Where On Earth Did Marriage Come From?

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.