Revisiting God’s Design For Marriage: Lego Vs. Painter Views Of M Series

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.”