Dennis Tuuri

that as a church and as people and as families, we look back on our past year. We evaluate what we did properly and improperly for our Lord and Savior. And we look forward to the year ahead and with renewed optimism that he’ll be with us as we go forward into the future. We closed last week with “Onward Christian Soldiers.” And we made reference to Psalm 110 at several points during the sermon. And I want to stress again that verse three of Psalm 110 reads: “The people shall be willing in the day of thy power in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning thou hast the dew of thy youth.”

The point I wanted to make there is the people are willing. Christ’s people are said to be as the dew of the youth of Christ, the offspring of Christ to go forward into the created order preaching his gospel. They are said to be like the dew of the morning and in number, and they’re also said to be willing. So we want to stress this morning again that as we did last week, that we should all be willing to assist when the church moves into an area that we have determined is good for us to be involved with. We should all be willing to put our hands to the task.

Additionally, when individual men have projects they want to do or things they’re particularly concerned about in their family or with the help of other men in the church, we should be willing to encourage and exhort them in that task and to assist them in whatever way we possibly can. So we want to be people that are willing people as we go into this new year.

The second thing I wanted to point out in relationship to last week’s sermon was we talked about how with the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, with the escape of Jesus the way that Moses escaped to be the deliverer. Jesus coming back out of Egypt into Israel then to deliver the people from Israel. We talked about how Israel had become in essence a new Egypt. They had apostatized from the faith and they were seen as Egypt by God. Then in those three stories in Matthew 2 and we said that the church then is one of the examples or implications to that text for us as a people. We said the church can become Egypt and that’s certainly true.

But I didn’t make reference last week and I wanted you just to for a couple minutes this morning that the nation that we live in also can become Egypt. This nation particularly was founded. Many of the founding fathers had the understanding that this nation was a new Israel. Not in an exclusive sense like this is the only promised land of God. But they knew that when nations were established that they were to be established for the purposes of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and that as a nation walked in obedience to that, they would be an Israel of God in that particular locale.

And this country was formed with that understanding. There’s many historical references to that fact. And yet this country now, which was once then a new Israel, has also become more and more and increasingly like old Egypt, the way that the Israel of our Lord’s time had become Egypt. Pharaoh’s servants sacrificed their lives to sphinxes, idols of the Pharaohs themselves. Israelites sacrificed their young, as King Herod killed the young for his own political ends.

And today, many children in our land are being sacrificed to new idols of careers, convenience, cheap sex, and other idols of destruction. And so our nation has become also has changed from Israel to Egypt. Sexual debauchery marked Egypt of old, Egypt and its sin, and this country is now marked by that same sin of sexual debauchery. We have a new pharaoh as it were. Remember for a while Egypt was a good nourishing place for the people of Israel where they had a pharaoh that was understood and had probably converted to the faith of Joseph.

But we have a new pharaoh in this country, a new reigning power, and that is the power of the courts. This was illustrated a week or two ago. I saw in the McNeal error show that a judge in Kansas City, I believe it was Kansas City, in an attempt to desegregate the schools of Kansas City by judicial decree doubled the property taxes of the people in the region and imposed by fiat decree a 1 and a half percent, I believe it was sales tax or income tax that would affect businesses as well as people.

There was no representation in this great increase of taxation that this judge affected. And when the people cried out that this was taxation without representation and in a city council meeting they brought up little bags of tea to remind the civil magistrates of the city there that this was taxation without representation. The response of the city and the officials that spoke on behalf of the judge was that taxation without representation was a nice coin phrase. It was never part of the constitutional documents of this country. And so we have a new pharaoh as it were ruling in this country through the courts and that’s a good example of that.

The incredible fight over Judge Bork and the Supreme Court that occurred several months ago is another indication that the Supreme Court has become the ruling entity in this land with its fiat decisions as to what is right and what is wrong and what rules the nation will be governed by. The liberal opponents of Bork were extremely upset and agitated because they saw a new pharaoh arising to the Supreme Court ascending to the throne as it were that knew not the ACLU. In contemporary terms, the United States is old Israel has become old Egypt instead.

