Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Sermon text today is from Genesis chapter 2. I’ll actually begin reading at verse 8. Genesis 2:8. “The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden and from there it parted and became four riverheads.

The name of the first is Pishon. It is the one which goes around the whole land of Havilah where there is gold and the gold of that land is good. The bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hiddekel. This is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.

And the Lord commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.’ The Lord God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.’ Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.

Whatever he called each living creature that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on him and he slept. He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, he made into a woman.

And he brought her to the man. And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

Father, we thank you for your scriptures. Thank you, Lord God, that this is unlike any other book. We cannot understand the Holy Spirit without you. We pray that your Spirit illuminates us as we understand your text. We thank you, Lord God, that you tell us of your sovereign authority over us, that the Spirit comes to transform us in Christ. We pray, Lord God, according to your will, we would be transformed by this word. In Jesus’s name, amen.

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Today I want to talk about the wondrous gift that God has given to mankind in marriage. The sermon is entitled “Praise of Marriage.” We praise God for things given to us. Marriage is a tremendous gift and it’s a gift that keeps giving, as they say.

I’ll talk about that in just a moment. It’s a blessed occasion today when we celebrate Howard L.’s 50th wedding anniversary. And I’m just so pleased that the Lord God gives us the opportunity today to focus on marriage. What a rich thing it is for us. I want to talk a couple of minutes about three particular purposes of marriage taken from our text and then three particular traits which will enable us to fulfill those purposes in our marriages.

But I want to say a few words first about where we are. You know, we’re always in a historical context, and the historical context that we’re in—both in terms of marriage and the violation of marriage vows today as well as the broader culture—has caused me to reflect on a song written probably 20 years ago by one of the more literate rock and roll bands. Let me read a little bit of this song.

Now let me just say before I read it that the intent of the author of this song is to describe ecological disaster. These words are sort of based upon some lines from John Steinbeck’s book. And so it’s kind of an environmentalist song. But when I hear the song, I immediately think of the Garden of Eden. And the way I think of this song is as Adam the morning after his fall and his loss of that wonderful relationship with his wife.

You know, it’s so interesting and profound that Adam’s first recorded speech in the scriptures—man’s first recorded words—is this beautiful love poem we’re going to talk about in a couple of minutes. This delightful song. And then the next thing that happens is Adam falls and then he speaks in terms of his wife. He moves from poetry to trouble. He blames his wife for his own sinfulness.

So the isolation that occurs to Adam, not just his relationship with God being broken and severed and then he’s kicked out of the garden, but what must it have been like in that household the next morning?

Well, here are the words to this song and I want to put them in a little broader context to the two things I’ve talked about:

“Smell of the great sorrow over the land. Plumes of smoke rise and merge into the hand of God. The man lies in dreams of green fields and rivers, but he wakes to a morning with no reason for waking. He’s haunted by the memory of a lost paradise and his due to a dream he can’t be precise. He’s chained forever to a world that’s departed. Not enough. It’s not enough. His blood is frozen and curled with fright.

His knees tremble and give away in the night. His hand is weakened at the moment of truth. His step is faltered. And he talks to the river of lost love and dedication. And silent replies that swirl invitation flow dark and troubled to an oily scene. A grave imitation of what is to be. There’s an unceasing wind that blows through this night. There’s dust in my eyes that blinds my sight. A silence that speaks so much louder than words.

The promises broken. Promises broken.”

How are the promises of marriage? Adam’s would be broken. The covenant promised to Adam—to obey God’s law—broke. Lost love and dedication certainly relates to Adam’s relationship to God but also to the sentence on the wife and the acting out of that. And the silence speaks so much louder than words. Most people have been married any length of time know that silence in terms of their relationship.

Most people that have been married a pretty length of time know what it’s like when spouse communication breaks down. You feel guilty. You feel alternatingly angry. You’ve known that feeling I suppose too much time. Maybe it lasts a couple of minutes till you repent. Maybe it lasts an hour. Maybe it lasts a day. Maybe it lasts a year. So the painfulness of that isolation from our spouses that we feel through loss of love and dedication, along with the truth faltering in our relationship to our spouses, is a great sorrow when marriage is broken and when the marriage relationship gets divided and split asunder by sin.

But there’s a deeper sorrow gathering in our land. I think that while we can talk of ecological disaster as these men do, what we know is the curse always enters in through moral death. And we live in a day and age in the last 30, 40 years when less and less people get married, when more and more people live together. And now we live in a day and age in our state where the very image of God’s true marriage—a man and a woman—defining what Christian marriage is, is now under attack.

Now we can look at it as political warfare and it is that. We can look at it a lot of different ways. But one way to look at it is that there is a gathering of sorrow in our land because the Christian blessing of marriage is being moved away from by our culture.

Now, we have this Defense of Marriage Coalition. Some of you know we’re going to make an offering for that today. If you’re going to make an offering for the Defense of Marriage Coalition, please make out a check, put it in the box, and you can just put those checks up here. My assistant will mail them to the Defense of Marriage Coalition, and I’m heavily involved with that. I got involved enough last week where we had this gel out here on the floor taking pictures—pretty nice picture up in the States that’s that nice round window across behind me.

Pastors need to come out of the pulpit to engage this subset title. It’s important that pastors across the state too step up and engage this effort. The Defense of Marriage Coalition was involved in legal pleadings this last Thursday or Friday. One of the judges from the county will be making a decision probably within the next week. I think I’ve read in the paper that the state kind of wants him to get rid of all marriage and sort this whole thing out. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few months.

We of course, the Marriage Coalition has municipal petition to change the constitution and make it explicit and trying to make confessional statements more explicit these days by saying 24-hour days. So now we’ve got to make our state documents a little more specific that marriage is between a man and a wife. And so we’re involved in all that stuff and who knows what’s going to happen.

And I put “Defense of Marriage Coalition” in quotes in your outline because it’s not as if this creation institution by God is offending in that sense. The question is not going to be whether or not marriage will continue as an institution. It will. It’s God’s plan. It’s what he has decreed. And whether the state recognizes Christian marriage or not does not ultimately define whether or not marriage is true.

