Oakbrook Evangelical Free Church

Genesis 1:26–28 (ESV) “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

Genesis 2:18, 20 “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him…for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.”

Genesis 2:21–25 (ESV) “So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.  And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.  Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
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. “

Matthew 19:4–6 (ESV) “He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Introduction:
In the Bible there are three human institutions established by God
a.         The family
b.         The church
c.         The state

The Bible does not address or regulate schools, businesses, museums, hospitals or any number of other important enterprises or institutions important in human culture.

Marriage is different.  God established marriage for the welfare and happiness of humankind.  Marriage did not evolve as a way to determine property rights.  At the end of the Genesis account of creation God brought a woman and a man together to unite them in marriage. The Bible begins with the wedding of Adam and Eve and ends in Revelation with a wedding of Christ and the church.

Marriage is God’s idea.
Marriage was designed by God.  That design is crucial.
Marriage was instituted by God,
It is regulated by his commandments,
and it is blessed by our Lord Jesus Christ.

God invented marriage, then we should make every effort to understand and follow his design for it!

When the state gets involved in the issue of marriage they’ve gotten themselves into something invented by God. 

Marriage   Marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all. Where marriage erodes, social pathologies rise. The impulse to redefine or redesign marriage is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil law as well as our religious traditions. Yet it is critical that the impulse and these forces be resisted, for yielding to them means abandoning the possibility of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and the hope of rebuilding a healthy lives and marriages and families.
Marriage is not so much a “social construction,” but is rather an objective reality designed and created by God — it is the covenantal union of husband and wife— it is the duty of the law to recognize, honor, and protect.  When you and I get married we’ve gotten ourselves into something invented by God and it will require radical commitment and every effort of every fiber of your body, soul and spirit.

TS: This raises the question of “who says so?”  The Bible!

2.         The Bible as God’s sacred instruction manual.
Some people do not acknowledge God or the Bible.
You may not share the view that the Bible is God’s authoritative revelation to humankind.  You may appreciate the Bible but may not trust it in what it teaches about love, marriage, and sex.  You may think that what the Bible has to say about these subjects are ancient, regressive or backward and don’t apply to today.

Whatever view you are coming from let me encourage you to come along with me on this journey.

The honest truth is that it is difficult to get an objective view of LSM because of our own experiences and because of the culture we live it.

The Bible is the only objective, transcultural owner’s manual we have available.  Its teachings have been tested by millions of people living in many different cultures over thousands of years.  And it has stood the test.

American culture and its stifling dogma is less than 50 years old.  The tenants of the false religion of secularism have become the mixed drink from which the highest levels of our educational, governmental, military and religious establishment have drank.  It is destroying people, marriages and families.  Eventually it will end up in the dumpster of filed social experimentation.

Sometimes people are pessimistic about marriage
As comedian Chris Rock has asked, “Do you want to be single and lonely or married and bored?”  …frustrated, upset, stretched, stressed

Today more than half of all people live together before getting married. In 1960, virtually no one did.

One quarter of all unmarried women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine are currently living with a partner,

Over the last forty years, the “leading marriage indicators”—empirical descriptions of marriage health and satisfaction in the United States—have been in steady decline.
1. The divorce rate in the 1960s was about 23.  During the divorce revolution of the 1970’s it was nearly double that.  Today the rate of divorce is nearly the same as it was in the 1960s.  But…

2. In 1970, 89 percent of all births were to married parents, but today only 60 percent are.
“Today, the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children’s family lives. In fact, because of the growing prevalence of cohabitation, which has risen fourteen-fold since 1970, today’s children are much more likely to spend time in a cohabiting household than they are to see their parents divorce.”  Why Marriage Matters, 30 Conclusions from the Social Sciences  http://www.americanvalues.org/wmm/

The National Marriage Project, founded in 1997 at Rutgers University, is a nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and interdisciplinary initiative now located at the University of Virginia. The Project’s mission is to provide research and analysis on the health of marriage in America, to analyze the social and cultural forces shaping contemporary marriage, and to identify strategies to increase marital quality and stability.

3 Most tellingly, over 72 percent of American adults were married in 1960, but only 50 percent were in 2008.

Time to get back to the Book
Genesis 2:24 (ESV) “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

We were made for marriage and marriage was made for us.  What went wrong?  Genesis 3 – Falling away from God has broken even aspect of the human experience.  It is not that the desire for romance is too idealistic.  It is that this idealism absolutely must take into account the impact of sin.  The reality of the fall must not be allowed to create a heart of pessimism for marriage was created by the God of hope.
We are examining Love, Marriage and Oreo Cookies
Our focus today is a part 1 of marriage as God designed it to be.
~ God said it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone.

