God Made Marriage Good, Part 2 | What Makes Marriage So Good

Genesis 1-2

The Bible tells us that God made marriage good. He made marriage good. It’s a pre fall creation, pre fall institution. He made it good. Like everything God made, marriage in, is an expression of his infinite unbounded part of goodness. Marriage is an expression of his perfect wisdom of design, his perfect wisdom that it’ll be the conduit of goodness and blessing to us. Marriage is an expression of his amazing kindness, his amazing grace to us. God made marriage good and his goodness through marriage is evident, firstly, in the structure and the form of marriage.

The structure and the form of marriage is a manifestation of God’s goodness. Secondly though, this God’s goodness is evident in marriage, through marriage, and what that structure in form provides. That marriage is a context of and a conduit for God’s blessing and God’s goodness. So, marriage is good because it manifests the goodness of God in its structure and marriage is good because it manifests the goodness of God in what that structure provides, those two things.

We are, though, as we think about the structure of marriage and marriage as an institution. We are facing an uphill battle in trying to convince, this culture, that structure is good. That the structure provided by an institution is good.

Because the word out on the street today is if it’s an institution, let’s burn it down. If it’s an institution, it’s a systemic sphere of oppression and injustice and power dynamics. That’s what institutions are. So, torch em. Let’s burn them all down and start with something else. What, what that something else is they haven’t really put that together yet, but I can guarantee you it will look a lot like an institution. And then their children or grandchildren be burning that one down. So don’t follow that. But we are facing an uphill battle because, the fact that structure in an institution is a good thing given by God, that’s the thesis that we’re going to pursue here.

So, we see in Scripture, marriage is the first institution that God created. Marriage is the very first institution God created and he designed that institution with a certain structure and order to it. He intended that structure, that order, those boundaries of that institution to give form and shape to individual human beings. Individuals come into the institution. They come into the form and the structure, and they’re shaped and guided and pressed and directed forward to their blessing and to their good.

There are other institutions in society besides marriage, but marriage is the very first one. We think about government as an institution. We think about the workplace as a form of institution. The church, certainly an institution. But marriage is the very first one. According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, prior to all this woke stuff going into dictionaries, that’s my copy, it is safe at this point anyway. But an institution is “a well-established and structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture.” An institution is a “well-established structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of culture.”

That’s what marriage is. That’s what, God designed marriage to be. Marriage, the well established structured pattern of relationships and it is a fundamental part of culture. It is the essential part of culture. Marriage is indispensable to culture, which is why the dictionary entry cites marriage as a primary example of that, of what an institution is. Marriage, family, you could say that marriages is to family what the root, trunk and branches is to the fruit, but they are the same institution. They are the means of perpetuating the culture forward, producing new marriages and producing new families. Marriage, family it’s the first institution God created and it makes it the most primary, the most fundamental institution of humanity.

In January of 2020 right before the pandemic, so this book didn’t get probably the press or attention that it deserved, but it was Doctor Yuval Lu Levin who published a book called A Time to Build. Time to Build at the beginning of 2020 when, a lot of other people said no, it’s time to destroy. But he called his book A Time to Build and the subtitle is this “From Family and Community and To Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”

Interesting insightful book and in it, Doctor Levin refers to the family as quote “the first and more most formative of our institutions.” He defines institutions. Here’s his definition, institutions are quote, “the durable forms of our common life. The frameworks and structures of what we do together.” That’s his word. That’s his definition. By the word durable, he means the way an institution and here’s his quote, “the way an institution keeps its shape overtime, and so shapes the realm of life in which it operates.”

So, durability means shaping overtime. It’s durable, permanent you could say. By the word form he means, and here’s a quote, “form is a structure, a shape, a contour. It’s the shape of the whole. It’s the arrangement that speaks for its purpose, its logic, its function, and its meaning.” Very important to say durability and providing form. Form shapes the whole. It arranges the parts and it points to its purpose, logic, function and meaning. So, since institutions are durable, they are by their very nature formative and determinative.

Levin explains it this way. He says, “Institutions structure our perceptions and our interactions and as a result they structure us. They form our habits, our expectations, and ultimately our character by giving shape to our experience of life in society, institutions give shape to our place in the world, into our understanding of its contours. They are at once constraining and enabling the means by which we are socialized and so they are crucial intermediaries between our inner lives and our social lives.” End quote. Powerful institution. And you can see in an institution, in the certain, in the shape that it’s in today where people are redefining what marriage is or where marriages have been ripped asunder by divorce, shred by immorality.

That durability and permanence and forming and shaping effect of that institution, it still has an effect on the next generation. Kids growing up in single parent homes or not even knowing their parents. Grandparents raising them, some aunt or uncle raising them, whatever. That shapes the way they think about the world. Think about your own marriages where parents stay together. Think about how much of a head start your children just being by, being raised in a, in a home where two parents are together.