Additionally, another thing. I thought of this whole line of thinking when Pastor Jack from Alaska called me. He gets the Melbourney Intelligencer report and Melbourney in his report has broken with Reagan now and talked about the terrible legacy of Reagan. This is seven years in office so far. And on this report, he’s going to send me a copy. I haven’t seen it, but apparently he takes the map of the USSR and superimposes the map of the United States on it. And they’re almost identical in terms of their amount proportion of size and everything if you break the USSR off from its surrounding countries.

And in a sense many of us have been appalled at the doctrine of moral equivalency when talking about Russia and the USSR rather and America. In other words, the media continually tries us to see the problems in America in a similar moral light to the problems in the Soviet Union. They try to draw moral equivalency between those two governments. We had our Vietnam, they have their Afghanistan. So we can’t criticize them for Afghanistan as we were in Vietnam. Well, most of us have probably fought that line of reasoning for quite some time now in our discussions with people. Maybe not self-consciously, but increasingly there is a growing moral equivalency that is in effect an equivalency between this country and the Soviet Union as evidenced by that fiat decision of the judge in Kansas City.

Again, there is a growing moral equivalency of those two nations as they both seek to build a moral base apart from God. Remember the driving factor behind the Soviet Union is atheism is the official religion of the state. Well, that certainly has become the official religion of the United States as well. The lack of theism. And as much as President Reagan mouths platitudes about God and about his concern, for instance, for the unborn, he has not made that a major issue of his administration. We have a growing moral equivalency then and the United States of America can become the Soviet Union apart from invasion by that country, and increasingly that’s what’s happening in this country.

I believe all of this really is a lead into today’s topic as well though because all what all this portends for the country. We can keep our church out of Egypt as it were. But for this country as a whole, what this portends is God’s judgment. Herod and his rebellion against God resulted in God’s temporal judgment against him. All such rebellions are judged temporally by God. One of two things will happen in this country.

We will either have massive repentance and a turning back to God or we’ll have continuing judgment from God upon this nation. Now that’s important. The reigns of the scripture are often seen as the judgment of God. And the scriptures tell us that the house built on sand, when those rains come and the storms that represent God’s judgment comes, it falls and mighty is the fall thereof. But the house built on the rock will stand in that storm of God’s judgment.

That rock, of course, as Christ instructed when he gave this parable, was not simply hearing the word of God. It was those people that hear the word of God and obey it. Those people have a rock, have a house built on the rock. Those people will survive the judgment of God.

On the covenantal judgments of God against this nation as they come, this morning then we’re going to look at the foundations laid in God’s word for the household itself. We want to make sure that each of our households is built on the rock in obedience to Jesus Christ. And we’re going to begin this morning a series of husband and wife relationship messages. And this has implications for all of us regardless of our marital state. I want to point that out that although the primary reference to what we’re going to talk about this morning has to do with husbands and wives, in a sense we’re all wives.

The scriptures say if we’re part of the body of Christ, then we’re part of the bride. Jesus is the groom. And so men have this dual capacity in them as it were. They have to understand that they have a female sort of role in relationship to Christ. He’s our head and we respond to him the way that our wives are supposed to respond to us as their heads. So we’re all wives in the sense if we’re part of the body of Jesus Christ.

What we say about wives’ proper response then will be predicated at least partially on the relationship of the church to Jesus Christ. Most of all, most all of us are also in a position to exercise household management either as wives or as mothers or over our own households. Wives share the management of the household with their husbands. We’ll talk about that a little bit more. But what I’m saying is these roles have implications for all of us in the church.

The younger ones in our congregation should pay particularly heed as we go through the scriptural teaching on husbands and wives because they’re quickly reaching an age and they may not realize it, but they are quickly reaching ages where they’ll be establishing their own households in the not too distant future. And so they should pay attention to these messages and realize there’s implications for their understanding of marital relationships as well.

We’re going to start this morning with the husband’s responsibilities, then move on to the wives and then move on to a few of the limitations of the family. Specifically, some of you have asked that I give you a preview of what the messages will be. This morning is going to be kind of an overview establishing the covenantal headship of the man.

Next week we’ll talk about the man’s role as guardian, okay? The husband’s role to guard his wife. And we’ll be looking at the various guarding passages of the Old Testament and New Testament where Adam was to guard the garden. The priest was to guard the temple, the elder is to guard the church, the husband is to guard the wife, and we’ll take implications from those positions for the husband-wife relationship itself.