I.          The Gift
What Are We Going to Do With The Gift!
The totally “other”
Genesis 1:27 (ESV) “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

“Love shouldn’t be this hard; it should come naturally.” In response, I always say something like, “Why believe that? Would someone who wants to play professional baseball say, ‘It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a fastball?’ The understandable retort is, “But this is not baseball or literature. This is love. Love should just come naturally if two people are compatible, if they are truly soul mates.”  Keller, Timothy, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment (p. 29).

Genesis 2:21–25 (ESV) “So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.  And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.  Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
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. “

Adam lived in paradise and yet God says his situation is “not good”.
So God creates someone to be his perfect complement.

God’s Gracious Gift   “And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man”

The quest for compatibility is impossible.
The issue men is “will you accept God’s gift?”

Prov 31:29 “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”

Love   “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, 1960), 123.
“There is a profound longing we feel for marriage. We hear it in Adam’s “At last!” cry at the sight of Eve, the indelible sense that locked within marriage is some inexpressible treasure.”

II.         His opposite And His Equal
Genesis 1:26 (ESV) “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Genesis 2:18, 20 “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him…for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.”

Male and female! – not incidental but the very core of who we are
If we do not embrace our gender, we cannot understand ourselves.  Every cell in our bodies is marked either XX or XY. A simple DNA test will confirm if the one tested is a male or female.

A Journal of the American Medical Association study analyzed reams of research on fetal DNA tests — 57 studies involving about 6,500 pregnancies — and found that carefully conducted tests could determine sex with accuracy of 95 percent at 7 weeks to 99 percent at 20 weeks.

Intro to Pink Brain, Blue Brain:
FINALLY GETTING to know the new neighbors. They moved in a week ago, but you’ve had no chance to chat, which is surely why you didn’t notice sooner that the woman is pregnant. Very pregnant, by the looks of it. “How wonderful!” you croon over your common fence. “Do you know if you’re having a boy or girl?” Why is this always the first question we ask when learning about a new baby? The answer is simple: because sex is a big deal. Not just the act of it, but the fact of it. Of all the characteristics a child brings into the world, being male or female still has the greatest impact—on future relationships, personality, skills, career, hobbies, health, and even the kind of parent the child is likely to become.  Eliot, Lise Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps – p.1

“Sex differences in the brain are sexy. You can hardly pick up your favorite newsweekly without coming across some reference to this research. It gives an easy explanation for the bewildering Mars/Venus gaps we find so amusing: why men can’t multitask and women can’t read maps; why men love The Three Stooges and women have their chick flicks.” P.10

His equal
Together they reflect the image of God.
Together they are to rule and subdue; be fruitful and multiply

St. Louis to Ft. Clatsop        MAP
Lewis and Clark Expidition – May 14, 1804 – 1806   PORTRAIT
Military Personnel
Lewis, Meriwether. Captain
Clark, William. officially second lieutenant (co-captain 2000)
4 Sergeants …. 23 privates

Civilian Members of the Expeditionary Party
4 men, one of which was
York: Wm Clark’s slave – big man excellent hunter
1 woman – Sacagawea (also Sacajawea, Sakakawea). PIC Shoshone woman who was born around 1788. She was about 12 when Hidatsa raiders captured her at the Three Forks and took her to their North Dakota villages. She was the only female member of the expedition, just 15 years old.  Charbonneau took her as his second wife around 1804. She probably died in 1812 at Fort Manuel near today’s Mobridge, South Dakota. At one point in their expedition they encountered a hunting party…
Can you imagine the pioneers making it with the women?

Seaman – Lewis’ Newfoundland Dog

“Whether you identify yourself as an egalitarian, a feminist, a traditionalist, a complementarian, or any other variety on the interpretive spectrum, the differences between men and women will become an unavoidable issue in every marriage. Failure to come to terms with it is like tiptoeing around the proverbial elephant in the living room.”   Keller. The Meaning of Marriage (p. 162).

When people come into a marriage relationship they may not have thought or talked about roles and their relationship.  Those who are marriage likely came into marriage unprepared for the new immediacy of “how are we going to related in this relationship as male and female?”  But make no mistake about it the subject of gender roles in marriage is a contentious and controversial one and it is one with which marriage partners struggle.

