Clough Divine institutions Lesson 5
Divine
Institution #2 - Marriage
Tonight we move to the second of the four divine institutions. We have spent the last four weeks on the first divine institution; a divine institution being a setup or a design feature in creation that is unique to man, that has a central spiritual function. The four divine institutions are: volition, marriage, family, and national government. Those four institutions are peculiar not just to Christians, but they are especially designed for the entire human race. Therefore they are not called Christian institutions, they are called divine institutions. They are essential for man’s spiritual welfare because God cannot operate in human history apart from these divine institutions. Any movement in history that is anti divine institution at any point is destined to cause suffering and chaos. And as we covered when we went through volition, we went through several of the attacks that have been made upon volition.
We have covered the attack in which volition was denied through the doctrine of determinism, in which the whole cosmic order becomes one vast machine and this vast machine essentially is something that goes on without responsibility on the individual creature’s part. Therefore the boundary between man as a free unique individual and animal determined by hereditary characteristics, instinctual urges and so on, has been erased, so there is no discontinuity between the animal kingdom and man. And so when we look at the hierarchy of the universe we have angels, we have men, we have animals, we have plants and we will have machines. You’ll notice in the art tonight how the emphasis is now down here; the despair has gotten so bad that the artists no longer believe even man is an animal, but he’s worse than that and he’s lower than that, he’s a machine.
Now the Bible says that there’s a unique discontinuity between man and animals; a discontinuity of personality in which volition is found above the line and no volition is found under the line. There is a type of choice that animals have but it’s not comparable to man. Man and angels together share personality with God as the Triune God; God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. So we have this discontinuity. Below this we have animals and then there’s another discontinuity in the Bible placed between the animals and the plants and above this line is life; below this line is no life. You have to catch this because a lot of people think in terms of organic and inorganic structures and therefore are concerned with the boundary between plant and machines and say life is there; not so says the Bible. The Bible says nephesh, or the Hebrew word for soul is what is translated in our Bibles as life, and this life has not been given to the plants, it has been given only to the animals. So you have animals, men and there’s the boundary for life. Angels are not said to have nephesh; angels are said to be pure spirit. So you watch these categories; angels share a personality with man, both have personality. Men and animals share life in the nephesh sense, and you have to keep these two distinct. Angels in this sense don’t die, the wages of sin for them is the spiritual separation but they don’t experience physical death, obviously, they don’t have any bodies. So nephesh is unique with animals and men.
Now when we start with the second divine institution this is going to become important because obviously marriage requires personality and nephesh, or life and it can’t exist with personality alone and it can’t exist with nephesh alone, the two must be together. Therefore marriage is limited to men, this institution.
So we have a definition of the second divine institution and although this may sound trite to define marriage I’m defining it because of some of the issues that come up. So as we discuss this over the next few weeks we’ll go back to this definition again and again and again. So the parts to this definition are crucial. A personal relationship or the personal relationship between a male and female member of the human race which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers. Keep that definition in mind because that’s going to solve the problem of divorce and it’s going to also solve the problem of when marriage starts and where it ends because marriage is defined as that which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers.
Now as always we are going spend the first
session on working over the definition; we’re going to take the definition
apart and consider carefully each part, each word of that definition. The first central part of the definition is a
“personal relationship.” This is
essential to this divine institution. Please also remember that each divine
institution is built on the preceding one; this is why we’ve ordered them one,
two, three, four. The divine institution
of volition is necessary for the design of marriage and marriage in turn is
necessary for the design of family and family in turn is necessary for national
government to exist. So all these divine
institutions fit into an order and if you break the order you break all of them
up in the end. They fit together very
delicately and the trouble with the
First, a “personal relationship,” let’s look at that for a moment because this sets it off from all non-Christian definitions of marriage. The first thing to remember about the fact that it is s personal relationship can be found in Genesis 1:26. This is why this divine institution has to be considered with the others. Those of you who joined us for the second divine institution, you’re not going to get as much out of it because you’ve missed the first one, volition. It’s funny how word gets around when you’re speaking on sex or evolution. If you want to fill out the house just announce this. Genesis 1:26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea…” and so on and so on.
Now if you will look carefully at this part of the creation work of God, about God doing this and about God creating man in His own image, [27] “in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them, [28] And God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. Look carefully at verse 28 because verse 28 says something that is not said previously in the Genesis narrative. Look at verse 28, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Now turn back to Genesis 1:11, here is after God created the plants in this hierarchy of creation and when He blessed the plants the said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.” In other words, here we have the plants commanded to reproduce and expand. Then in Genesis 1:2, “And God blessed them, saying,” these are the animals now, these are the animals, “God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.” Now the words, be fruitful, and multiply and fill, watch those three verbs in verse 22, be fruitful, multiply, and fill. Those are the same three verbs you find in verse 28; in verse 28, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill.” The word “replenish” is the same word in the Hebrew, “fill.” “Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth.” Now tacked on to those three verbs in verse 28 are two extra verbs and these two extra verbs define the difference between man and the animals. In verse 28 the next two verbs are: “and subdue it, and have dominion over.” Subdue it and have dominion over.
