God Made Marriage Good, Part 1 | What Makes Marriage So Good

Genesis 1-2

This first message has an extended introduction to establish the not just this message, but the entire series. So if you think my introduction is going a bit too long and you wonder when I’m going to get into the text of Scripture, just be patient. That’s by design. We’re going to get there, okay. As we present the positive case for marriage, what the Bible has to say about marriage, I would guess that in a group of this size the subject of marriage brings different thoughts to mind, raises different memories for each and every person, evokes a range of sometimes contradictory emotions and feelings.

There’s one has said “marriage can be a little slice of heaven on earth and also a living hell at times.” We all understand that. And there are marriages that are strong and healthy and mature and filled with great, great joy. Many marriages like that, that I have seen and learned from and rejoiced in. And my own marriage just continues to grow in joy and satisfaction and contentment, in appreciation for my dear wife and what God has given me in marriage and my family.

There are others who don’t have the, the same sense of rejoicing in marriage. Maybe at the start of a marriage, and they’re still dealing with those issues of sinful selfishness and those prickly things that they’ve got to get through and work through and it could be a very discouraging time.

Sometimes there’s a, there’s a marriage when one or both of the married partners are corrupt and negatively affect the marriage. I think it’s also safe to say, safe to assume, that everyone and especially in a Christian assembly like this one. Everyone knows that they ought to think really well of marriage. We know from Genesis that God made marriage in creation week and he called it good, and so we ought to think it’s good too. No matter what our lived-out experience is, we know from the New Testament that marriage is a picture of Christ and his church. And so, we know that marriage is good and that marriage is a blessing from God.

We also know at the same time that there can be a gap and sometimes a very wide gap, between what the Bible teaches with great depth, precision, theological depth. There can be a, a difference between what the Bible teaches, what the Bible pictures in idyllic even lofty poetic language. I mean, think Song of Songs. There can be a gap between the biblical portrayal of marriage and its ideal and the reality that many experience in their own homes.

Some married people can feel discouraged about their marriages when they compare what the Bible says with what they experience. When they see what the Bible teaches, and then they realize that what the Bible teaches, and then what they see in their own marriage, it doesn’t seem to approximate in their own marriage what the Bible teaches very well.

Some, some people the harder they try, the more difficult it becomes for them. Let’s say a word here too about unmarried people. There are unmarried people that, whenever a church kicks off a series on marriage, they can feel left out. Like okay time for me to doodle during this time of ah, six weeks of marriage series or whatever. Sometimes they can even feel more discouraged that they’re left out of this great conversation about marriage. Sometimes they feel like they’re missing out on God’s best if they’re not married. And that’s not true, by the way.

If you just look at your Bible, you can see there’s some great Christians we’re not married like, the apostle Paul. Was not married, seem to have a very rich full life. And look at the Lord Jesus Christ himself. He was not married. He did the full will of God. He rejoiced in his days. Even his days that on Earth ended in crucifixion and then he came through in triumph as we like to speak about so much here. We realize that Paul, the Lord Jesus Christ, they were not married.

And so, for those of you who are here and you’re not married, hang in there. There is a lot, a lot, a lot to learn on the subject of marriage, and there’s a lot that pertains to you in the subject of marriage as well because marriage as an institution, effects all of society. So, think about where you fit into that. Whether you are unmarried and been unmarried all your life, or whether you’re divorced or widowed or whatever the case may be. If you’re not married, I intend to preach a message for you at the end of the series.

So, I’m preaching at to the end of the series so you can’t check out at the beginning of the series. You know stick around. Nevertheless, lest we be hasty in accusing the Bible of some kind of idealism about marriage. But it really doesn’t get, the Bible doesn’t get marriage in a sinful world. They don’t get my marriage. In fact, there’s commands in scripture, I know, but there’s an asterisk next to them, invisible to the common reader. But I see it, that my marriage and my situation is unique and that doesn’t apply to me, because it’s just not dealing with reality.

Lest we be hasty in accusing the Bible of that, that it’s idealistic, just a few moments of reflection and it’s going to force us to admit that the Bible is very aware of life in a sinful world. And the Bible is also very honest about the reality of marriage. God portrays marriage throughout the scripture as it really is, and we really need to look no further than the marriage of Abraham and Sarah.

Right at the beginning, Abraham is the father of faith. The father of faith. He’s bound to have a good and exemplary marriage for us all to follow right? Caution you about making a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive texts of scripture when you read about Abraham and Sarah right. Abraham played the coward, in his marriage to Sarah. Remember he feared for his life when entering into foreign lands and he hid the fact that Sarah was more than just his sister related to him through parentage.

She was actually his wife, and that’s the predominant preeminent relationship that she has to him and yet he downplayed that, he hid it. He asked her to hide it. He did this twice. He first deceived Pharaoh and then Abimelech and Sarah was brought into these harems of these powerful kings, and it was only by divine intervention that she was spared from being used that way. No thanks to Abraham. No thanks to his non-existent sense of husbandly protection, hey man, where do spine go? Where did his father of faith, where did your trust in God go?

