Dennis Tuuri

We continue this morning with a series of talks going through the marriage relationship, the relationship of husband and wife in specific. We began a couple weeks ago by talking about the creation pattern set up by God and then reestablished and reconciled in Jesus Christ. We started in Genesis with the first marriage and we saw the covenantal nature of marriage, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones is what Adam said of Eve when she was brought to him.

This is it. This is my complement. This is my partner. And that language we saw was developed later in the scriptures as covenantal language. And so the marriage is a covenantal relationship. I thought of an illustration of this—one of the frequent expressions that kids used to use, I don’t know if they still do or not, is give me some skin, you know, and you’d put your hands like this and it’d be like you’re bonded together covenantally, skin of skin, you know.

Well, Adam and Eve were bonded covenantally together. Of course, they were originally also one flesh, but that then became the covenantal nature of marriage. From our passage this morning, we saw that same thing—that we’re one with Jesus Christ covenantally, and so we’re of his body, one flesh. Based upon that, we looked at the covenantal headship of man, then looked at the functional subordination of the wife—equal in essence, differentiation in function, functional subordination. And we said that the thing that should tell us is not to stress first and foremost the role of submission of the wife in terms of building a correct Christian home, and not as the way to reform our country and our families by stressing submission. Rather we should stress the greater accountability of the husband. Then, if he’s in that kind of functional relationship to his wife, he’s been given greater responsibility, and with that responsibility greater privileges in a sense of determining the direction for the home. There’s a greater accountability. And so families have to be rebuilt upon the federal headship of the husband and his responsibilities being carried out fully in terms of his covenantal relationship to his household and to his wife.

We began to talk last week specifically about how these things work themselves out in the function of the husband. Ephesians 5 is, as we’ve said several times, the most thorough teaching on the marital relationship in all its aspects. And we said that Ephesians 5 tells us of two duties—actually there’s one duty to love your wife sacrificially. To love your wife sacrificially is the thing that men are supposed to do, and that responsibility finds itself issuing forth in two specific functions: to guard and to nourish. Last week we spoke about the guarding relationship with the husband, and hopefully you have this image now in your mind and you carry it into your households—that you’re to guard your family, you’re to guard your wife, you’re to teach your young sons to guard your young daughters, and you’re to teach them that men in general are responsible for guarding the elements in our society and culture that God has put in a functionally subordinate relationship to them.

And so guarding is an extremely important aspect of what we as husbands have to do to recover true biblical marriages, and as a result of those true biblical marriages and families, to rebuild a godly nation once more.

Now, I was thinking about what I’m going to talk about this morning when I got my paper yesterday and I saw that Governor Goldschmidt has given his state of the state address. I don’t know if any of you got the Sunday paper, but the very headline says governor urges children’s agenda.

Now I bring this up for two reasons. One reason is to alert you to that fact because you’re going to have to know that. Governor Goldschmidt last year made the economics of course his big priority—the Oregon comeback. This year he’s stressing the children’s agenda. That is not good news for those of us who love children and those of us who understand our responsibilities in relationship to our children. It may very well portend very difficult times in the next legislative session and then following that.

So I bring it up to alert you to that and to alert you to the need in terms of your guarding responsibilities as men to remain at least in touch and to whatever degrees your responsibilities allow you to be involved as well in the political process to try to guard your families against Governor Goldschmidt’s children’s agenda. Two legislative sessions ago, a year ago, we had to fight off Attorney General Frohnmayer’s agenda of child abuse, which would have ended up abusing more children, I’m convinced.

And now Governor Goldschmidt is going to make the next legislative session one that he gears toward children’s needs, including child abuse issues. So we fought the little giant last year. Next year we’ll have to fight the big giant. But the second reason I bring it up, and more importantly, is that it has to do with our topic this morning. Governor Goldschmidt used an interesting phrase in his state of the state address. He said that as carefully as we have used and preserved, as passionately as we have cared about our forests, so must we husband and harvest the new growth of talent and hope that lies within the next generation. Speaking of children, to husband and to harvest.

Now, a lot of people heard that or read that and thought, what is he talking about? To husband the children? You know, well, it’s kind of a term that isn’t used a lot anymore—to husband resources in that way. But it’s a good term he used, really. It’s interesting that if you look at current day dictionaries of what husband means, it still has that sense—which he was using it there—an archaic sense according to Webster’s Dictionary: to manage economically or to conserve. But primarily, a husband today, when you use the word, talks about the husband’s responsibilities in terms of his wife. But it wasn’t always that way. The etymology of that word wasn’t that way at all. In Hebrew, the general word for husband, and again in Greek, was just a generic term for man—*ish* in the Old Testament—and you just had to understand from the context whether the man was married to a wife, that he was a husband.

