Dennis Tuuri

# Malachi 2: Marriage and Covenant, Law and Love

But it’s on much more than marriage. And it has great significance for all kinds of relationships, including as I said earlier, a relationship to the church of Jesus Christ and a particular local church as well. Please stand for the reading of today’s text, Malachi chapter 2. I might mention one thing here by the way. There is a verse, which verse is it? There’s a translation here that is unusual. This is the ESV translation and there is a text in our chapter today that’s normally translated “I hate divorce,” and so this is a statement of God’s hatred of divorce.

But this translation is a little different. Literally it can be read “hates divorce,” and he would be not God who’s the speaker but the one who ends up getting divorced. So, “he who hates divorce,” and that is a legitimate translation. The ESV actually changes the word “hate” to “not love,” which probably isn’t as good a translation, but in case you’re wondering what happens to the translation here, that’s what’s going on in this ESV translation.

So I wanted to explain that before we read God’s word for today. All right. Malachi 2.

“And now, O priests, this command is for you. If you will not listen, if you will not take it to heart to give honor to my name, says the Lord of Hosts, then I will send the curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings. Indeed, I have already cursed them because you do not lay it to heart. Behold, I will rebuke your offspring and spread dung on your faces, the dung of your offerings, and you shall be taken away with it.

So shall you know that I have sent this command to you, that my covenant with Levi may stand, says the Lord of Hosts. My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave them to him. It was a covenant of fear, and he feared me. He stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity.

For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts. But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of Hosts. And so I make you despised and abased before all the people. And as much as you do not keep my ways, but show partiality in your instruction, have we not all one father?

Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? Judah has been faithless. An abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of Hosts.

And this second thing you do: you cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning, because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, ‘Why does he not?’ Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union?

And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. For the man who does not love his wife, but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garments with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit and do not be faithless. You have wearied the Lord with your words, but you say, ‘How have we wearied him?’ By saying, ‘Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delights in them.’ Or by asking, ‘Where is the God of justice?’”

Let’s pray.

Father, we acknowledge that you are the God of justice. That justice shall indeed be brought to victory through the gospel, the proclamation of the message of the ascension of the Savior King to your throne and to your right hand. Bless us, Lord God, as a church with justice in the context of our relationships. Give us unity of purpose and heart and action and feelings as well. Bless, Lord God, the marriages of this church that justice might be found in them, and that we would not be faithless one to the other in our marriages.

Bless, Father, your word today by the power of your spirit. Transform us, minister life to us through the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. In whose name we pray, amen.

Please be seated.

So we move today from a consideration of the need for the Holy Spirit—not just for marriage, but marriage as a subset of the unity of the church of Jesus Christ from Ephesians 4 and 5, which is the beginning of the section that then leads into a distinct relationship: husband and wife relationship. But even in that section of Ephesians 5, as we’ll see when we get to that in more detail in later weeks, the context is still Jesus and the church, which has been the subject of Ephesians 4 and the first half of Ephesians 5.

So now we get to specifically what Tim Keller in his book The Meaning of Marriage calls the essence of marriage. The essence of marriage is marriage as a covenant. When we began back in, I think 1983 or so—I think we’re coming up to our 30th anniversary next year as a church—one of the first things we had to do is decide a name. And I remember sitting around a living room and coming up with name suggestions. We wanted “Reformation” so that people wouldn’t think of us as “reformed,” whatever that means. Reformed what? We wanted to tie ourselves to the Protestant Reformation. Now, that only does that with a very limited portion of our population these days since nobody knows what the Protestant Reformation was anymore, but that’s why we chose Reformation.

And we chose Covenant because as we began to become reformed in our theology, we saw that in many of the Baptist and community churches we’d been involved with, the idea that the truth of covenant, which pervades the scriptures, had somehow kind of gotten shoved to the side. And so we saw the significance of our relationship to Christ and God the Father through Christ and the Spirit by way of covenant. We saw ourselves in that relationship—that relationship determines sort of everything else.

And so covenant pervades our understanding here at Reformation Covenant Church of social relationships, marriages certainly, et cetera. So covenant is a tremendously important concept and certainly for marriage, as we’ll see in today’s text and then in some observations that flow from it, but it’s important beyond that as well. And I think that to the extent that our culture is moving away from marriage, it’s moving away from Christianity. It’s moving away from what we’ll see today by way of what covenant is all about. That’s true in general of the culture at large.

And so as we can move back together in our churches through membership covenants and in our marriages through marriage covenants and try to be faithful in those, we’ll be imaging the personal structural bond of the triune God himself in our relationships, and as a result of that, we’ll bring the idea, the concept, the truth of covenant back to our culture as well.