Sarah’s no jewel either. She failed to believe God’s promise to her husband that she herself in her own body would bear the son of promise and she’d do that in her old age. And so, failing to believe she tried to fulfill the promise in a fleshly way, by giving her handmaid Hagar to her husband. Yeah, that’s going to turn out well. When the inevitable happened, Hagar became pregnant, gave birth to a son, Sarah was looked at by Hagar with contempt. The scripture says when that caused the conflict that you could have predicted Sarah said to Abraham, “You did this.” What? Wait a second. You’re responsible for my suffering, Abraham. Abrahams’ like wait a minute, whaaaat, that was your idea. You’re not going to get off Abraham on a technicality, trust me. He’s responsible, isn’t he? He’s responsible.

The marital sins of Abraham and Sarah extend from the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve. We’ll get into this another message, but there’s a role reversal between Adam and Eve. And it kind of embeds itself into our sinful reality of what we’re born into. Men being like their father Adam, in their natural state, and women like their mother Eve, in their natural state and conflict ensues. Should we be surprised? The Bible is very honest with these things.

We understand the imputation of Adam’s sin to all his progeny, and that’s us. And so, like their ancestors, the sins of Abraham and Sarah, just like Adam and Eve’s sin had consequences on the entire human race, the sins of Abraham and Sarah had consequences as well. Ishmael and his Arabic descendants, Isaac and his Jewish descendants, that conflict continues to this very day to define the Middle East.

Every government of the Earth, their policies, their foreign policies and their military thinking has to think about that conflict in the Middle East, that goes all the way back to Abraham and Sarah. So, when we see what the Bible teaches about marriage. When we learn about the doctrine of marriage, we can rejoice in the Bible’s doctrine of marriage, and we can say amen when we see how the Bible describes actual marriages. How it portrays the marriages of sinful people. We have to look at that and then look at ourselves and admit, oh me.

Sometimes married people wonder if they can survive their marriages. Dorothy Patterson, she’s the wife of the famous Southern Baptist theologian and statesman Paige Patterson and he served the SBC as president for a, a term, also two of its seminaries. He served as president of two Southern Baptist Seminaries, and his wife Dorothy was quite a known character, she was quite a character too, but she was quite a known lady for her ministry to women. She had a soft heart toward women and she was once, once interviewed at an event for seminary wives.

These are women who are married to men who are training for the ministry and that always has a unique set of challenges for the wives and families of seminary men. So Mrs. Patterson had a soft spot in her heart for these women. And she was asked by one of these young seminary wives, “Mrs. Patterson, in all of your years of marriage to Doctor Patterson, did you ever consider divorce?” Without hesitation she said, “Divorce? No never, now murder.” We laugh at that because we know kind of what she means, right?

Marriage is this intimate, intimate relationship. It’s this institution that doesn’t feel institutionish, it’s so close and personal and relational. Relationship with another human being that goes really deep. It has a spiritual significance of the communication of two minds in close connection and that’s portrayed in the intimacy of the body as well that is exclusive to that man, and that one man and that woman for the whole life. Because of that intimacy, marriage involves the risk of hurt. It’s about bringing another person of the opposite sex, someone that we really do fail to understand well. Bringing that person close to us, in underneath the armor. Where words can penetrate the heart. Where actions and inactions can hurt very deeply, leave lasting scars, and yet marriage remains. It is a durable institution.

Marriage is an arrangement that no matter the difficulty, it seems, no matter the pain that people endure, we simply as a human race, cannot refuse to enter into it. We keep marrying and giving in marriage, don’t we? We’re drawn to marriage. We’re inclined to it. We’re eager to enter into marriage, and I realize that there are people here and there who think the grass is greener outside of marriage. They imagine life would be far easier if they’d never been married at all, but I highly doubt that.

Among those who get divorced, many don’t stay single for very long, but they tend to remarry. It would seem that in spite of any difficulty, in spite of what can be great relational pain and emotional hurt, there are very few who want to forever get out of marriage. For many, marriage, even Christian marriage, especially as the husband and wife grow in Christian maturity, marriage is really a little slice of heaven on earth. For others though, absent the maturity or absent faith in Christ altogether, marriage can be quite the opposite of that. One major mark of immaturity is, among those who enter into marriage or try to practice marriage with a false set of expectations.

I see this all the time as the source of so much disharmony and strife, disunity, fighting, arguing, all the rest, false expectations. And that’s really what I want to do in this opening message. I want to disabuse you of false expectations about marriage, and I want to establish you’re thinking about marriage on a biblical foundation. So, let’s, let’s take the false expectation, ah we all hold, we all share. We all have some form of that. And let’s just, let’s just look at it very critically together, okay, let’s, let’s look at it critically. And then whatever is false, let’s kill that together. Okay, just have a big killing party of false expectations. And then we’ll go back to the Biblical Foundation. We’ll say that’s where we build. That’s what we’re going to understand together, okay.