And so in Webster’s 1828 dictionary, it points out, for instance, that originally the term husband had no relation primarily to marriage. But among the common people, a woman calls her consort “my man,” and the man calls his wife “my woman,” as in Hebrew. And in this instance, the former or occupier of the house or the builder was called “my farmer.” So Webster’s dictionary points out correctly that the biblical terminology uses just man and woman in terms of the marital relationship. But it’s a good term—husband—it comes from two words, two Saxon words: *hos*, or house, the dwelling place, and then *bond*, which meant to till, work, or eventually to occupy as well. But it meant, in other words, somebody who was a farmer who tilled and worked land, who conserved the soil in that sense of using it properly. And so that’s the sense in which Governor Goldschmidt was using the word, to husband the resources of Oregon.

You’ve probably heard the term husbandman. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about this morning—the husband as a husbandman. And I do that to try to bring about this understanding: that there’s a linkage between that word husband and our responsibilities in terms of our wife, which will develop here in a couple of minutes. The point is I want us to think about that word husband and the larger word that it’s a shortened form of, which is husbandman.

As we go over the responsibilities of the husband to nourish his wife, we’re going to look then this morning at first of all the Old Testament model in the garden of what Adam did for the ground. Remember we said that there’s correlations: Adam had two tasks over his big garden—which was to keep the garden, to guard it, and also to till it, to cultivate it. We’re going to look at that a little bit.

Then we’re going to look at the husband husbandman nature of old covenant and new covenant special offices in the church. And then we’ll look at the word nourish using the Ephesians 5 passage, look at it generally, and then look at it in terms of this relationship of being a husbandman. So that’s what we’ll do this morning. That’s the outline.

Okay. First of all, Adam’s husbandman nature. As we pointed out, Adam was put into the garden of Eden. We’ve gone over this in the last couple of weeks with two tasks: to guard the garden and to cultivate it. And we said last week and the week before that Adam had two gardens, one big garden and one little garden, as it were. In Song of Solomon, the wife is referred to as a garden. Adam had two responsibilities, and his responsibilities toward his wife were the similar responsibilities he had to the big garden.

Both cases, he was to keep the garden, to guard it, and to cultivate it. That means that we would profit then if we look at the relationship of Adam’s big garden and what he was to do to it before we consider his relationship to his little garden in this sense. Okay, there’s a parallel there. There’s a correlation. And so we want to look at the first example to see what he did there.

Now in relationship to Adam’s big garden—the garden of Eden and then later, with the expansion of the gospel, all of the world—and our responsibilities to exercise dominion over the whole world, which means to guard the world from profane influences and also to cultivate the world. There are two common errors in relationship that man makes to the earth, and this isn’t anything new for most of you, but we have those people among us today, and in varying degrees you hear this refrain frequently in at least some of the newspapers.

You have people espouse the idea of the noble savage. They look at the culture around us. They say we’re alienated from nature. We got to get back to nature. It’s civilization itself that gives us all our problems. We want to go back to being noble savages. We got to return to the jungle. That there’s peace in the jungle. And if man can only just throw off civilization, that he could then experience life as it was really meant to be experienced.

These people believe that man has no more functional responsibilities over the earth than any other creature. It’s just one creature among many. We have no more right to the land we stand on than the horse or the dog or the ant even. I believe it was Schweitzer who said you have to be very careful never to step on ants, for instance. And you take that logic down far enough and you would also say that man has no more ethical responsibilities over using this land than does fungus or anything else.

Man is lowered down from his image of God down to being one among many creatures, and as a result having no special rights in terms of exercising dominion over that created order. Is to exist in the midst of a jungle and to cultivate the jungle would be wrong and sinful, and that’s what’s produced sin in our society.

Now this is obviously a very unbiblical position. But you know, I was thinking about this as I was listening to some people talk about this last week, and I thought that really, I think this is a response partially to the true sense of alienation that man does feel from the creation. With the fall of Adam, his relationship to his big garden suffered. Okay, he now had to work the ground with much labor. From the sweat of his brow, he produced things. And so there is an alienation from nature that fallen man is in the context of and must experience.

And his way to solve that alienation is to throw off civilization and culture. Well, that’s not the biblical way to solve it. But the point is that it is a biblically based problem—this alienation between man and nature. And they say to solve that problem, we just throw off culture, we throw off the idea of dominion. Well, there’s a second group of men who would say that what we can do with nature is anything we want to do—the survival of the fittest. And if we want to cut down every tree from here to the coast, we can do that. It’s no big deal. It’s our land and we’re going to do that. And we want to do whatever we can with that land for our present use only.

Trees are seen only, for instance, as some sort of economical resource. There’s no inherent value to the trees as a creation of God. Rather, you look at a tree and you see board feet. So that’s the second problem. It’s not the noble savage. Now it’s the exploiter. The exploiter of the environment, the one who does whatever he wants to do with the environment with no laws from God relating to or affecting his relationship to the environment.

