God’s Plan for Marriage (Pt. 1)
Text: Ephesians 5:21-33
By: Ken McKinley
(Read Text)
A man and woman, both 60 years old, had just spent the day celebrating 40 years of marriage. They got home and were examining their gifts when all of a sudden an angel appeared and said, “Because you two have been such a loving couple all these years, the Lord is going to give each of you one wish.” The wife jumped up and said, “I want to travel around the world.” Poof! Airline tickets to London, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo appeared in her hand. Next it was the husbands turn, he scratched his head and then said, “I’d like to have a wife 30 years younger than me.” Poof! He was all of a sudden 90 years old.
Most of the time; people go into marriage with certain expectations and desires. Most people have the perfect picture of marriage in mind, but the reality is that we all marry imperfect people. The choice that people then have is to either destroy that false image we have, or destroy the other person we’ve married.
I once heard it said like this:
A woman marries a man expecting he will change, he doesn’t. A man marries a woman expecting that she won’t change… she does.
Our text this morning is the classic passage on marriage. It is the longest, most popular and most debated passage on marriage found in Scripture. For some wives, verse 22 is enough to get their blood boiling to the point that they question the inspiration of Scripture. For some husbands verse 25 must have been written in error and they want to throw it out of the Bible.
What I want to do is look at this passage over the next few Sundays and really unpack what it says and what it is teaching, and in order to do that we have to first look at the overall idea that Paul is trying to get across here. Now you might be sitting here today and saying to yourself, “Hey I’m not married, this doesn’t apply to me at all.” But let me just tell you, whether you’re married or not, the nature of marriage affects each and every one of us.
Now I want you to notice that in verse 31 Paul goes all the way back to Genesis 2:24. So we see that Paul is saying that we need to see marriage as rooted in creation. This was something that God instituted before the fall of mankind. By doing this Paul is showing us that marriage is rooted in the creation and that marriage reflects the covenant and that those who are married are complementary to one another. Way back in Genesis; everything that God had created was said to be good, but then God says, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Adam needed a companion, so God gave him the job of naming all the animals. That’s more than just saying, “dog, cat, bear, horse, elephant, etc…” naming implies knowledge of the animals’ character and personality. It would neat to know what Adam named all the animals, but also in the process of naming, Adam was made aware that each animal had a mate that was suited to it.
So Adam was then made to sleep and God took from Adam in order to create what was most suited to him.
When Adam first saw Eve he was struck with awe and wonder.
It’s “Woah – man!” Not “Woe – man.”
And I could preach just on this for the next year, but I don’t want to stray too far from our text. Paul ties marriage in with creation and what that means is that marriage is the first and foundational institution. Marriage existed before government; marriage existed before the church even. All aspects of society are just extensions of the home. Government isn’t anything more than the enlargement of the parental structure on a grand scale. Education is the formalizing of home instruction. Health care comes from the nurturing of parents. Every institution derived by man can be traced back to the home in some sense or fashion.
And Paul says that it is marriage that causes us to leave our father and mother and be joined to our spouse. A lot of problems stem from this. Often times a man might be looking for a wife who was just like his mother, or a woman might be looking for a husband who was just like her father. Maybe her dad was a successful businessman, but her husband is struggling, or maybe her dad was Mr. Fix-er-uper, and her husband is Tim the Tool-man Taylor, an accident waiting to happen. Or maybe a man’s mom was Suzy homemaker, but his wife is afraid of the washing machine.
This isn’t to say we can’t look for admirable traits, but if we get to comparing too much, we are getting into trouble.
But leaving a father and mother goes beyond just this. For some leaving a father and mother means setting aside the frustration and disappointment of their parents, instead of projecting them onto their spouse.
So leaving the father and mother is more than just leaving the house, it’s more than running home every time there is a problem and looking to daddy and mommy to make things better – though that is implied as well; but leaving also involves being aware of the tendency to cling to the models set for you by your parents, and being aware of our tendency to compare our spouses to them.
Paul says we must leave our father and mother and be joined… That word “joined” means to create a bond, to be glued together with supernatural super glue. It’s also a technical term for the Covenant. Turn with me to Deuteronomy 11:22-23 (Read). You see in verse 22 there where it says, “Hold fast to Him.” That’s the same meaning as being joined to your spouse.
The word “covenant” in Hebrew means to rip or tear. In the OT a covenant was established by cutting an animal into two pieces and walking between the two pieces. By doing this, the person was swearing an oath, saying – “May the same thing happen to me if I break my promise.”
Maybe marriages would last longer to day if we had the bride and groom walk between butchered animals instead of giving rings…
I want to tell you all a story I heard recently about a man named Glynn Wolfe. Glynn Wolfe died alone in Los Angeles in 1997. He was 88 years old. No one came to his funeral and the city had to burry him in an unmarked grave. That’s not so unusual for a place like Los Angeles, what is unique is that Glynn Wolfe was married 29 times. It is said that he had 19 children, 40 grand-children and 19 great grand children. But no one came to his funeral. He died alone. And what’s really bad about this is that Glynn Wolfe was an ordained Southern Baptist Minister.
He spent his entire adult life never fully committing to a wife, breaking covenant after covenant.
It makes you wonder why he was even in the ministry and what kind of people called him to be their pastor doesn’t it?
Paul says a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. When we look at this, it should make the verses before it a lot clearer. Paul’s talking about unity between the husband and wife. God took from Adam and then returned to Adam, and this shows us the complementary function in marriage.
Most of us want to know “who is supposed to do what,” and “when they are supposed to do it.” And we don’t ever take the time to consider the “why.” And I think this is where we fail a lot of times. We’ll get more into that next time.
Look at verse 32 (read)
Paul says, “This is a great mystery.”
First of all let me say that Paul isn’t throwing his hands into the air and saying, “We can’t understand this; so don’t even try.” The word “mystery” doesn’t mean that it’s too hard to figure out.
We’ve already talked about how the word “mystery” is used in this letter. It is something that was before, not completely understood, but now that Christ has come we see things much more clearly.
We see that God’s plan for marriage was and is a type of God’s plan for His Church. God likes to use visual aids. Baptism is a visible example of being united to Christ’s death, burial and resurrection; Communion, and Passover in the OT are visible teachings of Christ shedding His blood for our redemption, and marriage is the same thing, and God takes it just as seriously.
How we live out our marriage says a lot about how we view our being united to Christ. The unity that we as the Church have with Christ is actually lived out each and every day in our homes. Whether its lived out correctly or in-correctly. If we have unity in the home, then the chances of our walking in unity with the Lord are actually much better. Because they are both rooted in our understanding of our being one with Christ.
So how are we doing and what are are we basing this understand on?
I think it’s a real shame that after Charles Stanley divorced his wife in 2000, many Baptists decided it was ok if they got divorced too. They didn’t base this on the Bible, they based it on a pastor.
Paul says that he is speaking of Christ and the Church, in other words, this unity that we are to have in marriage is supposed to be the same as the unity that we as the Body have with Christ.
Our unity with Him is complete and unbreakable because of the Covenant. In Christ we have the Son who left His Father and was joined to us in an unbreakable union. It’s a union between Him and us; Christ the Head, and the Church – the Body.
Do we understand that marriage is supposed to be the same sort of union this morning?
Now we are going to talk more about this next time, and go even deeper in depth, so I hope that everyone is here as we dig deeper into God’s plan for marriage.
INVITAITON AND CLOSING
