Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

By reviewing, we’ve given I believe eight or nine talks, nine or ten talks on the marriage relationship—what it is—and then from that the responsibilities of husbands and the responsibilities of wives. Those series of talks are now ended, and we begin this morning a series of what will probably be four sermons on limitations to the family. Having laid out the foundation of the family and the husband-wife relationship, we’ll move on to certain limitations. So I thought it’d be good to review what we said first in the last nine or ten sermons, which have been interrupted from time to time for other things.

We said at the beginning of our series that marriage is a covenant. We demonstrated that quite convincingly, I think, from Scripture, and that as marriage is a covenant, it has a covenant head, and that head is man. The wife is given to man to help him maintain the family unit, which is a covenant. She is covenantally subordinate to the husband. His covenantal headship, however, gives him increased responsibility in terms of the family and also increased accountability.

And so it’s kind of a two-edged sword, so to speak. The wife is given to man to be a helpmate. We said that in the Genesis account, the Hebrew word there could be translated a helpmate as “opposite him.” In other words, a complement to the man, not an exact replica of the man. And so if many of you have wives that sometimes you wonder why they’re so different than you are—you know, that’s in the plan of God. They’re to complement you. They’re not just to duplicate you. And so the two together provide a covenant unit, the family, which is important for God’s Word and for our society.

God’s Word tells us that it’s important for society, for the church, for the state, and all of these things on that basis. Then we started with the covenant—the husband. Since he’s the covenant head, since the Scriptures say that he has primary responsibility and greater accountability, we began with his responsibilities.

And you remember the first thing that we said was that the husband was responsible to nourish and cherish his wife, from Ephesians 5. He’s to love his wife. Ephesians 5 says specifically that this is to consist of nourishing and cherishing. Those are his two primary responsibilities. We said that he is to cherish his wife, and that word in the Greek meant the same way a mother bird would cherish the young in her nest by putting her wings over them, keeping them warm and safe.

And in a sense, this infers then that what we have is a guarding responsibility given to us there. The husband is to guard the wife as the mother bird guards the young birds in the nest. We said that’s consistent with the Genesis account, that Adam was given two responsibilities in terms of the garden. Those responsibilities were to till the garden, but also to guard the garden. And so as he guards the garden, we’re supposed to guard our smaller garden—our wives, as it were.

We said the Song of Solomon—Solomon actually calls his wife a garden in the Song of Solomon. And so we have those guarding responsibilities. Additionally, those guarding responsibilities are seen in, for instance, church officers. The Levites of the Old Testament in that particular system were to guard the things that were holy or set apart to God. We’re going to talk about some implications of that a little bit here later on when we talk about our children. But suffice to say, the Levites were also to guard the holy things from being misused.

And then also the elders in the church are to guard the church. They’re to protect the church. And so man has this continuing responsibility developed throughout all the Scriptures in terms of guarding things. And specifically in the marriage relationship, the husband must guard his wife. That was once commonly understood in this country. It’s now not commonly understood. And it’s important that we bring up our boys, for instance, to realize that they have a responsibility covenantally to girls to guard them and to help keep them safe.

Okay, we said that the other side of what the husband is to do is he’s supposed to nourish the wife, and that means that he’s supposed to develop her potentiality. We said that Adam, for instance, was to till the garden—to nourish the garden, as it were—to take what was potential there and to develop it, to make it more glorious, as it were, for God, to “heavenize” it in a sense.

We said that the Levites who are guarding the things of God in the temple and the things in the tabernacle that they would use—they also were then to go into the tabernacle and to work with those things inside the tabernacle, imaging, as it were, the work that would be accomplished by Jesus Christ at His coming and His work on the cross and then His work in the greater temple, which is the temple of God’s holy justice court of justice. And so they were to “heavenize,” as it were, the interior of the temple through the work that they were to do.

And we said that those same two words about Adam—the Hebrew terminology “to till” and “to guard” the garden—were the same Hebrew words applied to the Levitical tasks in terms of the temple. And so there’s this expansion going on. And we said that the elders as well were to nourish the church, weren’t they? Remember, the elders don’t just guard the church. They’re supposed to give the church things from God’s Scripture and feed them and nourish them so that we all grow together. We encourage each other in the faith and we all grow into the image of Jesus Christ in a fuller sense. We mature in terms of our understanding of God’s Word and in terms of our practice of God’s Word.

And that’s a heavenization process as well. We become more heavenly in the sense of conforming ourselves to God’s laws and conforming ourselves to those laws that would produce order and peace on the earth—where there’s order and peace in heaven. And we said that the husband’s supposed to do the same thing with the wife. The word is “nourish,” and the word has implied in it in the Greek text to bring somebody to full development.

