of God. The assumption
that children are an intrusion into our marriage and the
sometimes byproduct of the act of sex is a deadly thing to the
glory of God.
The fourth function of marriage is pleasure. We know this
because we have read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. We know this
because we have read the narratives of the Scripture. We know
this because we have read the Song of Solomon. We know this
because God looked at His creation and declared that it was
good. One of the reasons we hear so little about this from some
quarters is because we as evangelicals have no theology of
embodiment. We tend to be Gnostics of sorts, talking about
ourselves as merely spiritual beings, with the body being just
what we happen to live in. But understand that God made us in
these bodies to His glory, and the bodies tell us many things.
For one thing, a man's body says that he is to be united to a
woman and a woman's body says that she is to be united to a man.
Adam in the garden was man, but he really wasn't fully male
until there was a female. Our bodies tell us something. Our
drives tell us something. Do not despise what God has put within
you. I speak both to women and to men, but particularly to guys.
Do not despise the passion for sexual union that God has put
within you. Do not slander the goodness of God's creation. We
were made for marriage. We are called to marriage, and all the
unrest, the unsatisfaction, the anxiety, the disquietude in our
souls is meant to drive us towards the satisfaction that God
intends for us only in the covenant of marriage.
Scripture says that the sex drive is put in us by God, amazingly
enough, to drive us to holiness in marriage, to drive us to
throw ourselves upon the mercy of our Creator saying, "I cannot
handle this," and to trust God's provision both for a spouse and
for grace and mercy to arrive at that day when the covenant is
made
I also want to speak about four enemies of marriage. The first
is defilement. Hebrews 13:4 says, "The marriage bed is to be
held in honor and undefiled." Defilement, most classically by
adultery, is a huge problem because it violates that which God
has declared to be holy--the covenant made before Him, the
promise made by a husband to a wife and by a wife to a husband
to "keep only unto you until death do we part." Adultery is an
abomination in God's sight. It is an ugliness over which the
people of God should be heartbroken, and the church in this
generation is going to be judged, I submit to you, because we
take such things lightly and we do not exhort each other to
holiness in marriage. This is no small thing.
Fornication is also a defilement of marriage. It is not exactly
the same thing as adultery. It is sex before marriage by
unmarried partners. When the Bible says that Adam "knew" Eve,
that is not a euphemism. I think that it is just about as
explicit as it gets, because what happens in the act of sex is
the transmission of a knowledge, a knowledge that should only be
shared between a husband and a wife before God. When that
knowledge is shared with another, it is an awful knowledge to
have. Marriage is weakened, the marriage bed is defiled, and
husband and wife arrive at the marriage bed with knowledge they
should not have. Around too many marital beds are a host of
others who are there in spirit: previous partners known,
previous experiences shared. So what do you do if right now, you
are one who has known fornication? Trust the grace and mercy of
God, and know that it will be for you a painful prompt to
holiness in marriage, a humbling reminder to claim the grace of
the all-sufficient Savior for the forgiveness of your sins.
Divorce is the second enemy of marriage. God is explicit about
divorce--He hates it. We must be the people for whom divorce is
inconceivable. That the church has accommodated the divorce
culture is evidence to the world that we are not serious about
the gospel.
Divergence is the third enemy of marriage. The Wall Street
Journal, in a review of the 1990s, talked about it as the decade
beginning with the DINKS (double income, no kids) and ending
with the DINS (double income, no sex) because husbands and wives
are both professionals, both involved in life, both traveling,
both having their own lives, their own autonomy. The cartoon
accompanying the story was of a husband and a wife in bed, each
with a laptop computer. Divergence is a deadly danger.
The last enemy of marriage is delay. Delay--this is where I get
into trouble when I talk about this in churches, because people
get angry. The average age for a first marriage of a white male
in America, according to the 2000 census, is 27.5. Updated data
indicates it is now over 28. For a white female, the average age
for a first marriage is about 26.4. In the year 1900, the
average boy reached sexual maturity at about age 15 and married
generally by 20. The average girl reached sexual maturity at
about 14 and married somewhere between 18-20. Today we have a
situation in which puberty and sexual maturity come at about age
13. Now, what have we done here? We have created this incredible
span of time where sexual passion is ignited, but there is no
holy means for it to be fulfilled.
I want to speak of one sin that I think besets this generation.
It is the sin of delaying marriage as a lifestyle option. This
is a problem shared by men and women, but it is primarily a
problem for men. We have established a boy culture in which boys
are not growing up into men. Guys, God has given us a
responsibility to lead, to take responsibility as a man. Does
that mean having a job? You bet it does. Does that mean being
productive? You bet it does. It means also taking the initiative
to find a godly wife, to marry her and be faithful to her in
every way, and to grow up to be one who is known as "husband,"
and by God's grace eventually as "father." Sometimes, men think
they will put off being a husband and father until they can
establish their professional identity. I would beg you to
rethink all of that. What is the ultimate priority God has
called us to? Is the crucible of our sanctification going to be
our jobs? No, the Scripture is clear that God will sanctify us
largely through our marriages.
The injury that comes by delay is multiple. The longer you wait
to get married, the more habits and lifestyle patterns you will
have that will be difficult to handle in marriage. The more you
as an adult define yourselves as an "I," the harder it will be
to become a "we." Of course God's grace can build a wonderful
marriage even when people marry well into adulthood. If you are
in that situation right now, then be determined from this very
moment to fulfill God's purpose and calling in your life by
finding that spouse. Find that woman God has for you, marry her,
and say from henceforth and forevermore, "I am planting a stake
in the ground, a line on the calendar, a mark in my life that
from this point on we are going to seek in every way to reflect
God's glory in marriage." And notice men, you bear the bigger
burden here because you have the responsibility to be the
initiator and a spiritual leader. You must assume leadership in
taking pre-marital sex off the table. You must prepare yourself
for the task by becoming a godly man worthy of a godly wife, a
man who has already decided to enter into a lifetime commitment
with the wife God is preparing for him, before even seeking her.
And if you are yet young, I want to exhort you to think of
marriage not as something that is out there somewhere on the
horizon, but as one of the nearest responsibilities you now
face. You have got to be urgently seeking a spouse as much you
would seek what God would have you to do vocationally, as much
as you would seek what God would have you to do in terms of your
mission for life. And yet, remember that your role in this
seeking process is faithfulness. God is in charge of results and
His timing or outcome for us may diverge from ours. God cares
more about our heart's desires than actual results. Prayer,
patience and humility are the foundations of this process.
Get serious about this. Understand it as a matter of
accountability. Understand that delay can equal disobedience.
Seize the responsibility. Go for the maximum display of God's
glory. Do not be satisfied with anything less. Stay pure until
marriage, trust God in all things, honor marriage in every
respect, let the marriage bed be undefiled, and live out God's
passion as married couples. Show God's glory in marriage. |