Again, he’s alienated from that environment and he strikes back at it in a sense through his exploitation of the environment.

But the biblical model is neither one of these two. It’s not the noble savage throwing off civilization, thinking we’re just one creature among many. And it’s not the exploiter. The biblical model is as a husband—to conserve the resources, to use the resources well, and to actually develop them for God. Adam was put into the garden to till it, to cultivate it, to work it—is what that word means—to produce from that garden goodness.

Now if you think this through, that means that Adam’s work—God said all this was good—and Adam’s work was good. And it was good therefore that Adam took that earth and cultivated it and made it more beautiful, as it were. And so Adam had this task of taking the example that God had given him in Eden into the rest of the world, remodeling the world, reshaping it, as it were, bringing out the glory that was inherent in it.

The scriptures say in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that man goes from glory to glory. There’s this progression, as it were, in man and the very essence of man. And there’s to be this progression in the earth as well. And you can see that, for instance, when they went into the promised land—there were separate sanctuaries set up. And those sanctuaries were, as it were, sort of emblematic of the garden of Eden sanctuary.

And so man was to take the garden and expand it. And we talked about the expansion of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You begin with God’s special place with a special people—being the garden of Eden. You move into a whole country then being Israel. And now we have the whole world being reclaimed for God. And so man’s responsibility in terms of the environment is to develop it, to bring out its potential, as it were, so that the whole world will be filled with the knowledge of the word of God and then become obedient to it.

Now you know there’s various laws in the scriptures about how we relate to the land, isn’t there? We can’t work the land for more than seven years. It’s unbiblical. God says to give it a sabbatical rest. He says that we’re not to make war against the land, we’re not to ruin it in our warfare against other men. We have to be careful for portions of the environment. God says that’s what you have to do. God says not to mix seeds together. And certainly there’s lots of reasons for those prohibitions.

The point is though that God’s law puts bounds around the way we use the earth itself. We’re not free to exploit it any way we want to. We’re husbandmen. We’re stewards. Okay? We’re cultivators of the land. We’re not destroyers of the land. The land is God’s creation. He gives it under our dominion, which means we have responsibility toward that land to make it productive and to make it more beautiful.

An example of this was in the movie Mosquito Coast, which many of us have seen. And there’s various comments about what the movie meant and everything. The point is there was one point in that movie where Harrison Ford, his son was talking about him and he said that dad always said that God gave us a world with potential that had to be developed and brought out. And so Harrison Ford was a very creative man, a genius, as it were, of mechanical devices, and he brought out the potential of the world. He turned a wasted jungle area into a garden spot, into a beautiful place, a beautiful oasis.

Well, that’s a good biblical motif for what we do in the world. The world that God has given us has potential that we’re to bring out and to glorify and make more beautiful for God. It has gold, which God says he values, and he values it in a refined state, and he puts us here to make it refined. He has us build furnaces to refine it, and he says he puts value in it.

The difference—the problem with Harrison Ford in that movie, of course, was the way he went about doing it.

Several writers have commented on various numbers—four, five, six-fold actions of what we do in terms of the world. The six-fold order would say that we begin by taking hold of things that God gives us. We take things from him. We give thanks for what we receive from God. We break this—it is all imaged, by the way, on the communion service. The way that Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke the bread, distributed it amongst his people.

Some people would see in that ritual a pattern for the rest of how we are to live our lives. And whether there’s an explicit one-to-one correlation, I don’t know. But it is a good teaching device. It is a good perspective on what communion is all about—to realize that in communion we’re giving everything that we’re needed by God, nourishment in Jesus Christ, and everything in our lives is part of that nourishment that Christ brings to us.

And so it’s proper to see all of life like a communion loaf, if you will, not in a sacramental sense, but as the communion loaf imaging, as it were, what we’re to do throughout the week with every good gift that God gives us. And the point is you take—God gives us. We take the bread. We give thanks to God for what he gives to us. We then break the bread. We distribute the bread. People eat, evaluate that bread.

We taste it. We evaluate it. And then we rejoice before God. Remember I mentioned several times that morning prayers are a good thing to do—to teach your children that we go into the day taking the day from God. Say, “This is the day that God has made. We’re going to rejoice and be glad in it.” We give thanks to God for that day, and we pledge, as we do that, to use everything that we receive from that day for God’s purposes, to glorify him.

You see, we take what God gives us, we develop potential from that. At the end of the day, we evaluate our works. Do we make the world better or do we make the world worse through our actions today in this household and in our extended relationships as well?