And so the husband is to make sure the wife becomes what she is planned to be by God. One of the implications about that we talked last week about briefly was we talked about the Proverbs wife of Proverbs 31. And what we said was that if your wife isn’t the Proverbs wife—remember, you’re here to nourish her, that she would become that. Don’t criticize her for not being exhibiting all those qualities. Encourage her, pray with her, help her to develop into that model that God gives us in Proverbs 31. See the difference there? Don’t criticize. You’re there to help her develop in all that she is before God, the way that you’re developing as well.

We said that the wife’s responsibilities begin with one operative word, which is submission. And throughout the New Testament, you’ll find the wife being told to submit.

Oh, by the way, we gave two practical examples of that guarding and nursing on the part of the man. We said that in terms of guarding, the husband is required to have a dowry before he marries his wife. And so that’s a method among other things that protected the wife from financial disability or financial hardship should he die or should there be a divorce, for whatever reason. He’s to guard her financially. That’s just one picture of all his guarding responsibilities. But it is a good one to keep in mind.

The case laws say we’re to have a dowry for our wives. And that’s an example of the guarding functions. Additionally, the case laws of the Scriptures say that we’re to have a year of exclusion. The first year we’re married, we’re not supposed to involve ourselves in any public work outside of our normal vocational calling. We’re not supposed to get heavily involved in the church that first year. We’re to take the year off, men are. And a specific reason is that you might cause your wife to delight in that marriage, that you might nourish her that first year, make her a real focus of your life, and establish that relationship in a good fashion. So those two case laws give us this picture of guarding and then nourishing. Very important for us to continue to remind ourselves of those responsibilities as husbands.

The wife has responsibilities as well. And we said that the first order be is with submission. The wife, as we said from 1 Peter 3, is to submit herself ultimately to God’s order. Okay? Man’s the covenant head of the covenant unit that God has established, and he has been placed there by God. It wasn’t your choice or his choice ultimately that brought you into marriage relationship. It was the choice of a sovereign God.

And so God has given that man as your covenant head. It’s part of His order in the world. And you submit yourself to that order. We said that ultimately the wife is submitting herself not unto the husband. Ultimately, she’s submitting herself to God. Remember that 1 Peter 3 gives us the example of Jesus Christ, who submitted Himself—who submitted Himself to the authorities that were going to put Him on the cross, actually. But it says that He entrusted Himself to the one who judges justly, to God the Father.

So we entrust ourselves and we obey God’s order. We entrust ourselves not to the order itself but to the one who creates it, to God. And we know that God is a just judge, okay? That He will deliver His people that are in trouble and distress in a normative sense. And that He cares for us. Later on, 1 Peter says that we can cast all our cares upon Him because He cares for us. He’s not an impersonal judge. In other words, He has love and compassion and concern for us. And we can cast our cares upon Him because He cares for us. And that’s who Jesus entrusted Himself to, and that’s who the wife is given as a model to entrust herself to.

Now, there are limits, of course, to that submission. If the order would cause you to break a command of God, then you cannot obey that command of the civil magistrate or your husband or the church or anybody else—your employer, for instance. They can’t cause you to break a command of God. You must obey God rather than man. After all, the whole point of obeying the order is to obey God’s method of ruling the world. And if that method has been subverted to the point that they would cause you to throw off God’s reign, then you cannot obey that particular authority.

The context in 1 Peter 3 of giving us the wife’s submission to her husband was first that rulers were to submit to rulers, and the example he gives us specifically in 1 Peter 3 was to Caesar, who had probably unjustly gotten his power at the time. So an ungodly sort of ruler, a Caesar, as an example of who we’re supposed to submit to. In terms of master-servant relationships, the servant is said to submit to the master even if he’s fro—cruel. Okay? Again, he uses worst-case scenario. You’ve got a bad master; still you’re to submit. Jesus Christ is given as an example, of course, and His example was again a worst-case scenario. And then finally, in 1 Peter 3, the godly wife is to submit to her husband even if he’s an unbeliever.

So in all those four examples, we have worst-case scenarios given. So it’s quite important to see that God’s Word tells the wife to submit herself to a just judge who cares for her—and God—in spite of the particular weakness of the vessel that she’s submitting to. Okay.

The result of that submission, of course, is blessing from God. And again, Jesus is our example of that. Submitting to God, humbling himself, as it were, to the point of death, as it says in Philippians, God then highly exalted Him and gave Him a name above every other name. And that’s a pattern that God sets up for us as well. Okay. Submission and suffering for doing what’s right—if we’re called to do that by God—will eventually end up in more blessing from God. It says that we’re blessed from God because of that.

The second word we said in terms of the wife’s responsibilities was the word obey. And again in 1 Peter 3, we’re given the example of Sarah, that Sarah obeyed her husband. And Sarah obeyed her husband not just with what she did; she obeyed her husband with her tongue. It says specifically that she called her husband Lord. And we talked about that incident from the Book of Genesis about how when God promised Abraham seed, and Sarah in her remarks talked about her husband as her Lord. Okay, she did it with her deeds, with her tongue, and also with her attitude.