Who needs a piece of paper? That’s the idea. Now, used to be a generation ago that 75% of adults were married. Now it’s down to 50% and dropping. And people say, “We don’t need a piece of paper. We don’t need what they’re saying—covenant or contract or binding structured personal relationship that a covenant represents.” And our contention is that since God says this is what marriage is, we do absolutely need the piece of paper.

And we’ll be discussing why today. Now, what we’re going to do is look briefly at Malachi 2, make some very quick observations on it. We’re primarily looking at it to as a strong text that indicates that marriage is a covenant. Of course, it clearly states that. And then after that, we’ll talk about marriage as a covenant. We’ll look at a couple more biblical texts and we’ll look at some observations of what the significance of that is.

What does it mean marriage as a covenant? What does it mean a pledge of future love? What is the relationship of promising to who we are as people and to our freedom and the well-being of a culture and society? And in that section of the sermon, we’ll rely on some quotations that Tim Keller has from C.S. Lewis, from Lewis Smedes, and other people. And we’ll see the significance of why covenant is so important.

And then finally, we’ll look at the relationship of law and love. A covenant is a legal binding relationship. And what does it mean? What does it mean in terms of our feelings? Are feelings unimportant? No, because feelings are very important. We need laws. And so we’ll see that law, command, predates, as it were. It comes before our feelings. And I’ve got on your outline today that old illustration for you old-timers. I think it used to be in the Four Spiritual Laws book, you know, where the caboose of the train is feelings. So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll look at the text. Then we’ll look at marriage as a covenant with some implications. Finally, we’ll conclude by looking at the relationship of not just covenant to marriage but law then to love, law to feelings, law to our subjective realization of who we are. All this to the goal of maturing us as Christians and as imagebearer of God.

All right. On your outlines, we’ve got some very quick points to make about Malachi 2. You know, we don’t want to just—I mentioned last week, exegesis. We don’t want to just extract the marriage text out of its immediate context. And so Malachi 2 has a specific set of addresses. Right? He addresses. He says, “Now, O priests, this command is for you.” So this section is given to the priests. Now it has relevance and significance for all of us—we’re a nation of priests—but this is given to the representatives of God who are responsible for binding the community together and for doing that through clear instruction, as the text goes on to say.

So the addressees are the priests, and the specific thing that’s talked about here is the command.

The reason he’s writing this is given to us in verse two. He says, “If you will not listen, what does listening mean? If you will not take it to heart to give honor to my name.” So what flows here is an exposition of what it means to give honor to the name of God. As Christians, our walk—remember we said that walk is mentioned over and over again in Ephesians 4 and 5—this is what marriage is in the context of. It’s part of our walk.

Our walk is to be wholly given over to a set of actions and attitudes that gives honor to God. And this is a wonderful summation at the front of Malachi 2: that our marriages and everything else that it talks about here, all of our lives, are to be ones in which we give honor to God in. That’s the basic command: to honor God in all that we do and say, and certainly to honor God in our marriages. So that’s the command.

And then there’s a threat. He says, “If you don’t do this, I will send the curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings.” He says, “I’ve already done it. I’ve already cursed your blessings.” That’s a great phrase because, brothers and sisters, we don’t earn blessings. It’s easy to think we do. It’s easy to think the gospel has just gotten us back to neutral. But the gospel isn’t neutral news.

The gospel is good news. We have received all things in our relationship with Jesus Christ. We have all blessings. The blessings are not ours by virtue of our merit. That’s not the gospel. The gospel is that the blessings are ours by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, and his gift to us is giving us the spirit to bring him and his blessings to us. But those blessings can be lost. You see the difference?

It’s not that the blessings are earned, but the blessings can be lost. God may curse our blessings. So it’s not as if you leave here today and say, “Am I going to be blessed or am I going to be cursed?” No, you leave here today blessed. But if you don’t honor God, those blessings will be cursed by God. Very important distinction, and I wanted to point that out even though it’s not really what we’re talking about today, but it has great significance for how we view our lives.

Do you understand that? I hope you do. You don’t earn blessings. They’re yours in Christ. You’ve got them right now. The question is, are you going to maintain those blessings, or are you going to turn those blessings into a curse by having God curse those blessings through a failure to honor God? And specifically by way of application in this series, honoring God in your marriage?

He then goes on to talk about the past faithfulness of Levi. The tribe of Levi, in verse four, he says, “My covenant with Levi might stand, says the Lord.” And he goes into a little bit of discussion of this. “My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave them to him. It was a covenant of fear, and he feared me. He stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace.”