Well, the problem with Harrison Ford in Mosquito Coast was he took hold of the jungle. He worked it, but he didn’t give thanks while he did that. He left out the essential element of seeing what he did in relationship to God for his purposes—and not Harrison Ford’s purposes. And so Harrison Ford was judged by God. He built a house on the sand, literally, in that movie, and he was judged by God. He was the foolish man who didn’t obey the words of Christ and didn’t give thanks to God.

We grow grain. We make bread out of the grain. We raise grapes. We make wine out of the grapes. And God says wine is good. It’s a great gift that he has given to us. And so man is here with the big garden to develop the resources of it, to bring out its potential. Adam’s task was to subdue the earth, to exercise dominion over the land by doing these two things: of guarding the land and then cultivating it, bringing out its potential. Okay. So the term husbandman really catches what Adam did with the garden and what we’re to do in terms of the physical resources of the earth as well.

We are to husband it. We’re to cultivate it, to till it, to build, as it were, for the potential that God has given us in the earth—things to glorify him, being thankful for the resources that he gives us. Okay, that’s the Adam model.

Let’s look now at the old covenant special office model. Remember we said the old covenant officers in Numbers 3 and 4 are said to do these same two things in terms of the temple. They were to guard the instruments and they were to use the instruments. In Numbers 4:24-28, we see then the service that’s required of the men of God. Let’s just turn to that real quick. Numbers 4. This is the service of the family of the Gershonites to serve and for burdens. And they shall bear the curtains of the tabernacle and the tabernacle of the congregation, this covering and the covering of the badger skins that is above upon it and the hanging by the hanging for the door of the tabernacle of the congregation and the hangings of the court and the hangings of the door.

It goes on to mention all these elements of the tabernacle and all that is made for them. The end of verse 26 shows how they serve. And he goes on to talk about the service of the Gershonites and their burdens and all their service. What I’m trying to point out here is that here’s one specific task. These men were to serve God. How? By guarding these instruments that were used to construct the structure of the tabernacle itself, a movable structure.

And then their service part of it, now, was to use that—the raw elements that God had given them in terms of the tabernacle—to construct them in the middle of the wilderness, wherever God told them to put them up, and to build, as it were, a little garden right there in the middle of the wilderness. And so the old covenant officers served God by being husbandmen over the things. For in this specific example, the literal physical structure of the tabernacle—they would take it and put it together, they would build, they would till it, as it were, and create it into this structure that God had given the exact pattern for, of course.

And so the old covenant officers had a pattern given from heaven of what they were to do on earth with raw materials that had been developed for that very purpose. And they then, as part of their service—the specific word used here is the same word used of Adam to till the garden. Part of their service, purpose of the tabernacle was to put those things together and to make that garden in the middle of the wilderness. And so you see the same task of husbanding those resources, bringing up the potential, the raw resources God had given us for the purpose of glorifying the earth, creating, recreating the garden, as it were, looking forward to the heavenly sanctuary of the tabernacle that they had received the pattern from Moses, who had gotten it from God.

They were to make heaven on earth. Okay? They were to take earth and bring it into the model that they had received of heaven. And so we’re to subdue the earth. We’re to pray that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. Cultivate and husband the resources of the earth.

In Numbers 3:8, the same thing is said. They keep the furnishings of the tent—meaning to do the service of the temple. They’re to guard the instruments, as we said last week. So that the tilling, the development of heaven and earth, so to speak, may be done in the tabernacle itself. And that work within the tabernacle goes on and images what occurs in Jesus Christ—giving of himself as the offering, the sacrifice for people.

What they did was imaging that it was cultivating, as it were, and tilling the resources that God had given them. Cultivation itself then is seen as the priority, and the guarding aspect basically allows them to do that work with the raw resources. You see, guarding is almost secondary to this function of cultivating and tilling and creating heaven on earth, as it were.

That’s the old covenant officers—just like Adam husbanding.

New covenant: the same thing. In Acts 20, we went over these verses before, but in Acts 20 we talked about Paul’s charge to the Ephesian elders. He told those elders to shepherd the flock—okay, to guard the flock against wolves—and of course obviously to feed the flock as well. Psalm 23, of course, tells us that God gives us food in the midst of our enemies.

And so the Ephesian elders were to see themselves as undershepherds to Jesus Christ, guarding the flock and nourishing the flock as well. Okay. Paul said that he declared what was profitable unto the church to the elders themselves. In verse 32, he commended them to God and to the word of God. And that word of God was the strengthening aspect that was able to build them up. That’s the words he uses there.

He says the word of God is able to build you up in the faith. And you know, that’s what Ephesians 4 is about. We’ve talked about it. Ephesians 4 and the special gifts, the officers to the church. What’s the point of those officers? Just to function and that’s it? No. The point of the officers, the special gifts of God to the church, is to mature the body of Christ—to take and develop the body of Christ, to bring out the potential of all the people within the body of Christ.