When she said, “My husband’s my lord,” in the context of what she was saying, she was saying that in the tent by herself. Okay, Abraham wasn’t there. God—the angels—the messengers of God, God in the form of the messengers, wasn’t there in the door of the tent. So she did it even when people weren’t around. That’s my whole point. She still affirmed lordship of her husband and obedience to him in thought, in word, and in deed.

That term “Lord,” of course, is an interesting term that God gives us an example of in 1 Peter 3 for wives’ relationships to their husbands. Lord is a term that is used of God and masters, for instance, and rulers in 1 Peter 2. These terms are also terms that are used of God in the ultimate sense. And again, this reflects to—what you’re obeying is somebody who’s been given a title that really is properly only applied to God Himself. But God says, “I’m going to let these people under My order and under My authority use these same titles to remind you that it’s really submission to Me that you’re doing.” Okay?

And you should have a reverence then, a sense of respect for the ones that God has placed in authority in terms of the relationships that we have in the world. Okay.

We also mentioned that term Lord, the English word as it works out that we have today in the Lord—it’s a good word to remind us of what the husband’s responsibility is. Remember, we said that “lord” came from two old English words that meant “loaf” and “warden.” And you put those together, you have “loaf warden” or eventually “lord.” And so the point is that right in the term “lord” itself—loaf warden—we have that two the two primary responsibilities of husbands reinforced again. He’s to provide loaves. He’s to provide nourishment, as it were. And he’s to be a warden. He’s to guard those under his charge.

From there, from the wife’s need to be submissive in terms of her spirit and obedient in terms of her actions, we then talk about the godly adornments of the wife in 1 Peter 3 and other verses as well. And we said that those godly adornments are to be meekness, not weakness. Meekness doesn’t mean weakness. Meekness means being brought under God’s harness to be used for His purposes and to have the strength of the person channeled, as it were, in a correct direction. And so you actually become more strong if you want to look at it that way.

The ox when he’s hooked to the thing that keeps him under control—to the, what’s that called? The oxbow. The bow, I guess, or whatever it is, the harness—that ox doesn’t become weaker. He actually becomes stronger for the task he’s given. He becomes more focused on his task. And so wives, in their submission, don’t become weak women. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But Proverbs 31 says they’re strong women. Okay? Because they’re meek. Jesus was meek. Jesus wasn’t weak. Brought under God’s harness.

The other adornment of the godly wife is to be meekness and also a quietness in her heart. And quietness, we said, didn’t mean she wasn’t supposed to speak. Quietness meant having an unmovable and unflappable spirit, as it were, steady and settled. Because after all, she’s under God’s harness and she’s under the harness of somebody who’s going to take care of her, who’s a just judge who cares for her. And so she has a quietness there, a spirit that implies a settledness and a firmness in terms of her calling.

She’s not going to be flapped about. She’s unflappable in the sense that she won’t be disturbed by things that happen to her. So her stability is in God and His harness, and so she’ll have a quiet spirit about her.

The fruit of all this is good works. That’s another adornment of the godly wife. She is to have good works, which are necessary as an evidence of salvation. Remember, we said that if you’re going to be Sarah’s daughter, you have to have the faith of Sarah and you have to have the deeds of Sarah, according to 1 Peter 3. And we said that the faith of Abraham, which makes us Abraham’s sons in a sense, also—Jesus said that if you want to be Abraham’s sons, you must do his deeds.

And so faith and works go together. Works evidence true faith. Works don’t merit faith or merit salvation, rather. Faith is what God gives us to effect salvation. But the works evidence that faith and salvation. And so works are necessary in that sense to evidence salvation.

Those two adornments—the internal spirit of meekness and quiet heart and then the external being good works—both are required, is what we’re saying in terms of having adornments that prove you to be a true daughter of Sarah and a good wife.

Then we concluded last week with the relationship of the wise wife and the relationship with the Proverbs woman. And we said that she was a dominion woman. Verse 10 of Proverbs 31 says, “A virtuous wife—who can find one?” The word “virtue” there is translated over a hundred times in the Old Testament as “army.” It means a valiant warrior. The “gib’or hail” of the Old Testament—the mighty men of valor—who are a special class because they were strong, mighty men who would go forth conquering for God. Well, the Proverbs woman is called a virtuous wife, a strong wife. Again, she’s not weak because of her submission. She becomes a strong warrior for God, a dominion person, part of the army of God.

She’s not some blushing violet, as it were. She’s a mighty warrior to be used for God’s purposes. And it goes on to say that she then exemplifies what that mighty warrior as part of God’s army is all about. She’s a good helpmate. She manages the household that God has provided her in the marriage relationship. She manages that household with intelligence. She considers fields. She has faithfulness. She has good management skills.

