Is the culture shaping the Biblical view of marriage?

When you start doing this sort of analysis, you compare the marriage rates and divorce rates over the last 50 years. Compare what’s happening in the educational systems. When I was in high school it is was hard to find a couple that would talk openly about the fact they were living together. Now they do talk about it very openly. There’s no shame in anything anywhere.

When I was a teenager in the 70’s there was an assumption that self-sacrifice was a good thing. Now self-promotion and self-identification issues are far more central to pursuing the public good. What about social mores, the amount of sexual abuse, the amount of hidden abuse in the home, and the amount of biblical illiteracy.

In a postmodern world, it’s harder and harder for men and women (especially men) to make commitments. There is something intrinsic to a good marriage that works on your selfishness, because in a good marriage, you really are seeking the other’s good. So, a good marriage trains you to be less selfish.

At the same time, it’s very important not to make single people second-class citizens. In some churches, unless you’re part of a family, you’re just second-class. That’s not right either.

So delight in your singleness; it’s a gracious gift from God. Delight in your marriage; it’s a gracious gift from God. There is a guarantee whichever gift you’ve got, there are going to be days when you’re going to wish it were the other one. That’s part of our brokenness and our sinfulness too. It’s just the way it is, the grass on the other side of the fence looking greener, and all the rest. It’s part of our immaturity, our selfishness.

Staying Married is Not about Staying in Love

Staying in love isn’t the first task of marriage. It is a happy overflow of covenant-keeping for Christ’s sake.

Marriage is like a metaphor or an image or a picture or a parable or a model that stands for something more than a man and a woman becoming one flesh. It stands for the relationship between Christ and the church. That’s the deepest meaning of marriage. It’s meant to be a living drama of how Christ and the church relate to each other.

There is literature published where serious anthropologists and experts in world religions will argue that they are not prepared to say that some tribe in a remote jungle that burns the firstborn child to death is wrong in what it’s doing, because that might be very meaningful for them.

It’s everywhere now, that sort of view is not shocking. So that where there is moral indignation, If you come back and say, Well, maybe Hitler was right from his perspective too. He had his own worldview.

The best of them (someone like David Tracy) will say, “No. You have to face the fact that the burden of Western culture now is liberally orientated sociologically, egalitarian, fundamentally committed to a secular worldview, and so on. Those are the goods and the givens in our Western culture.

For goodness’ sake, why is this going on? You’ve just let man make up some arbitrary goods and bads. But that’s the way it is in or Western culture. It is a frightening world.

A Biblical Marriage

Marriage is so important that it is presented as a type, a model, of the relationship between God and Israel. The relationship between God and Israel is sometimes said in the Old Testament to be a kind of marriage. This is picked up in the New Testament as a kind of reflection of the relationship between Christ and his church.

And the most ultimate thing we can say about marriage is that it is the display of God. The reason it is the display of God is that in Christ, God has made a new covenant with his people. In it he promises to forgive and justify and glorify all who turn to him from sin and receive Christ as the Savior and Lord and supreme Treasure of their lives. Marriage between a man and a woman was designed from the beginning to be a reflection and display of that covenant relationship.

That’s why Paul quotes Genesis 2:24, “A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” and then says, “This mystery is profound, it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31–32). Leaving parents and holding fast to a wife, forming a new one-flesh union, is meant from the beginning to display this new covenant—Christ’s leaving his Father and taking the church as his bride, at the cost of his life, and holding fast to her in a one-spirit union forever (1 Corinthians 6:17).

Staying married is not the same as staying in love.

It’s about covenant-keeping. If a spouse falls in love with another person, one profoundly legitimate response from the grieved spouse and from the church is, “So what! Keep your covenant.”

This is why the doctrine of justification is at the very heart of what makes marriage work. It creates peace with God vertically, in spite of our sin. And when experienced horizontally, it creates shame-free peace between an imperfect man and an imperfect woman.

If you want to understand God’s meaning for marriage, you have to grasp that we are dealing with a copy and an original, a metaphor and a reality, a parable and a truth. And the original, the reality, the truth is God’s marriage to his people, or Christ’s marriage to the church.