Now to show you the connotation of “subdue” and that it means a forceful conquest, turn to Jeremiah 34:11. This is one of the key locations for this particular verb, “subdue.” I want you to go over here because I want you to see the connotation of this word “subdue” so you just won’t kind of speed through it forty miles an hour through the Genesis narrative and say ho hum, I’ve read that about 20 times and so I’m not going to pay attention. But if you do this you miss the point of the text. In Jeremiah 34:11, “But afterward they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids, whom they had let go free, to return, and brought them into subjection, for servants and for handmaids.” The point is, the subdue; it means to bring into a position of servitude, it means to conquer and to make servile that which you conquer. And that is the command that man is given toward the animals, to go out and to subdue these. There’s going to be a contest; Satan is going to contest every square foot of ground and if he didn’t indwell the serpent he probably would have indwelt something else, that when man advances the frontiers of conquest in taming these animals, there’s going to someday be a contest and the contest happened to be the time when they tried to tame this serpent, and it turned out the serpent tamed them. But the point was that man was given this conquest. This is a sign of a spiritual conflict for which man was designed, which we’ve covered elsewhere as the angelic conflict.
So this “subdue” is the original intent of man. Man was created as a conqueror; always remember this. Man can’t be content unless he’s conquering. He’s got to conquer and this is why to my way of thinking a lot of evangelical Christianity has made the Christian life too vanilla, and that is that they have left out the conquest factor; they have left out the fact that the Christian life is a holy war in which there is engaged a struggle that will never end until the rapture of the Church, a struggle that entails every area of life, a struggle between divine viewpoint and human viewpoint that never is resolved until the day you die; a struggle that has to go on and on and on; a struggle in which you can be the winner or you can be the losers, depending on your mental attitude in appropriation of God’s grace.
So man has inherently within himself this drive for conquest and dominion. Now, the second thing to notice about this, apart from the fact that this sets man off from the animals, is the fact as Genesis 2:18 says, “The LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone, I will make an help fit for him.” This is means that man cannot exist as a solitary person. Please remember this; this is a feature that is inherent in personality. Nobody can be a loner completely. It’s impossible. A person who is absolutely alone is found in the funny farm but not in normal life. You cannot exist totally alone; it is impossible. You are made as a personality that must interact with other personalities; this is why we have the Trinity. And this is why people who try to believe in a personal God, who try to say that I believe in a personal God but I don’t accept the Trinity can never resolve the problem of personality. This is left as a dilemma because if God were a solitary personality existing forever he can’t be the archetype of our kind of personality and if He’s not the archetype of our type of personality, then we do not share personality with God, then we cannot communicate with Him. The whole thing comes tumbling down and if you want to see this in a graphic form study Islam. In Islam God is a solitary personality but in Islam in heaven nobody finally enters into a personal relationship with Allah. The men go and they have a thousand women and they have a big party time, but they never have a personal relationship with Allah. Do you know why? Because logically it can’t follow from a solitary personal God. You must have a personality that has multiplicity in it and diversity and this is found in the doctrine of the Trinity. This is why God is Triune, and why it’s something exciting to say that I worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit because that means that I worship a God who is very personal, who has personal relationships within Himself and it means I can break into the circle of fellowship through salvation.
Well, all this text of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 points to the fact that the personal relationship between a male and a female member of the human race cannot be on the same level as the animals; there is a qualitative disjunction between the two. We are not talking about some animalistic type of operation; we are talking about the relationship that exists on the high level of personality and this is absolutely crucial when we get into the later questions of marriage. This is going to come back and we’re going to build on it so just remember this is one of the building blocks that we’ve laid down, we’re going to come along later and we’re going to build on top of this thing. Tonight we’re just laying out the bricks.
The second thing to remember about this
definition; we’ve dealt with the personal relationship between a male and
female member of the human race, the second thing to notice about this
definition is that it is not true of angels.
Turn to Matthew 22:30, this is a personal relationship that is utterly
unique to the human race. Angels, I
said, share personality. Once again
let’s draw the diagram: we have angels, we have men, and we have animals.