And so what do we get together for here on Sunday? We get together here to expose ourselves to the word of God, to understand what is said there, not just for intellectual curiosity but to go home then and to apply it, to develop it in our lives being mature men and women. That’s the goal of the Christian service is to cultivate the people. Now themselves, the shepherds of God in Acts 20 and Ephesians 4 and in other places of scripture are to husband the resources of God’s people.

They’re to cultivate them to maturity. They’re to produce heaven on earth through the church. Now, in the same way that the tabernacle or the garden was heaven on earth, the church is the tabernacle of Jesus Christ, right? We’re the temple, God says, corporately and individually. We’re now the temple of God. Christ resides in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And so we’re to shepherd those resources. We’re to husband them. And so the special officers of the church in the new covenant as well are seen as husbandmen of resources for God, to the end that they would be cultivated and properly developed, that God would be glorified and the whole process continues then, giving glory to God. That’s what Ephesians 4 and the elders of the church are all about. Okay, that’s the models we’re going to keep in mind.

Put that in the back of your mind now. Those models of the garden and the priests and then the new covenant elders in terms of their cultivation, their nourishing that they were to do—the way that Adam was to cultivate the garden—is this consistent theme of being husbandmen over resources, developing and cultivating those resources for the glory of God. Okay. Okay. Put that aside for a couple of minutes.

And now we’re going to look at the specific verses this morning from Ephesians 5. And we’re going to look at the specific word *nourisheth*. Now, God’s word is highly refined. You know, it’s like pure gold, more than pure gold—twice refined. And so when we read these passages of scripture, you see a little word like nourish and just pass it right by. But it’s really important to say, “What does this word mean?” If this is one of the two central things we’re to do for our wives as men, and if we’re going to be held responsible as covenant heads, we better know what this word means.

Because if we don’t do the guarding, if we don’t do the nourishing, then God’s going to judge us for it. Plus, we want to obey God anyway, right? We don’t just have the threat out there of God’s judgment. We have the promise as well of God’s blessing. So we got to understand what this word means.

Now, the word *nourisheth* here is a word—the Greek word is *ektrepho*. Okay, there’s only two occurrences, and we’ll talk about the second occurrence in a few minutes. The root word to this word *ektrepho*—it’s *e* and *trepho*. *Trepho* is the root word. That word means to stiffen or to fatten, and by implication then to feed. By the way, you like that—fatten and feed stuff? I like that. Anyway, the word means to feed. Okay. And that’s related to there’s another word that’s very similar to *trepho*—*trophe*. And that also means food. And there’s common roots to those two words.

So in its rudimentary sense here then what this is talking about is nourishing somebody, feeding them, bringing them up, developing them. Mule in his commentary says that this is a growing development brought about through nourishment. Okay, is what’s being spoken of here. And so the husband is to nourish his wife. And very obviously then, the way we nourish our bodies, we feed our bodies, don’t we?

And so the first subpoint in your outline under nourishing is we nourish our wives with food, the way that we nourish our bodies with food. In 1 Timothy 6:8, it says to be content with food and raiment. Matthew 6:26, the same word *trepho*—the root word of this word for *nourisheth* in Ephesians 5—is said of the birds of the air. The birds of the air are fed by God. *Trepho*. And so if we husbands are going to *trepho* our wives, we have to provide food for our wives. Okay? And as I said, 1 Timothy 6:8 says specifically that we are to give our wives food.

And the specific word there, by the way, is a strengthened form of food. We’re to give her not just enough to barely squeak by on. We’re to—well, actually 1 Timothy 6:8 refers to everybody being content with food, but the contentment we’re supposed to produce in our wives is with adequate food for the task, fully nourished, not just skimping by. We have a responsibility to give our wives food.

We’ll talk about this more two weeks from today when we talk about the dowry and the implications economically for men to provide for their wives in that way. But you know, I there’s a line to a song about the good old days in America when men could work and still would. You know, men have to work. It’s a responsibility. They have to provide food. We don’t want to spiritualize this to the extent of not seeing here the responsibility to provide food for our wife. Very important.

Exodus 21:10 says there’s three things that men have to give their wives. And one of those things is food. If you don’t give your wife enough food, she can come to church court and divorce you, file a bill of divorce against you. Okay? It’s a basic responsibility.

The second thing that 1 Timothy 6:8 says we’re to be content with is clothing. And that same thing is said in Exodus 21:10. The three things are food, clothing, and—we’ll get to the third in a second. A second responsibility the husband has is to provide for his wife clothing or shelter. That really has to do more with last week, but it is important to recognize here that it is an essential thing you provide your wife with in terms of nourishing her body.