So in a sense, I don’t really like the name all that much. It’s not up to us to—certainly it is up to us to proclaim for the truth of marriage, and that’s what we’re trying to do. The question is not about proclaiming for the great benefit of Christian marriage. The question is whether we’re going to have Christian marriage in this state or across the country. The question is: How much sorrow will the land go through? How much alienation, isolation, and turmoil will go on and be suffered before the people of Oregon repent and turn back to God’s definition of what marriage is? That’s really the only question before us.

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Now, I do want to talk about marriage as opposed to the family. As important as the subject of the family is, most of the songs we have about marriage relate to the family as well. I think it’s interesting that in our text, she is not seen first as a mother. She is presented first as a woman. Her primary role is as woman, not as mother.

The primary role of wise humans is to perceive that role as mother in our lives. Now, I mean, we have children and you know, hopefully we have good relationships with them as they leave the home. But really, there is a permanency to the marriage state that extends past our civic obligations, certainly extends past our church membership obligations, extend past our family obligations in the direct sense as well.

I mean, our vocation even—you know, a lot of people have to move around for vocational purposes. You’re not told in the scriptures to stay with one God in one place all your life. You’re not told in the scriptures to stay with one congregation all your life. If you move and join another congregation, if you find a congregation that’s more faith-focused, you take the word of God where it’s better for your sanctification. There’s no sin against leaving a congregation over that.

And we’re not told we’re supposed to have children in our house the rest of our lives. In fact, we’re told just the opposite. Children are supposed to leave the home when they’re ready to. But the parents who we are told about—the ones who we’re supposed to stay with—are our spouses. This is to be a lifelong relationship that has permanency and stability to it. It’s really the core of family extension.

As children leave home, you still have relationships with them that are strong and good. Praise God for the Praises and their wonderful relationship with all their kids. But really, what we’re talking about primarily is this relationship between a man and a woman. You see, we don’t want to lose sight of that as we stress, as we do so often, the Christian family.

This marriage relationship is the core of it and it has a preeminence to it above the family. And a woman is more of a wife than she is a mother. It certainly precedes motherhood, and in terms of the use of one’s time, it far outlasts direct involvement in mothering as well.

There’s a transition, you know. I’m 50-some now and you know, my wife is 50-some and we move away from parenting so much. There’s still advice to your extended family as they grow. But now you can’t go back to where it was before you started having children. What are you going to do if you’re trying together these things? So there is this permanency and ultimacy of the marriage state that’s on this side of our text that’s very important.

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Now notice in our text as well that God, fatherly and sovereignly, right? He is the Lord God. He is the heaven God, Lord. That means he’s our Father. He’s our sovereign as well. God, both sovereignly and fatherly, brings Adam to a deeper awareness of his need. You know, he brings Adam to name all these animals and then Adam knows more that he needs his complement, his wife, his partner.

My hope for today’s sermon is that God does the same thing with us. That he takes these verses that we’re going to look at and he ministers to us a deeper understanding of our normative need for spouses, the marriage partner, for wives, for our husband. I’m not going to qualify everything I say by talking about the exception. Certainly there are single people who are called to remain single for taking jobs. Okay? And certainly there are women who work outside of the home legitimately. So all of that’s okay, too. But we’re talking about the normative state here of what the scriptures describe for us in Genesis 1 and 2.

And the normative state is it’s not good for man or woman to be alone. And God drives us to a deeper sense of our awareness of that, like he does Adam, as we think through this text to the end that we might indeed recognize it’s not good for us to isolate ourselves from our marriage partner, our husbands or our wives. To the end that those who are single in our congregation might have a renewed impetus to seek out godly mates.

Now, again, I’m not going to talk about the second calling. Most of you are not supposed to sing the rest of your life with God. Most of you aren’t. For most of you, that’s not a good thing. You know, God says against the tree of knowledge of good and evil, right? That’s what the text says. Then he immediately goes on and says, as he declares what’s good and evil, “It is not good that man be alone.”

So I have a little later on the outline: it’s not quite evil, but it’s more—I think in the sensual structure—it’s more than just the absence of good. There’s something positively unhealthy about being alone and without entering into the married state for most men and women. You single people today are going to be encouraged and brought to a deeper sense of your need for Christian spouses and the importance of this institution as we look through this text today.

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So let’s go on now and talk specifically about these purposes of marriage that we can see pretty overtly in the text before us. And these purpose statements are given to us.

And actually, before we quite get there, let me say one other thing about marriage. In Christian worship, God gives us gifts in worship, right? He gives us gifts of glory, forgiveness of sin. He restores us to a sense of proper importance and authority through the confession in glory way. He gives us knowledge of what the world is like. He’ll bring us a little more in his text says about it, and he gives us rejoicing life together as we all rejoice together.

God gives gifts. Well, marriage is this gift from him as well. And this marriage is given to us as a gift. And as I said earlier, this is a gift that keeps on giving. Marriage, if you think about it, produces all kinds of benefits for a culture of Christian marriage.

You know, there’s statistics upon statistics that show that Christian marriage produces better—in fact, better wage and journey capabilities—of the husband who has a helper given to him by God or wife. Married people make more money. Married people are more productive in the workplace. If Adam’s job is to beautify the world, that’s meant to be by income in some way. And God says that marriage is a gift to Adam and a gift to the world to make the world a more beautiful place to equip the world through couples that will increasingly beautify it.

So beautification and production is a great gift with God. Statistics are quite clear that marriage also gives us safety. I saw a study the other day that said that 80% of abortions, for instance, are performed by single women—okay, those that are not married. So marriage protects children from the ultimate physical child abuse, which is abortion.

Cohabitation—a man and woman living together outside of Christian marriage—results in a woman being three times more likely to be physically abused by that man than if they were married. Marriage is a gift from God. It gives us money. It gives us physical safety of children. It gives us physical safety of wives as well.