Animals have life; man has life in the sense of nephesh; angels have personality, man has personality but animals
don’t. And therefore man is the only one
that has the two together, life and personality. And so therefore in Matthew
So we know the second thing then, a personal relationship between a male and a female member of the human race; it’s unknown in the angelic kingdom. And that’s for a good reason because what does marriage typify? Marriage typifies a relationship between Christ and the Church and angels don’t have that relationship and so therefore marriage is confined to that area that answers to the type; if marriage is a type of the relationship between Christ and the believer, then man and man alone can experience that relationship and therefore man and man alone has the relationship called marriage; angels cannot.
Now we will progress to the last part of the definition: “a personal relationship between a male and a female member of the human race which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers,” which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers. Now we’re going to look at this saving relationship in three different ways. The first way is to look at the mechanics of the relationship between Christ and the believer along the principle of grace and faith. One is male and the other is female in form. Turn to Ephesians 5:22, please remember the context, elementary principle of Bible study always goes with the context. What is the context? Verse 18, “Be filled with the Spirit;” the context is the filling of the Spirit. All right; now isn’t it interesting that the first manifestation of the filling of the Holy Spirit apart from verses 19-20 is the marriage relationship. Isn’t that interesting because the first manifestation of sin was in the marriage relationship. Isn’t that interesting? The fall, the very first observation after the fall, has to do with animals? No, it has to do with Adam that couldn’t get along with Eve and they both head for the bushes, having a fight right there, that’s the first manifestation of sin.
Now isn’t it interesting that Paul reverses
this; the filling of the Holy Spirit, the first manifestation is in the same
realm of the fall. And so in Ephesians
To show you how Paul used the word turn to Romans 8:7, I want to give you the flavor of how this word is used. Now please, at times there’s going to be pressures on the women and there’s going to be pressures on the men, so just kind of hold your fire until I’ve gotten it all done and then you’ll see that it balances and you just can’t handle it any other way, piece by piece. So if some of you ladies feel impatient, just relax, the men will get theirs, so it will all balance out in the end. But just hold on until we take the whole thing in its entirety.
Romans 8:7, “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither, indeed, can it be.” The carnal mind cannot subject itself to the law of God. What is that subjection? The subjection is one of form in authority; form in authority, or truth in authority. In other words, there’s authority and then there’s form; there’s a truth, there’s something definite there, it’s not just a hazy nothing, there’s something definite and the carnal mind can’t subject itself to God’s will.
Romans 10:3, Paul uses hupotasso again, “Fro they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.” Here again you have form and authority and an act of volition. You had an act of volition before too. In other words, at this point there’s two systems of salvation. The Jews at this time in history had misconstrued the Law, the Old Testament, to the point where they thought that all you had to do was obey a certain behavioral standard and that automatically conveyed salvation. And that is salvation by works, but here there’s a salvation of God’s righteousness; the righteousness comes from God by grace, this is salvation by grace, this is a wholly different system, and these people have not submitted, hupotasso, they have not given up the fact that they want this salvation by works. Technically in one sense you don’t give up anything when you become a Christian, yet in another sense you do; you give up all hope in trying to find a solution yourself, on the basis of your own human merit. And when you can get that out of your head, that you can’t save yourself on the basis of your human merit, and you go under, then you are submitting to God’s grace.
Again we have this submission to a form and authority by an act of volition. See, divine institution number one is not going to be destroyed in divine institution number two, nor is divine institution going to be destroyed in divine institution number three. For some families they allow the children to run the house; you are allowing divine institution number three to destroy two, you’re working the wrong way. So divine institution two cannot work backwards and destroy divine institution one; divine institution one is the building block on which divine institution two is built.
Romans 13:1 is the other place where Paul uses hupotasso and here again we get the flavor of this word. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God,” and so on, and this is the institution of government, and he defines this, he defines it as carrying forth your citizenship responsibilities in your society. And so here it means taking your place in the order of things.
Now let’s go back to Ephesians 5; when he
uses the word, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the
Lord,” he is saying there’s a form to marriage.
And the form and structure isn’t something that’s been socially worked
out; it’s not something that the man has dictated, it’s not something that
society has dictated, it’s not something that has come down the evolutionary
pipe. It’s not something that is worked
out by mere group dynamics in a society, and it’s not something like a lot of
people are saying it is today, that it’s sheerly for the pragmatic edification
of society. In other words, we’ve found
experimentally that men and women go better this way, like
The next part, “as unto the Lord,” and here’s where Paul is going to begin the analogy. [23] “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, and He is the savior of the body. [24] Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.” And here we have this submission taken on further. The body and the head, let’s look at that analogy a moment. “Head” and “body,” this is used in the Ephesians epistles referring to the Christ; when you have Christ with an article in front, “the,” “the Christ,” or ho Christos, when you have this structure it’s referring to something more than just Jesus and the believer. It means Jesus as the first believer, the first one that’s resurrected plus all other believers together as a unit. Then it’s called “the Christ.” And so we have “head,” means Jesus as an individual, plus the body, many individuals. And so this together makes the church. And so he’s saying on the same analogy, the man in verse 23, the husband, aner, is the head of the wife.
