OPENING
SENTENCE: When my sons were younger they spent hundreds of hours playing with Legos.
INTRODUCTION: We bought dozens of kits each with assembly instructions. The kits included pirate ships, castles, police and fire stations, exotic vacation places, spaceships, Star Wars themes and more. Each kit came with all the pieces needed to build it. However, in time, the pieces all got mixed together making assembly of the original kit difficult- you had to search through the piles with thousands of pieces to find the right ones. Eventually, the boys began to bypass the instructions altogether to make up their own creations that no longer resembled the picture on the instructions that came with the kit.
John Wyatt uses Legos as an analogy of our contemporary view of sex and gender. “If there is no God and man evolved as a cosmic accident, then there is no design whatsoever in sex, marriage or family. We are simply a collection of constituent parts that can be changed and adapted as we like. You can try to improve or upgrade to a different model- you can reprogram the machine because that’s who we are. In the words of an old Lego advertisement, “The only limitation is your own imagination.” The same observation could be made for marriage.
This view places supreme value on the individual and his choices and encapsulates the central mantra of our time. The roots of this profound individualism go back to the period of the Enlightenment 300 years ago where human reason took precedence over divine revelation. In this view truth and morality are subjective without any external authority to tell us how to behave. It's up to us to draw our own conclusions and live our own lives. As the boys from Boyzone put it in one of their songs: No matter what they tell you; no matter what they say; no matter what they teach you: what you believe is true. Or, as John Stuart Mill, the founding father of Western liberalism, wrote: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” Regarding marriage, this means individual autonomy supersedes the marital union.
One of the core values that comes out of this is that we must be authentic- to be true to ourselves and ourselves alone. Jonathan Grant has expressed it well: “Modern authenticity encourages us to create our own beliefs and morality, the only rule being that they must resonate with who we feel we really are. The worst thing we can do is to, conform to some moral code that is imposed on us from outside- by society, our parents, the church, or whoever else. It is deemed to be self-evident that any such imposition would undermine our unique identity . . . The authentic self believes that personal meaning must be found within ourselves or must resonate with our one-of-a-kind personality.
When applied to marriage this means that two self-autonomous people marry primarily for their individual self-fulfillment and must be true to themselves. If the marriage fails to enhance this end it serves no purpose and should end. Social researcher Andrew Walker summarizes the unanticipated result. “The deterioration of a marriage- and family-oriented culture has resulted in pain and suffering on a massive scale because it is a deterioration of God’s plan for justice and social harmony. Abuse, poverty, lack of education, and crime are just a few of the social ills caused by this failure.” This pain and suffering couples face is this positions strongest nemesis.
TRANTISITON SENTENCE: Biblical Christianity presents a very different view of sex and marriage- one that is incompatible with the Lego view.
TRANSITION: This view says that we are not a cosmic freak of nature formed through unguided, purposeless evolution. Marriage is like a wonderful painting by a loving God. It says that His beautiful masterpiece was corrupted through sin and that it is His desire to restore it to its original design. But, we first must know what that looks like, to find out what went wrong and, then participate in His plan to fix it. The biblical view says the two become one flesh. In this view, the social unit supersedes individual autonomy and self-fulfillment.
SAY WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO SAY: This morning I want us to look at what that original design looked like by considering the question, “What does Genesis tell us about why God created marriage?” We will see that marriage is a vital part of God’s mandate to populate the earth by providing loving, permanent marriage relationships that model the covenant relationship between Christ and His church.
I. God created marriage for procreation. (1:26-28)
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; 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.”
A. God is the most valuable thing in the universe and we bear His image. Colossians 1 tells us:
Regarding, the supremacy of Christ Paul tells us, “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.”
Nothing exists that is greater or has more value than God Himself. Now, think about it, we bear the image of this great, supremely valuable God who created all things. Nothing else in creation can make this claim. We have a greater capacity to bring glory to God than any other thing in creation. So, if God is sacred then the image we bear is also sacred.
B. Procreation is a sacred act in that it produces children who bear God’s image. That is why Christians take such a high view of sex. It is not primarily for our pleasure and exploitation. It should not be cheapened by promiscuity or used out of the context for which God intended it. Certainly, procreation is not the only reason for marriage but it is centrality should not be diminished. Sex must be more than mutual gratification where we use others as tools to bring us pleasure. It has a divine purpose bigger than self-gratification.