She leads in service as well as in dignity among the household. She begins the service of the day, and so she sets the example for those who are under her, under her control and under her authority. She is recreative. She takes wool and she takes things like that and makes them into fine fabrics and makes fine clothes out of them. She’s what? God—she images God in that sense. God took things and then made something out of nothing.

We’re given the created order by God, and we’re given it for the tasks of tilling it. Remember, to make it more beautiful. And so she takes raw material, develops the potential, and becomes recreative under God. And so she’s imaging God in that sense. She has God’s blessings upon her. Her lamp doesn’t go out by night. The wicked, the Proverbs say, their lamp is put out by God in darkness. But the people that He blesses, their lamp doesn’t go out at night.

The root of the Proverbs woman is said at the end of Proverbs 31 to be the fear of God. That’s the root from which all this other fruit comes forward. She relies upon God and upon God’s grace and upon the spirit of power that God would give her to accomplish the task that He gave her rather. And so we’re the same today. We have to rely upon the spirit of God to do whatever we’re going to do for God.

We’re going to talk about that more in a couple of minutes as well. Her evidence that she recognizes that her position of being a strong warrior and doing all these things well and being blessed by God—that all that is of God’s grace—is that she turns around and demonstrates grace to the poor in her vicinity. She stretches out her hand in Deuteronomy, where we have the recitation of the Ten Commandments.

We read it in our family this morning on the way in. It says that God brought us out with a stretched-out arm from Egypt. See, He showed grace to us by stretching out His hand to us, as it were, and delivering us out of Egypt, which of course was just leading forward to the great deliverance to be accomplished by Jesus Christ. Jesus stretches out His hand to help us out of the miry pit. And so the Proverbs woman recognizes that her blessing from God is of His grace, and she turns around then and doesn’t expect works as the basis for somebody else’s blessing.

She extends grace to them by stretching out her hand the way that God has stretched out His hand to her. And that’s the Proverbs woman. She exhibits it—it’s interesting that in that description she exhibits the man’s calling in a sense, doesn’t she? She nourishes her household. So she gets up before it’s light out and she feeds her household. And then it says she guards her household. Her household isn’t afraid in times of snow because she makes some double garments or scarlet garments, whatever it is, something to protect them from the cold.

You see, she’s a helpmate. She’s a complement to her husband, and she exercises the same tasks that he does, under him, in terms of the household. Okay? She has those same responsibilities as vice regent, as prime minister under the king, as it were, as his queen, which is what the Proverbs woman is—King Lemuel’s wife, a queen. She exercises his authority in the household. And so she does the same things that he does. For her, she does then to the household. She nourishes and she protects.

In the same way, husbands have to, in a very real sense, be like their wives. Qualities are required for submission and obedience. We said that all men are men under authority. Remember that Jesus said that the soldier who understood authority said, “You don’t have to come to my home to heal my servant. You just say the word. I’m a man under authority. I recognize your authority in this situation. You can do it with just a word. You can send people there. You can send the spirit of God to that place and heal them.”

Well, see, we’re all men under authority. And Jesus responds to us well with blessing if we recognize that and acknowledge it. We all have to be submissive. We have civil authorities. We have church authorities. We have employers that we work for, either directly or to the public at large. We’re men under authority. We have to be submissive to the authorities that God has set up. Nobody’s autonomous. That’s the whole point.

And of course, we’re all ultimately being submissive to God. And we have to obey, as men, as well. And so all this is linked together. These callings—these responsibilities of man and wife—are to be seen as primary callings, but they also manifest each other’s callings in a sense as well. Okay? And we said that all this is hooked together. 1 Peter 3 that idea of being submissive and being obedient applies to all those different authorities that he spells out: the civil government, the employer relationships, the domestic relationships, and later he’ll talk about church relationships as well.

And the point is that if you as a man reject the authority or the order of God in terms of the civil government when you should be obeying that civil government, or at the church, or with the employer, then what you can expect is rebellion from your own household against your authority. You see, it’s all of a piece. It’s one garment that God gives to us. And we can’t reject part of it and not expect manifestations of rebellion in other parts as well. Okay?

That’s the summation of what we’ve talked about so far. Now, we’re going to talk about some limitations on the family. And I’ve got some good news and bad news, I guess. The good news is that your outline, which is pretty extensive, we’re not going to cover everything on here. I guess it’s bad news for some of you. You really wanted to hear this third portion here in terms of contraception.

I’ve decided that after reading a lot of the Proverbs the last couple of weeks and doing them responsibly here, talking about Proverbs 31 last week, it’s probably not wise to try to tackle all this information in one Sunday. And so we’re going to stop after point 2 and go to point 3 in a few weeks, a few weeks from now.

Next week is Easter Sunday. We’ll have a special Easter service. The following week will be the marriage celebration and worship as seen in the marriage relationship and people coming together and talking about Jesus Christ and the Church becoming one. So Steve and Marge’s wedding will be two weeks from today. The third Sunday from now will be the day after the conference, and Jack Phelps will be here and sharing with us some things from the Scriptures.