Two weeks from today, we’ll talk about the husband’s responsibility to cultivate his wife, to nourish his wife. And we’ll talk then about that in a general sense and again look at the cultivation of the church by the eldership, for instance. Look at the way the Levites were to cultivate the people of God and their work in the temple as well. And we’ll draw illustrations from that and then bring it into the New Testament teaching of man’s responsibility to love his wife in the sense of nourishing her.

Three weeks from today, we’ll take one week off from this series to talk about abortion. It’ll be Human Life Sunday and we’ll have a service of malediction. And we’ll be talking about a little bit different twist this year because of the series of messages that we’re going through. I’m going to talk about the husband’s responsibility in terms of abortion of children. That’ll be three weeks from today.

Four weeks from today, we’ll look at specifically the Old Testament case law about the provision of dowry or financial support for the wife by the husband as an aspect of guarding. We’ll take that as a whole separate topic, but it will relate back to the husband’s responsibility to guard his wife through the Old Testament case law relating to dowry. And then the following week, we’ll talk about the Old Testament case law, the exclusion from public service or duty for the first year of one’s marriage. And we’ll look at that as a specific case law example of the husband’s responsibility to nourish his wife.

Okay. So that’s the next six or seven weeks worth of messages. Today overview, next week guarding generally. The next week nourishing generally. The next week abortion and the husband. The next week guarding specifically related to dowry and the following week nourishing specifically related to the year of exclusion for men from public service when they get married. Okay.

Now this morning we’re going to focus on husbands and I guess for the next six to seven weeks we’ll focus on husbands’ responsibilities. Husbands have taken a real beating over the past thirty or forty years in this country. A man’s home used to be considered his castle, of course, over which he was king and that home is no longer a castle over which he is king. That castle has become a rented domicile. Either rent it directly from a landlord, a lord of the land that you’re staying on there. So you’re certainly not king of that castle or indirectly if you own your home, own your home quote-unquote.

Indirectly, it’s become a rented domicile to the state because the state as king has exerted its authority over the land through the twin ungodly concepts of eminent domain and property taxation. So there’s no castle in the sense of a castle in the old sense, the term where a man owned property free and clear. There is no castle left in this country for the man to be king over. But I guess that’s okay because, you know, a king is really a king not so much because of the castle that he inhabits.

He’s a king because he has subjects that he rules over and has authority over. So I guess men can still be kings. But even here there’s problems. The queen has asserted kingly prerogatives now in this country. And so the man may have had some of his kingship diminished as the wife is encouraged daily in this country by the media and by entertainment, other kinds of vehicles to assert kingly prerogatives.

Well, at least he’s still part of the kingly management team, right? He can at least still be part of at least half of his responsibilities as king over his used-to-be castle is left. But increasingly, children regardless of age are seen as full partners in the family corporation and as such voting members of any family decision. And now the monarchy has been revealed to be totally thrown off in favor of a radical democracy based upon one man, one vote.

And I’m sure that won’t take long before we realize that should be one person, one vote. So that kind of radical democracy is entering into family life. And in light of this trend of the usurpation of the king from his castle and the radical democracy of one man, one vote, in light of this trend, I strongly advise in your own household the elimination of all household pets. We want to avoid having to divine the dog’s vote.

When the twin principles of evolution and one man one vote run their natural course, which is to say run amuck, but here within the confines of our corporate castle here, Reformation Covenant Church, I guess we’re a little safer. I thought about our church. I was listening to a tape by James B. Jordan on Ephesians 5 and he was it made me think of our church in a certain sense. Don’t get offended when I tell you this, but he said how when he first went to the church there in Tyler and I don’t know what the name of the church is these days he used to be a Presbyterian. I don’t know what it is these days, but when he first went to that church, he said that first week he was there, guys and say, “Hey, you know, we don’t let our women vote at the business meetings here. You know, we’re really reformed. You know, we don’t let them vote.”

And he said, “That’s true. They don’t let them vote.” And then they’d say, “Why don’t you come out to our guys night out? You know, and he realized they were going out for guys night out couple, three times a week, many times, leaving the wife and the kids at home to go out with the boys. And he said it wasn’t long before he realized this kind of mentality. It wasn’t really a church he was now fellowshipping in the midst of. He said he was like he was back in sixth grade and it was like a boy’s clubhouse. You know, those people have I guess basically left his church now. And so he could speak that way.