Homelessness is 77% more likely in a home where there’s cohabitation going on outside of marriage. Marriage is a gift from God that keeps on giving. It gives safety of the spouse, of women. It gives safety of children. It gives production. It gives things change to the world and it gives more and more money that is an indicator of that work and vocation being covered.

So marriage is this gift that keeps on giving to us. It’s a gift from God. It gives us stability. It gives us the kind of perspective in life that makes us blessed. And I want to talk about three specific ways in which marriage is a gift to us and three purposes of marriage that are accomplished through Christian marriage.

And the alternate part of this part of the outline is why singleness is normally not good and hence is closer to evil. Sort of—it’s not the same word for evil—but it is stronger than just an absence of good. At least as one comment puts it, singleness is a painful deficiency the way the text is to be read. You understand this? There’s a determination of good and evil. And then God immediately gives us what isn’t good. And it’s singleness of man and I would say and woman as well.

There is a painful deficiency in this. Woman is the first good thing that God then gives to man, right? And God creates things as good. And God sees man in a deficient state—not good. Maybe not quite evil to be single, but it’s pretty bad. A habit of painful deficiency for most of you. And God then moves to take care of that by producing good, and that good is the wife.

To what purpose? Well, obviously the text tells us that one purpose is vocation. Adam is not created just to kind of hang out wherever he wants to be and stay at home. Adam is created to exercise dominion over the world. He’s to take his vocation, his calling from God down those rivers that are given to us in the text and supposed to beautify the whole world. He’s a farmer. He’s a beautifier. He makes the garden more beautiful.

He takes the image of the garden and then takes it into all the world. This is what he’s supposed to do. He guards that garden to affect that path. I mean, man is created to work. He’s created to take the things of the world, to beautify them through various techniques and abilities, bring them back in praise to God as attributed to him, and show God that we’re beautifying the world. Man has a vocation. He has a calling and it is holy before God.

Man is outward-facing. You know, there’s a lot of people these days, you know, kind of a reaction against some of the liberal cultural perspectives that have surfaced in our land, is kind of an undue reaction to that. They want to be at home all the time. Men want to be focused in the home all the time. You know, the way they spend most of their life is the way most of us are supposed to do it. You may work out of your home, that’s okay, but you’re not to be inward-facing to the home.

The home, the wife is given not as the object of what you’re supposed to do in life. The wife is given as a helper to help you affect your vocation by facing away from the home. See, now, physically where you work is irrelevant. The text talks about leaving and joining. That’s not physically necessarily. A lot of cultures don’t leave physically. You move to another floor of a house or something. But the point is a leaving and a joining.

And here it’s the same kind of thing. It’s not important where you physically work. What I’m talking about is a mindset. And the mindset that says the family is ultimate is wrong because marriage is more ultimate than the family. And the mindset that says the household is ultimate is wrong because man is the outward-facing one in his vocation. This is what God has called him to do: exercise dominion.

And for that particular purpose, he gives to man a partner, a helper, suitable and comparable to him. The opposite of still human but not like you—something else. And this is a helper to you to exercise vocation in the context of the world.

So the first blessing of marriage is better vocation.

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Now let’s put this together with what we’ve learned as we did our quick little six-verse overview of Proverbs the last couple of months. We remember that at the very center of Proverbs there are these 30 sayings of the wise—words of the wise. Wow. Wow. And the first 10, right, are like where it begins. It talks about vocation, diligence and vocation. And do you remember what we said about diligence and vocation? That the book begins with that and the book ends with that?

It was kind of a comment on the fourth through the first four commandments. But the book ends at the beginning and end, saying one and ten, made reference to the poor. And it put vocation and diligence specifically in the context of ministering grace to other people, right?

And then we get to the end of Proverbs and what do we see? Right at the center of the godly woman—the church, right? We’re that Proverbs woman. You can make application to individual women. That’s okay. But ultimately, I think it’s talking about the church of Jesus Christ as well as wisdom. We reflect the wisdom of Christ. That’s who we are.

In Revelation, you got the beautified Christ, glorified Christ in chapter 1. In chapter 21, you get down to the end: the church is like that. So Christ is wisdom. We become wisdom by the end of Proverbs. And right at the center of that description, very clearly, I think a chiastic structure—right at the center of it—was this emphasis on the hands, the palm and the arm, right, extending out in work but also extending out in benevolence, reaching out ministering with palm and arm and strength to the poor.

My point is that vocation is furthered as men see their work primarily—well, certainly to beautify the world God’s given to us, to glorify him—but to help other people. Vocation, by the words of the wise and by the conclusion of the book of Proverbs, is to the purpose of otherness. It’s to the purpose of helping someone other than yourself. It’s not so you can build a huge nest egg up and retire and you’ll have your fun. That’s not the idea. Work is to extend grace to other people. It’s to show benevolence. It’s to die to yourself and live to helping someone else.

Well, that’s what we’re prepared to do in Christian marriage. Adam has to die, right? He goes into a deep sleep—deconstruction. He goes into a coma. He nearly dies. It’s a pictorial, symbolic death. He dies to himself that he may wake up and live to his wife. And in doing that, you see, God has given him a gift that will cause him to function in the workplace and in vocation with increased productivity.

God teaches man through marriage to live for someone else, to go outside of ourselves. And when we learn that lesson, that’s when we can be very successful in commerce and business and vocation. You know, the picture of people that over the long haul are successful in business are people that understand they’re there to serve their customers. They’re there to extend help to other people. Money is a trailing indicator of service and grace and putting others, seeing others as more important than yourselves.

This is what vocation is biblically and this is what we’re trained to do.

On your outline, I have this woman, Jennifer Hoss. I misspelled it the second time around. Well, and I don’t know that she actually called herself that. There was this woman named Jennifer Hoss in the Netherlands, I think last year, maybe about this time last year or maybe two years ago. And she was a woman who decided to marry herself.

