Where On Earth Did Marriage Come From?
3/11/2004 Genesis 2:18-25 Ephesians 5:22-33
Suppose you brought you a shiny gold brand new Lexus. You’re looking real good going down the highway. But when you get home, you notice this funny sound when you stop. The next day you notice this funny sound every time you stop. Now you go to pick up the phone book to take the car in for someone to fix it, where are you going to start looking for repairs?
How many of you will look under Ford dealerships? How many of you will look under Frank’s One Stop Mechanic? How many of you are going to look under the Lexus dealer?
Something inside of you tells you, that if anybody ought to know how to fix a Lexus, it should be a Lexus dealer since the car came from them in the first place. How would you feel if the Lexus mechanic said, “Mr. Jones, there’s something wrong with this car. If I were you, I’d take it down to Pete’s garage.” You’d probably want to know, “does he specialize in Lexus’s?” If the mechanic said, “I don’t think so, but I heard he likes to come up with no ways of making cars run,” what is now going on in your head.
By this time you are highly upset. After all the money you spent, you want to talk to a manager. You want a Lexus dealer to fix it. You want it fixed right. You want it covered under the warranty. You know that car came from the Lexus corporation and they ought to know more about that car than anybody. If they cannot fix it, following their own instructions, then you want your money back.
Let me ask you this question, “where on earth did marriage come from?” “Where do you go when it’s not working?” “Who should decide the best way to keep it going and the parts needed to establish it.” Well, marriage did not come from anywhere on the earth. Marriage came down from heaven. If marriage needs to be changed, repaired or fixed, it should be down according to the owner’s original blueprint and design.
Marriage was God’s idea. God had created Adam, and gave Adam the job of working in the garden of Eden. In addition to working in the garden, God had given Adam the voluntary responsibility of leading a life of holiness by choosing to obey God. To our knowledge, the one commandment he had to prove his love for the Lord was to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Adam lived in what appeared to be a perfect world. It was God who knew that Adam was missing something. God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone, I will create a helper suitable for Him.” The feeling of loneliness may have pushed Adam to want to try out that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s desire for Adam was holiness. God wanted a helper suitable for Adam.
The Hebrew word for help is y’ezer. The word refers to God in psalm 70:5 when it says Oh Lord you are my help. In Psalm 115:9-11, God is called the help of Israel. Finally in psalm 121:1-2, “where does my help come from, My help comes from the Lord.”
So in order to have a suitable help mate, the help mate had to have the character of God, the help mate had to be a support in the way God supports us, and the help mate had to be a gift sent from God. So here are three qualifications for a marriage partner that you can ask: 1) will this person add to my holiness before God; 2) will this person support me in my times of crises and need, and 3) is the person a gift sent by God into my life. Now if you have someone that’s got you doing something contrary to the word of God, that person is not a gift sent by God nor is the person truly a help.
When God brings the man and the woman together, God does four things in Genesis 1:28. The first thing God does is blesses them. God is happy over them and gives us favor to them both. The second thing God does is tells them to be fruitful with their lives and multiply in numbers. The third thing God says to do is to fill the earth. The fourth thing they are to do is to rule over the earth.
Everything that God tells them to do is based on something that God sees coming into existence 1,000s of years later. When we reach the New Testament, and find Paul talking marriage between a husband and a wife, all of a sudden Paul says, “I’m talking about Christ and the church.” God gave us marriage to help us understand what Christ and the church is to be about. Christ gave his life, in order to make the church holy in God’s eyes.
Marriage is about two people dying to their own selfish nature in order to help both of them become more holy or more like Christ. If you’re not ready to die, you’re not ready for marriage. Women are told to submit to their husbands as the church does to Christ and to respect their husbands. Men are told, be willing to do whatever it takes to help to your wife become all that God wants her to become and to love their wives. In marriage Adam represented Christ and Eve represented his holy bride the church.
The same command that was given to Adam and Eve was given to Jesus and the church. God blessed Jesus and the church. Jesus and the church were both to be fruitful and multiply. The church was to fill the earth. And the church was given power over everything in the name of Jesus.