Many false expectations, many, many false notions about marriage, but, and I can’t cover them all right now. I’m actually just going to hit one up front, and it’s really the main one. The main false expectation and it’s perpetuated everywhere today, everywhere you look. The main false expectation perpetuated today in this emotionally oriented, highly sentimentalized, Disneyfied culture, romanticized, pornified, highly psychologized culture. This is just the modern world we live in, but the predominating false expectation of today is revealed in the answer to this question, and it’s a question that I ask every couple coming in for premarital counseling. Every, every couple that I’m going to potentially marry and bring them to the altar, to stand to make a covenant before God and man. I asked them this question, why do you want to get married? And you know the answer that most people give in today’s world. Especially the unbelieving world, why do you want to get married?

The answer is some form of; because I want to be happy, because I want to be fulfilled, because I want to be satisfied, because I want to be content. I believe marriage will make me happy or happier than I am right now, and so that’s why I’m getting married. Nobody says when you ask them why do you want to get married? They say, well, I want pain, misery, suffering, a lot of insults. I want to be eviscerated in all my, you know, whatever.

People said they want to be happy. That’s, that’s the common answer to that question. That’s why I want to be married. And listen, it is not only unbelievers who think like that. Okay, let’s, let’s just be honest here. We’re Christians. Let’s be honest, there are professing Christians who think exactly like that. Genuine Christians who think like that. Christians may answer with, when you ask them, why do you want to be married? They say, well I want to glorify God. I just want to glorify God. I want to give myself in service for a lifetime for Christ’s sake to this adorable creature before me, before you.

 She says, I just want to serve this godly man with my life. I wanna submit to him, to be his wife. And he says, oh, I just wanna love this saintly perfect creature, woman. As Christ loved the church and gave himself up. And I nod and smile and say, watch what happens in their first argument. Christian friend you may have said that, and you may really believe that you believe that. But here’s what that first argument, or a series of arguments just revealed. You got married because you two want to be happy and you want to be fulfilled and you want to be contented.

You’re more infected with the cultural form of false expectation about marriage than you realize, and that’s because you share the same sin nature with all of Adam’s race. Let me quickly add, that if you’re operating on a biblical and not a worldly definition of happiness, but a biblical, if you’re operating on a biblical definition of happiness, that happiness comes through holiness. Well then okay, you’re on the right track. If life for you is what Jesus calls us to in Luke 9:23, it’s a life of continual self-denial and cross bearing and obedience to everything Christ commands. You know what, marriage is going to be easy. Your just gonna flow through marriage, you gonna sail.

If you’ve a, accepted what Jesus taught us in the Sermon on the Mount, that happiness is this state of blessedness and contentment and joy is coming through poverty of spirit and mourning over sin. Oh yeah, your sins going to be revealed in marriage. That happiness is about being meek. It’s about longing for righteousness. If you believe that happiness comes through you being merciful, pure in heart, a peacemaker, enduring persecution. Well, marriage to a fallen sinner is a pathway of happiness for you, my friend. Because, you’ll go through all those things. We don’t naturally, though, operate according to that biblical paradigm, do we?

Instead, because of our sin nature that even as believers though we are born again, regenerated, have a new nature, we still have this sin principle within us that we still fight against. It’s there whether you’re aware of it or not, and i, it influences your thinking whether you’re aware of it or not, and so it’s better to be aware of what’s affecting you and afflicting you and bring it to the fore and deal with it. We bring all kinds of false notions into our marriages. All kinds of fleshly, worldly, unbiblical notions of what happiness is and those ideas and expectations enter into our marriage.

People get married to fulfill romanticized ideals that they read in novels or that they watched in movies. People get married to fulfill relational desires, to curb feelings of loneliness and to complete themselves and feel significant an and that my life is meaningful and to bear children and that’ll bring significance and all the rest. People get married for the sake of sexual fulfillment. Some frankly, look at marriage as a sanctified outlet for what is really, truly a sinful lust that needs to be repented of.

False assumptions, unbiblical ungodly presuppositions, they lead to false expectations and I can guarantee you they will be disappointed. It’s guaranteed. By trying to make another human being do for you, what only God can do for you. That is to satisfy your deepest longings for intimacy, for significance, for purpose, for meaning, for joy. Listen by trying to make another human being do that for you. You’re turning your spouse into an idol. You are saddling them with a burden that they cannot bear. They’re just creatures like you. They cannot bear the weight of being the object of your false worship.

You’re sinning against God in your idolatry. So, his blessing will not come upon you if you treat your spouse that way. You’re failing to live according to God’s good purpose. His wise design for your life and for your marriage. So, let’s do away with that false notion false expectation about marriage right from the beginning. And we’ll get some clarity about marriage and set some biblical expectations instead.