Andrew Walker speaks to saying, “In a culture that is overwhelmingly focused on the prosperity of adults, we should not be surprised that marriage has come to be understood primarily as a vehicle for the happiness of adults in which creating and raising children is an entirely separate discussion from the decision to marry. Of course, the ultimate manifestation of our new normal priorities is abortion, the elimination of a child before birth to preserve the preferred life script of adults. … “Today, whether inside the church or outside, culture has made marriage more about sexual ecstasy than viewing it as a key institution for the benefit of society.
C. The reason that marriage is between a man a woman is because only they can create a family with children.
With a new paradigm of sexuality wired by the Sexual Revolution in the 60’s, sex became radically more adult-centered, rather than child-centered. Sex and marriage became less about the needs of society and children and more about adult desires. And this has had profound implications for the current paradigm of marriage we live with today. Unquestionably, marriage has changed over the past five or six decades. And it’s had devastating effects on the social fabric of America. Sociologists— liberal and conservative— all recognize that the breakdown of the family has spelled disaster. Incarceration. Poverty. Education. Each of these is tied to intact marriages and whether children grow up in homes with a married mom and dad. On the whole, today’s marriage culture is missing the connection between marriage and social well-being.
ILLUSTRATE: A common argument against the view that marriage is primarily about childbearing and family is that some either do not want or cannot have children. But, that does not diminish the importance of procreation as a primary motive for marriage. Consider a sports analogy: The kind of cooperation that makes a group into a baseball team is largely aimed at winning games. Teammates develop and share their athletic skills in the way best suited for winning—for example, with extensive practice and good sportsmanship. But such development and sharing are possible and inherently valuable for teammates even when they do not win a game. Just so, marital cooperation in both sexual and domestic life is characteristically ordered to procreation and childrearing. This is not to imply that infertile couples are somehow “losers.” Infertility in no way reflects on a couple’s efforts or character. But there is no denying that countless infertile couples would be first to admit: Infertility is a loss, a regrettable lack.
APPLY: We have embraced a view that marriage is just a romance between best friends. Romance is certainly an important part of marriage, but it is much more than that. This misunderstanding of marriage prioritizes companionship and romance above all else. Yet is far, far more than that. It is a sacred bond that God created to fulfill His mandate to fill the earth.
What does Genesis tell us about why God created marriage?
II. God created marriage for companionship. (18-23)
18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. 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 then 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.”
A. For the first time, God says “It is not good” in regard to man’s aloneness. At each major milestone in creation, the God concludes, “And it was good.” Now we read, “It is not good that man should be alone”. Adam did not even fully realize his aloneness until he finished naming the animals and observing they all came in pairs- male and female. So where was his compliment? There was none and it was not good.
B. God creates woman out of man to be a suitable helper. To remedy the situation God created woman as a compliment to the man. Again I remind you of the imagery I spoke of some months ago. God puts man to sleep. Creates another being of him in the form woman and then reunites these two individual beings into a “one flesh relationship.” We see this in our biological makeup. All the functions and organs of our body are designed to operate independently with one exception. The sexual organs are designed to fulfill their function with a sexual compliment. Male and female are more than just two self-autonomous entities who exist independently for mutual self-gratification. They are designed by God to reunite the two into a one-flesh union. Sex is only part of that. Both give up their separate individual identities to form one. This union supersedes the individual.
C. With the creation of woman and marriage, God says, “It was very good.” In questioning God’s plan and design for marriage we question the very goodness of God. Modern society thinks it has a better plan. A plan that rejects Gods design and lets the individual make his own. If God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to His purposes for it. We do this in many other aspects of our lives.
ILLUSTRATE: “Think of buying a car: If you purchase a vehicle, a machine well beyond your own ability to create, you will certainly take up the owner’s manual and abide by what the designer says the car needs by way of treatment and maintenance. To ignore it would be to court disaster.”
APPLY: Plenty of people who do not acknowledge God or the Bible, yet who are experiencing happy marriages, are largely abiding by God’s intentions, whether they realize it or not. But it is far better if we are conscious of those intentions. And the place to discover them is in the writings of the Scripture.