Now I said it reminded us—he didn’t mention by the way cigar smoking in the clubhouse but I guess he could have. But anyway there is there can be a tendency to fall into that kind of mentality. We’ll talk about the effects of the fall and the marital relationship that causes that kind of mentality a little later in this morning’s talk. But this way, this approach to reasserting the king and his castle, and the approach being here to stress the submission of wives to their husbands. Okay. As the fundamental way, as the basic way to reassert the king over his castle, to reassert the submission of wife to husbands as the primary method to reassert kingship over your castle, I think is an approach that is fundamentally flawed from a biblical perspective.

Now, before you think of when we’re going to fire this guy, I want to go on real quickly to say that the scriptures definitely teach the functional subordination of the wife to the husband. And we’ll consider that briefly this morning. And when we get done with the series on men. We’ll talk about submission of wives in a couple of months or a month and a half from now. But it’s not the key. The stress on the submission of women is not the key to recapturing the biblical concept of marriage of the marriage relationship.

I believe that what we’re going to discuss this morning is the real key to rebuilding the man as king over his castle again—the biblical concept of the marital relationship. This morning we’re going to talk about first the covenantal nature of marriage. Secondly, the covenantal subordination of the wife. And third, the covenantal accountability then of the husband.

**First, the covenantal nature of marriage.**

There’s internal evidences in our text this morning that suggest this. First of all, the expression used “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” Adam here has been given a helper and he wakes up and he realizes he says this is it. This time, this is now my true helper. This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. That’s an interesting expression. It’s one you’ll find peppered throughout scripture—about I don’t know ten or fifteen references probably—and it usually in the initial stages of the revelation of God’s word refers to kinship and particularly by blood.

Laban talks about Jacob his nephew as bone of, or rather as bone of his bone and his flesh. So it relates to a blood relationship here. And in one sense that’s literally true in this passage of course because the woman has actually been taken out of the man and is of a blood relationship then, as it were, with Adam. But it tokens a similar relationship for all such married people because the verse goes on to say after he says this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

Adam goes on—or actually the comment by the author probably goes on to say in verse 24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. Bone of bone, flesh of flesh here.” And so he’s indicating this is going to be true for all marital relationships. The wife will be bone of Adam’s bone and flesh of his flesh. Bone of the husband’s bone that is.

Well, in 2 Samuel 5, this same expression is used. And it’ll be good for us to consider just for a minute here what the implications of that passage are. 2 Samuel 5, the first couple of verses: “Then came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron and spake, saying, ‘Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh.’” So here the ten tribes here are telling David, “We’re bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh.”

Now, some commentators say they’re referring here to the physical relationship. In other words, all of Israel descended forth from Israel, from Jacob. And so we have here a statement of blood relationship. But if you think about it—remember that Israel wasn’t all necessarily descended forth when they came out of Egypt. They were a mixed multitude and certainly it would be kind of a strange thing to be trying to assert their familial ties with David here. It would have been more understandable if it was his own tribe that was saying this to him.

But no, it’s all the tribes of Israel here that want to serve him. But the passage contains an indication of what they’re talking about in the next couple of verses. “Also, in time past when Saul was king over us, thou was he that let us out and brought us in Israel. And the Lord said unto thee, ‘Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be a captain over Israel.’ So all the elders of Israel came to the king in Hebron. And King David made a league with them in Hebron before the Lord. And they anointed David king over Israel.”

What they were saying when they said that you’re bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh is they were asserting not just a blood relationship, which is certainly true of all created people—I mean, after all, we all come forth from one actual blood family. I don’t think that’s what they were stressing. They were saying, “We’re in covenant with you.” And they then ratified that covenant. They made league with David in Hebron. And so bone of bone and flesh of flesh refers to a covenantal relationship as well as to originally a physical relationship.

In Leviticus 18 and 20, it’s interesting that prohibited degrees of marriage reflect this one-flesh concept. When a woman is divorced or widowed from her husband, she still is considered as a blood relative of the husband in terms of the laws of consanguinity, the laws against prohibited degrees of marriage. So the covenantal relationship she enters into with her husband still carries over even after she’s widowed or divorced for some reason. She’s still part of that blood group. Okay? So she’s covenanted into blood—or not blood rather—but to bone and flesh there as well.