God made three observations about each marriage when Adam and Eve saw each other. God says a man shall leave his father and mother behind and be united to his wife. This indicates, the strongest bond in a man’s life is to be too his wife. If a man is not ready to say goodbye to everything except Christ, he’s not sold out to his wife to be.
The two are to cleave to each other or be united together in their relationship to each other and to God. Their commitment is to be a lifelong commitment. Finally they are to become one flesh. Their bodies are to be united together, out of the commitment they have previously made to each other before God. Now when you look at a man’s body and a woman’s body naked, you see that they were literally made to be joined together.
So God expected a number of things to come out of marriage. 1) Marriage is to help us live holy lives before God. In the New Testament, we find that if we are attracted to someone with whom we are involved, to keep from falling into sin we are to get married to allow a free expression of our sexual desires. But the expression is only allowed out of commitment to each other. Husbands and wives have a marital duty to fulfill each other’s sexual needs.
2) Marriage is to help us overcome our selfishness by applying the relationship of Christ to the church. You keep asking the question, what would Jesus have me do in this situation. A good marriage is made up of people constantly dying for Christ in order to accommodate this other person.
3) Marriage is to help us become all that we can be in the eyes of God. Marriage is to improve our spiritual lives for the better. We grow by investing in this other person. We marry not to get help but to become help to this other person. 4) Marriage is the way we to produce children and enjoy having sex in the process. Jesus made it clear, that marriage is to be taken very seriously, and provides only limited reasons for a divorce to be given.
When you read the word of God, you discover that God’s plan was always for one man and one woman to be married for life. Even though you have people with several wives in the Bible, nowhere does God say, this is a good thing and he never tells anyone to do it. In the New Testament. Jesus emphasizes again that one man is to be married to one woman.
We are living in a time in which marriage seems to be up for grabs. Some people are calling different things a great threat to the institution of marriage. The greatest threat to the institution of marriage, is when we as Christians take something that God has proclaimed as sacred and holy, and see it as nothing but a convenience as long as it suits us.
One of the prices of following Jesus Christ is not being loved by the world. Peter tells us, there is no escaping that if you follow Christ, at some point you will be persecuted. Today, if you state that beyond a shadow of doubt “that a marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman in the eyes of God and the state”, you will be called all kinds of names.
You’re a bigot, a homophobe, a narrow minded right wing religious nut, and you’re trying to impose your religious beliefs on others. So we keep our mouth shuts and betray Christ rather than standing up for what is the truth of God’s word. The media has us thinking the majority of people are in favor of gay marriages but they are not. Who is imposing their beliefs on whom?
Today, we are faced with the issue of homosexual, gay and lesbian marriages. They are claiming a constitutional right to marry. Because we don’t know the constitution, we assume because they said it, then it must be true and spelled out in the constitution. There is nothing in our constitution that says anything about the sexual choices that people make, and that others must accept those behaviors.
If homosexuals have the right to marry based on the constitution, then a woman has a constitutional right to marry two or more men, a father has a constitutional right to marry his daughter, and any citizen has a constitutional right to adultery and to sex with whomever he or she chooses so long as the person agrees. Our constitution was never designed our intended to give us rights of doing certain things in our bedrooms.
We are told that the gay rights battle is the same as the civil rights battle for us as African Americans. That simply is not true. From the moment I enter a room, you know that I am Black. That’s not true about a Gay person. You have to observe their intimate behavior to know they’re gay. During our struggle, we did not have the powers of media the crusading our cause. We were lynched by the hundreds and it did not make anybody’s newspapers.
We were not shown on tv shows or in movies as wonderful people with generous hearts to win over the hearts of racists.. We were buffoons, idiots and servants in the roles handed out. We couldn’t influence those making the films and pictures. Our average income was not in the middle and upper middle class.
We were down at the bottom of the poverty level. When we broke the laws, we were beaten, jailed, and hosed down with powerful water hoses. We didn’t have the major at city hall, breaking the law on our behalf and everybody smiling and cheering without a policemen in sight. We fought and died on plantations to be free. We were hunted like animals to be forced to return to slavery. We had our families split up and destroyed. We shed our own blood in the civil war to fight for our freedom.