Which I know that any school teacher here will tell you that is not happening in the elementary ed and junior high and high school. They can’t find, they can basically gather into, on a one or two hands maybe an among dozens and dozens of kids. A number of people, maybe a half a dozen who have parents still together, living in the same home together. So, think about your marriages and staying together. In the power of that, just staying together. Shaping the kids and the grandkids for generations to come. Don’t minimize that. This is what marriage does. This is what family does to form our character.

Parents, we think about this in terms of discipline, that’s what it is. We’re rerouting our children and I’ll quickly add that without that rerouting and without that discipline, you know, in a family, in a marriage, in a society, society unravels. We’ve been witnessing that for decades now in this country, haven’t we?

Doctor Levin he’s Jewish. He assumes a Judeo-Christian perspective of fallen nature and a fallen world. Life in a fallen world. And that’s why he sees that institutions are a vital tool in a fallen world to shape character in a fallen world. He says quote, “the premise is that human beings are born as crooked creatures, prone to waywardness and sin.” that there, “We will therefore always require moral and social formation, and that such formation is what our institutions are for.” We agree with him on that, don’t we?

Life in a fallen world institutions are so vital for shaping fallen nature, fallen character to shape it, and build it up into, strengthening into a godly character, and a mature form. But what we read in Genesis chapter 1 and 2 tells us that God created the institution of marriage before the fall, not after. God created marriage as a formative institution, not for a world primarily with sin, but for a world without sin. He designed us to be mutable creatures. That is, we change. We live in a time space world where overtime we change either for the better or for the worse. We’re always in some state of flux. Biologically, that’s true. Skin cells are falling off of us and new skin cells are being formed all the time.

I don’t know, how what the time period is, but it’s true to say that the old is gone, the new has come in, in a matter of different a, you know, days, periods of how many skin cells fall off and how many are reformed an you’re not the man you were or the woman you were. We’re always changing and so God created us to be mutable, to be changing, to be growing, and that’s why he created this institution of marriage. It’s for the shaping of the individual and the formation and shaping of society before sin began.

In fact, God created two individual human beings along with the institution of marriage that would give them form and shape. And he created the individual and the institution. You could say, let’s put it this way, the individual and the society created on the same day, same day. Institutions are not an afterthought. Institutions are not an oops, gotta do something about this fallen humanity. Institution, society, individual in society together on the same day.

God spent the first four days of creation forming and shaping his creation, and he spent the next two days filling it. That became the pattern for mankind created in his image to follow in procreation. The exercise of Dominion in the world. So, the formative role of marriage and of the family. This is a good gift from God. It’s to mold the mutable creature, it’s to shape and mature that first couple, Adam and Eve, and to ensure blessing and flourishing for all their posterity. Marriage forms and shapes them as individuals, and then it fills the earth through procreation in the family.

What had been in assumed from the beginning of time about all this can no longer be assumed in the Western World. Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, all the countries and territories under the influence of the West. And so we might just say the whole world; pretty much. While marriage is still an institution, people are now prone to resist its role as a formative institution in their lives. The culture of our time sees marriage as a performative institution, not a formative institution. A performative institution. It’s a platform.

Marriage is a platform, like all other institutions have become. It’s a platform for self-expression. Not just marriage in the family, but in schools, the workplace, the church, the government. There’s no institution that hasn’t been touched by this new phenomenon. No institution that has not become a stage for the expressive individual to show the world their authentic inner selves. Get on the big stage and to show what they are, what they think they are on the inside, what they feel or intuit that they are on the inside. That’s got to be shown in all the institutions of life.

Again, it’s Yuval Levin who writes, quote “We have moved, roughly speaking, from thinking of institutions as molds that shape people’s character and habits, toward seeing them as platforms that allow people to be themselves and to display themselves before a wider world.” End quote. This is why you can see in so many romantic stories or romantic comedies that the story is all about the romance. It’s about the buildup and bringing a couple together, and it culminates doesn’t it, with the wedding?

That wedding is the, the thing that they spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars on because that is the performative stage to present this couple to the world and the story ends there; not much interest in the actual reality of married life. Not much interest in the hard work that goes into investment of the man into the woman and the woman into the man, of the parents into the children and into the family. Not much interest in the way the institution of marriage and family squeezes the, the soul, squeezes the heart and outcomes pride and self-centeredness.

And so, marriage as an institution is meant to squeeze the pride and self-centeredness out of the couple, it’s to form and shape and mold them into models of sacrifice, but not begrudging sacrifice, cheerful sacrifice, joyful sacrifice, grateful desire to give to another. Any attention that modern stories give to married life is usually negative, isn’t it? The oppressive way that it stifles individual liberty, individual freedom, turns the man into a monkey and the woman into a tyrant. It’s not true on either side. It’s total perversion.