The word for clothing in Exodus 21 refers to a heavy cloak. Cf. Exodus 22:27, which says that you don’t take a man’s cloak from him overnight if you have a pledge against a loan. You return that cloak to him. The word is a heavy cloak that would protect him from the elements. And so again, when we say we’re going to provide our wife clothing, it just doesn’t mean skimpy clothing she can get along in the house. It means she can get along whatever environment is in the context. It’s good clothing. In other words, substantial clothing.

And again, if you don’t provide for your wife substantive clothing or substantive food, she has a charge against you according to the scriptures that she can press for your breaking covenant with her.

Third thing is conjugal rights. Exodus 21:10 says that there are three things that men specifically have to provide for their wives: the three things are food, clothing, and conjugal rights. I debated whether or not I should even mention this morning, but I think I should because it’s part of the word of God and it’s an obligation that men have toward their wives. Sexual relations is what we’re talking about here.

Those sexual relations are to be seen in the context of prohibitions of God’s law. There’s specific prohibitions. There’s prohibitions in God’s law relative to sexual activity and the menstrual cycle, the reference to childbirth. There’s also reference in 1 Thessalonians 4:5 as to how we conduct marital relationships in the home. You’re not just free to do anything you want, even given the prohibitions of the timing prohibitions we just mentioned from case law.

There’s a good way and a bad way to go about conjugal relationships, and 1 Thessalonians 4:5 says we’re not supposed to be like pagans. Okay? There’s a differentiation. And so you have that responsibility for your wife. Provide her with conjugal rights within the prohibitions of God’s law. And there’s a responsibility. You don’t have an option in the matter. 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 again says that it’s part of the rights of marriage—both ways—that conjugal relationships take place.

Now, that’s really important. And like I said, I kind of hesitate to bring it up, but it’s important to think through that a little bit.

Now, the Old Testament, Exodus 21:10, the case law we mentioned, talks about conjugal rights, and many people may comment on that. What it’s talking about is producing children. Children were important for women, especially if the husband died, to provide support for. And there’s certainly an element of truth to that. But it’s interesting that in 1 Corinthians 7:1-5, that I just mentioned, where the same basic case law is applied to the New Testament husband wife relationship, that there’s no mention of offspring there.

There’s no, in my mind, indication that offspring is meant. Rather, there’s a companionship that’s being talked about. There’s a covenantal relationship that’s being talked about. If the scriptures talk, as they do in Ephesians 5, the verses we just read about the husband wife relationship being one flesh and having that kind of union—one flesh—then also you can’t ignore the obvious implications for conjugal relationships.

What I’m saying is that the covenant you have with your wife is reinforced by that activity. Okay? It’s not just an outlet to keep her from getting in trouble. It’s a reinforcement to the covenant reality of our marriage agreement, our marriage covenant. And that’s why it’s so important.

It’s interesting. Martin Luther—I’ll quote now from a book by Edith Simon about Martin Luther’s attitude toward this. Before Luther had himself cast off celibacy, he had condemned it merely as a source of continual temptation and distraction to those who are not equal to perpetual chastity. In other words, his attitude then was still basically orthodox for the Catholic Church, accounting chastity as the higher state. Okay? And you just got married because you had to, because you couldn’t be chaste. You didn’t have enough self-control.

Upon his own experience of marriage, however, that attitude was changed dramatically to one more positive. Perpetual chastity was bad. Only in marriage were human beings able to acquire the spiritual health which they had used to seek in the cloister. So the strange thing was that before he had ever experienced sexual release himself, Luther saw marriage as a primarily physical affair, and afterwards saw its benefits as primarily spiritual. Evidently not for him a purely physical communion.

See the point I’m trying to make? These things are linked together, and it’s part of the covenantal nature of the marriage. That covenantal aspect is strengthened, and the idea of companionship is strengthened through conjugal rights. It’s something you owe your wives.

So those three things are certainly necessary for nourishing our wife. The fourth thing, another thing that’s important, is affection. In 1 Thessalonians 2:7, it talks about a nurse nourishing a child. And that *trophe* is the word here. Another word linked to words we’ve been discussing. And that idea of a nurse caring for children is having affection for those children. It doesn’t just—it’s not a mechanical device. It’s not like these you’ve seen these experiments they’ve done with monkeys, you know, where you have mechanical mothers and the babies just tend to shrivel up and die away. They get all kinds of food. They have protection, you know—we’ve talked about that—but they don’t have love and affection. And because of that, they don’t do well.

Well, people are the same way. We’ve talked about marriage as a covenant, and love is a commitment, and love is action according to 1 Corinthians 13. That’s good and proper. But boy, don’t think for a word for a minute here that we want to ignore the aspect of affection and emotional attachment and concern and care for your wife. It is vital. You just have to have that.