The walk again—every aspect in peace, the blessings and righteousness of God, uprightness—”and he turned many from iniquity.” See, and we’ve seen that over and over again in the last few sermons: that part of our obligations are to turn each other from iniquity. So he cites the past faithfulness of the priestly group, the Levites, and that past faithfulness is tied to proper instruction and helping people to grow, and also turning away people from iniquities.

So he cites past faithfulness and then he says you’re not like that. You’ve broken the covenant. You’ve been covenantally unfaithful. Verse 8: “You have turned aside from the way.” So the basic idea is they’ve turned aside from the way, the walk, everything to honor God. They’ve turned aside from that. And that’s why their blessings are now being cursed. And there are people who turn away from the way of marriage, and that’s why they’re not very happy anymore. Their blessings of marriage have been cursed because they’re not walking with God anymore.

They’ve broken their relation, their covenant, their obligations to him. “You have caused many to stumble by your instruction.” So they’re not teaching things correctly. “You have corrupted the covenant of Levi.” So he tells them this is the problem. You’ve broken covenant with me. You’ve corrupted the covenant and you’re not walking correctly anymore.

And then he gives some specifications to this. Okay? And so what I’m doing is providing a context for the instructions we have here about marriage. It’s not just some little thing thrown in. Just like in Ephesians 5, it’s not something thrown in. There’s a context. There’s a movement of Paul’s argument that leads up to it. And there’s a movement of the argument here as well. And interestingly enough, the movement’s somewhat similar.

Look at look at verse 10. Well, first verse 9. “You know, well, what have you done? You haven’t kept my way as you shown partiality in your instruction. What’s it got to do with marriage? Nothing. Marriage isn’t being addressed yet. The first specification isn’t failure in marriage. The first specification is partiality. And look what he goes on to say in verse 10. “Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another?”

Now, that’s a general statement. He’s still not talking about marriage. He’s talking about the same thing that God says in Ephesians 4. And in fact, the language brings it back to you, doesn’t it? “Have we not all one father? Are we not one entity here?” Just as in Ephesians 4, there’s one Lord, one faith, one baptism—before you get to marriage, there’s this obligation to let the spirit blend you together into a unity or community.

And so the church is addressed first. We could say just like in Ephesians 4: to have good marriages, you’ve got to have people involved in a covenant community, a local church, who are committed to each other by covenant. I think it’s ideal what the Bible says. And those people are not to be partial. Those people are to be united to one another because they recognize there’s one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

So unity—it’s interesting here to me that in Malachi 2, which we normally turn to to think of their sins about marriage, it actually begins the first specification here is partiality. There’s no unity going on anymore. They’re faithless to one another. And not just the priests—because the priests have improperly taught the word of God and shown partiality in their dealings, the church—we can say in Judah—is disunited. It doesn’t have unity. It should. “We all are in this covenant of our fathers. Why then are we faithless to one another profaning the covenant of our fathers?”

The covenant of our fathers has first, before it gets around to marriage, the idea that we’re to be united together as a body in Jesus Christ. Now, that’s partly what we’re doing as we’re revisioning our parish groups here at RCC. I’m presenting a plan that the deacons and the elders discussed at our last meeting—tomorrow night to the deacons to get their input on what we’re proposing and what the kind of the direction we’re going. And I won’t reveal all the elements of it yet. I think it’s pretty exciting stuff. But let me just say this: this month, for instance, we’ve been talking about the Prepare Enrich couple checkup as a way of a tool, a free tool brought to you by Date Night Peddx. By the way, the results that the church gets from your test is not—we don’t know the names. You just have identified your church group by using the right number. And so the elders will get a combined report from all 50 couples or however many takes it. And then we’ll see how many of us are good at communication, conflict resolution, finances, spiritual values, friends and family, sex, sexuality, physical contact. We’ll see what things are strengths in our church and what things need work. And that’ll assist your elders to know what things need work and to provide Bible study, Sunday school classes, sermons, whatever it is to shore up that part of the marriages here.

So, it won’t. Don’t be fearful. There’s no breach of confidentiality possible with this firm. They really will just identify the entire group of RCC, not the individual results. If however you ever want to take the individual results of that inventory and approach one of the pastors here and help have him help walk you through it, we’re prepared to do that. We use that same inventory when we do premarital counseling or when we do enrichment exercises for couples that are married. So we know what those categories look like. We sort of know, you know, what can be, how useful that can be to you.

