Dennis Tuuri

# Genesis 2:18-25 Marriage and Covenant, Law and Love, Part Two

Today’s sermon text is Genesis 2:18-25, and we’ll continue today what we began talking about last week—what Tim Keller in his book calls the essence of marriage, which is that it is a covenant. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Genesis 2:18-25: Well, a well-known text, but we’ll be looking at it in a little bit of detail this morning. Genesis 2, beginning at verse 18. Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and 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 hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this account of marriage and of the world, the world being united to you. Bless us now by your Holy Spirit. Bind us together with the knowledge of our Savior representing your character and purpose in our lives. Help us to understand the covenant a little bit better today, Lord God, that we might rejoice in it and be faithful to it. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

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From the beginning of the Bible to the end, one way to talk about the Bible is that it’s all about a boy meets girl, boy marries girl, through all the difficulties of life, they stay happily married forever. That’s kind of the story of the Bible. It’s all about marriage. It’s all about the relationship between a man and a woman. Now, there’s a bigger picture to all of that. We’re told by the Apostle Paul in the most comprehensive section on marriage in the New Testament, in Ephesians 5:22 and following.

Paul says that this description of the first marriage, this man leaving his household, leaving his father, and then seeking out a wife and uniting to her and becoming one with her—one flesh—Paul tells us that this is a mystery of great significance and importance. But he says the mystery is that God is speaking in the text before us, and then as Paul applies it in Ephesians 5 to Christ and the church.

So ultimately, marriage is a picture of something much greater than itself: Christ and his church, his bride, his body. So at the beginning of the Bible here in the opening chapters of Genesis, we see the first marriage, and at the end of the Bible, we see what it really is representative of, pointing toward. We see Jesus and his bride in the book of Revelation, and the bride by the end of that book has taken on the attributes of Jesus.

It begins in Revelation with a wonderful sevenfold picture of the attributes and beauty of Christ, and it concludes with this beautiful bride city—the church—and she now is bedecked, as it were, and is beautiful. So that’s the story of the Bible. If you want to know what Christianity is all about, what the Bible is all about, it’s all about that. It’s all about Jesus leaving his home, his Father, coming to earth to seek a bride, to obtain that bride in the church, and to perfect that bride and make her ready as an ascension offering to live in heavenly realities with him, both here on earth and then also in the hereafter.

You know, it’s interesting. We talk about headship, and today this text tells us a little more about headship and how we’re so reversed first in our thinking on these things. But it’s interesting that, and we’ll talk about this more in future weeks, in Ephesians 5, you have this headship mentioned and you have the wife being washed through the washing of the water by the word, right, as an image of Christ and his bride.

Well, the specific sacrifice that seems to be being talked about there, and there is sacrificial language involved, is the ascension offering. That’s the only one where the head actually of the animal is offered as well as the whole body. And the ascension offering is a picture of total consecration to Christ. But more than that, it’s a picture of the transformation of the worshipper, represented by the animal, and the smoke ascends to heaven and the citizenship of that person, the worshipper, is found in heaven now with a heavenly perspective, united to her bridegroom in heaven, as it were.

So that’s what the Bible is all about, and we’re doing this series on marriage. But what we’ve seen so far is that the power for marriage is the Holy Spirit. The context for the discussion of marriage in Ephesians 5 is a couple of chapters of great significance in terms of not grieving the Holy Spirit by not being in disunity against other members of the local church.

So the marriage is a subset of something far greater, and that is again this picture of Jesus and the church, and specifically that’s worked out in the context of local assemblies of believers. So we’ve seen the context for marriage and the power for marriage coming in the context of being good church people. The church is absolutely essential as a precondition for what Paul eventually gets to in terms of discussing marriage itself.

And last week, when we looked at probably the clearest text referring to marriage as a covenant in Malachi 2, we saw the same thing. We saw that while most people turn to that text to talk about marriage, the first sin of the priest that’s talked about is partiality and not acknowledging that we have one Father, one Lord. Disunity. So again, this is language that’s picked up in Ephesians.