Yeah. And she had a marriage ceremony. And I guess it’s legal in the Netherlands. You can marry yourself. So that’s why I don’t know—maybe she gave herself a hyphenated double last name, such as is common these days, you know. But with her, since she married herself at the Hoss.

Commenting on this, someone said—and I don’t know who said this; it might have been Mark Horn—but he said that we’re all born wedded to ourselves and it’s usually an abusive relationship. Marrying another does require a divorce. So when you marry someone, you kind of divorce yourself and your focus becomes the other person. You take up your cross, you die to yourself and you serve the other person.

It’s not a sad thing to do. It’s a joyful thing to do. There’s joy in that process. It’s a loving thing to do. It’s a great thing to do.

Well, marriage causes us then to deny ourselves, to live for someone else. And as a result, it trains us in proper vocation to serve other people and to serve those that we can serve with the results of our service as well, graciously, benevolently giving to other people.

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Now, same-sex marriage—that you know, people are moving toward in our state—same-sex marriage is really an extended selfishness. You see, God gives Adam a helper comparable to him, the opposite of him, though, right? The same but not the same. And in same-sex marriages, whether a woman with a woman or a man with a man, what you end up doing is marrying kind of an image of yourself. You don’t want to serve others really. You want to be married but serve yourself. And so you marry somebody that’s like you.

And it’s amazing some of these more popular people that I’ve seen on the TV. You know, there was a lesbian relationship. I don’t remember her name. So Ellen DeGenerous, I guess. And people commented on the fact that the woman that she ended up being in this relationship with looked like her sister—look just like her. Why is that? Well, it’s because, you know, same-sex marriages won’t appreciate the otherness. They don’t die to themselves to live to someone else. They’re really—it’s an extension of loving themselves.

Okay. I have this a little later in the outline, but some theologians, the classical theologians, the church fathers, talked about fallen man as homo incurvatus in se. In other words, the human being completely bent in—homo man curvatus in se—curved in on himself.

Fallen man curves in on himself. He doesn’t appreciate or extend to the other. He becomes totally self-absorbed. Such a being can think only of the self and is compelled to revolve day and night around the self, never coming free of it and thus never experiencing the pleasure of engaging the other, caring about the other or giving to the other.

So ultimately, homosexuality is this denial of caring for the other, and as a result it doesn’t result in the proper sense of service and dying to oneself and living for other people. Christian marriage is a gift from God to build up vocation amongst other things by means of this idea of dying to ourselves and living to our spouses.

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Secondly, marriage of course is given for procreation. God says to Adam to exercise dominion, and part of the means of accomplishing that is to have lots of kids. And so we’re supposed to be fruitful and multiply. The text tells us.

Malachi 2:15 says specifically: Why did God make the two one? Speaking of marriage, why did God make Christian marriage? Why did God, you know, make and again normatively, right? I know there are exceptions to this, but normatively, why does God make the two one? Well, it says to seek a godly seed. So one of the purposes that marriage helps us to accomplish is a godly seed.

Now, again, here same-sex marriages can’t do this. My brother Rick, I was talking to him last week. I you know, I got my picture in the Statesman Journal and I sent my brother Rick a copy of the link and I told him it reminded me of what Mom always used to say: that fool’s names and fool’s faces often appear in public places. He called me about it and said that he saw on TV in San Francisco when they were doing gay marriages down there.

He saw that one of the men lined up to marry another man had a sign on the sign. It said: “One man plus one woman equals 1.5 billion people. One man plus one man equals zero people.” And my brother Rick said, “I don’t know what side he was on,” you know. Well, it’s an odd thing, you know. By definition, same-sex marriage—guy with guy, girl with girl—is infertile. You cannot have children that way. You’ve got to use something biologically from somebody else. You’ve got to adopt some. You got to do something. It is an infertile relationship.

Is there a message in that? Well, the message in that man carrying that sign that a man plus a man equals zero people is that’s what he wants. He wants the end of humanity, you see. Proverbs say that all them that hate me love death. They’re not interested in a whole bunch of people because people are image bearers of God and they don’t like that. They don’t like God’s image walking around the world. They loathe humanity. And so this man was like that. He really wants the end of human beings and so he espouses same-sex marriage.

Well, marriage is a great blessing because it provides us godly seed, and it’s godly seed, right? God isn’t interested just in children. He makes the two one to seek a godly seed—children that are disciples of the parents who are disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the greatest engine for discipleship in the world: the Christian family. There’s no doubt about it, right?

I mean, children make the best disciples. Children believe what the parents tell them from when they’re little. And you can raise children up. That’s the greatest source of our evangelism, I think the scriptures are clear about that. There’s unusual elements of evangelism and crusades, et cetera. But the normal method of Christian evangelism is raising up disciples for the Lord Jesus Christ, multiplying—two people, they end up having three, four, five, ten kids, whatever it is, and the church of Jesus Christ grows, godly seed.

Well, homosexual relationships, same-sex marriages, can’t produce a godly seed. Even when they do adopt children, those children are now by definition living in either a fatherless home or a motherless home. You see, God wants both sexes cooperating together in Christian marriage to be the model for you and I, for every human being. He wants human beings in the context that you’re birthed into a family.

And he wants from your very early days, you watching two people laying down their lives for one another and loving the other and not being selfish and seeing how the sexes are supposed to relate. Dad, normally, goes to work. Mom, normally, takes care of the home. God wants kids looking at that and seeing that. And when you take children either through, you know, artificial fertilization of some type or through adoption or foster care, what those kids are watching is something that God is not intending for them to see.

It’s not the right role model. They either don’t have a mother or they don’t have a father. There’s an absence of a man in the home or there’s an absence of a woman.

Now, that’s a big deal. Now, we, you know, there are statistics upon statistics that show that single-parent households are what produce crime, psychological problems, depression and suicide. Just amazing statistics. 250 judges were surveyed in the mid 1990s about crime and what are the causes of crime in the people that they saw before them. And you know, some of the causes are we can think of well—no job? 17% of the judges thought that was the biggest problem. Drugs? That was a part of the problem, a small part of the problem. Education? But by far the leading cause that these judges determined for crime and the people that came before them were people that came from single-parent households.