Having said all that, my point is that in the parish groups, for instance, one of the things we want the parish groups to do, I think, is to push down into the community what we’re talking about both in the vision and particular strategies of the church today, as well as some of the instruction. So I’m asking all parish group leaders to pick up a copy of this page, which are the detailed instructions for doing the couple checkup on the internet, as well as this card that we have on a conference over in Moscow, ID called Makers. And we’ll be able to then distribute that information. It’s good we make announcements. That’s fine. But a lot of people aren’t in the sanctuary and they don’t listen, et cetera. We can push information and encouragement to do things into the parish groups, and we’ve got a parish meeting coming up in one week.

So I have copies of these in my office. If you’re a parish group leader, I would ask you today to come to my office, go on in. It’s nice and cool in there, by the way, and pick up these two things, or several copies of both, and encourage your parish. Find out how many have done the couple checkup. Encourage them to do it. You see, building the church up in that way and discipling it is what we’re supposed to do. And that’s what Levi was to do. That’s what the priests were to do, and that’s what these priests were failing to do.

The first specification, the general charge, is faithlessness. You’re not walking in the way. But then there are these specifications of the charge. What specific things are they doing wrong to indicate the general charge? And the first of those is this disunity. Now, the second one we get into marriage. Finally, in verse 11, he says, “For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendants of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of Hosts.”

Now, probably this is a statement of political alliances, although it’s also, of course, true that you’re not to marry outside of the faith. But this is probably a reference to the sin of having political alliances, although it does, of course, touch on marriage and the need to involve in covenantal marriage again with members of the covenant community.

And then the third specification is delivered down in verse 14. “You say, why does he not? Because the Lord is witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. And here we have: did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? And he seeks godly offspring.” So here the final specification is the part that we normally think of in terms of Malachi 2 instructions about marriage.

But see, I’m going through all of this to be faithful to the text. I’m also going through all of this to make you understand that if all you want to do is work in your marriage, come and go from here, spend an hour or two in the worship service and not be part of the community, not part of a parish group—it’s not going to work. Not going to work. Marriage is seen in Ephesians 4 and 5 and in Malachi 2 as a subset of the relationships that we have in the context of the body of Christ.

God has given you pastors. He has given you other people to be encouragements to you. Isolation in marriage is a sure bet that marriage will then fail so significantly and very importantly. Here’s what this text tells us: of course, marriage is a covenant. “She is your companion, your wife by covenant.” So in Christian idea of marriage, husband-wife relationships, permanent obligation and relationship with one another, it is referred to explicitly as a covenant, and therefore has elements of our covenant with God to it. And it doesn’t look like other sorts of arrangements.

It’s not a civil union. It is a covenant. It’s not a bargain or agreement. It’s a covenant. And then he goes on to tell them, he says, “God seeking godly offspring. Therefore, guard yourselves in your spirit. Let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.” And by the way, that’s the way it normally goes. It normally goes that way. Men are the head of the relationship in this. They’re the ones usually who become faithless to the wife. And I’ve seen this over and over and over again.

Now, the wife may be the first one to break, right, and to leave the relationship, but typically, not all, but typically that’s because the husband for years and years and years has not really been faithful to the wife. And as a result of that, you know, it’s sort of like, you know, watching a basketball game. The refs usually catch the, you know, the second foul, but they don’t see the precipitating incident.

And in Christian communities, women are trying to be godly, you know, quiet, meek spirits, you know, submissive and all that stuff. I think maybe that’s a little overdone in a lot of relationships in Christ, in Christian circles. And the end result is that wives put up with an awful lot of foolishness and faithlessness, really, to the covenant on the part of husbands without using the importance of the relationship.

We’ll talk about this next week when we talk about the purpose of marriage, which is sanctification of each other. And they don’t necessarily engage in that. They don’t know how to go about doing that and what they see as a godly way. And that’s the fault of the church. Our job is to help women understand: how do we go about doing that? And men as well. But in any event, what’s said here, placing the male as the normal violator, the one who is normally faithless to the wife, his covenant bride, is typically the case, I think.

And the only way around this is to guard yourself, he says, in your spirit. Your spirit must be hooked up with the Holy Spirit to guard yourselves that you’re not faithless in that covenant relationship. So that’s Malachi 2, a quick overview. And yes, I look to it primarily to assert that marriage is a covenant, but it has all kinds of other important truths for us—the same sorts of things we saw in Ephesians 4 and 5.

All right, so that’s the first part of the outline. Let’s move to part two. Marriage is indeed a covenant. And there’s a couple of other verses here. Malachi 2:14, of course, but in Ezekiel 16:8, God’s talking about his relationship to Israel. And here’s what he says. “When I passed by you again, he says, I saw you were an abandoned, bloodied baby left for dead out in the middle of the wilderness. Okay, so there’s no value in this baby, right? I mean, there’s a human baby, but she’s not lovely. Okay, but he takes care of her. And then finally, she grows up. And he says this:

“When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you are at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you. That’s a Hebraism for ‘I married you.’ I spread the corner or wing of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine.”