So marriage is in the context of something far greater. So when we preach through marriage, we’re really preaching about the relationship of Jesus and his bride, the church. It’s about all of us, and the lessons of marriage can be very immediately applied in most cases to our relationship to the local church as well. In today’s text, again, we see sort of the expanded context for marriage. We see the first marriage, the first courtship, and you notice the Father brings the girl to the man.

This is the first marriage, but of course these are the mother and father of the race. This is Adam, the beginning of the race. And so we kind of have represented in it all of humanity. And more than that, we have, as I said earlier, the reference in Ephesians that what is ultimately being pictured here in these verses from Genesis 2 is the relationship of Christ and his bride, of God and his people, as we just read about from another prophetic book.

So that’s again the setting and context—that we have here is marriage in the context of something much bigger, much broader, that really involves all of humanity. So we’re going to continue today to talk about marriage as a covenant, and that is what Tim Keller refers to in his book as the essence of marriage.

So he moves from the power for marriage, which is the Holy Spirit, to the essence of marriage, which we’ll conclude today, which is that it’s a covenant. And then he moves to the meaning of marriage, or the mission rather, I’m sorry, the mission of marriage, which I’ve referred to on your outline as the purpose for marriage. And what we’re going to talk about next week, and we’ll talk about it for several weeks in terms of how it works out, is that marriage has as its purpose sanctification. Now, that’s not normally thought of as the purpose or mission of marriage, but I think Keller is right that it’s at least one of the most significant things that happens in a marriage.

And when we see that marriage is really this kind of illustrative example of Jesus and his bride, which Ephesians 5 says the whole point of that text is that Christ is sanctifying his bride, so sanctification of the marriage partners is the mission Tim Keller says of marriage, and we’ll get to that next week. But first we want to talk about this simple truth. I feel a little, you know, I was mentioning earlier to Agata, this is kind of like coals to Newcastle, right? I mean, hopefully here at Reformation Covenant Church we have an understanding of the significance of covenant, and I think in most of our families we recognize that marriage is a covenant. And yet I’m spending a couple of weeks talking about it. Why?

Well, a couple of reasons. One, our children don’t necessarily know this. And the more people that come into RCC without knowing the background of how we formed and why we chose that word “covenant,” it’s important to teach each succeeding generation that marriage is a covenant and that our relationship to God is also this covenant thing and what that means and the implications of it.

So that’s one reason. The other reason why is our culture is totally losing the meaning, and so the covenant is being washed out of virtually every institution, being replaced with relationships that are fleeting—that are only lasting as long as you know, good thoughts are happening, good times are happening. When hard times happen, people flake out of arrangements and agreements that they enter into.

So the topic is significant, and I want to look at it first of all here from this text. Now, the covenant is of course this huge overarching concept in the scriptures, and so it’s kind of hard for us to get a handle on it. It’s so comprehensive, and people have tried to look at it in different ways. One way that was significant with the people that influenced RCC in the early days was this five-part model.

Most covenants seem to follow this pattern, and the pattern begins with God’s transcendence. So God is the initiator of the covenant relationship. And in our text, what happens is God begins to speak in verse 18. He’s created man. He’s done the creation thing, and then the Lord God speaks, showing his transcendence. He’s the one that’s bringing the covenant to pass. He’ll bring it to pass because he’s the one speaking it.

Notice what he says. I emphasize this in my reading: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” Now, if you’re reading Genesis and you’re reading the creation account, and this is good, and this is good, and this is very good, and then we get to Genesis 2 here and we read that it’s not good—something God made was not good. So what does that mean? Was it bad? No, it wasn’t complete. It wasn’t complete.

So immaturity is what we have so far, and immaturity is to be moved on to. So God fixes this thing of not goodness. He’s going to make something happen. And he does it through transcendence, through his own sovereignty. And he sets up a task then for Adam to show him his own need. This is important to us because frequently we go about work in the world, and we don’t necessarily think in terms of what God is showing us. But this is what he does.

