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Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our father and from our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
[00:00:10] In our Old Testament reading from Genesis, chapter two, we hear, let's say, the simplicity of God creating human beings and instituting marriage. I say simplicity because marriage is complicated and difficult.
[00:00:39] But here it is in its simple sort of pure form. Before the fallen to sin, God lays it out there. Right? Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Things were wonderful. There was no shame.
[00:01:00] And this is the way God created things to be. Marriage.
[00:01:06] God treats it like a necessity.
[00:01:09] Marriage is very important because it's not good for man to be alone.
[00:01:14] And just think about that line. It's not good for man to be alone. We need to be together.
[00:01:22] Today, more and more, people feel isolated and disconnected.
[00:01:27] You could look at that isolation and disconnection, separateness from a lot of perspectives, actually, if we want to kind of zoom out, you could even see it in our architecture.
[00:01:46] The United States is a modern country, and so our modern values are embodied in even things like architecture.
[00:01:57] When did we build everything?
[00:02:00] After the enlightenment, basically.
[00:02:03] And so because of the car, even our cities are structured so that things are farther apart. Our roads have to be wider. If you go to Europe, which I haven't really been, I've been in airports. But if you go to Europe, you know, apparently the cities, I guess, other parts of the world, too, the towns, everything feels real squeezed together. I suppose disneyland even is designed that way. And I think it's modeled after, like, european towns. So everything's close together. The houses are close together because the streets are narrow, because they weren't built to accommodate cars. Right here in the United States, everything just feels pretty far apart because you have to have room for all those cars anyway.
[00:02:50] I think that that kind of illustrates a disconnection that we feel more and more in the United States, perhaps as we dive farther and farther down the.
[00:03:04] The hole, the rabbit hole of technology. I mean, what's social media doing to us? We think that it's going to make us closer, just like cars. Cars really should make us closer to each other and airplanes, but somehow they manage to pull us apart even more. And it's the same with social media. Social media is this extra opportunity for connection. We don't even have to see each other face to face. We don't have to go to somebody's house. We can just pull out a phone and boom, boom, boom, and immediately contact somebody. And yet that ability to skip the in person interaction actually drives us apart, because I suppose we end up relying on the connection that we assume we have and miss out on a lot of the in person, face to face.
[00:04:00] More than that, it's not just a matter of, like, you know, I gotta see you face to face. It's living together in community, which in some sense, we can only imagine the fullness of what that could be by remembering the past and communities that lived together and worked together. You know, somebody makes shoes and somebody makes you just live together.
[00:04:25] You got to go to living history days or centennial village to kind of see what that was like, I suppose.
[00:04:35] We were made to live together.
[00:04:38] God, right there in the beginning, Adam and Eve, they're actually one and the same. Eve is made from Adam.
[00:04:45] And so there are two, but they're really.
[00:04:48] They're one, you know, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. And God institutes marriage as this union between the man and the woman because it's not good for man. Or you could even just say humanity. It's not good for man to be alone.
[00:05:10] Marriage really does illustrate the greater need to be together, maybe especially in this sense, that Christ's work of salvation for us, not just in for giving us our sins and giving us a, you know, a train ticket to heaven or something like that.
[00:05:28] Right? But God's work of salvation for us in sending his son Jesus to us, right close to us, to gather us together in himself, to make us his body, all of that is embedded in the. In the imagery of marriage.
[00:05:45] That's how closely God has united us to himself for the sake of being together and not alone, all of us. But even with God, it's not good for man to be alone. We were meant to live in communion with one another in God.
[00:06:03] So Christ is the bride of the church. We are united that closely with him. Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. Jesus says to his church, to you and me, that's how closely we are related.
[00:06:23] Now, as we've already said, that's disappearing in our society. And one place you can go to see that is in Marx and Engel's communist manifesto. All right, don't go. You don't need to go read that. But I did kind of recently, and I was surprised.
[00:06:43] I was surprised to see that in the communist manifesto, it actually criticizes all institutions and all structures as means of oppressing.
[00:07:02] Means of oppressing people. But included in that is marriage. He actually says, like, marriage is a sham marriage is just like the wealthy people, the people who have property and can lord it over everybody else. It's just a means of saying that they're better than everybody else.
[00:07:22] And really they're all just. They're all just messing around. And marriage is all for show. This is, I think, in some ways, what you hear from society, okay? At least our society.
[00:07:35] I mean, that's too broad a term, okay? There are so many people who value marriage, and there's a lot of upholding marriage and such. But just let me go there for a second, okay?
[00:07:45] Our society, or at least powers that be in our society, want to tear down structures like marriage and say, well, why is a married couple any better than a couple that's living together, that loves each other, right? Or even maybe not a man and a woman? I mean, just, you know, kind of follow that trail, right? So there's at least a strong component of our society. That is trying to tear down this simple and fundamental structure, this basic sort of building block that holds together society.
[00:08:28] And one of the places that Marx is coming from in his communist manifesto is assuming that human well being is related to having possessions. For him, there are the haves and there are the have nots like you. You either have possessions or you don't. And really like everybody, to be happy, needs to have things. And if they have things, they're going to be happy. And so we need to, you know, take away personal property from everybody and then distribute it evenly, right? We have all this shared property, so then everybody's happy, right? The problem with that, from a christian perspective, is that's not what makes us happy.
[00:09:11] That's not the key to human flourishing, having stuff.
[00:09:16] Being a happy human being, from a christian perspective is not about pursuing hedonistic pleasure and getting as much as possible from possessions or relationships and whatnot.