So here you have the man and the woman or the man and the wife. The wife counterpart in the analogy is to the church; the man’s counterpart is to Christ in this design. There is a parallel in the design structure, and I don’t care what the psychologists say and I don’t care what the sociologists say, if this pattern is not adhered to there is going to be misery and suffering and so on. Every kind of suffering that exists in the second divine institution comes from a breakdown in this design. Then it says further in verse 23 that “He,” Christ, “is the savior of the body,” we’re introduced to the concept of grace. How was Christ the Savior of the Church? Christ was the Savior of the church by dying for the church, by solving the sin problem by an act of love. So therefore Jesus Christ did something to bring the body and to deliver the body. So the man is cast in the role of doing something for his wife, or the counterpart, the body.
Now Ephesians 5:24, “Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.” And here we can begin to draw at least four points of analogy for the woman’s role in marriage. We’ll get to the men in the next verse but there it’s exactly the counterpart to these four. The first one that we see as we look at this, that immediately strikes your eyes, is that the woman is cast in the role of a responder. In other words, logically she can’t respond if there’s nothing to respond to. And so therefore we have the analogy in verse 24; how could the Church believe if there was no gospel? If Christ had not have died on the cross 19 centuries ago, what are you going to believe in? You don’t believe in anything because there’s nothing there to believe. So you could believe from now until hell freezes over and it isn’t going to solve your problem because you can’t believe “in” something; there’s nothing there, no object of your faith, it’s just a vacuum. So therefore there has to logically be something and then the person responds; we responded to God’s love in Christ. Christ didn’t come along and say if you believe in Me I’ll love you. He said I loved you enough to die for your sin, and now will you respond. So the woman is cast throughout the Bible in the role of a responder.
The second thing is, and it too logically follows from this analogy, is that the woman is the one who makes a volitional choice. The woman is one who makes a volitional choice; she is one who must exercise her volition and cannot be coerced. You’ve heard, gentlemen, the expression, “a woman convinced against her will is of the same opinion still.” Well, here’s the Biblical form for it, and that is that she must be won over, and she must have her volition active if she is to fulfill this greater typology. Do you see the point? We’re not saying that this is just Paul’s point; he’s saying that this is the design structure and if you mar and gum up the design you mar the whole thing in its functioning.
So therefore the second thing we pull out of this is that there must be a volitional choice on the part of the woman, that can’t be coerced just as when Christ came to you through the preaching of the gospel He didn’t bang you over the head. Now sometimes He treated you a little rough; sometimes there were certain events that He allowed to bring into your life, but those events weren’t forcing you to believe; they were there to show you your unbelief. In other words, they were cast into your life to point out the fact that you were groundless in your hope, that you had no basis for living. That’s why the pressures were there, to destroy your unbelief, but not to coerce your belief. Then God brings the gospel, either because you read it in the Bible, or because someone on the job or on the campus talked to you, somewhere you heard the message. Then you had an act of volitional choice.
The third way the woman is cast by way of this analogy is that she is the truster; that she is the one that fulfills the role of a truster. In other words, here the Church must trust in the character of Christ; it must trust in the character of Christ! And so the woman is cast as a truster. She again is a responder, she must choose, and she must place her faith in her husband.
Now if you want to see the Biblical analogy
of how God wooed Israel and how He asked them to trust Him, turn to Deuteronomy
4:31-39; here’s a classic illustration of how God was cast in His role as
initiator and one who tried to woo Israel, as the wife and here we find Him
asking Israel to trust Him. [31] “(For
the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) He will not let you slip, and He will not
let you go [forsake thee, neither destroy thee], nor forget the covenant of thy
fathers which he swore unto them. [32] For ask now of
the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created
man upon the earth, and ask from the one side of heaven unto the other, whether
there hath been any such thing as this great thing is, or hath been heard like
it? [33] Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking
out of the midst of the fire, as thou hast heard, and live?
[34] Or hath God assayed to go and take him a nation from the
midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders,” now on what
basis does God ask “trust Me.” Look at
verse 33; on the basis of His Word and verse 34 on the basis of His works. [“…and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by a
stretched out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your
God did for you in
[38] To drive out nations from before thee greater and mightier
than thou art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as
it is this day. [39]Know
therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in
heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else.”]