Single-parent household is a greater risk factor for crime than drugs, lack of education, or lack of a job.

You see, cause it’s outside of this great blessing and gift that God gives us—Christian marriage. If you’re in the psychological realm, psychologists have analyzed adolescent suicide, suicide of young people, and what’s the leading cause of suicide with young people? Well, there are some subordinate causes. A breakup with girlfriends is a sign, or a boyfriend—problems at school. But again, here by far the greatest risk factor for somebody committing suicide is to come from a single-parent home and to come from a home that is disordered because of that.

Single-parent homes are homes that are places that produce crime and that produce depression and suicide. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, they’re places of great risk of safety to those people that happen to inhabit that house in an unmarried state.

So God gives us this wonderful blessing of marriage to help us produce children—not just any children, but godly children, law-abiding, emotionally stable, productive members of society. And Christian marriage is the blessing that God gives us to create that. And that’s a wonderful blessing from God.

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And the third blessing that comes from marriage, the purpose of marriage, I think—and this is implied more in the text than stated, but I think it’s there—the third purpose is recreation. Recreation. It is the exhibiting of art in the poem of Adam that he speaks upon being presented with his wife.

So I’m using recreation here in the sense of recreation being creative like God, taking speech and doing beautiful and wonderful things with it, okay? And this I think is one of the purposes of marriage. God isn’t just interested in utilitarian changing of the world or utilitarian breeding of people to change the world. He wants us to be joyful because he’s joyful and he wants us to delight in life that he has given to us and delight so much that we sing and we write poems and we make beautiful paintings and we build beautiful buildings and we exhibit our recreative capabilities as creatures and image bearers of God.

And we see that right here in the text. It’s not obvious in our English translations, and on your outline here I’ve given you a little bit. This is man’s first recorded words. It’s not in the words of Paul McCartney, just another silly love song, although it is another silly love song in a sense. I mean, silly love songs are not so silly. They’re profound. Man has sung love songs for 6,000 years.

And here’s the first one, but it isn’t a silly one. It’s really quite a sophisticated piece of poetry, as it turns out. And I’ve given you a translation here.

Sophisticated poetry that focuses on the other, okay? And so Adam—and I’ve given this translation on your outline:

“This now! Exclamation point. That’s kind of what he’s saying in that first line. This now, at last, he’s saying. So there’s an exaltation here. This time bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. This shall be called woman. For from man was taken this.”

And I’ve given you the structure of the number of words in each of those lines, right? Two words, two words, two words, three words, three words, and the crescendoing up of the number of syllables in each line from four to six to a triple set of seven. This is poetry. In other words, there’s a definite form and structure to this in terms of the way these lines are written.

And it isn’t just poetry in the sense of these metered lines that are given to us with a crescendo of both words and syllables. No, there’s some very interesting things going on here. There is parallelism between lines two and three: “Bone of bones and flesh of flesh.” That’s a parallelism, right? It says the same thing with different words. And in four and five: “This shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.” Wall, man. You see parallelism in lines two and three and four and five.

There’s wordplay—woman, man. They both come from the same basic word. So there’s wordplay being used in this song to make its little catchphrase of man in both man and in woman. There’s chiasmus going on. There’s a chiastic structure certainly in lines four and five.

I’ve given you a more literal translation: “This shall be called woman. For from man was taken this.”

Beginning, end, middle point—woman, man. This woman taken from man. This chiastic structure. And really, it’s kind of a little more complicated than that because the “this” at the end goes back to the “this” at the very opening of the section itself. “This time,” and then we get down to the end: “This,” you see. It brackets the whole thing. So it’s not complicated, but it’s certainly not a simple structure. There’s a chiastic structure at the end, and the whole thing has this bracket around it.

That’s just what we saw in the first ten words of the words of the wise. By the way, those of you that were here, remember we had commandments one, two, three, and then commandment four was a chiastic structure with seven words of the wise. And at the end of that seventh one—the tenth word of the wise, the seventh of the words of the wise dealing with the fourth commandment to work—connected back up to saying one—same kind of structure.

So this is complex. It’s not complicated, but it’s certainly not a simple structure. And it’s not just a silly little piece of poetry, no. Adam is doing it. He’s in the groove. He’s in the creator groove here. He’s speaking words of love that have, you know, a lot more to them than just “I love you, honey.”

He’s singing a great song here and composing a wonderful song. You look at the Song of Solomon at the other end—much longer than this. But what is it? It’s the song of all songs. It’s the song that’s the gold standard for how you’re supposed to write songs. And what’s it about? It’s about a guy and his wife. That’s all it’s really about. And we can look at analogies and allegories to the church and Jesus Christ, but I’m telling you, you have to read it first and foremost as a love song. That’s what it is.

And this is where it comes from as well. Adam is doing the love song thing. There’s verbal repetition, as I said—a two-beat tricolon as they say, and then a three-beat. By—goes on here. And then this ends Adam’s exclamation.

So you know, one of the purposes I think that we can infer from this of the married state is joyfulness, and a joyfulness that bubbles over and finds expression in creativity, in artistic expression of oneself. And as I said earlier, you know, the homosexual being curved in on himself, he may, you know, focus so much on himself that he ends up thinking about some pretty interesting things about himself and expressing those. But ultimately, that artistic expression is not dealing with the other—it’s dealing totally internal to himself.

And I think that the art of the homosexual community will demonstrate that. As you look at it, it’s all curved in.

Well, biblical expressions of poetry and literary devices are other-oriented. Adam focuses on the other.

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The sum of all this is we’re supposed to be image bearers, and marriage gives us image-bearing capability. You know, it’s interesting because you’ve got God and he’s going to make man in his own image, right? What does that tell us about God? Well, God is so loving that he creates other people to have fellowship with him, to bring into his fellowship. God propagates, in a sense. We’re not, you know, propagation of divinity. I don’t want to get into all that. But understand that there’s something to this: God creates someone that can have relationship with him through Christ. And that’s the way God is. God makes us and then he makes us so that we can have children that we can bring into that relationship as well.