In Luke 24:39, Jesus said that “a spirit hath not flesh and bones as I do.” When Jesus appeared to the disciples, he said, “I have flesh, I have bones.” Relating back to this passage, this term from Genesis 2. And he was asserting then that he was a physical body. But he was also asserting his kinship with them. And this is more clearly pointed out in Ephesians 5:30 where we’ll be dealing a lot with Ephesians 5 this morning. But it said there that “we are all members of Christ’s body” and it goes on to say in some versions or some translations “of his flesh and of his bone.”

We are covenantally related to Jesus Christ. We are covenanted into his body and as such we are flesh. We are part of his flesh and his bone. And so when Adam asserts here that she is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, this is covenantal language that he’s talking about here and he’s referring to the covenantal relationship of marriage.

Another internal indicator in the text is the idea of leaving and cleaving here. Now, it’s easy to read back into Adam saying, or the commentator saying in verse 24, that “A man will leave his father and his mother. It shall cleave unto his wife.” It’s easy to take a passage of scripture like that and impose into it our understandings of culture and our societal groupings today. What I’m saying is that today if somebody gets married, they go off and they have their own little household totally separate and remote from their family. Is that what this means? Is that what it implies in the primary sense? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Remember we talked about leadership in the Old Testament. We talked about the Beth, the house of the father. Remember that the representational nature of the civil and religious government was based upon Beth Obs—households of father of the of the father—and that household was an extended household and we saw that through very specific evidence from selection of men to be perform these offices.

Well, the Beth is an extended household that presupposes that most of the relatives are going to be fairly close. Of course, in that context, they would have been because they were all in the wilderness together, all in camp together, but still that carried over into the promised land as well. What’s being stressed in leaving is not a physical separation from one’s parents. That’s not what’s being stressed.

What’s being stressed is a leaving—not physically primarily, but what’s being stressed here is the establishment of a new household unit. Okay? The word translated leave here is often translated in other verses, in fact, normally translated as forsake. And it’s used very frequently in the Old covenant by writers to refer to Israel in regards to forsaking the covenant. “Don’t forsake the Lord your God. Don’t forsake the covenant.” Or as an indictment against them, “You forsaken the covenant.” It’s used covenantally. In other words, that particular term.

The same thing’s true of the word cleave or to stick to. Now, that word also—that’s very commonly used in terms of relating how Israel is to stick to the covenant, to cleave to the covenant, and to stick to Jehovah as covenant God. And so both those terms, leave and cleave, are used throughout the Old Testament primarily to reference Israel not leaving the covenant and cleaving to God.

Okay? They’re used covenantally. So these two terms are used to indicate here that man establishes a new covenantal unit when he marries. He forsakes the covenant of his of his family that he’s coming out of—is of the covenant of his father and his mother and that covenantal group. And he covenants into a new relationship with his wife. That’s the primary reference here is that it’s a new covenantal unit, not the idea of physical separation, although that will many times occur as well and normally would occur probably.

Now, if these two references here to bone and flesh and then the leaving and cleaving are a little bit obtuse, if they’re too typological, there’s some real clear passages of scripture as well that tell us the same thing is true. Malachi 2:14-16 refers then to the covenant as a marriage covenant. Starting at verse 14: “Yet ye say, ‘Wherefore, because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously? Yet is she thy companion and the wife of thy covenant.’”

The wife of thy covenant. What he’s saying here is real clear that marriage is a covenant of relationship that’s been established by God. And your wife is the wife of the covenant. Again, in Proverbs 2:17, we read the following, talking about the adulterer, “which forsaketh the guide of her youth and forgetteth the covenant of her God.”

Calvin commenting on this verse says that not only does this verse assert that the wife has broken covenant with her bride of her youth, with the husband of her youth, the guide of her youth, referring to her husband. She’s forgotten the covenant of her God. And he says here, there’s a relationship that shows that the covenant of marriage is not only a covenant, it is the most sacred of covenants that we enter into. And so it’s called the covenant of God.

God established Adam and Eve in a covenant relationship. When we covenant into marriage, it’s an important, vitally important covenant that we enter into. And Calvin commenting on that text said that very thing.