And 1 Thessalonians 2:7 tells us we must. In Colossians 3:19, husbands are specifically admonished not to become embittered against their wives, not to have a bad emotional reaction to your wife. James, the same word of bitter being piercing or pungent, talks about a mouth uttering forth bitter things or sweet things. Well, the opposite of bitter then is sweetness. And if we’re not supposed to be bitter toward our wives, we should be sweet toward our wives. We should be affectionate.

Our words should be affectionate words. And we should have love and concern for them that transcends just obligation. We should have affection for our wives. It should be obvious, but again, that’s part of the nourishing process that Paul talks about in Ephesians 5. It’s part of your responsibilities to be affectionate toward your wife. And if you’re not affectionate toward your wife, you pray about it. You spurn bitterness and you cleave onto affection for your wife. Okay? You start doing what’s right for her according to God’s law. You start obeying God, and those emotions will occur. Okay? To treat your wife with affection. That’s important also.

The fifth element here is rest. Rest is essential to nourishment, isn’t it? If we eat all good food and have good clothing and everything else that we need, but don’t ever sleep, we have big problems. I know I’ve done that a few times myself and had big problems. Rest is essential for what we are as people. And we should know that in this church. We’ve talked several months ago about the Sabbath and the importance of rest, the Sabbath for man. And certainly the Sabbath should be a day of physical rest and emotional and spiritual rest as well for your wives. And you should encourage Sabbath rest. That’s important and essential.

Another illustration of this I want to use really has more to do with food. I hope this isn’t a bad illustration, but it really has to do with food, but it’s kind of more geared to rest. In 1 Samuel 14, they’re out. The men of Israel are out. Saul and his son Jonathan are out doing battle and at war, and they’re running along and Saul has commanded his people not to eat anything until the enemy is pursued and vanquished. Okay? Stupid thing to command his men to do. There’s no reason in God’s scripture to tell your guys when they’re out there in warfare, “Don’t eat until you catch the enemy and kill them.” That’s really dumb.

They’re running along. Saul’s son, Jonathan, has not heard this oath that his father said about whoever does that’ll be killed. And he’s running along and they’re going through an area where there’s honey all over the place. Honey is actually dropping out on the ground. There’s honey all over the place. And so here they are going through the land that God’s promised—milk and honey, right? And the king is not being a good king. He is telling his people, “Don’t eat the honey.” He’s keeping his people from the blessings of God.

Well, Jonathan didn’t hear it. He’s running along, tired. He dips his staff as he’s running along, apparently in the honey, puts it to his mouth, and his eyes brighten up. Okay? And he’s able to go on then and do his job well. And so the point is that this, in a sense, is Jonathan is getting rest from his labors. Even while he’s running, he’s getting nourished, and as a result resting, as it were, even while he’s working, by getting that honey.

Now, what am I saying that for? You know, and I suppose you could tomorrow when your wife is working around the house real hard and you come home, you could probably run over to the cupboard and get a spoon and get some honey. But that would be one thing you could do. But what I’m trying to get you to see is that you should have concern for your wife if she’s involved in her tasks to nourish her and to give her rest as she does that.

Some practical ways to do this: to assist her with some of those tasks. If you get home tomorrow night, your wife has had a tough day homeschooling, all these tasks getting done—and I know you’re tired, too—but you can go home and let’s say there’s a real messy kitchen and she hasn’t got time to clean the kitchen yet and maybe goes to bed because she’s just too dog tired to do it. Maybe you could clean that up for her in the middle of the night and surprise her. She gets up in the morning. I’m telling you, her eyes will brighten if you do that. Okay? Jonathan’s eyes brighten. We should give our wives rest.

Now, it’s not just crazy Dennis saying this. Okay. John Calvin—that you know, supposed hater of women—John Calvin said that told the men of his time that they would find married life taking on new meaning if, as well as toiling at their work for the family, they would support their wives at home and give them courage and as much help as possible in their burden of care for the infants, especially when they awakened up at nights. Knowing that to bear all this is what is acceptable—a sacrifice to God—is as their daily task. Calvin told his men that they would find marriage much more rewarding if they would help the wise of the housework, even to the point of getting up in the middle of the night with crying babies to help them.

Now, you know, don’t go home and all the wives say, “No, you can take care of the child in the middle of the night.” The idea that it was somewhat exceptional for men to do that. But the point is they should have that kind of compassion and concern for the wife to give them rest from their labors and to encourage them in the task they’ve been given by God. Flowers occasionally is a good idea. Maybe you can’t afford flowers, but you can certainly afford to stop the car along some field somewhere that nobody owns, pick a few wildflowers, and give them to your wife. Consideration like that goes a long way toward helping her to be nourished for her task.