Please
remember as I have repeated again and again, Christianity never, never asks you
to believe for the sake of believing.
People always think of Christianity as something where you put your
brains in the closet, lock the door and throw away the key. Now that ironically is exactly what modern
philosophy is doing. That is what modern
philosophy is doing, they’re asking you to lock your mind in the closet and
throw away the key. This is
existentialism and illogical positivism and all the rest of the movement are
largely this kind of faith; empty faith, where you literally must turn your mind
off to make the leap.
Now
it’s precisely the other way around. In
the Bible God never, never expects you to believe Him until you have carefully
considered His works and His words. Just
as, when you exist in personal relationships, boyfriend/girlfriend, man and
woman, man and man, woman and woman, when you have a personal relationship, how
do you trust someone? Without getting so
philosophical how do you trust someone?
On what basis do you trust someone?
You men who are in business, how are you going to trust a business
partner? It’s not some mythical thing by
which you prove Christianity; you do it the same way you do anything else. How do you trust someone? You trust someone by listening carefully to
what they told you and watching their behavior.
Do they tell you one story tomorrow and another story the next day? If so, then you don’t trust them, but if they
tell you something and they stick by their word, and if their works line up
with their words, then you trust them, don’t you? In other words, your trust is in fact.
Same
thing in the Bible, Deuteronomy 4, God has told them and He has done things for
them; He says now will you trust me?
This is the theme of the New Testament, why John said, “These are
written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ.” He didn’t expect the people of his day just
to go off and believe in a vacuum; he said I have given you fact after fact
after fact after fact and you believe it.
Now therefore, if the woman, turning back to Ephesians 5, if the woman
is declared to be a truster, what does this imply about the man? This implies that she has to have some link
with the man on which to base her trust, therefore the woman has to have some
words and some works from the man or else she has nothing to put her trust
in. Now it’s as simple as that; that’s
the analogy and how it’s worked out, and this is why, when communication goes
in marriage, which is usually the first thing to go, what happens to the works? Goes!
What happens to the woman? She
can’t trust, nothing to trust in. So
this is why communication is important and so we have words and we have works.
Then
the fourth thing that we note is that the Church, as Paul says in Ephesians
5:27, “That he might present it to Himself a glorious church,” when, right
away? No, it takes time. In other words the fourth factor is there is
growth required before the woman can truly be a responder and a truster. She must grow, and this doesn’t happen over
night, there’s a period of growth; love requires time to grow and so here, as
with the Church, the Church takes time.
If it were not so then Jesus would take us to be with Himself at the
point of salvation. Why leave us around? He doesn’t need us to evangelize the world;
angels are going to do the evangelizing in the Tribulation and He has all sorts
of ways of evangelizing the world. He
could have a loud speaker in every ear drum if He wanted to. He has gobs of ways of evangelizing the
world. The main reason why we are left
here after the point of salvation is simply to grow. So that’s the fourth thing.
Now
Ephesians 5:25, now we have the husband’s role, “Husbands, love your wives,
even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it.” Now here we have the love commanded on the
part of the man and if you look at these four characteristics of the female or
the wife’s role, if you reverse them you get the male’s role. There’s nothing
profound but it just follows from the analogy.
One, remember the woman is the responded; what’s the man? He’s the initiator. Christ…who loved who first here? Did Christ love you or did you love
Christ? Christ loved you; He died for
you while we were yet sinners. Who
initiated then? Logically what came
first, Christ’s love or your love?
Christ’s love! All right,
analogy; what has to come first logically?
Man’s love, so he is cast in the role of the initiator.
The
second thing about this is, that answers to the fact that the woman has to make
a volitional choice, is a startling little thing but quite obvious, is that
when Christ goes to woo a person to trust in Him, He provides everything except
one item. Christ has provided everything
for your salvation, He has died on the cross, He has solved the sin problem, He
is going to provide for the death problem through the resurrection, He has
provided for the spiritual death problem through regeneration, He has provided
for our lack of positive credits with God through the imputation of Christ’s
righteousness to our account. He has
provided every one of these things except one and Christ never, never can
provide that and still have a plan based on divine institution number one. What is that?
Volition! In other words, the man
can do everything except choose; in other words, he can’t make the choice in
this analogy. In this analogy it’s the
woman who chooses, and the man can’t do anything about it. He’s cast exactly in the role of Christ where
Christ provides everything except the choice and He’s not going to do
that. This is why we have an
evangelistic appeal, because the decision is up to the individual, reject or
accept. So this is why one element of a
fellow’s idea when he’s looking at a girl is does she respond. If she doesn’t, fine, go somewhere else. This is exactly the way the Lord works in
salvation. You provide and if there’s no
response move on, that’s the point. So
the man, then, can provide everything except this volitional response.