And this may then be a month or even five weeks away. I haven’t decided yet when the third part of this talk will be. I’m sorry if you wanted to hear about that this morning, but believe me, you’ll enjoy hearing about it at a little slower pace than I would have to deal with it if I went through it now. Okay.

We’re going to talk about limitations. We’re going to talk today about no-fault child rearing versus promises of God in terms of children becoming Christians. We’ll talk in four or five or six weeks about contraception and the limitations that God places upon us in terms of bearing offspring. We’ll talk the following week after that about divorce as a limitation of the family. The family is not an absolute institution. God provides for divorce. And we’ll talk about that. And then finally, we’ll talk about the tension between the natural family and the new family of the Church that God has established, and some qualifications and again to family autonomy, as it were.

I want to say as we go into these four talks specifically that these really can be quite controversial, as is probably obvious. And I was looking at Proverbs 30, and I wanted to bring something up from there before we get started. Proverbs 30 says, “The words of Agur the son of Jakeh, even the prophecy the man spoke unto Ithiel, even unto Ithiel and Ucal.”

Now, I’m not going to get into a lot of this, but some commentators believe the question with this one, as with Lemuel and Proverbs 31, is who actually wrote this? And some commentators think that Agur here is actually Isaac. Okay. And so I’m sorry, Jakeh. And some people think that this is actually Jakeh who wrote this particular Proverb. And the reason for that is—well, I won’t get into all the reasons.

Verse 4 talks about who hath ascended up into heaven and descended—ascending and descending. And so they see a clue there that this is probably Jakeh and Jakeh’s ladder that’s being talked about. And there’s some other clues as well. It’s not a ridiculous hypothesis. You may think it is, but it really isn’t. There is a riddle aspect of these first few verses.

But either way, if it’s Jakeh or if it’s somebody else, what I wanted us to look at just for a minute was verse 3. It says, “I neither learned wisdom nor have the knowledge of the Holy.” Okay? Verse 2 says, “Surely I’m more brutish than any man and have not the understanding of a man. I neither learned wisdom nor have the knowledge of the Holy.”

And see, this is one of the Proverbs, one of the 31 chapters in Proverbs—that’s the book of wisdom. This author, whoever it was, had learned enough wisdom to record that wisdom and have it included in holy writ. Okay. But part of wisdom, I think, is acknowledging what verse 3 says: I’ve neither learned wisdom. Okay? Nor do I have the knowledge of the Holy.

There’s limitations to our wisdom, is what this guy is saying here, I think. And it’s generally true, I think, that as people get older, as they increase in wisdom, hopefully one thing they recognize more are their limitations before God. We’ve talked before about the term “sophomoric.” You know, a sophomore is somebody who has a little knowledge and thinks he has all the knowledge. When he’s a freshman, he doesn’t think he knows anything. He gets to be a sophomore in high school or in college—now he’s got the world on a shoestring or something. He thinks he knows the whole thing. And there are people who are sophomoric.

You get a little bit of knowledge from God, a little bit of wisdom, and you think you have all the wisdom. Now, why am I bringing that up? I’m bringing that up to say this: that over the next four weeks as we talk about these controversial subjects, we don’t want to be sophomoric. We’re going to expose ourselves—maybe we’ve exposed ourselves already to some small amounts of teaching on this subject, and hopefully I’m going to broaden that a little bit for you.

What I’m saying is we’re not going to reach final conclusions on all these matters that will be definitively proved to you from the Scriptures over these four sermons. Now, hopefully the Word of God will give us the clarity and understanding so we can understand these issues and decide for ourselves how to apply them in our lives. But I’m just warning you a little bit here against getting cocky about the answers we come up with from these verses. Okay?

We want to mature in the faith, and part of the maturity of the faith is recognizing our limitations and how wisdom comes with time and not just with study. It’s a result of both those things. See, and it also comes as a result of obeying God’s Word. We don’t know all the answers today because God doesn’t want us to have all the answers today. He brings us slowly into maturity of the faith. Okay.

Another thing I wanted to point out before we get into this is I mentioned this before: if you read John Calvin’s sermons, he goes back and forth on issues a lot, and we talked about this before. He’ll say, you know, well, the family is an important thing and da da. Then he’ll say, but the family isn’t all that important, and so you have to look at this side too. The reason he goes back and forth on specific issues that he talks about—Richard Meyer pointed this out to me—is that we really need that.

See, we’re prone to sin, and we’re fallen man, and that sin is pretty pervasive in most of our lives. And as soon as we get a correction from God here, we tend to go off this way. We need another correction to bring us back this way. The way of God is what we’re trying to keep on, not going from the left hand or to the right hand, either. And so some of what we’ll be saying over these four talks will be kind of going back and forth, back and forth, and it’s to keep us on God’s path. Okay.