Sixth, we’re to nourish our wives with the word of God. Food is often used as a metaphor for the word of God. Certainly then, one of the necessities that we provide for our wives must include the word of God as well. In verse 26 of Ephesians 5, it talks about Jesus Christ sanctifying the wife, guarding her and also washing her with the water of the word. And that corresponds to the nourishment we’ve been talking about—that washing of the water with the word. Part of the nourishment we give for our wives then is spiritual food. Okay, the word of God is important.

I said that there’s two aspects of that. First of all, publicly. Joshua 8:35, Deuteronomy 31:12—you can look those references up later. The point is those were specific admonitions for the people to assemble to hear the word of God. And part of that assembly was the women. Okay, women were commanded to be in public worship and to attend the public hearing of the law when those laws were read.

In 1 Timothy 2:11, it’s an interesting passage in the New Testament. It says pretty much the same kind of thing. It isn’t really used that way much, but I think it probably should be. 1 Timothy 2:11 says: Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. Okay? And you read that verse and you tend to think, well, you can tend to think, you know, this is a verse to put women in their place. And there’s certainly maybe some aspect of that in the passage here in terms of the subjection of the woman in terms of teaching. It goes on to talk about that. But remember that the culture at that time was not dissimilar to the culture portrayed, for instance, in the movie that came out about four or five years ago, *Yentl*.

And remember that movie, the woman couldn’t go to find out more about the word of God. She couldn’t learn. They weren’t encouraged to read the Bible. They weren’t encouraged to know the law of God. The men were trained in that. Now, it’s true, as I said, that men are the teachers of the scriptures. It’s clear the women do not have a public teaching role. It’s wrong for them to do that. But that doesn’t mean they’re not to know the scriptures.

This verse can be seen as making provision for the wife, correcting the error that the woman not learning at all. He could have said, “The wife doesn’t need to learn.” He didn’t. He says, “Let her learn.” Okay. Let her learn the word of God. Let her learn it with quietness.

Susan Foh, in *Women and the Word of God*—I think it’s called *Woman and the Word of God*—I don’t agree with everything in the book, but she makes some excellent points about this verse and others, emphasizing that women are to learn the scriptures. And there too she points out that Ecclesiastes 9:17 tells us that the normal method of learning is in quietness. Quietness isn’t something imposed upon the woman. All you got wise out there sit quietly while I talk up here because that’s the way one way that God has given us to learn. Ecclesiastes 9:17 says: The words of the wise heard in quietness are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools. Okay?

So it’s good to learn in quietness. It’s not a prohibition placed just upon the wife. We all have to learn in quietness various times. And so we’re to encourage our wives to be hearing the word of God and to be publicly involved in the worship service of the church and hearing what’s said from the pulpit.

There is a public responsibility of the husband to provide the nourishment of the wife by giving her the word of God through the public services of the church then, okay. Now I bring this up real pointedly because you know, it’s easy for women to be absent from the service up here—this part of the service—to be down in the nursery, to be doing other things, getting food ready. And see, but see what I’m trying to point out to you is that you as husbands, if you’re going to nourish your wives with the word of God, you got to make sure she finds out what was said up here.

Now, if you can take the notes home and go over them with her and teach her what’s said, great. If you’re not going to do that, get a tape. Make sure she’s exposed to what’s being taught here. It’s important. It’s part of the obligation that the wife had to attend—as I said—the public reading of the law. Those verses I pointed out, and again in 1 Thessalonians, women are to learn. Okay? So there’s a public proclamation of the word of God. You should expose them to it. Additionally, privately as well. Husbands should be teaching their wives.

In 1 Corinthians 14:35, it says for a woman, if she has questions, to ask her husband at home. See the idea? The assumption is that when you go home, you and her are going to talk about what was said at church, and you’re going to talk about other portions of the word of God that you’re studying through. You have a responsibility to teach your wife the word of God. It’s that clear—publicly, privately as well.

Now remember, in however, that they’re a complement to you, right? They’re like the opposite of you. They’re a complement to you. They’re not the same as you. What that means is that normally you won’t want to necessarily go home and say, “Okay, Dennis says you got to learn theology here and I want you to read *Institutes of Biblical Law*. We’re going to together every other week go through one chapter of it.” That’s not the way it works.

The idea is you have a companionship with your wife. You’ve got, if you listened last week, at least once a day—at the end of the day—a little evaluation time there at the end of the day—be a perfect time to explain to her elements of the scriptures that apply to those specific problems she’s having. You teach your wife as your complement. You’re not supposed to instruct her like a theology professor. She doesn’t learn in the same way. We can take that as an assumption because she’s your complement. She doesn’t necessarily learn in the same way that you learn. That doesn’t mean she can’t learn. It doesn’t mean there’s anything intellectually inferior about her. She may be intellectually superior to you. It’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about that she learns in a different fashion. Normally, she’s a complement. Okay?