So God says that his relationship to Israel is a marriage covenant. And we see this over and over again in the prophets. So again, marriage is a covenant. It’s not a kind of barter relationship. It’s not what you could call a consumer relationship in our day and age. Consumer relationships are the ones that we normally enter into. If you’re going to hire a gardener, maybe that’s not a good illustration since in a way you’re both gardeners in the couple relationship, but you know, you’re going to hire somebody to mow your lawn, you know, a couple of times a month, maybe edge your lawn. You enter into a consumer relationship with him. He’s got a good and service that you’re buying from him.

Or if you go to a butcher or something, or a particular gas station, you have this consumer relationship, and it’s based upon you’re getting something every time you go to the person and you’re giving him something in exchange. But if the gardener doesn’t do such a good job or if the meat doesn’t taste that good, you look for somebody else, right? Because it’s a consumer relationship. You’re after the best bang for your buck. You’re after the best, you know, product for your dollars. And when the relationship starts to wane and the gardener doesn’t do such a great job, you’re losing money on them, right? So to speak. You’re not getting the good and service you’re paying for, and you cut your losses and you give up on him and go someplace else.

Well, for all too many people, that’s the problem. When they reject the piece of paper, when the man says—and it’s usually the man again, not always—when he says, “What do we need a piece of paper for? I love you.” Right? Well, you need a piece of paper because without it, marriages tend to become consumer relationships where you’re looking at it in terms of what you’re getting. The individual’s needs become paramount, and in that situation the relationship has tremendous stresses on it, doesn’t it?

I mean, if you’re in a mutually satisfying economic relationship with someone else, if you’re in this consumer relationship where what you get in marriage is turned into a commodity—how many goods do I get out of this? Goods and services for what I put into it?—then what you’re both going to do is you’re both going to be putting on your best face, right? Because if you start to mess up and if he finds out who you really are, or if she finds out who you really are, they’re going to bolt. They’re going to go get the next gardener. They’re going to hire, right? They’re going to go to the next butcher. They’re going to—whatever the analogy is—they’re going to go to somebody else. And so it puts tremendous pressure on the relationship. Rather, not marriage apart from covenant, it puts tremendous stress because you’re always trying to put on your best face.

You know what you’re really doing is you’re marketing yourself, right? You always try to think of new ways to market yourself to the person you’re living with or in relationship with because otherwise they’re going to grow dissatisfied. Now, what basis is that for a permanent long-term relationship? None. It produces anxiety, lack of stability, lack of permanence, and it’s simply not able to build the kind of long, binding relationships that marriages produce.

So, that’s what we mean here in this part of the outline: because marriage is a covenant, it’s not a consumer relationship. It also isn’t a bargaining process. Now, even if you’re married, you can still think in terms of commodity consumer relationships. And the people that I see marriage problems with, this is what typically happens: they forget they’re involved in a long-term structural personal bond of marriage with permanent vows, and they just start acting like they’re just living together.

It’s a bargain. What I mean is the bargaining process is this. So my wife isn’t doing what she used to do. The food isn’t as good. You know, she doesn’t look as good. She’s putting on some pounds as women tend to do over the years, in spite of how the culture doesn’t want to acknowledge God’s glory and way—we do. And so she isn’t really fulfilling. She’s not as nice to me as she used to. Just, you know, look at me so adoringly, and now she doesn’t.

So I’m not getting as much, you know, out of this relationship. And because I’m not getting as much, I really shouldn’t have to give as much either. So you ratchet it down a few degrees. You don’t do the extra things you used to do for her. You know, this is the way it is at work. If you think you’re underpaid, what do you do? You underperform, right? That you typically don’t. You should do the reverse. But we don’t.

If we’re not going to have hope or prospect of getting a better return for our investment, we ratchet down our investment. And so, even within—I’ll bet you right now in marriages in this church, this dynamic is going on. Husbands or wives are thinking, “Boy, it’s not like it used to be. The honeymoon’s over long since.” And as a result, you’re not putting the effort in to make the honeymoon what it was before.

Now, that’s a commodification. That’s a looking at marriage and its benefits as a commodity, right? It’s a bargain, commercial sort of transaction way of looking at things. It’s not what the scriptures say, which is that marriage is a structural personal bond of commitment, a permanent commitment one to the other.