Now
answering to the fact that the woman is a truster, obviously then what must the
man be, the counterpart? He must be a
revealer and so therefore he is cast in the role of a revealer; he must reveal
his character to his woman. He has to
reveal his character, if he can’t, then she can’t trust in his character; it’s
simple, it’s obvious. If God didn’t
reveal Himself in history how could He expect us to trust Him? If He didn’t reveal Himself as the God who
was capable of handling the Exodus problem, if He didn’t reveal Himself as the
God who was capable of handling a dead body in a grave in a tomb in Jerusalem
at the beginning of the first century, if He can’t do that, then what have we
got to trust in? We haven’t got
anything, that’s what wrong with the liberal position on the Bible; wash away
the resurrection, wash away this, wash away that, and I come back and I say
yeah, and what am I supposed to trust in?
Your empty theories? You see it
all hangs together; you cannot dump these things in the wastebasket and expect
to produce virile Christianity. It’s
impossible. If Christ didn’t rise from
the dead I have nothing to trust in and if God didn’t do what the Bible says He
did in Exodus I can throw out the Bible, put in the wastebasket and go live
like Solomon tells us in Ecclesiastes; that’s the only choice. So now man is cast as a revealer.
The
fourth thing, compared with growth is the fact, and this is going to shock some
of you, is that man must have endurance and patience. Christ had to have endurance and
patience. The first time He started
working in a rather dramatic way in your life did you come around? The heck you did, you sat there and
kicked. Now what would you have done if
He had taken off and said ha-ha, I’ve got 5 billion other people in the world
and I’ve got to work with them so sorry, you had your chance. No, it means that the man has to have a
counterpart role of Christ of endurance and patience.
So
then, let’s summarize the first aspect of this, the grace/faith role. This is one aspect to this typical marriage
relationship and that is that the woman is cast in the role of a believer, or
one who has faith. What I’ve listed for
you, if you look at it carefully in these four is actually the components of
faith. First there is a response to a
revelation; secondly there is volition; thirdly there is trust, and fourth
there’s growth. Those are precisely the
elements of faith. And so the woman then
becomes the typical agent in history for revealing in a very physical and
concrete way trust.
Now
the man, looking at these four things we have grace; that’s what Christ had
toward us, and so the male is now cast in the role of the second divine
institution of fulfilling in a concrete and physical way God’s concept of
grace. Now isn’t this very ingenious of
God, to design the human race with just exactly the design that He knew
hundreds and thousands of years later would bring to fruition in the spiritual
reality called Christ and the Church. Adam and Eve know that Christ was going
to become incarnate and all the details like we do. The civilization before the flood, they
believed in Christ in their own way and the information they had but they
didn’t have all this; Paul says the Church is a mystery, it wasn’t revealed in
the Old Testament.
So
isn’t this amazing. God appreciating and
anticipating what He was going to do thousands of years later in history,
already from the very beginning set marriage up, and men would wonder, why do
we get married for, it’s kind of a crazy relationship. You can imagine the philosophers speculating,
what’s with this marriage business, why have it, can’t understand the meaning
of it. And then suddenly in 33 AD, when
the Church was born, the theological connection was made—this is why we have
marriage, because all down through the centuries men were forced to act out the
role of grace and faith, grace and faith, and this has a far more subtle reason
that just typology. By causing the human
race to live this way and to act out these parts of grace and faith, what do
you suppose was produced in the mind of man?
Categories and concepts. And so
now when we come down to the New Testament and the word “grace” is used and the
word “faith” is used, those words have meaning.
Why? Because all during the
centuries men and women had to behave in certain ways. Now, because they were, you might say forced
or designed to operate in these ways, now at the crucial moment in history Paul
can pick up this concept, this behavior pattern that was built into history and
say see, this is what we mean by grace; this is what we mean by faith. So that there’s not a loss for words, there’s
not a loss for communication. God has
structured the whole creation so that it has built into it the very analogies
that are needed.
Just
think of it this way: there might be analogies yet to come. In other words, in the truths in the
millennial kingdom when Christ may reveal more than He even has not, in the
details of the kingdom, there might be things that we are doing today that we
just never think of, normal every day activities of life and all of a sudden a
prophet in the millennium is going to say do you know what you’ve been
doing? For thousands of years you and
all of the human race were doing this one thing; do you want to find out why
you were doing it? Because now in our
age we see the connection.
So
here we have the same thing. For years and years and years we have this
institution of marriage and you can tell in the Old Testament they didn’t know
what was going on with marriage because they had polygamy, they didn’t
understand that marriage had this form to it.