God gives Adam a task to name all the animals. God’s hierarchy, his relationship to Adam, is pictured in the hierarchy of Adam over the animals through naming them and exercising dominion, so to speak. So that hierarchy is the second part of this five-part model of one way to think of the covenant.

You know, God comes to a particular situation. This happens throughout the Bible. He sets up a relationship of hierarchy between himself and a person, and then in various cases, between that person and other persons, as he’ll do here with marriage. And so God does that. He begins the initiation of the covenant. He brings Adam to a recognition of his need, and then he puts Adam into deep sleep. This is death. Deep sleep is akin to death. It’s a way to demonstrate death. It’s like, you know, when they put you under for radical surgery on the operating table, they put you into this deep sleep. And so it is a representation and a symbolism of death.

When the world gets better, it gets better through death and resurrection. And of course, that’s what the creation days were all about, right? It goes dark, deep sleep, darkness happens, and then the world comes back the next day better. God does something new. In essence, God moves things along, usually involving death to the party. And so Adam goes into this deep sleep, and God takes a part of Adam out from him, closes up Adam, and then he forms the woman from this thing.

Now, it’s significant then that he actually brings the woman to the man. That’s what the text says in verse 22. So this idea that God is bringing the woman to the man again shows hierarchy. It shows the relationship of this headship over Adam, and God is bringing him his wife. It also, of course, is pictured in all kinds of weddings, thousands, millions of weddings, where the father of the girl brings the girl to the man. And we see this covenantal transfer of headship from the father to the husband in many weddings. This is how it works. The father, you know, and we’re prone to say the father and mother give his daughter away.

It used to be understood that the father represented the father and mother. They’re one person. But in any event, that’s what’s happening here, and that’s what happens in a marriage covenant. So the covenant is seen in terms of hierarchy. And then this hierarchy is demonstrated as well because Adam then starts to sing—the first words of man. And in the Hebrew, this is rhythmic and poetic. This is a song. It’s a love song.

The Bible is one long love song, and this love song goes: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.” So Adam sings, and again we have here in Adam’s response to God the idea of hierarchy of relationship. You know, the woman is taken from man, and Adam names the woman. He doesn’t just name the woman; he also names himself differently.

So God gives Adam a new name as a result of this covenant. Adam was “Adamah,” ground, before, and he’ll keep that name. But here for the first time, he’s referred to as “Ish,” and woman is “Isha.” And so woman and man have this kind of common name. And of course, that’s represented in marriages as well. The woman takes on the man’s name. “Ish” is the name of the man, and “Isha” is the name of the woman.

And so we have this idea of hierarchy. We’ll talk about this more in future sermons. But we have an odd view of headship. You know, what headship is about is pictured for us here. It’s in dying for somebody. It’s not in ruling over someone. I mean, there are relationships and there is submission involved, which we’ll talk about. But what does it tell us here? It tells us that the covenant head of the woman died for her.

He went into deep sleep. And what does it tell us in Ephesians 5 about headship? Jesus’s headship is demonstrated in him dying for the girl, for the bride, right? So we have a weird view about headship, and it sets up all kinds of emotional connotations that are really quite unfortunate. They’re quite mistaken. So in any event, here in this covenant, hierarchy is in place both between God and Adam, but also between Adam and his wife. He’s the head. He dies for her, and he names her, and he also is renamed.

Then we see “Therefore”—and now God is speaking. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” The third part of this five-part covenant model. So we’ve got transcendence—God initiates it. Hierarchy—there’s a relationship given, which usually involves naming. You know, we’re Christians, right? When the new covenant happens, we’re no longer Jews. And before they were Jews, they were Israelites. And before they were Israelites, they were Hebrews, right? The Hebrews—Abraham came from the Hebrews. Jacob was Israel. Israelites. Jacob’s son from which the kingly line would come was Judah. Judahites, shortened to Jews. And when Messiah comes, he’s the Christ, and we’re Christians.