To have children images God. To have offspring, so to speak. To have vocation images God. God has just made things—six days, rested on the seventh—and now he tells man, “Make stuff,” right? And God has done it in a wonderful structure, you know. The Spirit of God moves and brings forth order and beauty and light and filling. And there’s been, you know, for 2,000 or 6,000 years, people have meditated on the beautiful structure of the creation account in Genesis 1, the artistic arrangement of it and all the different relationships of those seven days. It’s very interesting stuff.

And it’s very interesting, and I guess I can’t read Hebrew, but I read guys that do. True. And they say it’s very interesting in the Hebrew as well to look at the structures of how this is written. Well, that’s how Adam becomes when he gets his wife there, right? That’s how a husband and wife are. They delight in each other so much that they find artistic expression to talk about that delight.

God delights in who he is in the context of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He delights in that community of self-offering, one to the other, dying to themselves and serving the other—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He delights in that, and it overflows and finds expression in bringing of the created order as his bride to come into that relationship with the Trinity. And that’s mirrored in Christian marriage.

What we’re saying here is the purposes—vocation, propagation, and recreation—are all image-bearing purposes from who God is. And none of them can be met by the kind of marriages that are envisioned today in our culture in terms of same-sex marriages. They fall far short because they are a rejection of image bearing to God.

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Well, quickly now, three quick qualities—traits to protect this and defend this. Three traits to cultivate in marriage and how to cultivate your marriage or how to succeed in vocation, propagation, and recreation. This is the purpose. What are some things that we should remember? And as I was thinking about this, I love this word: fidelity. Fidelity. Fidelity versus adulteration.

What’s the great crime against the family? Not so much the family, but against marriage in the Old Testament? It’s adultery—capital crime, death penalty crime—because it’s so bad to strike out at the heart of marriage. Adultery is a word that means, we use it in other contexts—it adulterates something, right? It takes a pure substance and adulterates it with some dross. That’s kind of what adultery means. The English expression to adulterate something is to mix something with it. And as a result, it becomes now impure.

And so the opposite of adulteration in that sense is high fidelity, right? There was a movie—not recommending it, but it was a tricky good premise. The premise was you got this guy who likes to listen to records and he’s into hi-fi fidelity music equipment, right? And so, but the other side of it is he can’t ever be faithful to a girl. He’s always, you know, other girls and breaking up and going through all kinds of heartbreaks. And by the end of the movie, he’s brought to high fidelity in his relationships the way he likes high fidelity in the reproduction of sound.

Well, I like that imagery, but fidelity is an old-fashioned kind of word, but that’s what it means: truthfulness to a particular standard, right? You want to hear that thing played just like it was recorded. Not high-fidelity equipment that won’t adulterate that sound, okay?

And what we want over here in order to have vocation, propagation, recreation is high-fidelity marriages where admixtures into that marriage from other people, adulterous relationships, are kept out. You know, and our Savior says that a man who looks at a woman with lust commits adultery in his heart. It isn’t, you know, trying to get rid of the civil crimes against physical adultery. And it isn’t the same, but what he’s saying is it’s the same in that it adulterates the relationship.

You see, how many women do you go to bed with? To make it a very explicit sort of statement here. You see, we live in a time when the beauty of the female form—and it is beautiful—is presented to us every day of our lives. If you’re involved in any kind of media, whether it’s the newspaper, television, movies, radio, all that stuff is shouting this stuff at you.

And in a way, that’s because marriage is such a great thing, because the physical relationship of man and woman is a wonderful blessing from God and people want to delight in it. But the problem is, without doing it wisely and submitting to God, you are presented with all kinds of temptations, both men and women, that distract you from high fidelity to your spouse.

You see, Job made a covenant with his eyes not to look at a maiden. And I always use that expression with young men who aren’t married yet. You know, I always, part of my normal stuff I talk to young guys about is covenant with his eyes, not to look at a maiden. He guards himself. The Lord God has helped me out in that way. I don’t have, you know, God made a covenant with my eyes and said, “Don’t let him see too much.”

Well, Job is a righteous man. Job is a good man. And he was a married man with kids. And as a married man with kids, he made a covenant with his eyes not to look at a maiden, to preserve and enhance your vocation, propagation, and recreation—to preserve and enhance your marriage. Be high-fidelity guides. Avoid movies if looking at that stuff adulterates your relationship with your wife. Avoid songs. Avoid the Oregonian.

If you’re tempted, your eyes cannot be trained, and you cannot exercise covenantal control not to look at a maiden. Don’t look at the paper, then put it away. You don’t need the Oregonian. You don’t need movies. You don’t need any of that stuff. We have a tremendous difficulty today with adulteration through physical images presented to men on the internet and other ways.

Don’t, you know, this is the day that the Lord has made, and it’s a day of judgment. Don’t walk away from this lightly. Make a commitment in your hearts today, men, particularly women, you too, but mostly men today, to avoid adulteration and be people who are of high fidelity to your spouses. Not just, you know, you didn’t sleep with somebody last week, but did your eyes engage in that? Did lustful thoughts enter into your heart? Because that adulterates your relationship with your wife. That’s what Jesus is talking about.

And high fidelity means every time you turn that thing on, you’re getting good sound. Doesn’t mean most of the time. You know, another interesting song from 10 or 15 years ago, Leonard Cohen: “Everybody knows you love me, baby. Everybody knows you really do. Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful, give or take a night or two.”

That’s not high fidelity. Occasional adultery is not good. God says high fidelity is the way to enhance your marriage, which results in an increased vocation, recreation, and procreation before God.

So high fidelity. Jesus in Revelation 19:11: “I saw heaven open. Behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it was called Faithful and True.” That’s fidelity—faithfulness to your spouse. You see, Jesus, the one that we follow, is designated at the head of who we are as we go out of this place today. Jesus says that on the side of his name there is “Faithful and True.” He’s the faithful and true witness.