Having said that, we’ll actually get to our outline. First point is the context of the discussion. And this is again to help frame the issues that we’re going to be talking about over the next four sermons. First of all, from Psalm 127:1 and 2, we have God’s sovereignty asserted. That should be rather obvious, but let’s just look at the verses.

“Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows, for so he giveth his beloved sleep.”

The point of those first couple of verses there is that God’s sovereignty is being asserted and that the necessity of God’s blessing must be realized by anybody who’s going to build a house or guard a city or his family or nourish his family or do any other task that a man is called to do with the energy God gives us. You must be relying upon the sovereignty of God. And we talked before about that last week. Proverbs 31, she relied upon God’s grace, and we should rely upon God’s grace and the gift of the spirit to do these things for us. God is sovereign.

Now, many people think that in these first verses we have indication that this song was written for Solomon. The subtitle of course says “A Song of Degrees for Solomon.” That isn’t necessarily inspired. We don’t know for sure that it was written for Solomon. But there are clues here that say it probably was. That Solomon is a good one to keep in mind as we look at these verses.

“Except the Lord built the house.” Remember, Solomon was the one that built the temple. David couldn’t build the temple because he was a man of warfare. Okay? And God says Solomon’s going to build My house for Me. And so Solomon was chosen to build God’s temple. But even in the building of God’s temple, according to the design that God had given to him and everything, still Solomon had to be reliant upon God for the construction of that temple. Holy work like that—except the Lord built the temple, they labor in vain to build it.

“Except the Lord keep the city.” Solomon was a king, and Solomon had to guard the temple and guard the structure that God had given to him as well. And then verse 2 says, or the end of verse 2—”so he giveth his beloved sleep.”

That term “beloved” there is “Jedidiah,” and that was Solomon’s first name in 2 Samuel 12:25. The prophet named Solomon Jedidiah. His name was then changed to Solomon, which has the implication of peace. But his first name was Beloved. And so David might well have provided this for his beloved son, Jedidiah there. That’s why he’s talking about “he giveth his beloved sleep.”

Now that verse that says “he giveth his beloved sleep,” many people think—and I think it’s probably accurate—that really the translation there would be better if it said that he gives to his beloved while he sleeps. Okay? That in spite of all our efforts, God gives to us supernaturally, as it were, while one sleeps. Now that’s a very possible way to interpret this verse. Either way, I suppose it has pretty much the same implications.

We can either talk about God giving those who trust in Him sleep, and the Scriptures certainly say that—they say that those who don’t trust in God don’t get good sleep, that they are like the seas, who toss up and turn and everything if you don’t trust in God’s sovereignty. Those who do trust in God’s sovereignty go to bed at night. They close their eyes and they rest in God. And he gives us sleep. And during that sleep, of course, what does He give us? He regenerates our bodies. He gives us strength. He gives us a clear mind so we wake up the next morning, we’re strengthened and we’re more sharp in terms of our mental faculties. And then we can do the work that’s talked about in the first half of verse 2: rise up and do the work that if we don’t rely on God’s sovereignty will be eating the bread of sorrows. If we do, He’ll give us the blessings.

But it could very well, and particularly in terms of Solomon again, refer to God giving us blessings while we sleep. In let’s see, First Kings 3, you want to turn there for just a minute. First Kings 3, beginning at verse 5, said, “In Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night. God said, ‘Ask what I shall give thee.’ And Solomon said”—and it goes on and talks about how Solomon asked for wisdom from God. Okay? The gift of wisdom to Solomon is in the context of this dream at night that Solomon has—that verse 5 tells us specifically—was a dream by night.

And then in verse 15, it says, “And Solomon awoke, and behold, it was a dream. He came to Jerusalem and stood before the ark of the covenant and offered up a burnt offering and offered peace offerings and made a feast to all his servants.” See, all this happened. The context of this verses 5-15 of God providing Solomon wisdom was in Solomon’s sleep. And so it would be accurate to say that particularly in light of Solomon’s gift and what this verse is saying, that even while we sleep, God can give us blessings. Even while Solomon slept, God gave him this tremendous blessing of wisdom because Solomon asked for it for the purposes of doing his job well that God had given to him. Okay?

Well, that’s a tremendous thing if you think about that, and it’s a tremendous statement of God’s sovereignty in the life of man.

One more verse that indicates this was Solomon is 1 Chronicles 22:9 and 10. “Behold, a son shall be born to thee, who shall be a man of rest, and I will give him rest from all his enemies round about. For his name shall be Solomon, and I’ll give peace and quietness unto Israel in his days. He shall build a house for My name, and he shall be My son, and I will be his father, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel forever.”

See, rest is a predominant theme of these first couple of verses. We rest in God and His sovereignty. And Solomon is said to be a son who would have rest and rest from his enemies. God would help him watch over the city, as it were, and help him to guard it. Okay?