What does Genesis tell us about why God created marriage?
III. God created marriage as a permanent covenant. (24)
24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
A. It is a sacred covenant constructed and affirmed by God himself. The well-known theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Marriage is more than your love for each other. . . . In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, and office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.”
As Bonhoeffer says, marriage is more than your love for each other. As Paul will later argue, the meaning of marriage is the display of the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his people.
B. It is a permanent covenant that makes us “one flesh.” This one flesh union is the heart of what marriage is. Jesus will later remind us that this union is divinely created and is not to be torn apart. God Himself joins the two into one. Piper: “When a couple speaks their vows, it is not a man or a woman or a pastor or parent who is the main actor—the main doer. God is. God joins a husband and a wife into a one-flesh union. God does that. The world does not know this. Which is one of the reasons why marriage is treated so casually.”
C. It is a public covenant given for the good of the individual, couple, children and society.
Traditional, exclusively monogamous marriage brings enormous benefits of all kinds to adults, and even more to children and society at large. We can even look beyond scientific research to make that point. There has never been a culture or a century that we know of in which marriage was not central to human life. And even though the number of married people has decreased in our Western culture, the percentage of people who hope to be married has not diminished at all- even among the millennials who are less likely to commit. (Keller-Popenoe)
There is a profound longing we feel for marriage. We hear it in Adam’s “At last!” cry at the sight of Eve, the indelible sense that locked within marriage is some inexpressible treasure. And that is right. According to Genesis 1 and 2, we were made for marriage, and marriage was made for us. The trouble is not within the institution of marriage but within ourselves. Until we can discover what it is within ourselves and God’s solution we cannot enjoy what God designed for our good.
D. It models the relationship between the church and Christ. (Eph. 5:31-32) “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
In this passage, we get our major first glimpse of God’s solution to make a marriage relationship work. The word mystery is used to refer to some wondrous, unlooked-for truth that God is revealing through his Spirit. So what is the secret of marriage? Paul immediately adds, “I am talking about Christ and the church.” That will be the quest of this series.
ILLUSTRATE: Tim Keller has said, “So, what do you need to make a marriage work? You need to know the secret, the gospel, and how it gives you both the power and pattern for your marriage. On the one hand, the experience of marriage will unveil the beauty and depths of the gospel to you. It will drive you further into reliance on it. On the other hand, a greater understanding of the gospel will help you experience deeper and deeper union with each other as the years go on.“
APPLY: The Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfillment and sacrifice but rather mutual fulfillment through mutual sacrifice. Jesus gave himself up; he died to himself to save us and make us his. Now we give ourselves up, we die to ourselves, first when we repent and believe the gospel, and later as we submit to his will day by day. Subordinating ourselves to him, however, is radically safe, because he has already shown that he was willing to go to hell and back for us. This banishes fears that loving surrender means loss of oneself.
SAY WHAT YOU HAVE SAID: This morning we looked at God’s original design for marriage by considering the question, “What does Genesis tell us about why God created marriage?” We saw that marriage is a vital part of God’s mandate to populate the earth by providing loving, permanent marriage relationships that model the covenant relationship between Christ and His church.
TIE INTO OPENING SENTENCE: We must choose between two conflicting views of sex and marriage. Either there is no God and marriage is like a Lego set in which each individual constructs his own views of marriage or there is a God who designed marriage for our good.
APPLY TO SPECIFIC AUDIENCE:
1. The modern notion that self-autonomy with the individual’s happiness and well-being as the supreme end is the primary cause for the broken state of marriage in our culture. Marriage is not about you. It is something much bigger and much better.
2. When we discover God’s original plan for marriage we can begin the process of living it out.
3. The ultimate purpose of marriage is to put the covenant relationship of Christ and his church on display. Only in understanding our own brokenness and God’s sacrificial grace can we understand how to view our own marriages.
HAYMAKER: Art restorers respect the work, and know that their job is to bring out the artist's original intention. They work at cleaning and restoring the vivid colors. They study the work and the painter so that they can carefully get it back to what it once was. They work so that people can see the original in all its glory. That is our quest for this series- to restore marriage to bring out God’s original intent so his wonderful covenant will us will be on display.