He is the one who is high fidelity. See, not just most of the time. He is high fidelity to his bride all of the time. And if we’re going to follow him out of the church today to go into the world in terms of vocation, procreation, recreation, we must do so with that name stamped upon us. We want to be high-fidelity guides as we enter into this world.

1 Corinthians 4:2 says there’s only one thing required. It doesn’t really say it quite that way, but I think you can get this implication. What is required of a steward? 1 Corinthians 4:2 tells us: “It is required in stewards that one be found faithful.” That’s what’s required.

Are you faithful to the task that God gives you to do? Are you faithful? Do you have high fidelity at work? Do you have high fidelity in terms of fulfilling your task at this church—small or large? Are you faithful to it? You see, do you have high fidelity? Or do you adulterate these tasks by doing other things and not attending to what God calls us to do?

You want to be given more stewardship? You should. That’s what we’re here to do in this world—exercise greater and greater dominion over the world like Adam. If you want that, then you got to be faithful in small things. And God will make you faithful in more. Be faithful, man. Particularly in the context of your marriage, have high fidelity. Do not allow your relationship to be adulterated by the world around you.

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Secondly, perseverance versus quitting. Faithfulness for the moment is good. And if we look at faithfulness over time, we can call that perseverance.

Psalm 71:18—you know, I can’t ever think of people like Howard without this verse coming to mind. Psalm 71:18: “Now also, when I am old and gray-headed, O God, do not forsake me until I declare your strength to this generation, your power to everyone who is to come.”

That’s Howard wanting it. It’s hard. That’s what they want to do the rest of their lives. They don’t want to quit. They want to be even better now. They want to persevere, not just in their marriage relationship, of course that, but they want to persevere in serving Christ. They want to show to this generation the blessings and power of God.

And they’ve done it so that their propagation now goes beyond simple physical propagation. You got all kinds of kids in this church who call them, you know, nana and papa. Why? Because they’re faithful. They’re showing to that generation the perseverance and the work that the Lord Jesus Christ has called them to.

Proverbs 2 says that the adulterous woman is the one who forsakes the companion of her youth, her covenant, the covenant of her God—the one who is her spouse by covenant. God says, “Don’t do that. Persevere.” You know, talking to that Statesman Journal reporter a week or so ago, before that reporter came here to take the picture, and he said, “Well, why is it you guys are so good at what you’re doing? You know, the Oregon Citizen Alliance never was that successful. And yet Oregon Family Council—you guys are doing great things.”

And that’s kind of the thrust of the article: the Defense of Marriage Coalition, which operates under OCA, is much more sophisticated and effective than Christian activists were 10 or 15 years ago. Why are you guys doing so good?

Well, I said, you know, he was about 48, 49. He said, “You’re kind of like me. You remember those rock groups from the ’60s and ’70s, the Rolling Stones or, you know, Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, whatever it was. You know, if they just stuck around long enough—they stuck around for 20, 30 years—they got to be legends. Why? Well, because you get better. You just hang in there, and other people who are not persevering fall off. And hopefully you learn a little bit as you mature and you get a little better at what you’re doing. And then pretty soon, it’s 20, 30 years later and now you’re a legend in the rock and roll business or in political action. You’re doing really good work and you’re effective for the kingdom.”

Well, that’s the way your marriage is. You know, it could be tough if you get into marriage. You know, Isaac and I were kind of joking around. We had that song at the end of the service: “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.” And then it, at the very last verse, it talks about, you know, we’re supposed to be like the pilgrims and the Mayflower. We’re supposed to take that ship into the stormy winter sea.

And in a way, it’s kind of an odd ending for a sermon focused on the gift of marriage to us. But in a way, that’s what it is. Sometimes the married life, you get up that morning and you sail into a cold wintry sea. It’s tough sledding. And you want to remember that godly people persevere in that high fidelity. They keep it up day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. They don’t quit. They don’t quit.

And as a result of that, God makes them effective. As a result of that, when you’re as old as Howard and Wanita, people could be calling you, maybe nana and papa. You’ll have people looking to you to show them the goodness of God, to your generation, to your kids and all that sort of stuff. You see, persevere. Don’t quit.

Hebrews 6 says: “God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love, but you have shown toward his name that you have ministered to the saints and do minister. That each of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

Not bad, not a bad thing to look at another couple that have persisted in 50 years of marriage and imitate them. God says we’re supposed to imitate one another. And we’re supposed to imitate the perseverance, love, and commitment that Howard and Wanita have shown each other. That’s not a bad thing to say from this pulpit. That’s what Paul writes to people over and over again in the New Testament: “Look at the people that have walked the path. Look at the people that have persevered. Do like they do. Imitate them and understand that the blessings of God come to those who persevere.”

Galatians 6:9: “Let us not grow weary while doing good. In due season we shall reap if we don’t lose heart.”

The end comes—that wintry sea. You hit the other shore and you hit the blessings that God gives to us. You remember what we said when Jesus cried out in John’s gospel in chapter 19: “It’s finished.” Jesus was a finisher. He got to the end of his work. His very food, his existence was to do the will of the Father in heaven and finish the work that he’d been given to do. Your marriage is a job and a vocation. It’s a delightful one most times. It’s a tough one to receive other times.

God says your job is to be a finisher in your marriage, to persevere in your marriage. And God will bless that. He says, “Surely you’ll get to the harbor on the other side.” Jesus leaves us alone, middle of the lake, frequently dark at night, winds blowing, can’t see what’s going on. His eyes on us from the shore. You see, eyes on you.

If you’re struggling in your marriage today, don’t quit. Don’t get discouraged. Persevere in what you’re doing. And the Lord Jesus Christ, he sees you. He’s praying and interceding for you with the Father. He’ll bring you to your Capernaum, to your safe harbor that you’re going to. And then third: thankfulness.