So the gospel is more like what marriage is supposed to be. Jesus makes a commitment. He doesn’t love. He doesn’t die for you because you’re lovely. He dies to make you lovely. And he dies and he enters into this covenant. And unless you violate it pretty severely, you know, he is always there for you, right? You’re always there. And this is the way marriage is supposed to be. It is a long-term binding commitment of faithfulness to each other. It’s a covenant, which provides permanency and stability to a relationship.

Now, the same thing’s true in some ways of the church. I keep—and I will keep—linking marriage and membership in a local church. It’s a little different because people move. They decide it’s better for their spiritual health to go to another local church. That’s fine. That’s good. But while you’re members of a local church, you have those same kind of obligations. And if the church isn’t giving you what you want, the idea is not to dial back your responses to it or your service level.

The idea is kick it up. Make the church a better place. And so in marriage, you have this obligation to act toward each other in obedience to the vows that you made at a particular time in your life. In those vows, you said the relationship needs take precedent over my personal needs. That’s what you said. “I’m going to love you in sickness as well as in health, in poverty as well as in wealth, right? Whatever the circumstances you’re throwing up, I’m going to clean it up. I’m going to love you in sickness and in health.”

There’s no return on your investment at that point, right? Now, maybe there is long term. I’m sure there is long term. And ultimately, our personal needs—our personal need to be part of the imagebearing capacity we have—to have this kind of covenantal relationship of service to someone else. That is our deepest need. And there’s great satisfaction that comes from that. But it doesn’t look like that in the short term.

But that’s what you’ve done. You said the relationship, if you’re married, if you’re going to get married, the relationship is more important than my individual needs. And more than that, you’re saying that my individual needs, what I want to do, will be often put aside. You’ll be involved in self-sacrificial action. You’ll have to clean up the vomit. Okay? You’ll have to change the poopy baby with your children. It’s like that. It’s like raising kids. And so that’s what you pledge to do. You pledge to this long-term personal relationship where the relationship has precedence over the individual—your own individual needs.

Now, as a result, of course, your individual needs are blessed. God’s blessings include stability, right? Security. What you really want to know is: when I stop marketing myself and I show who I am to someone, are they still going to love me? That’s what you want to know. You don’t want to market yourself, you know, paint your face or whatever it is, change your attitudes, be specially careful. You want to be able to have someone realize, yeah, you’re going to try hard to be lovely, but you’re going to be unlovely. And what you need in a marriage relationship is a covenant, not a consumer relationship where the other party’s prone to jettison you.

You need someone who is committed to you warts and all. And then that provides deep satisfaction. That provides deep relationship. That relationship is built how? We die. If we seek to save our lives, we lose them. If we lose our lives for the cause of Christ, for the cause of the marriage that we’ve entered into with him as well as with someone else, we find our life. Our truest joys are found in that—by dying to ourselves, living unto Christ, and specifically living to the mate that God has called us to be in relationship with.

So you no longer have to prove your value daily. You have the blessing of coming together and mutually sacrificing for each other and loving each other in spite of—not because of—who you are. Many times that’s gospel love. That’s a reflection of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Matthew 5:46 our savior says, “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do that? If you just love because somebody’s loving you, that’s worldly love.

But when you love people that aren’t necessarily lovely and aren’t necessarily loving you at that moment, this is Christian love. So we have a covenant relationship. Because of this covenant relationship, there is involved in it this pledge of future love. Point B on your outlines. And what I talked about earlier with the Dows and the Foresters—that is a pledge of future love.

You know, you don’t—when you get married, you don’t usually have vows that say, “I love you so much today. I promise to love you today. I promise I really love you right now.” What good is that? That’s useless. What people pledge is, “I promise to love you in sickness and in health, right? I promise to love you in the future.” That’s what the covenant is. It’s not about loving in the present. I mean, it involves that, of course. There is love, but the emphasis isn’t on that. It’s a pledge of future love.

And that’s what these parents were doing. They were pledging future love to these children. And in spite of, you know, Asa breaking things in the house, Takashi and Debbie kept loving him. And he’s now a godly seed, right? Because of that love. And so that’s what marriage is. Marriage is this obligation, this pledge of future love. Keller uses the illustration of Ulysses tied to the mast. Great illustration. You know the story, right? So Ulysses and his men are sailing past the island where there are these sirens, and they know that these women singing—these weird siren women—will cause them to go there, and they’ll never be able to get away. So Ulysses, to avoid this, he does something. He has his crew tie him to the mast. So he can’t control the ship, but he leaves his—you know, he’s tied. He can yell at them to do this, that, or the other thing, but they won’t. They won’t pay any attention to him.