[00:09:30] It's found in being a creature of goddess, which is to say, like, governed by his word, right? Receiving God's word, which includes here, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh, living within God's word and receiving from him structures to confine us and give our lives shape just to live as a creature of God. And of course, Jesus has a big part in this because we rejected that. And Jesus came to us, came close to us and brought us back and made us his brothers, made us his bride, in order to bring us back to God and to root us again in himself. In this structure, he who was obedient to God's word and obedient to the point of giving up everything, all chance at any kind of hedonistic pleasure or gathering possessions for himself or anything like that. He just gave it all up in order to live in the structures and strictures that God gives and therefore become a human being, right? A flourishing human being. And we all, by faith in him, are united to him and are rooted back in that structure of faith, of simply receiving from God and living in his word, receiving from his word the shape of our lives.
[00:10:58] Now, the communist manifesto, you know, that's, like, we recognize now after unspeakable, you know, wrongs and such that have been perpetrated under that philosophy. Like, that's a bad word, at least. At least among most of us, you know, to say, like, communism, right?
[00:11:21] But what fueled that was the idea that life is about following our own desires. And you don't have to be a communist to approach things that way. I mean, it's pretty common, I would think, to approach marriage or let's say imitations of marriage, people living together, right, as just a. A source of pleasure, right. And something to enjoy and then to be thrown out when we're done or when it's not fun anymore, right?
[00:11:55] And so really, it.
[00:11:59] Well, it's all around us, and that's our sinful nature.
[00:12:03] That's our flesh and our worldly desires.
[00:12:06] Or to go back to the Garden of Eden, that's Eve turning to her own understanding and listening to the serpent and coming out with a different philosophy of life and how things should be.
[00:12:22] So here we are in the midst of a society that's breaking down and in the midst of a culture that doesn't teach us what it means to be married or what that looks like. It doesn't teach us how to flourish as a human being according to God's word. But we have God's word and promises.
[00:12:45] And so let's say we can recover what it means to live as a human being according to God's word, and more so as we pay attention to his word and receive it together, as we get together and discuss together what it means to live as God's creatures, paying attention to God's word and doing all this in faith.
[00:13:13] And the thing is, there's a ton of purpose in that.
[00:13:18] There's a ton of purpose in that.
[00:13:23] One time after high school, I unexpectedly met up with a friend from high school in another country. It was crazy, the coincidence. And we were talking, and actually, I had met Virginia.
[00:13:41] I had known Virginia for six months or something. Like that we had been together and, you know, but not married. This was early college, and. And he asked me, you know, so are you, like, you gonna marry her? And I said, oh, yeah, you know, and he said, how can you be so sure? Like, I don't understand how you could know that or be confident in that, because. And then he went. He proceeded to explain that all of the marriages in his family had been broken, you know, ended, and none of them had worked. And they had all caused a ton of pain along the way, probably for them and for him. And so how was he going to jump into.
[00:14:26] To marriage?
[00:14:28] How is that going to work?
[00:14:31] And, you know, I was just a college kid, early college at that. I probably didn't say anything helpful. I don't know, maybe a little something. I don't know. Hopefully God was at work in that conversation.
[00:14:43] But now I would say, by faith, right? By faith. Just like starting anything or going into anything requires faith.
[00:14:52] Like, if you're going to start a new business, you don't know that it's going to work, but you can start it hoping and just plan to be committed to it, and we're going to see this through. And so you go out and try and start it by faith, and, well, who knows if it's going to work or not. I think probably a large percentage of new ventures don't work.
[00:15:14] But this is different. I mean, okay, so it isn't, right. You get married, it's the same thing. You do it by faith, by faith in God's word. And one of the keys to marriage is that both parties do this by faith, together, in faith, looking to God for help and committed to one another in Christ, like, in his word, committed to being, to having their lives and their marriage structured by God's word. And of course, there's, on some level, it can't be totally controlled. There are two people involved, and then the world throws everything that it can at us in our own sinful flesh. And so it's not exactly clear how this is going to go.
[00:16:08] Well, it can only be, this venture can only be undertaken in faith.
[00:16:18] Here's something beautiful about marriage. Unlike a business venture, it's like, you know, well, unlike a business venture, marriage has God's word attached to it.
[00:16:32] This is given by God and has his word. And so, well, I suppose now I'm eating my words a little bit. You know, so does. So does a business venture in the sense that you're. You're providing for other people's needs, right? By producing a product or a service or something like that. And so don't. Don't view it as totally secular and without meaning in faith, okay? Our work is meaningful when viewed in light of God's word, in recognizing that this is a way that God is working through something human and worldly for the benefit of others. And so it's actually a wonderful and godly and heavenly task.
[00:17:17] But marriage is. Marriage is kind of on a different level. God institutes it so that we would be united together.
[00:17:27] And so as we embark on. On these ventures of marriage or continue, you know, in marriage, that's what marriage is for. Marriage is for building up community, right? It's for the uniting of two people, but then also for the structure of the family and then. And then the structure of society, right? Families. Families together.
[00:17:55] Anyway, as God's people, we have a unique opportunity in marriage as we imperfectly live together under God's word, nestled in the structure that he's given us. We have the opportunity to demonstrate God's love that unites and also to.
[00:18:18] Well, to love children and to bring them up in the way they should go. We have the opportunity to embody God's own love in coming near to us through Christ. We have the opportunity to proclaim the gospel even in our marriage, and also to repent honestly.
[00:18:43] This is really the way it goes, is our children watch us, you know, make mistakes and then repent and be reconciled and look to Jesus together.
[00:19:00] And then hopefully through that, they come to know God's love for them. Right?
[00:19:06] Marriage is difficult.
[00:19:08] Marriage is difficult because we have our own sinful flesh and other enemies, the world, the devil, coming at us to attack us. But we have Christ, Christ, who holds us together.
[00:19:23] And thanks be to God for that. In Jesus name, amen.