Now, this two-fold witness we’ve gone through—then the particular text, the covenant terms used, and then these specific verses from Malachi 2 and Proverbs 2 and other many other overt passages from God’s holy word. We see that marriage is indeed a covenantal reality and must then be understood in light of this. It’s not primarily an emotional relationship. It is a covenant.

**What are some of the implications for this?**

Well, the first implication is that if this is a covenant given to us by God, a holy covenant, then it must be governed and guided by God’s purposes above all else. If it’s a covenant that God has called us to, then we must see the covenant in relationship to God’s purpose. What is God’s purpose for marriage?

Well, certainly the text just before us says that the woman is given to man to help him in his calling. He’s a help meet for him. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. The verse from Malachi we just read goes on to say after saying that the wife is thy companion and the covenant, the wife of thy covenant, goes on to say “and did he not make one yet he had the residue of the spirit and wherefore one in other words why did God make man one man and woman one in this covenant of marriage?”

What’s the purpose? He says in Malachi 2:15: “he says that he might seek a godly seed.” So another overt purpose of the marital covenant established by God for God’s purposes is—and this purpose is explicitly given to us in Malachi 2:15—a godly offspring, children. So we have clear indication that there are at least two reasons why God has this marital covenant: both to help man in his dominion calling, his vocational calling, and to produce godly children.

But these are not the primary purposes. Otherwise you’d have no purpose, for instance, for a couple that had no children. But that isn’t true. And the text itself here that we’ve been reading from this morning in Genesis just before this says what the real purpose is, the fundamental purpose from which these other two purposes come forward.

In Genesis 1:27, we read that “God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female he created them.” So man then is made, the man wife relationship is made here to image God. That’s the purpose of man—to image God in all that he does—to glorify God by that imaging of him and to rejoice and enjoy God in that relationship. The central purpose then, the most overarching of all of the purposes of our marriages is to image God in that marriage.

Now, that means that when we evaluate our marriages, we can’t use standards that are extra-biblical. We have to use God’s biblical standards of this covenant that he’s established to image him. And when we evaluate our marriage and our marital relationship with our wife, we must let that standard of imaging God be first and foremost in our mind. It also means though that God’s law then must govern that covenantal arrangement.

If God has given us this covenant of marriage to image him and secondarily then to provide help to the man for his calling and to have a godly seed, then God’s law must govern that marital relationship. The Puritans knew this well. Out of the Puritan family by Morgan, we read that “all people after Adam and Eve had to choose their own wives. Every proper marriage since the first was founded on a covenant to which the free and voluntary consent of both parties was necessary.

“The difference ended, however, when the mate was chosen. Since time began, no man and woman had ever been allowed to fix the terms upon which they would agree to be husband and wife. God had established the rules of marriage when he solemnized the first one, and he had made no changes in them since then. The covenant of marriage was a promise to obey those rules without condition and without reservations.

“Many other covenants are bounded by the makers, Samuel Willard admitted. But all the duties of this covenant is appointed by God. Therefore, when husband and wife neglect their duties, they not only wrong each other, but they provoke God by breaking his law.” It’s God’s law that governs God’s covenant that he has given to us for the purpose of imaging him. And therefore, our marital relationships must be governed by God’s law.

Now, that’s certainly true, as the Puritans pointed out there, about after we’re married. In fact, the early vows of marriage that are being changed now. The vows that couples take always had a phrase in them that they were to walk—uh—that they vowed to live together after God’s ordinances or after God’s laws in the holy state of matrimony. There was in the question about “Will you consent to be married until death do you part?” The phrase then after that said “according to God’s holy ordinance.”

Part of the vow of marriage should include a reference to the fact that God’s law, God’s ordinances govern that relationship and that they’re not free to use that relationship for their own purposes. It must be bounded by God’s covenant of law given to the covenant of marriage. But even the selection itself, of course, is bounded by God, by his law.

In 2 Corinthians 6:14, we read that we’re not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. I think this refers more than just a profession of faith, though. We talked before about this passage about how the scripture goes on in 2 Corinthians 6 to talk about “what commonality has righteousness with iniquity in terms of consecration. What commonality has light with darkness in terms of knowledge? What commonality has Christ with Belial in terms of dominion and the dominical aspect of marriage?”

And what he’s saying there is that marriages—govern the selection of your marriage partner must meet those criteria. You must marry somebody with the same knowledge about what God has given us in his holy scriptures that you might work together as prophets under God. You must have the same sense of consecration of things in terms of righteousness. You must have the same sense of dominion calling under God. Those are essential aspects to our selection of mates.