This particular Psalm was referred to by Benjamin Franklin at the founding of this country, which probably many of you already know, but I’ll read a portion here from Benjamin Franklin’s speech at the Constitutional Convention. We, you know, we’ll pick up in the middle of his talk.

“We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this. And I also believe that without His concurring aid, we shall proceed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial interests. Our prospects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing government by human wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, or conquest.

I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven in its blessings on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service.”

So Benjamin Franklin—what his eternal state is, I don’t know—but in this speech he relied upon the wisdom of holy Scripture, and he said that if this verse is true—and let’s assume that it is—he said, and I believe that it is because of experience—we better rely upon God’s sovereignty and the establishment of this nation. This was built in some measure at least upon this very verse.

Now that’s not unusual. The city of Edinburgh, its motto is this first verse: “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” You see, this nation was founded upon that principle. And as a result of that, Franklin said what we should do in response to that verse and in response—proper response to understanding God’s sovereignty—is to pray and to implore God, to beseech Him to bless us in this endeavor.

The result of an understanding of God’s sovereignty is a reliance upon Him ultimately and His prosperity, and a reliance that’s demonstrated by praying for what we’re involved with and seeking His wisdom from the Scriptures. Of course, you have to build the house according to how He tells us. Okay.

Okay. So first of all, these verses tell us that God’s sovereignty is the context for our conversations about any project we’re going to talk about. And secondly, man’s responsibility. It says, “They labor in vain that build it; the watchman waketh but in vain. It’s vain to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows.” But the point of all that isn’t that God’s sovereign and don’t you do anything. You still have to build the house. You still have to watch the city. You still, as a husband, have to guard your family. That’s a responsibility from God clearly laid out.

And this verse does nothing to take away your responsibility. This verse asserts your responsibility in the context of a reliance upon God’s sovereignty. You understand the difference? Don’t let people—you know, don’t your own mind play off this false dichotomy between a reliance upon God and our own actions. Our actions have to demonstrate our reliance upon God, but act we must. We must work. We must do the things that God has given us to do.

We’re responsible, and we’ll be held accountable for it. The watchmen particularly—remember those verses from Ezekiel—that said if you don’t watch, if you don’t cry out, then you’re responsible for the blood guiltiness of the persons that are hurt. See, so we have responsibility, and these verses do nothing to obviate that responsibility. In fact, they probably increase it because now we’re responsible to do those things and also do them upon the reliance of God’s sovereignty and blessing in the affairs of man.

Now a result of all this, of course, will be no anxiety. If you go to bed at night troubled and you don’t have good sleep and if you’re all concerned about things and if that you remain in that state over the nighttime, then you’re demonstrating not reliance upon God but upon yourself. You’re probably worrying unduly. Now there’s all kinds of reasons why you may worry properly, but the point is you should resolve that as you go to bed.

If you’ve sinned and are worried about the effects of that sin, confess it to God. Make restitution. Move on from there. Move to a position of rest, knowing that you’ve fulfilled your responsibility and that if you’ve done that, God is accountable for the results. Okay? He’s responsible to guard the city, as it were, once we’ve fulfilled our responsibilities. We should rely upon Him and His sovereignty even while we work.

And if we do that, we’ll have rest from anxiety and from reliance upon ourselves. Okay.

In the third section of this Psalm, verses 3-5, children are inherited of the Lord. “The fruit of the womb is His reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed. They shall speak with the enemies in the gate.”

These verses talk about God’s children. Either way you look at verse 3, the point is that children come from God—or it said it—also said that the translation here, “the children are an heritage of the Lord,” means that the children are actually God’s inheritance. It doesn’t mean that they’re an inheritance that’s given to us by God. But in the ultimate sense, it means that the children are God’s inheritance themselves.

You know, Malachi 2 says that one reason for marriage, why did He make them one? That He might obtain a holy seed thereby. See, they’re His seed. They’re holy. We’re going to talk about that in a couple of minutes more, too. Point is that these children belong to God. No matter how you interpret that first verse, how it lays out, the point is they come from Him. They’re His given to us as stewards only. Or that they themselves are directly His inheritance and His reward.

Verse 4 says there are arrows in the hand of a mighty man. They’re an offensive weaponry here. Arrows were like the heavy artillery in this particular period of time when things were written. And so children are like heavy artillery for us. Some man said that well, arrows can be used—you know, if you shoot them, they might you might shoot them with your enemy or they might be shot at you. And if you let somebody else control the direction your children go in, you may well find that they’re going to be arrows aimed at you, not aimed at your enemies in the gate.

But they should be weapons that God has given us to use. And verse 5, of course, says that if you have a quiver full of them, you won’t be ashamed. They’ll speak with the enemies in the gate. Okay.

It’s interesting that the Hebrew word for “son,” “ben,” and “daughter,” “bat,” both come from the root word that “house” comes from—”to build.” Remember, we said the “Beth” is the house of the father. “Bethlehem”—house of bread. See, there’s the same root word which means “to build.” And so children are seen as building up something as well and building your defenses specifically in the context of these verses. Sons are builders. Daughters are builders. And they’re to be defensive help for us in our old age.