This idea that when these things are transformed and renewed, new names describe the new situation, runs right through the Bible, and it ends up with us being called Christians. And so this naming thing is kind of a big deal. And what essentially is happening is there’s really a death and resurrection—like the seven days of creation, where the world goes dark and it comes back better. And the covenant is essentially a new creation every time. What we refer to as the new covenant is the newest covenant. There was an old covenant, and then there was a new covenant with Abraham, right? And there was a new covenant with Moses, and there was a new covenant with David.

So these are newness, they’re recreations of the world, and they’re pictured by this change of name that moves us along in history. That happens here. But with the covenant, with that renewal through transcendence and hierarchy, the law is stated—a law governing this thing. There’s a structure to the covenant, and a law is stated. God immediately states this covenant law here: “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother, hold fast to his wife.”

Now, why is it a man leaving father and mother and holding fast to his wife? Because again, marriage is a picture, an image, of something far greater: that Jesus the Son would leave his Father, right, and he would come and obtain a wife. So it’s a law. There’s ethics. The third part of this five-part covenant model is a law, and that law is stated here. This is what’s supposed to happen from now on, and it happens to this day.

Covenants have a sign or a seal as well attached to them—something that pictures, and not just pictures, but that really makes the covenant happen. We could say it kind of puts it in force. We are sitting here before the sign and seal of the new covenant, one of the two of them—baptism and communion. And in this one, “the two shall become one flesh.” They’ll cleave together. They’ll be bonded together, glued together, the text says, and they’ll become one flesh.

And so marriage and its physical consummation is the sign and seal of the covenant unity that God has brought them to. We’re one with Jesus through participation in this. And we’ll talk about this, you know, in later weeks. But when couples engage in physical intimacy within marriage, that’s what they’re doing. It’s a reassertion. It’s a revivifying. It’s renewing. Not in the sense of “we have a covenant renewal” in the sense that the covenant was broken, but in the sense that the covenant can kind of wear out over time if you don’t renew it.

It refreshes, it restores, it makes it better, and it grows into the future. And one of the significant ways that happens is through the sign and seal of that covenant, which is physical intimacy in the context of marriage. And so that builds the marriage bond, okay? It builds the marriage bond. It’s a reminder. It’s a memorial. We can say, you know, to the husband and to the wife, “This is the one.” And they’re saying it to each other, “I will be faithful to you.” That’s what that action is all about.

So there’s this seal, an oath—an oath that this oneness will happen. And this oath is a death pledge, as one author put it. We are going to enter into marriage for life, until we die. We’re in this covenant. Or until one of us so rips apart the unity of the marriage that they essentially have killed it. If they enter into death and destroy the covenant, that is what happens when divorce occurs. Legitimate biblical divorce is because one party has killed the relationship, and in doing that, they’ve killed themselves, right? Because it’s not good for man to be alone. That’s death in the Bible. Death in the Bible is isolation.

So in any event, there’s this oath, this sign or seal of the covenant. And then there’s succession into the future. And in verse 25, “the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” So what’s going to happen here, of course, is they’re going to have kids, and there’s going to be succession into the future with children. But more than that, we’re going to see here in the next few verses that they lose that sense of unashamedness. They lose it through sin. They’re going to lose the life that they have together. They’ll enter into death, being ripped apart through their sin.

And so the final element of the covenant is the idea of succession into the future. There are statements about what happens in the future. And if you’re faithful to the covenant, then things will go well for you. And if you’re unfaithful to the covenant, things will go badly, and death will find you. And as we said last week, remember, it’s not as if you’re earning the blessings. You have the blessings sovereignly by God’s initiation of the covenant relationship. But you stand ready to destroy those blessings and to ruin them, for God to turn his blessings into curse—in the words of Malachi 2—through disobedience, radical disobedience to the law of the particular covenant.

So that’s kind of one way of thinking about a covenant in the Bible. Another way, more simply, is that it’s a personal structural bond. And you’ll see that in the middle of this five-part thing. There are persons involved, right? A covenant is between persons—God and man, man and woman. They make a covenant. It’s personal. There’s a structure to it. There’s a law governing it. In other words, there’s a way you’re supposed to act.

