Hi
and welcome to the Marriage Episode! My name is still Josephine, and this is
still Learning God’s Precepts or LGP for short and today we’ll be talking about
marriage.
Seeing
as I’m currently single, I do not feel quite qualified to speak about this topic,
but then I do not feel qualified to talk about every other thing I talk about
on this podcast. The only thing I know is that which God has taught me, and I
decided that if I could share every other thing I’ve been taught, why would I
hold back on this? God’s Word in my mouth qualifies me, and so I’ll speak.
Now
that we have out of the way, let’s back track to when I got my marriage lesson.
You see, I’d never really gotten the fuss about marriage. It made no sense to
me, and just seemed like a lot of stress with the occasional peck that did not
make up for the stress.
Then Jesus saved me, I got into church, and there’s this umbrella graphic that they share in church when they speak about marriage that annoyed me even more. I’ll look for a picture and attach it to the blog, but in this picture, there’s four umbrellas in graduating sizes with our Lord Jesus being the biggest umbrella, the husband being the next in size, the wife the next, and the finally we had the kids. This was the communication and reporting hierarchy (we human beings love power so much), where they say God speaks to the man, and the man to the wife and the wife to the kids.
Anyways,
one day, I’m reading my Bible and I’m awed by the perfection of God’s plans. I’m
blown away by how intricately entwined everything thing is. By how complete and
purposeful everything God has ever done is. And I say exactly this to God, but
then I also say that though everything was perfect and good, marriage stood out
as a sore thumb to me. I remember saying that I knew that because He (God) is
good, everything H e does is good, but I had examined marriage and I couldn’t
seem to see that same completeness and perfection as I saw in everything else.
I did not get an immediate response.
About
two weeks later God calls me into a 3-day retreat. I had been praying
specifically about something else, and I thought that that was what He was
calling me to receive. Alas it was not, it was to address what I had said a
couple of weeks earlier. I’m going to try and summarize what I was taught over
the course of 3+ days in about fifteen minutes.
Now
I’m going to ask that if you’ve not listened to the very first episode please
stop here and go listen – it’s called our identity in Christ. I’m going to be
assuming that you’ve listened to it as that is the foundation upon which this
is built.
So,
Let’s begin
Genesis
1: 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him; male and female created he them.
From
the above, we can see very clearly that both male and female humans, were made
in the image of God. Today, I’m not going to try to define what that image is,
I just want to establish it as a fact.
Then
1st Corinthians 11:7b says – forasmuch as he (the man) is the image and glory
of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. But then I began to wonder why
men got to be the glory of God, but we women were the glory of the man? I was
not a happy camper
So,
let’s go back to Genesis, shall we?
Genesis
2:22-24 and the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a
woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, this is now bone
of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was
taken out of Man. Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother,
and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
You
see when God wanted to create Eve, He took her out of the man, He basically
turned Adam from single to double. (This is why I really need you to listen to
that first episode). In order to create Eve God removed something from Adam. What
exactly was removed from him? What does this mean for Adam? And for eve? And for
marriage as an institution. To explain this,
I’m going to be examining 3 or maybe 4 stories in the Bible.
Let’s
start with Abraham. In Genesis chapter 15, God made a covenant with Abraham and
promised him that his servant would not be his heir but that he would birth his
own heir. This was where God told him to look now towards heaven and count
the stars, that if he is able to number them, so shall his descendants
be.
The
Bible tells us that Abraham believed, he actually believed God. But then he
went home and slept with Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant. I don’t know about you, if
God speaks to one half of a couple that they’re going to birth a child, the
assumption is that you know He’s speaking to both you and your partner. But when
you don’t see you and your partner as one, you take the vision that God gives
you for you guys’ life and destiny and personalize for yourself only – making
it all about you, with your spouse as an extra in the movie where you’re the
star act. I want to let you know that the result will always be Ismael. And don’t
forget that Ismael was a miracle, a miracle child! But God said he was not His
will.
Abraham
was called to be the father of nations, through Isaac. He had many other
children, but through none of them would his destiny – the reason God called
him in the first place – be fulfilled. Sarah had only one child in her womb – Isaac
– and he was the child of promise. But had she birthed him by anyone other than
Abraham he would not have been the child
of promise.
This
brings me to the next point I want to quickly make – if you think God called
your wife to be a mother, then he called you to be a father. And vice versa. I’m
not saying God called you to be the same thing – since Adam was divided into
Adam and Eve, I very much doubt that it’ll be the same – but you are two halves
of one vision. And those 2 halves merged at the point where you got married. For
God to make Eve, he took something vital out of Adam, this means that whatever
you have in your hand; though very important, is the incomplete half of something
of which a vital part is in the hand of your spouse - be you male or female.
Let’s
take a quick detour to Isaac himself when he married Rebecca. In Genesis chapter
24, when Abraham’s servant found Rebecca – just as he was about to leave, Rebecca’s
brother blessed her with the following blessing in verse 60 - “Our
sister, may you become the mother of thousands of
ten thousands; and may your descendants possess the gates of those who hate
them.” Does this sound familiar? This is basically the exact same promise that God
made with Abraham in Genesis 22:17 that was to be fulfilled through Isaac. This
means that immediately Rebecca said I will (or in our case, I do), the same covenant
came upon her too. These 2 incidents happened years apart, in 2 entirely different
places.
My
next example is Moses. Moses knew that
God had called him to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, and he was right.
But he grew up in pharaoh’s palace, and he only knew the way of the palace, but
the way of the palace is not God’s way. And when he tried to apply the things
he knew and learnt from his time in the palace, it backfired and next thing you
know he was on the run.