The copy, the metaphor, the parable is a husband’s marriage to his wife. Geoffrey Bromiley says, “As God made man in His own image, so He made earthly marriage in the image of His own eternal marriage with His people”

One of the things to learn from this mystery is the roles of husband and wife in marriage. One of Paul’s points in this passage is that the roles of husband and wife in marriage are not arbitrarily assigned and they are not reversible without obscuring God’s purpose for marriage.

The roles of husband and wife are rooted in the distinctive roles of Christ and his church. God means (by marriage) to say something about his Son and his church by the way husbands and wives relate to each other.

Some crucial passages, Genesis 1:26–28.

27 And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

“Let us make” How much literature is published on that one. Is this a reference to the three persons of the Holy Trinity? In dogmatics, across the history of the church, this has been the most common way of taking the expression by far.

A big question is, what the first readers of Genesis would’ve thought when they read, “Let us make man”.

Male and female he created them.

God made human beings, into kinds, two distinguishable kinds. He didn’t make two parties that were exactly the same. He made them male and female. He did not make them in a way where they could choose what they wanted to be.

This does not mean, because we’re made in the image of God and God made us male and female, that God himself is male and female, God is Spirit.

The language does suggest that in the beginning there was perfect harmony between these mutually complementary human beings as perfect as the harmony in God. Paul, makes some kind of connection along those lines in 1 Corinthians 11.

This is given to both men and women, male and female. Yet there is some difference here. God made us two complementary persons. Our gender is inseparable from who we are. Gender in the Scripture is not just for procreating (be fruitful and increase) though it is not less than that. The very expression suggests that we are maximally reflecting God this way.

The male is created first and God puts him into the garden.

There’s a certain kind of temporal priority in this passage that you simply cannot ignore.

God gives to the man, to Adam directly, the task of working and caring for the garden, and also the prohibition of 2:17. All of this in the sequencing of the account in chapter 2 is before the woman appears on the scene.

After declaring everything that he’s made good, up to now, God now declares something is not good. Verse 18. What is not good is the man is alone. This then leads, in due course, to the creation of the woman.

The naming of the animals that follows before the creation of the woman inevitably results in two conclusions: the naming of them is a power thing. It’s not just that he’s got the imagination to think of funny syllables. It’s an authority emphasis. He rules.

The creation of the woman was from man.

She is called wo-man, which establishes her as part of him, from him, yet together making a complementary whole. The first human words in the Bible are in 2:23. “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”

Full of delight, full of grateful recognition for the sameness and the difference to make a union that comes to be called marriage. It was not possible to draw this woman from the beasts, nor is she is a fresh creation. She is made from him, a fellow human, but with such difference in fact that now, complementarily, they become one flesh.

She was created to be a “helper” suitable for him.

There are mounds of literature just on the meaning of the word. Yet after you’ve pointed out the times in which the Bible can refer to God as helper, I don’t think what is meant here can be determined by word study alone.

The narrative flow unavoidably creates a certain kind of relationship. She is not called into existence to help animals. She’s called into existence to help the man.

It is not said that he is called into existence to help her, because when he is called into existence, she does not yet exist. This does not speak any kind of ontological inferiority, but it unavoidably presupposes a distinction in roles. You can not avoid this is you use a fair-minded exegesis.

The marriage thus formed is not the joining of two identical persons but almost the reunion of two slightly different halves coming together to form one flesh.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.”

He approaches the woman, but the text already establishes that he himself is a creature.

Why is the woman approached and tricked first?

What’s going on here is pretty clear.

What you have is a complete reversal of God’s created order.

It’s no longer man submitting himself to God and the woman submitting herself to man by helping him, together having authority over the creatures.

All is reversed, the woman listens to the creature, the man listens to the woman, neither listens to God. That’s what’s going on. There are hints all through the text that that’s what’s going on.

That’s why you get verse 17. “To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, not to eat.

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It is true that that’s going to be applied to the woman too.

Women die at the same sort of rate, more or less. But the curse is expressed on the man. This, literarily, is tied to chapter 2:17, where the prohibition and the promise of the curse is tied to Adam before the woman is even there. It’s this sequencing of things in chapter 2 that establishes Adam as the kind of head of the race or the representative of the race.

Marriage Roles

Ephesians 5:22 Wives, be in subjection unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, being himself the saviour of the body. 24But as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives also be to their husbands in everything.