So both of the selection of your marriage partner and then of the fulfilling of the marital covenant, it must be bounded by God’s law.

Another implication of the covenant of marriage is that God’s love must characterize it. God’s love is not unconditional. We’ve talked a lot about that in the last few weeks. You’ll hear this repeatedly about how marital love is unconditional, total, self-sacrificing love. And that just is not the case. We’re to image God’s love. And God’s love requires works from us—as a not as a uh—to merit the relationship we have with him, but to evidence the relationship we have with him. And so the marital covenant is not unconditional. There are conditions placed upon it. Divorce under certain circumstances is perfectly proper and right, although a terrible thing, but it acknowledges that the covenant of marriage has been broken by a party and that makes the covenant severed. And so the covenant there is a conditional aspect to that love.

Secondly, God’s love is not primarily emotive. In 1 Corinthians 13, we find that love is action. Love is doing things. The marital situation, since it is a covenant, primarily is not a relationship in which we’re to feel good about each other. You’re going to wake up some mornings feeling quite bad about each other and certain things will irritate you greatly about each other. But still, love is commitment to each other. Love is trying to seek the best for the other person. It’s not based upon emotions primarily, although that is certainly part of the marital relationship, but it is primarily a commitment one to another to seek the best of the other person and to glorify God through that relationship.

Another implication of the fact that marriage is a covenant is that it should lead to a contentment with your marriage partner. This is God’s partner for you. God and his sovereignty has brought you together into that marital relationship to image God. The idea of unity and diversity both in the trinity of God and as well as in the marriage is also an important thing to recognize in terms of this imaging aspect of the marital relationship.

Now, it’s interesting how it seems like people normally try to marry somebody that they’re somewhat like, but usually end up marrying somebody they’re not really like at all. Many marriages that you look around and see, you find people are married to just about their exact opposites and it’s like something has gone wrong. A lot of times young married couples feel that way. They thought they married one guy and they find out after six months that he’s quite another fellow altogether or the wife is quite another girl altogether and they think “I made the wrong choice.” This is a real big problem.

But that is understood if we look at these verses very closely that we’re talking about this morning as well. In verse 18, we read that “it wasn’t good for man to be alone.” It doesn’t say it’s sinful. It’s not good. Aloneness is not seen to be the normative relationship or the normative state for man. God’s image in man is seen through the marital relationship.

One is supplied then to be a helper to Adam matching him. Now it’s interesting here how you read these verses: “I will make him a help me meet for him.” The literal Hebrew words there read “I will make him somebody like opposite him.” Okay. The idea here is not identity with Adam. Eve is not an identical Adam here. She is a compliment to Adam. She is like the opposite of Adam. She’s a compliment to him.

See, there are simple expressions the scriptures could have used for identity. It didn’t. The point is not that Adam is given a helper that is identical to him. He is given a helper as a complement to him to complement his own personality and the way he is. And I wanted to bring in here the fact that my wife drove to church this morning. I don’t drive good on the ice. One of the first times I tried scoffing at this Oregon black ice stuff, I end up in the ditch. She was in the car with me and ever since then I say, “Why don’t you drive on the ice?” She’s a compliment to me in that sense.

Now, it’s a real crude example. But the point is that if you get upset ‘cuz your wife doesn’t like you and she falls short in areas that you are good in, don’t do that. Recognize that she’s a compliment to you and as you compliment each other, you image God and his unity and diversity as well. You don’t always get what you want necessarily, but you’ll find through marriage long-term that you get what you really need to image God successfully in your calling.

Okay. So marriage is a covenant and it’s very important to recognize that.

**Secondly, the wife is covenantally subordinate to the husband.**

And again, this is pretty obvious, but we’ll just go over these very quickly. First of all, internal evidences of the text: the order of creation here, Adam is made first, the woman is made second. That indicates a subordination of the wife to the man. In terms of the substance, the woman comes out of the man. She’s part of his original substance. And so she is seen as subordinate to him in that sense as well.