And Ephesians 5 helps give us a little bit of the structure, the laws that govern that personal relationship. A covenant—it’s not just law, but it’s certainly not just relationship. It’s relationship with a structure. And then finally, it’s a bond, right? There’s a bondedness in a covenant where the two parties in marriage are made into one.

A personal structural bond. And that’s what goes on here. Adam and Eve have a personal relationship. There’s a structure and ethic. God speaks law into that relationship, and they’re bonded together. That’s what happens every Lord’s day. We come here and confess our sins, right? And God assures us of our forgiveness, and he makes us persons again. He restores us to true personhood, glory. God gives us his character by forgiving us our sins, renewing us in our persons.

And then we have this word spoken. The structure of God’s relationship to us is explained in some detail from his Bible. So there’s a personal relationship. He forgives us our sins. He’s in relationship with us. There is a structure to that relationship, a law. And then finally, there’s a bond that happens as we get past into the last part of the service. We take the Lord’s Supper, and we’re one with him, and we’re one with the body of Christ. And that bond is refreshed. It’s renewed, so to speak. Not in the sense of “it was gone away and we need to bring it back,” but in the sense that “we’re better. We’re better. We get stronger in that relationship.”

So, a covenant, simply put, is a personal structural bond. And when we put it that way, it reminds us of a great truth: the great truth is that the covenant that we have in marriage or the covenant we have with God is a reflection of the relationship that is structured and bonded amongst the triune God himself. The fact of the Trinity, the fact that God is three in one, is significant. It is why these covenants look this way, because covenants reflect the character of God who makes them.

And within the Trinity, there is a personal structural bond. The three members of the Trinity are related to each other personally. There’s a structure to it. There’s a Father and a Son and a Holy Spirit, and they’re bonded together. And we could even say that, to a certain extent, while all members of the Trinity are equally God, the three are three distinct persons. And the personal aspect mostly is seen in a reflection of the person of God the Father. Yeah, we can think of Jesus as the person, but what did Jesus say? “If you see me, you see the Father.” Jesus came to reflect the character and personhood of the Father. So when we have a personal aspect to our covenant, it reflects the Father.

Jesus is the Word. He’s the one in whom all things are held together, right? In his law. Jesus is the Word, the law. “Obey my commandments.” He’s the structure to the whole thing. And the Holy Spirit is the person that is primarily responsible, as God’s matchmaker, to bring Christ and his bride together and then to mature us so that we don’t grieve the Holy Spirit through disunity, that we don’t sin against the Holy Spirit through being unfaithful to our wives.

That’s the two things that happen, right, in Genesis. Later on, they will resist the Holy Spirit, and they’ll marry pagan women. Because the Holy Spirit is striving to bring godly marriages to pass, to bring them to be. And the Sethites will marry godless women. And it says specifically that they’re resisting the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit bonds together a husband and wife. The Spirit bonds together Jesus and his bride. And the bride becomes part, then, of this covenant relationship, this personal structural bond of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in heaven. And when we come to worship, we meet with God. And when we meet with God, he gives us his gifts. He gives us his personhood, his character. He gives us his perspective, his law, his structure as to how we’re supposed to live our lives.

And he gives us a relationship that’s bonded tightly with him. In this structure, he gives us rejoicing, life together at the communion table. He gives us forgiveness at the beginning, the sermon, the structure in the middle, rejoicing, life together, bondedness at the end. This is covenant restoration, renewal, refreshing—what we do on every Lord’s day. It reflects the presence of the triune God with us, or rather, our presence with him.

You know, when I walk up this aisle here, I don’t know what you think, but what you should be thinking is, “Here we go. We’re going to heaven.” That’s the idea. In worship, we’re in the Spirit. We’re in the heavenlies where our citizenship truly is. We go to God’s throne room. And he ministers these gifts of glory, knowledge, and life. Personhood, a structure—knowledge, what we’re supposed to do—and life, rejoicing life together, bonded in our relationship with one another and with Jesus.