God was on our side from the beginning. There’s not a verse anywhere about being black is a sin. We don’t do anything to be called Black. God simply made us Black and never told us to try to change it because He hade us just like He wanted us. I’m sorry, but the homosexual struggle has not been our struggle. As African Americans, we way greatly outnumber the gay population in this country, yet we no where come close to the political and economical power of this group.
The homosexual lobby is not simply wanting us to accept their behavior which most of us do. They are demanding that we approve of their behavior as normal and pleasing in God’s sight which is opposite the clear teaching of God’s word. Their lobbies are demanding that we give them a higher standard of holiness than we have for ourselves.
For instance when it comes to the Boy Scouts, they have gotten the United Way and numerous state and local groups to deny funding to the Scouts because the Boy Scouts have a policy of not allowing homosexual scout leaders. They say it’s wrong to think that homosexuals are more likely to molest boys than the rest of the population. I think they have missed the point in trying to frame the argument in terms of child molestation.
Now it would seem to me, that if homosexuals are born with a desire for other men, then they would be attracted to young men. I look at myself, and I am trying to live holy. But I would not think it appropriate for you to put me in charge of a group of girl scouts going on camping trips with them. Not only do I not think it is in appropriate, I would not put myself into that kind of a temptation. Nor would I ask some other man to do it. I know what dwells inside of me and inside of men according to the Bible.
Now why wouldn’t a homosexual feel the same way about being with the sex he’s attracted to. Unfortunately, many Christians have kept silent and still give their money to the United Way. I will not give the United Way a dime until they change this discriminatory policy. Every piece of mail that comes from the United Way goes to the trash can. May God bless the Boy Scouts for loving our youth enough to look out for their best interests.
Now we have the issue of gay marriages. When someone ask you as a Christian, what is your response? Well first we need to remember, that marriage was God’s idea, and not the governments. The only marriages which will have any standing are the ones that God approves. Let’s apply some of the principles that God has placed in his word. Can God bless a man and a man or a woman and a woman in the same way that he can bless a man and a woman? Will the character of God allow God to proclaim, “this relationship is good.” We do not look to our heads to reason this, we look to the word of God.
Look at Leviticus 18:22 Leviticus 18:22 " ’Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable. Look at Romans 1:26-27 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
The gay and lesbian movement has been around for thousands of years in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Never does God approve of the behavior. I Corinthians 6:9-10 states, homosexuals, adulterers, and all those having sex outside of marriage will not enter the kingdom of heaven. There is no way God can bless something which is contrary to God’s character.
For a man entering into a relationship with another man, or for a woman entering into a relationship with another woman, they cannot fulfill God’s plan of holiness for the relationship. Sin always pushes us further away from God. God does not send a man as a gift, a man to fall in love with, and God does not send a woman as a gift to a woman to fall in love with.
Two men cannot become one flesh in the way God designed their bodies, and neither can two women. They cannot fulfill God’s plan for marriage to fill the earth. A man who is desiring another man cannot be the model God desires in representing Christ in a marriage. A lesbian cannot represent the image of the church. Both instances would be to declare what is unholy to be holy. Marriage is not simply a piece of paper. God designed it as a spiritual institution that is to be a holy union representing the nature of Christ and the church.
We are living in a time in which people want to pick and choose which part of God and the Bible they want to apply to their lives. As a society, we should not object to gays and lesbians having the same benefits as unmarried men and women living together. But if gays have the right to medical benefits and other job benefits, then unmarried men and women should be entitled to the same benefits. But as the church of Jesus Christ, we have to reject both lifestyles as being contrary to the word of God and subject to God’s wrath.
God decided a long time ago that a marriage consisted of a woman and a man. Regardless of what happens with the constitutions and the amendments, the word of God is still going to remain the same. We are under the delusion, that simply loving another person and being committed to the person can make everything all right. Sin doesn’t stop being sin just because it’s been happening for 20 to 40 years. Sin does not stop being sin because our family members or good friends are doing it. Sin stop being sin, when we come to the place of repentance and say, God I’m sorry. Will you forgive me for what I’ve done.