When he’s going past the place of temptation, Ulysses is tied to the mast. Ulysses has a ball and chain, and the ball and chain is going to save his life and the life of his crew. Marriage is a ball and chain in that same way. Yeah, I know it’s a negative illustration usually, but marriage—a commitment, a covenant, right? A pledge of future love—is being tied to the mast. So that when your spouse is going through difficult times of perhaps depression, sickness, problems with family, other extended family, whatever it is, problems at the church, you’re not going to be prone to leave. You’re going to be tied to the mast because of the vow you made.

That vow provides the long-term commitment that will sanctify you and sanctify your wife’s life. Apparently, statistics point out that if you take marriages that are unhappy, right, you tell people: are you happy or unhappy in your marriage? Two-thirds of those that say they’re unhappy in the present, if they stay married for 5 years, will be happy when they’re judged again. Two-thirds of all unhappily married people today—those that stay married in 5 years—two-thirds of those people will declare they’re happily married. You need to be tied to the mast. A pledge of future love ties you to the mast and keeps you and your family from shipwreck.

Now, it’s interesting, too, because in the illustration, of course, Ulysses has a crew. They stop up their ears. They put wax in their ears, and they stay on course. And so Ulysses isn’t alone, and neither are you in your marriage. You’re in the midst of a community, and we resist the temptations, right? We stay on course. And because the church as a whole stays on course, it helps us deliver men and women who are tempted to abandon their marriage covenants. Our job is to help them stay on course. Our job is to keep them tied to the mast as long as we can.

And so marriage is a pledge of future love. And it is a delightful one at that. The Song of Songs, we sing a song based on this, Chapter 8, says, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm. Love is strong as death. Jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly despised.”

A pledge of future love is involved in the very covenant of marriage itself. And because of that, that pledge keeps us tied to the mast. That pledge of future love is what we need to stay committed to those that God has called us to marry. So pledge of future love will bring long-term success to your marriages. Now there is an exception. Divorce is allowed in the scriptures. So when we say pledge of future love, it’s not really ultimately unconditional. I mean, we can talk about it that way and generally it is, but ultimately the scriptures are clear.

When Jesus is asked about divorce, he says your hearts can be so hardened. One spouse’s heart can be so hardened that they violate the marriage covenant in ways that are essentially irreparable. And for those cases, Jesus says divorce is allowed. In fact, God himself in the book of Jeremiah is said to have divorced his people. So, you know, divorce is something we want to resist at all measures. But on the other hand, I almost think that divorce is there because God desires these covenants of marriage and the fulfillment of them so much that if a person ultimately and definitively abandons that covenant relationship and commits a hardness of heart, a sort of set of actions—God says that is a betrayal of the marriage vows itself and a betrayal that breaks that covenant.

And so God says in those cases, divorce is okay. And in 1 Corinthians 7, cases of desertion—you know, the wife is not bound in those cases. She is free to remarry. Jeremiah 3:8 is where God says this. “She saw that for all the adulteries of the faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce.”

This is God. God sent her away with a decree of divorce. So if God does it, his imagebearer are also given permission to do it by Jesus and Paul and in the Old Testament as well. There is that exception to the kind of tied-to-the-mast-ness that we’re talking about here. So but essentially, this pledge of future love is at the heart of the marriage covenant and is an essential part of what God calls us to do in Christian marriage.

Now, this covenant relationship has both vertical and horizontal dimensions to it. The significance of this is pretty important. Pastor Wilson talked about this at our last marriage here at RCC. And you know, you might have—if you attend many marriages, you know, there are questions and vows. So the minister asks questions: “Colin, will you take this woman to be your wife?” And he says, yes. “And Sarah, will you take this man to be your husband?” And she says, yes. In longer form, but it’s a question. It’s not them pledging to each other. It’s them really pledging to the minister that they want to enter into this covenant.

The minister is a representative of God. And what they’re doing is they’re making a covenant with God to take this person as their spouse. They’re making a covenant with God of future love for that person, self-sacrificial love. And that’s the basis, then, that usually precedes—and it always precedes—the covenant vows they then make to each other. “I take you, Sarah.” “I take you, Colin.” They make vows to each other, but the basis for that vow—the base, the floor of that vow—is the vows and commitments they make to God first.

So it’s got a horizontal dimension, but it’s got a vertical dimension to it. And the significance of that is this. Well, there’s two things. One, non-Christian marriages don’t have the proper foundation. Keller says it’s like an A-frame, right? You see an A-frame. You’ve got the two parties. They meet at the top and they hold each other up. That’s what marriage is. But they’ve got to be on some kind of base, some kind of foundation. The foundation are those questions. This foundation is really the vows they make to God relative to each other that keeps the A-frame intact.