When sin entered the world, it ruined the harmony of marriage, NOT because it brought headship and submission into existence, but because it twisted man’s humble, loving headship into hostile domination in some men and lazy indifference in others. And it twisted woman’s intelligent, willing submission into manipulative obedience in some women and brazen insubordination in others. Sin didn’t create headship and submission; it ruined them and distorted them and made them ugly and destructive.

The meaning of kefάli (or head) so much ink has been spilled on the word meaning. The two dominant theories are that it means source, like the head of the river is a spring, or something like that, or authority over, but almost everybody in the field today, takes it to mean authority.

Almost everybody who is linguistically trained and who has actually looked at the evidence right across the whole theological spectrum recognizes that when kefάli (head) is used in the singular to mean something other than the organ that wobbles on the top of my neck (when it’s used metaphorically) it has the overtone of authority somewhere in the context, usually very strongly.

Headship is not a right to control or to abuse or to neglect. (Christ’s sacrifice is the pattern.) Rather, it’s the responsibility to love like Christ in leading and protecting and providing for your wife and family. And submission is not slavish or coerced or cowering. That’s not the way Christ wants the church to respond to his leadership and protection and provision. He wants the submission of the church to be free and willing and glad and refining and strengthening.

Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christ-like, servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home.

Today, in our time, this discussion has got so weird that one doesn’t know what to do with it. When you come to Ephesians 5, where we’re told that wives are to submit to their husbands as Christ to the church, this has prompted one author, Alan Padgett, to write a book entitled As Christ Submits to the Church.

His argument is since we’re all supposed to submit to one another (submit to one another reciprocally is what is presupposed) then this must mean that in some sense, the church submits to Christ and Christ submits to the church. Can you see Christ submitting his role of leadership to us, Harmony Community Church, that is crazy.

Ephesians 5:21. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. The verb “to submit” (hypotassomai) invariably in the New Testament suggests submission in some ordered array. It’s in a military hierarchy, or it’s in a master/servant relationship, or something of that sort of thing. It always suggests ordered array.

Now we apply this to wives and husbands. The wives are mentioned first, It presupposes that they are morally responsible agents themselves. Why then is she supposed to submit to her husband? What’s the reason given? Simply because he is her head, as Christ is the church’s head. That’s the only reason given.

Submission is the divine calling of a wife to honor and affirm her husband’s leadership and help carry it through according to her gifts.

When we are told, “so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything,” don’t misconstrue this. This does not mean every decision a husband makes is always good and wise and godly and just, and therefore, right across the board without exception she must submit in everything. I don’t think that’s quite the point. We are still to use some common sense Jesus gives us.

 

 

Just as the church in submitting to Christ, it is supposed to submit to Christ right across the board, there’s no no-go area. There’s no place where you say no to Jesus. “You can be Lord everywhere else but not here.” There’s no no-go area here either, but in everything, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I think we find this difficult not because the text is so difficult but because we don’t like it. Before we come to the husbands, we still have to acknowledge this is an argument by analogy. Whenever you have an analogy, you don’t have an identity. After all, the parallel between Christ and the church on the one hand and husbands and wives on the other, is not perfect in every respect. It is an analogical argument.

There are a lot of differences, Christ is perfect. Husbands are not.

Meanwhile, the husbands for their part are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. That’s a pretty miserably high standard, speaking as a husband. What does that mean?

Just as it’s possible out of the sweep of the Bible to talk about what it means for the woman to submit to her husband if she is to submit as the church submits to Christ, Joyfully, Completely. Over the whole range of things. It is to be done in everything, Without begrudging things, without scoring points, being thankful and respectful.

You can put words to all of these things from the whole sweep of the way the church is supposed to submit to Christ. How does it work the other way? Christ loved the church with utmost self-sacrifice for her good, and that’s how husbands are to love their wives (with utmost self-sacrifice for their good).

If this is true, then the redemption we anticipate with the coming of Christ is not the dismantling of the original, created order of loving headship and willing submission, but a recovery of it from the ravages of sin. And that’s exactly what we find in Ephesians 5:21–33. Wives, let your fallen submission be redeemed by modeling it after God’s intention for the church! Husbands, let your fallen headship be redeemed by modeling it after God’s intention for Christ!