There was a tremendous tension, in Abraham and all these great men. They did not have it clear as to why it
was. Now why do you suppose God couldn’t
clarify it? Because He couldn’t clarify
it without tipping His hand as to what He was going to pull off in the Church
Age. In other words, He had to stick with this, stick with this primitive
tradition that He had given Adam, to build up patiently by human concrete
behavior until the point in history would be reached when marriage suddenly
would blossom into something that was fantastic, and would become a means of
attaching content to words.
Now
let’s apply this principle. This is why
today it is crucial that we live as Christians inside this design form. Why? Suppose society tomorrow begins to, or
totally overthrows the form. There’s no
marriage, there’s none of these human relationships that God has ordained for
creation; fifty years from now I want to preach the gospel and I go up to my
congregation or my audience and I say, “faith,” “grace,” and they look at me
with blank stares because they have no way of understanding what those words
mean; it doesn’t ring a bell with them at all.
To
give you a more pertinent illustration, I once read how Jim Voss, when he went
into the slum areas of
Now
why is that? Because God has ordained
structures in society and they’re important and that’s why you can’t knock
these divine institutions, why when God says behave in a certain way He’s not
just being an old meany, and saying you behave this way or you’re going to get
hurt or something like that. God never
does that. There’s always a fantastically
profound reason, when God asks us to do something He’s not asking to do
something unreasonable. At the time He
may not have had a chance or might not have had the moment to reveal
Himself. For example, suppose we go take
a time machine and go back to Abraham.
And Abraham is sitting there and he’s got Sarah one the one hand and
he’s got a few of the other women on the other hand and he says I wonder what’s
this deal about monogamous marriage here, I don’t understand it God, what do
you mean I have to have one. And of
course at that time he had Sarai, who means contentious and he probably was
waiting to dump her down the nearest well in
Now
we have just a brief moment to cover the third part of this; I am going to deal
with the second one next time because of our time limitation. I said that we’re going to deal with a
typological relationship in three parts, the first one I’ve dealt with are the
mechanics of grace and faith. The second
one I’m going to skip and I’m going to work on the third one because this is
very quick; it’s found in 1 Corinthians 11:7-9.
I hope by next week we will have prepared the doctrine of men’s long
hair so those of you who have been waiting to find out what about long hair and
so on, we’ll have some words from the Scripture on it. We’re just taking one short segment out of
this long passage in Corinthians.
Obviously we can’t do just to it in 5 or 10 minutes but I want to just
point out a second quality of this marriage relationship. “Fro a man indeed ought not to cover his head,
forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of
the man. [8] For the man is not of the
woman, but the woman of the man. [9]
Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man.”
Now
there’s an analogy made here between the glory of God and the glory of
man. Let’s write this out: glory of God
— glory of man. What’s glory? Let’s get our words down so we understand
what’s going on. What is the common
definition of glory? Well, the way to
think of glory is just light shining forth; in other words, it’s a
manifestation of the presence of this object of the preposition, so when you
say it’s a glory of something, it means that you have a visual sign that that
something’s there. You may not be able
to see it directly. For example, you
can’t see electricity, but you know by the way the ions are acting in the gas
in the fluorescent lights and so on and on the coating that the electricity has
some voltage there. Why do you know
that? Because you can see the
electrons? No, because you see the glory
of the electrons. And so the light in the lamp, so now contemplate the ceiling
when you’re tired of listening to me, you can answer me, why I am contemplating
the glory of the electrons. So this is,
then, a sign of the presence, even though you can’t see them.
All
right, how is the man the glory of the Lord?
Well, he gives you a hint in the next two verses; “For the man is not
out of the woman, but the woman out of the man. [9] Nether was the man created
for the woman, but the woman for the man.”
In other words, the woman here is considered to be logically subsequent
to the man. In other words, she exists
to fulfill something. Now the glory or
the presence of God in the man is shown how?
How is the glory of God shown in the man or in anybody? The glory of God is shown in a changed life. So you have the filling of the Holy Spirit as
shown out in the behavior patterns, in other words, there’s a change of
behavior pattern. There’s a change in
the inner human spirit, all sorts of changes there. We call that the glory of God in the person.
All
right, now analogy. How, then, is the
glory of the man shown in the woman? By
the changes in the woman, and this ranges from physical pregnancy on all the
way up to the psychological realm, the changes that occur in the woman as a
result of the glory of her man. In other
words, the man causes changes to her physically and psychologically, and this
is what Paul means by the glory, the glory of the man or the sign that he’s
there…the sign that he is there, even though you might not see her husband you
can tell by looking at the woman she has one; the glory of the man.