It also implies, by the way, in verse 4, “children of the youth.” Most commentators agree that this implies that it’s good to have children real young or when you’re real young or early on in your marriage, because then they’ll protect you as you get older. Okay? They will be grown up by the time you need protection as you’re old, and they’ll be able to do that. And so young families seem to be indicated by this verse, as well as fairly large families. It’s real obvious from the context there.

But the point I’m trying to make is that these are God’s children and we have to rely upon God’s sovereignty with them as well. Now this is a nice verse to think about. But there’s a verse kind of on the other side of the coin in Job. Book of Job, chapter 5, rather. Instead of children protecting the father in the gate, something else happens in Job, verse—chapter 5 starting at verse 1.

“Call now, if there be any that will answer thee, and to which of the saints will thou turn, for wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayth the silly one. So, now we’re going to be talking about a foolish man, not a wise man, and a silly one.

Verse 3: ‘I have seen the foolish taking root, and suddenly I cursed his habitation. His children are far from safety, and they are crushed in the gate. Neither is there any to deliver them, whose harvest the hungry eateth up, and taketh of it, even out of the thorns, and the robber swalloweth up their substance.’”

You see, children can protect us in the gate, or for the foolish man, children can be killed in the gate—is what it’s talking about here. Either way, see what I’m pointing out here again is that you must rely upon the sovereignty of God. If you think large families are good, they may be good if you rely upon Him and you do your part in being responsible in terms of raising them, in terms of the rest of your life as well. If you don’t be foolish—if you’re foolish, your children will be killed in the gate the way they should have been defending you in the gate. Okay.

Now with that as the context, let’s go then to the specific problem of the limitation of salvation. Proverbs 22:6 is what we’re going to be talking about mostly. Here’s the thesis that we’re going to consider. The thesis is this: If Christian parents do their job correctly, they are assured of godly offspring. Okay?

Now, there’s some variation on that particular thesis, but that’s the general thesis. If Christian parents do their job correctly, they are assured of godly offspring. Now I’m going to be talking about Mary Pride here for a couple of minutes. Forgot to bring your book so I can’t read the quote I was going to read, but Mary Pride, Richard Fugat, and other commentators see in the verse Proverbs 22:6 a promise rather from God. And we read that responsibly—earlier I’m looking for Mary Pride’s quote that I have in here somewhere.

I was going to talk about the fact we want to be sure that we don’t misrepresent her here, because if there’s anything we should be sensitive to, it’s straw man arguments. We were thinking about I was thinking about putting out a pamphlet on the various things about Christian Reconstruction and instead of saying what Christian Reconstruction is, put what Christian Reconstruction isn’t, and then on the front of the cover have a straw man with various things put on there about things that people say we believe in, like bringing the kingdom by our own force and that kind of stuff.

But it is important not to attack straw man arguments, and it’s important not to misrepresent people’s position on this particular subject or any other. But I’m having a hard time right now finding it. I have Mary Pride’s quote in here somewhere, and I’m having a hard time finding it. Oh, great. Thank you.

Let’s get on with this, huh?

Okay, page 104. And of course, I want to preface this too by saying that this is a great book. This is an important book for the Church of Jesus Christ to reawaken people to what the Scriptures say in terms of husband-wife relationships, what being a wife and a mother is all about. It’s a tremendous corrective. We’re going to deal today and four or five weeks with another issue—than which I disagree with Mary Pride on. But the point is that we’re only doing this because this is such a great book.

It’s been well-received, and it’s important then, as we kind of take a second look at it after a couple of years, to sort of sort out what may not be proper in it. Okay? And to give a little balance on the other side, like I said, Calvin says we should do, and God’s Scriptures are clear that’s true. So it’s a good book. Great book, I would say. Okay.

Mary Pride says that if a child’s folly remains after talking about Proverbs 22:6, it’s because his parents are not doing their job. If they’re doing their job, their children will not grow up to be fools. God has promised. Now, a fool is somebody who rejects God. A non-Christian is a fool. And so Mary Pride is saying here, you know, that if they grow up not to be Christians—wise, judicious Christians—then we’ve done something wrong as parents. That God has promised in these verses that we—if we train them properly—have Christian offspring.

Now if I misrepresented that, somebody let me know during the question-answer time, but there’s a lot of other verses I could quote from those two pages or sentences rather that say the same thing. Okay. She also in that particular quote brings in Proverbs 22:15, which we’ll also talk about in a couple of minutes.

But first of all, I want to list some reasons for the thesis. First of all, Mary Pride and Richard Fugat rely heavily upon Proverbs 22:6. In fact, it’s just about the only reason they give. So the Proverbs promise of 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go. When he’s old, he won’t depart from it.” That’s one reason that people give.