Thankfully,
because God is the God of providence, he ran into Jethro’s daughters who were shepherds
– one of whom he married. You see God had called Moses to shepherd the people Israel
out of Egypt, everything else (the miracles and signs) God would do through him,
but he needed to learn to be a shepherd, and to think like one. Remember that Joseph
had told us that Egyptians found shepherds to be an abomination, and Moses had been
raised by Egyptians. This means that for Moses to effectively lead shepherds,
he couldn’t still hold the mind set that found them abominable. Moses needed to
learn new skills and to have his mind renewed.
So,
Moses had the vision, but his wife had the methodology.
She
was the shepherd that taught him how to be a shepherd; how to pick out the
right shepherd stick, good places to rest and feed the sheep, amongst many others,
and it was after he had fully embraced this role that God appeared to him in
the burning bush and sent him.
Finally,
I’ll end with Mary, the mother of Jesus and Joseph her husband.
Mary
may be called the mother of God, but Jesus is referred to in the Bible as the
son of Joseph, who is a descendant of David. Now, according to prophesy, the Messiah must
be a descendant of David and since Jews are patrilineal, Jesus’s father
had to be a descendant of David. So here we have Mary, chosen to be the one to
carry the Messiah, but had she been engaged to anyone but Joseph, who was a descendant
of David, and who had also been chosen to be the father of Jesus, there’s no
way we’d know who she is today.
Also,
there’s Joseph – good Jewish man, a descendant of David – but he was probably
one of thousands just like him in his day. Why do we know who he is today? He
married Mary. Had he married anyone else but her we would not know who he is
today. He was called to be the father of our Lord, and Mary to be the mother of
our Lord.
This
brings me to the comment I made at the beginning of this episode about 1st
Corinthians 11:7b which says – forasmuch as he (the man) is the image and glory
of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.
We’ve
already established from Genesis that both men and women are made in the image
and likeness of God, but this verse introduces something new – glory. It states
that men are the glory of God but women the glory of men. Why do we women get
to be the glory of men and not of God? What does it really mean for women to be
the glory of man?
So,
lets go back to Genesis. (This would be easier to understand if you have
listened to the episode on our identity in Christ). When God created humanity,
He created them in one body, He saw that it was good and asked him to be fruitful
and multiply and fill the earth. But male human bodies – though declared good
by God – cannot on their own be fruitful or multiply so they are not equipped to
fulfill the mission God gave him, thus, God said that it is not good for man to
be alone, or in other words, for man to be singular.
So,
what did God do? He removed something from the man, and then built what He
removed into a woman who had a body when joined with the man, together, they
could carry out and fulfil the mission given to them by God. As marriage is a mystery
that points us to Christ Jesus, it’ll be great to go back and look at that relationship
to help throw more light on what it means for women to be the glory of men.
In John 12:24, Jesus in reply to Phillip and
Andrew said – “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into
the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.”
That word alone
comes up here again. And in the same way that the Father said in Genesis that
it was not good for man to be alone, Jesus also insinuates that it was not good
for Him to be alone/singular. He wanted to multiply Himself. And He has done
that by dying on the cross, crucifying our old self, and giving us new life –
His own life. In the same way that eve came from Adam, when we are born again,
we become body parts of Jesus’s bride removed from His side. We become the branches growing out of Him, the
Vine. We – the church – are the bride of
Christ. The Eve to Christ’s Adam.
So,
how is Christ Jesus glorified on earth? By His bride. In His church. In John
Chapter 17:22 Jesus said - I have given them the glory that You gave me, that
they may be one as we are one. Christ is glorified in His church. people
do not see Jesus, they see us His body, but when they see us, they glorify
Jesus. It is in us and through us that Jesus’s handiwork is being exhibited as
we are built up in and by Christ. So, just as it is in us and through us that
Christ is glorified on earth, so also it is in and through the wife that the
husband is glorified. Outside of that, there is no glory, what you get is
Ismael.
What
God removed from Adam and built up in Eve is what makes for his glory. So, it
becomes their glory (i.e., The man and the woman). So, how does God want this
to play out in simple terms?
Husband,
all of your life must be focused on building up your wife. And as for the wife,
you must recognize that all you are is his. Christ’s focus right now is on
building His church, our response as the church is to let Him build us up. In a marriage, God relates to the man as the leader, and to the woman as the helper - no one replaces the other before God.
Finally,
I’ve seen a lot of people insinuate, whether by words or by practice, that one is
more important than the other, or that one is greater than the other – that need
to be greater than or more important than another is the manifestation of the flesh
and has no place in God’s marriage. Nothing can be done from the place of
strife or vainglory, not even marriage – God resists the proud, and calling
pride by another name like ego will not change what it is. There’s no place for
self, or self-importance in the things of God.
We
(male & female) are made in God’s image, and while men reflect God’s image
as Leader, women reflect God’s image as Helper. You are both a reflection of
God, and you are both ONE. Just as the triune God – God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one and co-equal. You both must ask the Holy Spirit to show you
where both your callings merge to become one.
God
made marriage good, in fact God said that it is not good that man should be
alone. God wants to help you, that’s why He gave you your spouse. He wants to
close up the gap in your journeys – both of you.
What about us single people? Does this mean that God doesn’t want to help us too? No, far from it. The Bible tells us that God covered up the flesh at the place where the rib was removed. This means that for men, God will cover up what is lacking in you. And for women, He (God) will continue to build you up i.e., make up for what you didn’t know you needed.