Well,
let’s conclude, because verses 8-9 actually speak of Genesis 2; let’s conclude
by turning back to Genesis 2:18 wind up where we started. “And the LORD God said, It is not good that
the man should be alone; but I will make a help fit for him.” Now don’t read that “helpmeet.” A help, separate the word, it’s a help fitted
for him; that’s what it means, and the word “help” here is always very
interesting, this word is always used…it’s funny, you look at it in a
concordance and the word “help” is always used of God, except this one place in
the Bible. It’s used about six times in
the Bible, every other time it’s used for God.
The only other time it’s used for something other than God is for the
woman right here in verse 18, “I will make an ‘ezer, have you ever heard of El
‘ezer; El ‘ezer, ‘ezer is help, El God, God is my help. And
this is the same word here, ‘ezer. “I will make an ‘ezer, or a help that is fitted for him.”
Now
let’s look on the analogy again. You
have Adam; what was given before this? Verse 17! Verse 17 was a command that was given to Adam
first, wasn’t it? God gave this command
or the will of God for his life before the woman came along. So we have Adam plus the plan of God first,
prior existing the woman. Then the woman
is brought on to do what? As an help
especially fitted for the man. In other
words, Eve comes in, not just for any man, she comes in because of this man and
what that man has been called before God to do, and she is brought in as a
compliment to him. Please notice
something now. Please notice that this
is not the test of compability that you would get in a normal psychological
discussion. Usually psychologists say
are a couple compatible, and they’ll give you some test like this: A and B, is
A compatible B, where A is a male and B is a female. Now are they compatible? And they always think of the thing in terms
of personality; is personality A compatible with personality B. But don’t you see, they miss the point. The Bible says no, that isn’t the
compatibility we’re talking about. The compatibility we’re talking about is
even higher than the psychological compatibility. The psychological compatibility you can be
compatible with many people, but spiritually are you compatible? Spiritually would have to be the
compatibility hinges on the plan. Eve
was fitted to be Adam’s wife, with what Adam had been told to do by God, not
somebody else, Adam.
So
we now have something else that’s interesting about this relationship and the
typological relationship, is that marriage also, not only the mechanics of
grace and faith but we have the purpose/design.
In other words, the end or the result or the goal, the goal of Christ
and the Church is what? Could Christ
have finished His ministry without the Church?
This is a trick question but in Colossians 1 Paul says huh-un; he says
literally I am filling up the suffering of the body of Christ in me. And Christ said to Paul on the
And
so similarly Adam here had a plan given to him; Eve was his helper, who was
compatible not just psychologically with Adam, but she was compatible
psychologically and she was compatible with the plan that God had given
Adam.
So
therefore, practical result, and we’re going to get into picking partners and
so on; you people that are married, you’re out of the running, but for the
other people we’ll go into that. But the point is that one of the things that’s
very interesting to notice is that fellows that haven’t got a solid grasp of
the plan of God for their life always seem to have trouble making up their
minds about their girls. Now it’s kind
of interesting; or if they don’t they’re just blind and they just step into the
thing without thinking, but the guys that are sensitive and think always tend
to have a tremendous problem on this.
Now the reason is that they fail to see this point; that compatibility
isn’t just a compatibility on the horizontal psychological plain; compatibility
is on a vertical plain with the plan that God has given to the man.
So
let’s tie this together and conclude so far for tonight on this typology of the
saving relationship. The definition of
marriage was the personal relationship between a man and a female member of the
human race, which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers. The ways in which the marriage relationship
typifies the saving relationship is in two ways: we’re going to see a third way
next time. The first way is that the
marriage, acting out and living in the marriage forces you into the roles of
grace and faith; you just have to do that.
The second thing that marriage, how it typifies the saving relationship
between God and the believer is the ultimate goal of the end purpose, that is,
that the man needs a helper to fulfill his life. And so Christ needs His Church to fulfill the
role and plan that God the Father has given to His Son. So therefore this is a far, far greater
conception of marriage than had ever existed in the ancient world.
I
don’t know whether you realize it or not, it’s something that’s been lost in
our time, but we fail to realize what marriage was around 1BC, we fail to
realize. If you could study what
marriage was in ancient
So
this concept that we’re getting introduced to here in the second divine
institution should revolutionize your thinking.
I want you to get used to thinking in terms of typology; I want you to
see the fact that when God gives structure to sex and to marriage He’s not
being a meany. What He is doing is
setting in motion a pattern of design that has a profound spiritual meaning. And if this is let go, and if this is
destroyed, everything else starts tumbling down; it’s all fitted together in
one beautiful system.
With
our heads bowed…..