The Mystery of Marriage: As Iron Sharpens Iron, Mike Mason Mating Flight – of Red-tailed Hawks – reach sexual maturity at two years of age, monogamous, mating with the same individual for many years. In general, the Red-tailed Hawk will only take a new mate when its original mate dies. The same nesting territory may be defended by the pair for years. During courtship, the male and female fly in wide circles (20-40 mph) while uttering shrill cries similar to a high-flying aerial dance. The male performs aerial displays, diving steeply at 120 mpg, and then climbing again. After repeating this display several times, he sometimes grasps her talons briefly with his own. Courtship flights can last 10 minutes or more. Copulation often follows courtship flight sequences, although copulation frequently occurs in the absence of courtship flights.            NATURAL BUT AWKWARD DANCE

In other ways coming into marriage is awkward and turns out to be the quiet beginning of your own world war 3.  The Notebook! Noah says to Allie, “Well, that’s what we do. We fight. You tell me when I’m being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you’re being a pain in the ass. Which you are 99% of the time. I’m not afraid to hurt your feelings. They have like a two second rebound rate and you’re back doing the next pain-in-the-ass thing. So it’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna be really hard. And we’re gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that, because I want you. I want all of you, forever, you and me, every day.

Helper = ’ezer is almost always used in the Bible to describe God himself. Used to describe military help, such as reinforcements, without which a battle would be lost. To “help” someone means is to make up what is lacking in him with your strength.  Woman was made to be a “strong helper.”  Keller, Meaning of Marriage (p. 165).

His opposite  “helper fit for him”  = “like opposite him”
The idea is complementarity and not identity.

Each is incomplete without the other.  Together they make a unified whole. Two pieces of a puzzle that fit together.  They were designed to make a harmonious duet.

They were to work together, have sex together and have children together.  Yes sadly, they also disobeyed God together.

Now, this oppositeness is the elephant in every home, on every playground, in every work environment.  It is the ageless “battle of the sexes”.  But God did not design things that way.

The difficulty of being together.
Their needs are different
Their preferences are different
They are different biologically.

Their communication styles are different – documented
You Just Don’t Understand – Tannen
That’s Not What I Meant – Tannen

Story – The round-about chaos in Scotland – 1^st night, 40 annive

Biblical Command:
1 Peter 3:7, 8–12 (ESV) “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.
Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.  For “Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit; let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it.
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

III.        What is the gift for?  For Companionship
Genesis 2:18, 20 “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him…for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.”

He was not alone.
But he was lonely in paradise. (subtle implication)
The issue of proximity – different comfort zone

Never underestimate the need for companionship.
Buy up every opportunity possible:
~ Tragedy in Lois’ family during 1^st 4 years of marriage
~ Trip to Israel
~ 1^st trip to Ukraine – Took Lois!
You only get so many chances in life to be together!

IV.        Who is the gift for?
Genesis 2:24 (ESV) “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

A.         Marriage is for adults (who can stand on their own two feet)

B.        It is for adults who are married
It is heterosexual: man + woman
It is monogamousl: one man + one woman
Life-long

C.        It is for “bonding  (attached + stuck like glue!)
Attached!
Whatever contributes to bonding is generally good.
Whatever threatens bonding is generally not good.

Conscious, deliberate, persistent effort to bond w/ her!

Men, maybe you feel like Jesus’ desciples…

Matthew 19:10–11 (ESV) “The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.”

D.        It was for intimacy!
Marriage is for procreation! 
Genesis 1:27–28 (ESV) “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

“God gives the human race the mandate to procreate, which is a reflection of his own boundless life-giving creativity. But, obviously, this wonderful gift of creating new human life is something we can only carry out together. Neither sex has all the characteristics necessary—only in complementary union can we do it. Keller (p. 165).

God created Adam and Eve, male and female and He gave Eve to Adam.

Thus, sex is inherently part of God’s creation.
Sex is not merely an activity that people do but gender is who we are!
It cannot be engaged in casually or recreationally!  That is a myth.
Sex incorporates every cell in your body.  It defines you.  It governs your patterns of communication.  It defines how you see the world.  And it goes into the very core of your soul.

In other words, marriage is for sex!  It is in the relationship between a committed husband and wife that children are to be born.  It takes both to have children and it takes both to raise them.

Marriage is for sexual intimacy!  “The two shall become one”
Face to face = unique in the created order
Not just for a short period of time during the year call “heat” or “rut”.
But year round, year after year.

For pleasure, skin to skin time for comport, stress relief and security in physical knowledge and acceptance.  “Adam knew his wife”

Intimacy with someone who is “totally other” is hard work and it does profoundly change us!  We are self-centered and selfish; we are deeply broken by sin.  We need changing!  Salvation +

But marriage brings you and I into closer proximity to another human being than any other relationship.  Not to mention that “male and female” is a reference to two different cultures in and of themselves which are “totally other”.

Wow!  How is this possible?
As Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”  Matthew 19:26