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I mean, it isn’t just about doing the right thing and duty day after day. You persevere. You have high fidelity in the moment and perseverance over time because at the core of your relationship to your husband and to your wife is a thankfulness to God that he gave you this wonderful gift that produces social stability, minds that are free of psychological difficulties, vocation enhanced, creative abilities, song in your heart.

You give God thanks for the marriage as opposed to grumbling about the problems and difficulties. You see every problem and difficulty in the context that God is maturing you as a servant of his and he’s giving you blessing upon blessing through the very things that you may not particularly enjoy for the moment.

What’s the root of homosexuality? Unthankfulness. That’s what Romans 1 says. “Although they knew God, the invisible things of God were clearly seen. God is triune—unity and diversity. That alone should drive us to opposite-sex marriage. Marrying a woman if you’re a man and a man if you’re a woman. But they see that unity and diversity and they see God. But they do not give thanks for what he has created and how he’s revealed himself. And that failure to give thanks is what leads down the line there at the end of Romans 1 to homosexual relationships, and then seeking the state to approve what God will never approve in the heart of such a person.

Unthankfulness is what leads to the difficulties of our nation and state today. Why do we have the battle we’re asking you to help us engage in? Because of unthankfulness on the part of people. And God turns them over then.

So you know, if you’re not thankful for your spouse every morning when you get up, well, you’re headed down the road toward what we’re trying to see not happen in the context of our culture. Thankfulness—joyous thankfulness to God for the blessing of marriage—gives us the proper motivation for high fidelity in the short term, which becomes perseverance over the long term.

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Whose image will we bear? You know, the text in Genesis—the narrative climax of the entire text of Genesis 2 and 3—is the fall of man, the temptation and fall. That’s where the whole thing’s going.

You see, Jesus comes to be with us today. What’s your decision? How will you respond to his word that tells you of the great blessings of the married state? If you’re single, will you pursue it more rigorously or not? If you’re married, will you be more thankful, have higher fidelity, and have greater perseverance?

And if you’re to just see marriage as an end in itself, you remember that it’s there for a purpose: to exercise vocation, to be recreatively artistic, have artistic expressions to God of that love, and then to propagate both in terms of physical propagation and the propagation of children in the faith.

What will we do? Whose image will we bear? Adam decided for a time to bear the image of isolation as opposed to completion. Everything I’ve said about marriage can be wrapped up in this: it completes people. Those apart from that, most people are incomplete and they struggle—they’re alienated, they’re isolated. Which image will we bear? You may be married but you still may be operating in terms of isolation, incompleteness. Will you rejoice in Christian marriage today? Will you recommit yourself to follow the Lord Jesus Christ in receiving this great blessing from him that blesses our land and our culture as we engage in it according to the power of the Spirit of God?

Temptation in the fall, expulsion from the land, or maturation in the context of the land? That’s what lies before us. Whose image will we bear? Will we go back to isolation? Will we be cold and silent toward our spouse? Or will we move instead in terms of completion?

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“Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.” We’ve got a momentous battle on our plate here in Oregon. A pivotal point in the United States right now is Oregon. What happened in the courts last week, what the Supreme Court will do with our initiative petition over the next two weeks, what the voters will do if we get it circularized and on the ballot by November—this is the pivot point for the entire country. This is why Dr. Dobson came out a week and a half ago. This is it.

And as America goes, probably so will go an awful lot of what else is happening in the world. And already we see what the state wants to do: They want to say, “Well, even if we get rid of homosexual marriage, we’ll at least get civil unions out of this deal.” No. We have a pivotal place right now in the battle of the country here in Oregon.

God has raised up people for this particular purpose who’ve been working away for 20 years learning their craft as Christians. We’re here now. We’re ready to do the job, right? “Once to every man a nation.” This is our moment—a pivotal battle in what kind of culture our children will inherit. Will it be one marked by these blessings of Christian biblical marriage? Or will it be the horrible deterioration as same-sex marriage eliminates and tries to eliminate the idea of marriage at all?

I heard a commercial the other day for some father-this organization, you know, trying to get substitute fathers for kids. How long will they be able to do that if same-sex marriage is where we move here in the next year or two? How could you say we’re going to help kids who are fatherless? That’s an affront to a lesbian couple, isn’t it? I mean, think of the implications. If we lose this battle, many things will deteriorate and fall apart.

Ultimately, the evangelism of the country will be damaged big time by such a move because, as I said earlier, it is the married Christian family who produced disciples and that married Christian family is now under attack. And if marriage goes the way that it looks like it’s going in this state and nation, then we lose the very root of Christian discipleship.

Now, long term, I’m not worried in the least. I know it’s happening. Long term. But short term, I’m pretty concerned. “Once to every man and nation, this is our moment.”

I believe that. But taking it to a more personal level, what can you do? You can do Christian marriage, right? You can decide today not just maybe to help out a little bit with the Defense of Marriage Coalition, get ready for the battle this fall. But you can decide just today that your moment—every man and woman—is today as you decide to be a man and a woman of high fidelity, of perseverance, and of thankfulness to God for the marriage that he’s placed before you.

What do we have in our country? Sweet smell of a great sorrow or Adam’s joyful love song? The choice is yours today. Jesus gives you the gift. Well, how are you going to respond to that gift?

My prayer for you, and it’s a confident one, is that you’re going to respond by singing the praises of almighty God in your home.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you, Father, for Howard and Wanita. Thank you for blessing them, Lord God. Thank you, Father, for their hard work as well. And we pray, Lord God, that you would bless us all now as we think about the great gift it is—Christian marriage.

Father, we pray that as we come forward with our tribute acknowledging you as our king, that we’d walk in the ways of our king, that we’d bear your image of community, that we bear your image of unity and diversity, that we bear your image, Lord God, of self-offering, dying to ourselves to live to our spouses. That we bear your image, Lord God, by being recreative, joyous people in the context of our homes. Help us, Father, to be people of high fidelity. Help us to follow our Savior who is faithful and true. In his name we ask it. Amen.