It’s interesting. Matthew Henry commenting on the fact that the woman was made from a rib has some nice things to say. He says, “The woman is not made from the head to rule over man, nor yet from the feet to be trodden upon by him, but the side to be equal, under his arm to be protected, and near to the heart to be beloved.” A little bit mushy, I suppose, but I do think it’s important to think through the implications of where she was taken from in terms of the rib. It indicates a subordination to man.

Third, man names woman. He says, “This is this I will call woman for she was taken out of man.” Man names the woman and the naming of things indicates authority over what is named. Adam has just named all the animals. God has given man dominion over the animals and he names them. He takes authority over them. And so here man takes authority over the wife covenantally by naming her as well.

Fourth, the purpose itself of the woman is to help man with his calling. And so there’s a covenantal subordination seen in terms of subordinating herself to the covenantal purposes of mankind.

So there are internal evidences in the text that talk about the covenantal subordination of the wife. There’s external evidences as well. Ephesians 5:22-24 we’ll deal with that in more detail later. 1 Timothy 2:11-15 talks about the preeminence of men in creation in the order of creation and then talks about woman’s necessary submission to man. 1 Peter 3:1 and many other scriptures you could fill in I’m sure that talk about the woman’s covenantal subordination to the husband.

Some of the implications are this then of this then is the functional preeminence of the man. If the woman is covenantally and functionally subordinate to the husband then he is functionally preeminent over the wife. We’ve talked about this example before, but one way to think about this—and again it has its limitations in terms of equality stated in the New Testament very clearly and also of course in the Old Testament—is that in the Trinity you have an equality in terms of the trinity but there’s a differentiation in terms of functioning of the trinity.

The Son is equal to the Father in terms of essence but he’s subordinate to the Father in terms of his function. And so covenantal subordination does not imply an unequal essence in terms of essence, but rather in terms of function.

Now, I just want to take a brief little sidlight here into man’s function and show that it’s vitally wrapped up in his relationship to his wife. In Genesis 2:15, it says that “the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” Okay? To dress it and to keep it. We’re going to talk more about this as I said earlier in the future, but I want us to just look at a couple of verses here or maybe just jot down the references to look at later.

This language of dressing it, working it, and also guarding it. Those are the implications. He works in the garden. He guards the garden. Those two same words are repeated in Numbers 3:7 and 8, Numbers 8:26, and in Numbers 18:5 and 6, in reference to the duties of the Levites at the temple. They were to work interior to the temple. Okay? They were to dress the temple as it were and they were also to guard the temple, to keep it. Okay.

This same concept as I said before is repeated of elders in the New Testament church. When we talked about the office of elder, we talked about the elders’ function in terms of guarding and in terms of teaching or cultivating the people that are taught as well. And by the way, when we start our elder training program in a couple of weeks here, that’ll be two primary aspects of what we’ll be doing there: teaching men and evaluating men in terms of their guarding capabilities and in terms of their nourishing capabilities as well.

This same two-fold definition given to the husband’s function also defines the husband’s love for his wife in Ephesians 5. And this is quite important to realize. In Ephesians 5 we read that the man is to love the wife. Well, let me just go to it and read it. “Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the church, gave him for it, gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse her.” Okay. Verse 28: “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth it and cherisheth it.”

Okay, so Paul here gives an example or a further definition of what that love the husband is to have for the wife is. He says the husband is to nourish the wife and the husband is to cherish the wife and that’s those same two-fold functions of dressing the garden, nourishing it, working the garden as it were, and cherishing it or guarding it.

The word cherished there comes from a Greek word that meant to keep something warm—the way that a bird keeps eggs or little birdies in the nest warm by covering with its wing. And so the husband is to cherish his wife in that sense—to warm it—to guard the wife as long as well as nourish her. And so we see those same two-fold purposes of man’s functional calling as a man now also relating to the his functional superiority over the wife. Those are his tasks as well: to nourish and to cherish.

It’s interesting by the way that term cherish—covering with feathers. You see that in a very clear example in the Old Testament relating to marriage when Ruth is covered, for instance, with the garment of Boaz. When somebody marries somebody else, they’re said to be covered with the man’s garment. And in fact, the Malachi passage we talked about earlier says that when a man marries more than one wife, he covers the wife with violence. He covers his violence rather with this cloak. The marriage conceals the polygamy—attempts to conceal that he’s really doing violence to the women involved. Men are to cover their wives with their garment. They’re to protect them as well as nourish them.