Life-Sharing Lesson 3 Marriage—What’s The Purpose Of It All
Genesis 2:24-25 (NIV) 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
We actually have two places in the bible that speaks of the creation of men and women. There is the very short of it in Genesis Genesis 1:26-28 (NIV)
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
We can see from this passage, when God created humanity, God created them male and female. It is the image of male and female that we are created in God’s image. The first instruction that God gave to them was to be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. God created them with the idea of sex being part of his commandment and will for their lives. Sex was God’s idea right in the first words that came from God to them. This idea of sex and marriage was going to imitate God’s relationship in how he was going to relate to humanity.
Then we have another version of the creation of humankind taking place which goes into more detail. We have in Genesis 2:7 Genesis 2:7 (NIV)
7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Then a little later we have Adam in the Garden of Eden and God saying it was not good for the man to be alone and that God would make a helper suitable for him. We pick up the story again in Genesis 2:20-25 (NIV)
20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh.
22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ’woman,’ for she was taken out of man."
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
In this second reading we get a clearer picture of the man and the woman being distinct from each other, yet have been created in a way in which they are able to express a oneness unlike any other thing in creation. God specifically created a woman to deal with the problem of isolation that Adam was experiencing. It’s not that Adam was saying, it would be nice to have a girlfriend, because he never knew what a girlfriend was. He was not sitting around on a Friday night saying he wished he had a date. You cannot miss what you never had. Have any of you sat around missing a million dollars. Since you never had it, you could not miss it.
It was not that kind of a aloneness that God was speaking when God said it’s not good for the man to be alone. It was God who recognized that Adam would not be able to understand what it was to be one as God was one in the Trinity. Remember God had said, “Let us make man in our image.” God had a unity in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but Adam had nothing to come close to compare that feeling of oneness to.
When God creates this idea of marriage, God already has in mind that the marriage relationship, would be the primary relationship of us as a people understanding our relationship to God. He lets them know that three things must happen for this relationship to take hold. Look at verse 24 again Genesis 2:24 (NIV) 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. A successful marriage is going to involve 3 specific acts.
The first is a Person has to leave the most important people in his or her life behind in order to put the needs of this person ahead of everything else. He leaves his father and his mother. The primary goal is going to be to seek the welfare of this new person. You should know from the start that you are going to have to pay a price in order to be with this other person and to meet their needs.
From the beginning you give up something to receive someone. This is a pattern you will have the rest of your life. You should say, “I do this because God told me to do this. I sacrifice, because in the beginning God told me that sacrifice would be involved but that’s the price I have to pay to have this other person. “
The second act is to making a binding pact with this other person to stay together no matter what and to be united with each other against the rest of the world. Although it says a man must leave for his wife, we know that a wife must also leave for her husband, otherwise the real uniting and later oneness could not take place. This passage is specific that a man and a woman is involved in this commitment. The commitment is to each other and to God. There is not any room for another person to come inside the relationship. Nobody is more important to you than this person. You are to be united. You have each other’s back. You reach decisions together. You understand what it is to give and to take.
The third act is to become one flesh. The two are to be united in a holy manner in terms of their bodies and their possessions. What’s mine is yours and what yours is mine. When you hurt I hurt. When you feel good I feel good. When you win, I win and win you lose I lose. I cannot separate myself from your condition. We are more than just on the same team, we are together the team. If you lose a job, we lost a job. If you get a job, we got a job.
We learn from the New Testament, that in exchange for your lifelong commitment, you receive ownership and control of my body and I likewise receive ownership and control over your body. As a matter of fact, my body is no longer my own. The sexual aspect of the marriage is an act of worship and obedience to God, because God has commanded us to participate in it.
The sexual experience is a holy experience in the eyes of God. This is the one time when we are offering something back to God, that we’re glad to be offering it back to God. God says here’s the gift of sex, now display your unity and oneness with it as on offering back to me. God does not close his eyes when a married couple is having sex. It is an act of obedience and it is good and holy because it is being used as God intended.
The most intimate act a priest could participate in the temple was to enter into the holy of holies. It was the most sacred place in all the temple and only the high priest could enter there once a year. No one else was allowed in. If someone did enter, he would do so at the cost of his life. The most intimate act involved in marriage is the sexual aspect in which a husband enters into the most private part of his wife. No one else has permission to enter into this most holy of places. It is the sign that I am totally devoted to you, and I welcome you as I welcome the presence of God in our relationship.
The husband is bringing the presence of God into his wife’s body as a sign of his complete devotion and dedication to his wife. They are bringing God into this aspect of the relationship that brings them both to a point of pleasure and ecstasy. God is glorified because they are being obedient to God’s will in this area.
The marriage relationship was created to be holy because God wanted to use the imagery of it to show how much God loved his chosen people. God married himself to Israel. In the New Testament, the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. Wives are called to submit to their husbands as doing it for Christ. Husbands are called to love their wives through self denial and self sacrifice as Christ loved the church. The purpose in marriage is for us to become more and more like God through righteous acts in the way we live.