This is the world of the Enlightenment liberalism gone to seed. Liberating the individual in every institution then serves the sovereignty of the sovereign self. The shift, we know it hasn’t happened suddenly. It hasn’t happened in a sudden way so that any of us would notice along the way. It’s actually this changing view of our institutions has been a gradual thing. It’s been happening over hundreds and hundreds of years. Carl Trueman traces the path of this in, if you’d like to get it, I highly recommend it, it’s called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

And in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self Carl Trueman says this, “Beginning in the 18th century with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he regarded the community that is institutions as a hindrance to the full expression of the authentic individual. A point picked up and given artistic expression by the Romantics.” So, the romantic poets, Wordsworth and others. Took his ideas and they romanticized it in poetry, and so throughout most of human history the commitment of the individual according to what Trueman says here, “was outwardly directed to those communal beliefs, practices, and institutions that were bigger than the individual and in which the individual found meaning.”

Truman continues with this, “In the world of psychological man, however, the commitment is first and foremost to the self and is inwardly directed. Thus, the order is reversed. Outward institutions become, in effect, the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being.” He goes on to say this, “In fact I might press this point further, institutions cease to be places for the formation of individuals via their schooling in the various practices and disciplines that allow them to make their place in society, and instead they become platforms for performance. Where individuals are allowed to be their authentic selves, precisely because they are able to give expression to who they are inside. For such selves in such a world, institutions such as schools and churches,” and I’ll just add in here, he wouldn’t mind, marriage and family as well. “Institutions, they are places where one goes to perform, not to be formed, or perhaps better where one goes to be formed by performing.” End quote.

Trueman traces this development over the past few centuries of Western thought, from Rousseau to the romantic poets, to the social and political philosophers, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin all the way to Sigmund Freud, who is essentially about the self, and then finally to post modernists like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, these men represent the philosophies that have come to shape the culture of the West. A culture that has displaced Christianity and for all those men.

For all those thinkers, and poets, and philosophers, their hostility to Christianity is the logical consequence of their enlightenment self-liberation thinking, it sees institutions as interfering with, stifling individual freedom. So, for them, this means liberation from religion, liberation from the church, liberation from God, liberation from traditional morality. For all of them Christian marriage is, for all of them, the most oppressive and repressive institution of all.

Because it does violence to individual self-expression by forcing each person to conform to the other. That’s exactly what marriage is supposed to do. Force us into conformity, shape us, mold us, squeeze us, and the Enlightenment philosophers in all their progeny say, no. That’s why when you see little, let’s just redefine human being, marriage, those kind of things. The idea is not to get more participants into marriage. We heard that during the whole gay marriage debate right, 10, 15 years ago?

We just, we just want, we just want everybody to enjoy this expression of marriage like you do. It’s not true. The end goal is the abolishment of Christian marriage. It’s the destruction of it, the destruction of the family, that’s the end goal. Why? Because they hate God because the self has become God, that’s what they serve. So today, psychological man, psychological woman, these expressive individuals, they see institutions as stages for their own personal performance.

The modern self feels no sense of accountability or submission to basic God given institutions, but instead pursues a project of redefining and reconstituting the institutions so they can reach their full potential. Family, marriage, even the concept of male and female all of that has to conform to this tyranny of the inner ever changing highly psychologized concept of the self.

Two men raising children, two women raising children, transgendered people having babies, whatever identity they feel on the inside, however their feelings direct them. The psychological self is the true self, that inner self, that inner sense of identity is what they intend to make the outside world conform with. They restart, they start the reconstruction with their biological self, and then they demand that every institution follow suit and accept them as they really are. This is where we find ourselves today.

We’re all aware of this, whether you’ve kind of taken the time to articulate it in your own mind or read about it for yourself, you know this is truth about what we’re seeing today. A world of radical deconstruction, a culture bent on destroying the very foundations of culture. Radical redefinition of marriage and family tears apart the fabric not only of society, but of humanity itself and because marriage retains its power as a formative institution, it shapes and forms the culture of tomorrow by what it passes on today.

That’s happening. It’s been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years. You may think that, well that’s the world, but like I said, it’s in all of us as well. We grew up living and breathing and having our being in this world. We breathe in and out the culture that we live in. We bring that into the church. We don’t check it at the door. It’s in us. We have to expose it. We have to come to terms with the fact that we, like the rest of the world, want to be happy and not always holy.

As Christians, though, we don’t want that. We want happiness in God’s way, in God’s design, according to his model, according to his design, we want happiness through holiness. We want God. We want His holiness. We want his truth. We want him to shape us and change us. So that’s the introduction. Pass through that. What’s the way forward? Is there hope for marriage? Is there hope for society? Is there hope for our marriages?

I’ll just say that the restoration of health to the culture, health to the society, really depends on it. This is where the battle is. Right here in the home. That’ll happen for us as individuals, happen for us as a church, extending out into society if we start with the operating presupposition and we bar all other presuppositions. We start with this presupposition that God made marriage good.