God’s arms are just as big to embrace the homosexual person as they are to embrace those of us who struggle with lusts in our hearts, or adultery, or sex outside of marriage. Thank God there’s healing available for all of us, regardless of which sexual issues we might have. Redefining the word marriage does not change our predicament. We lose the battle for deliverance when we insist on God changing the standards of His word, in order for us to do what we want to do. Where on earth did marriage come from. It didn’t it came down from heaven.
What will we say when others ask us about gay marriages, or living together, or sleeping with our boyfriends or girlfriends. ? Will we speak the truth of God’s word? Will we seek to make sure we do not offend anyone? Will we simply brush it off and not take a stand. Every time we have communion, we should remember it cost Jesus his life to be identified with us. What price will we pay to be identified with Him.
Sermon Outline Pastor Rick
“Where On Earth Did
Marriage Come From”
3/11/2004 Gen 2:18-25 Ephesians 5:22-33
A. Hey Look Who’s Driving The Lexus
1. What’s That Funny Noise I Hear
2. Who Are You Going To Call
3. Why Go To The Lexus Dealer
4. Better Check Out Pete’s Garage
5. You’ve Got Expectations
B. Marriage An Idea From Another Place
1. Adam Working In The Garden
2. Proving His Love & Obedience
3. God Notices Something Not Good Genesis 2:18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
4. Let’s Hear It For The Word y’ezer
Psalm 70:5 Yet I am poor and needy;come quickly to me, O God.You are my help and my deliverer; O LORD, do not delay.
Psalm 115:9-11 O house of Israel, trust in the LORD-- he is their help and shield. 10O house of Aaron, trust in the LORD--he is their help and shield. 11You who fear him, trust in the LORD--he is their help and shield.
Psalm 121:1-2 I lift up my eyes to the hills--where does my help come from?
2My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
5. A Helper Has Characteristics
6. Holiness, Support, Gift From God
C. God’s Intentions With Marriage
1. The Blessing
2. Being Fruitful & Multiplying
3. Filling The Earth
4. Ruling The World
5. Representation Of Christ & Church
6. Marriage Involves Dying To Self
7. Christ/Church & Husbands/Wives
D. What Should Come Out Of Marriage
1.Willingness To Live More Holy
2. Overcoming Selfishness
3. Fulfilling God’s Plans
4. Children & Joys Of Sex
E. In The Original Plan
1. One Man, One Woman, One Life
2. All Of The Added Extra People
3. Jesus Agrees With The Father
4. Paying A Price To Agree With
Jesus
5. Get Ready For The Names
6. Who Has A Constitutional Right
To What
7. Is It Really Constitutional
8. Where Will It End
F. Can The Gay Rights Struggle Be The
Same As The African American Struggle
1. Can You Tell What I Am
2. Did You Control The Media
3. Looking At Income
4. Slaughtered Like Animals
5. Political & Economic Clout
H. Is One Group Holier Than The Other
1. Accept & Approve My Behavior
2. The Boy Scouts & Its Leaders
3. Is Temptation Temptation
4. Should Pastor Rick Lead The Girl
Scouts
5. Forget The United Way With Your
Money
I. Should We Rejoice With Gay Marriages
1. Run It Through The Test Of
God’s Plan
Leviticus 18:22 " ’Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.
Romans 1:26-27 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
2. God Cannot Deny His Character
3. Too Many Failed Tests
4. Does It Lead To Holiness
5. Do The Two Become One Flesh
6. Is The Image Of Christ & Church
Demonstrated
7. Does God Call It Holy
J. The Difference In Society & Church
1. Not A Call To Discriminate
2. Not A Call To Acceptance
3. Treating All Unmarried Couples
The Same
4. Taking A Stand For The Word
H. God Has Not Changed His Mind
1. Who Makes Up A Marriage
2. Amendments Change Little
3. Time Does Not Change Sin
I. God’s Arms Are Open For All
1. Examining Our Own Sex Issues
2. Choose The Healing
3. What Will You Say
4. Who Will You Identify With.
Ephes. 5:21-33
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- 30for we are members of his body. 31"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Men Join Us For Men Who Excel This Saturday At 10 AM