Marriage and holiness are to walk hand in hand with each other for marriage to be what God intended for it to be. God wanted what was best for both Adam and Eve. So he created them with the reality that something was in one of them which was not in the other one. It was in the bringing of them both together that sex as a form of worship was pleasing in God’s eyes because it was obedience to the will of God for them to do it.
But the only way that sex could be worship was for it to be in the context that God designed it for, which was the context of marriage. Any other kind of sex is unholy and unclean before God, because it allows a person to be violated by another even if they consent to it.
For instance a married person can consent to sex with someone other than their spouse, but that sex is unclean and unholy because it is a violation of the person who gave his or her consent as well as a violation of the other person involved. Love is not what makes sex clean and holy. Sex becomes clean and holy when a person has fulfilled the three steps which result in marriage.
It is the marriage which provides the right and privilege of participating in sex which is meaningful to God. It is not how much you love someone that that gives you the right to enter in or to invite someone to enter it. It is not the engagement ring, that gives you the right to enter in or to invite someone to enter it. It is the marriage ceremony and commitment itself that gives you the right the right to enter in or to invite your spouse to enter in.
Two people of the same sex cannot be married in the eyes of God because the relationship itself is contrary to God’s nature of holiness. People turned to same sex attractions when they rejected the call of God on their lives and God allowed their sin to run wild in their minds. The relationship of two men together or two women together is considered unnatural. The sex that they have with each other, is never considered as being clean and holy. This does not mean they are not wonderful people. It does not mean they are not committed to each other. It does not mean they are the worst of sinners. It does mean, that relationship cannot symbolize the relationship that Christ has with the church or the relationship that God had with his people. Since God is holy, and God defines what holiness is, that which God deems unholy cannot be used to describe the essence and nature of God.
For our denomination to seek for ways to bless same sex unions is a denial of what God has said about marriage and what it represents. If today we bless same sex unions, then tomorrow should we bless teenage unions, or unions between consenting adults who do not want to get married, but want the church’s blessings on their activities. Of course not.
The desire between homosexuals can be a very strong one. But it is no stronger than the desire between singles who want to have sex. You may say but some singles can at least get married. But there are other singles who desire a marriage partner who may never get married. All of us are called to bring our sexual desires under the biblical authority of Jesus Christ. Marriage does not end our sexual attraction to other members of the opposite sex. We were born with those desires, and we must control them until we die, lest we destroy our marriages and our lives.
God has called us to lift up a standard. That standard continues to be that sex is God’s gift to us to be used in the context of marriage. Any other use of it is a violation of God’s word and a violation of the people involved. It is removed from being an act of worship, to being an act of defiance. The New Testament says it is one of the only sin that is committed against the body. That means it goes deeper inside of us than most sins, and has a much longer lasting affect on our relationship to the Lord. It is a sin that we as believers force God to participate in because the Holy Spirit dwells inside of us.
God has a better plan in mind for our lives when it comes to sex.
Marriage has fallen on such hard times, because people expected marriage to do something that it was not intended to do. Marriage is not a piece of paper to guarantee you a happy life from here on. Marriage is an opportunity to make a lifelong commitment to work together with another person to seek each other’s best interest in the relationship. Marriage is work at building a healthy relationship together. It shows that that the couple is involved in an exclusive relationship and commitment to each other, and everything else takes a secondary place in their lives.
Marriage is more than just a piece of paper from a legal point of view. Try dying and getting an inheritance from a live in boyfriend or girlfriend if there was no will. You will get nothing from the estate. Marriage is more than just a piece of paper from an emotional point of view. If the other person simply walks out of your life whom you were living with, there is no commitment you can claim to call the person back to.
Marriage is more than a piece of paper from a spiritual point of view. God blesses and looks favorable on the sexual activity of a married couple. God does not look favorable on the sexual activity of an unmarried couple no matter how long they have been together. An unmarried couple cannot represent the image of God which is at the core of why marriage was created in the first place.
The only safe sex, is sex inside a marriage in which two people are devoted to each other and committed to being together come what may. God created sex to build a greater unity in a couple and to use it to expand the human race. God made sex feel good so that the partners would continue to use it. God created sex to be a positive aspect of people’s lives. Once sex is taken outside of marriage, it becomes a means of exploitation of other people. I use your body, and you use mine. There is no commitment made, no acceptance of consequences, and no guarantees of being disease free.
People are left broken psychologically when they give up their virginity to the one they thought was going to be the one, only to discover the one has moved on to somebody else. Sex destroys peoples lives in a host of ways. From rape to abortion to disease and death, sex can be devastating. Once you have sex with someone, you take that experience to the next person that you have sex with. You also leave a portion of your self with that person. God never intended for us to scatter ourselves all over the place. What we do with our sexual lives indicate how we feel about God. Can we trust God to keep us sexually pure?
Marriage is considered to be holy in the presence of God. The sex within the marriage is holy in the presence of God. Marriage was created for the purpose of showing us the intimacy represented between God and his people. Marriage was God’s plan. God created humanity male and female for the express purpose of marriage being able to take place, and for us to demonstrate the image of God.