So if you enter into non-Christian marriage, you don’t have the proper base. The walls will collapse at some point in time, typically. But secondly, and this is most important for us: when you made those vows, you were making it the same, prior to that or in conjunction with that, you were making a vow to God to do that toward your spouse. And so to break the marriage covenant is to break, at the same time, a vow to God.

And so in Malachi 2, they’ve been faithless to the covenant with God. And one of the specifications is they’re faithless to their marriage covenants. They’re tied together. So the vertical and horizontal relationship is important to remind us that these—the marriage covenant is a covenant related to God as well. And violation of the marriage covenant is a violation of the essential covenant we’ve made with God.

Controlling the unpredictable. I think I’ll save most of this for next week. But if you would look at these points, here’s kind of the overview of the thing, right? The overview is: who are you? What are you prone to? The exigencies of the moment—are unpredictable events—are they the basis for what you end up doing? The promise of future love says that no matter what happens, right? No matter what comes, right? Whatever comes, I’m going to engage myself in this kind of ethical action toward you. I’m going to fulfill this covenant of love that the Bible says is marriage.

And as a result of that, you now are a person who has said, “I’m not prone to the circumstances we’re going to find ourselves in. This marriage is not going to be drifting about like a boat at sea. It’s going to be firmly anchored in this pledge of future love.”

And as a result of that, this pledge of future love produces a freedom to act in loving ways apart from the difficulties, the trials, the tribulations that you may find yourself in at a particular given moment in history. And when you promise something like that, you’re saying, “I’m not bound by the evolution of where I’m at. I’m not bound by all the specific things around me that push me this way and that. At I am making a covenant because I’m a mature Christian man or woman. I’m not going to be a child running after this and that thing. I’m not going to be tossed to and fro. I am committing. My identity is found in my commitments, in my promises, in my covenants. And that identity gives me a stability of a relationship in which I can carry out those covenants. I can carry out the covenant and its obligations in spite of all the exigencies of the moment.

Now covenant—marriage is a covenant. It gives us permanence. It gives us stability. It gives us a freedom of action apart from our environment in the marriage relationship, and because of that, it is maturity. Søren Kierkegaard talks about the aesthetic and the ethical. Now, the aesthetic is someone who—you know, the aesthete is into beauty, right? What’s interesting? What’s beautiful? I like that, and you run after that. And I like this, and it’s wonderful, and that’s great, and I run after that.

If that’s the kind of marriage you have, it’s not going to last because your husband or your wife won’t remain interesting. They won’t remain beautiful or handsome. They won’t remain in the marketing display they gave you during your courtship. They will change. And as a result, if your marriage is based upon aesthetics, well, it’s an immature marriage. That’s what children do. Children evaluate things for their sight, and they run off here, there, and everywhere because there are aesthetes.

But Kierkegaard says we have to become ethical beings who make choices. So we’re not moved about by the exigencies of what looks pleasing, interesting, and curious, and beautiful to us at the moment. Marriage is a covenant. Marriage is for mature men and women—men and women who no longer are driven about by every wind of what pleases the eye or the sight of our lives. People that are able and willing to covenant.

When people say, “Well, what’s in a piece of paper? I’m not ready to do that.” What they’re really saying is they’re not at a mature enough level in their relationship with you to make that permanent binding covenant that God says is the essence of marriage. Ultimately, the way Keller ends this chapter of his book is a section called “He Stayed,” and it’s talking about Jesus at the cross. He looks from the cross, and we’re despising him, ignoring him, rejecting him, abandoning him, and he doesn’t say, “Oh, okay. Well, to heck with them and get down from the cross.” Jesus stays on the cross, and he dies for those people that are doing that. And he dies, not, again, as we’ve said several times, not because they’re lovely, but because not because they’re lovable, but because he’s going to make them lovely. He’s going to produce that in them.

Jesus stayed on the cross. Couples who are bound to Jesus Christ and love him and love what he wants them to do, they stay in the marriage unless there’s, you know, divorciable action going on. They stay in that marriage the way Jesus stayed on the cross. They stay tied to the mast. And the end result of that, if both parties commit to do that, then both parties become increasingly lovable.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the wonderful gift that covenant marriage is. Bless us, Lord God, in our homes, in our families, in our marriages, that we would have this kind of commitment of future love to each other and fulfill it. Help us not to be faithless like those priests in Malachi 2, faithless ultimately to you, manifested by their faithlessness to their spouses.

Bless us, Lord God, with the commitment of our Lord Jesus Christ to sanctify each other in the context of Christian marriage, and to stay tied to the mast in love one for the other. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.