So really, this threefold aspect of the covenant is what we’re all about. Now, in our worship services, you’ll see that we use five C’s to reflect this. Well, that’s just because we’re called, and then we’re commissioned. The middle three C’s are what we just talked about—and they relate to this personal structural bond. In order for that to happen, God calls us here. And then it’s over, we’re commissioned to go out—succession into the future, transcendence. He calls us here. You see, it all works together.

So that’s what we’re doing here today—refreshing the covenant. And what God is doing with us is ministering these gifts. These—the covenant as seen in the very first human covenant between two people—reflects these truths that the covenant can be seen as a fivefold thing, but it can also be seen simply as a personal structural bond that God brings us into the context of.

Now, so what we’re saying this for is the reason why it’s significant that we have pieces of paper in marriage, that we have a covenant, a commitment, an obligation, is part of the structure of marriage without which you don’t have covenant and you don’t have a marriage. And now this seems counterintuitive to us—that promising is a significant deal, rather than the relationship, right? I mean, it seems a little counterintuitive.

People say all the time, “Why do I need the piece of paper? Why do I have to pledge my love to you when you know how deeply in love I am with you?” Right? And it almost seems like they’re saying, “Well, if you bring law into it, if you bring a covenant, a signed piece of paper, that’s going to destroy true love, which has nothing to do with law.” But if you understand that true love is reflected in the person of God, then we just talked about covenant relationships within the Trinity.

That’s true love. And true love then in human covenants reflecting that has to have this structure to it in order for true love really to flourish and be there. And so there’s a blessing of entering into promises and specifically the lifelong promise that covenant in marriage is. The power of promising.

C.S. Lewis said this. He said, “Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion, but the creation of time and will: Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.” Did you get that? I’ll read it again. “Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion, but the creation of time and will: Any marriage—happy or unhappy—is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”

I think that’s true. We’re people that are made in the image of God. We’re made to make promises and, through over the period of time, to exercise our will to keep those promises, rather than just bouncing off the walls depending on which way the wind blows. And that’s what creates interesting lives, interesting characters—is keeping obligations. I’d say the same thing about church membership. Frankly, I’ve been here thirty years. Some of you have been here thirty years, too. That is a far more interesting story to look at and tell than people that just kind of float in and float out of churches—the way that people float in and float out of marriages these days.

Now, I’m not saying there’s a one-to-one connection. Of course, you can go to a church for the well-being of your spiritual maturity. But I’m saying that, you know, when you have this covenant that we have at our church, to be part of the membership of a body and commit yourself long-term to that until you leave here, that commitment, that time that happens with your will exerted, makes it a very interesting relationship.

There was a man named Lewis Smedes, and he wrote an article. Smedes—this part of his article is called “Controlling the Unpredictable: The Power of Promising.” That’s the name of his article, and Keller talks about this article in his book. And I want to quote from Smedes. And Smedes is talking now about who we are, our very identity as people. He says:

“Some people ask who they are and expect their feelings to tell them, but feelings are flickering flames that fade after every fitful stimulus. Some people ask who they are and expect their achievements to tell them. But the things we accomplish always have a core of character unrevealed, or rather leave a core of character unrevealed. Some people ask who they are and expect visions of their ideal self to tell them. But our visions can only tell us what we want to be, not who we actually are. Who are we?”

And Smedes’s point is who we are is most significantly the promises we make and our fulfillment of those promises, because those are the things we’ve committed and pledged ourselves to, and they’re at the core of our identity.

To illustrate this, Smedes quotes from “A Man for All Seasons,” a movie which probably a lot of you have seen. It was written originally as a play by Robert Bolt. And there’s this, you know, Sir Thomas More is being asked to give unconditional submission to the king. And anyway, so he’s going to get persecuted, eventually killed, for his opposition to this. And he’s talking to his daughter Margaret. And so we have this dialogue between More and Margaret about the act of succession.

More says, “You want me to swear to the act of succession?” Margaret says, “God regards the thoughts of the heart than the words of the mouth. Or so you’ve always told me.” So he’s saying, “You want me to sign this act even though I don’t believe it?” She says, “Well, the most important thing is what you think in your heart, not what you actually do. You’ve told me this. That’s more important.”

More says, “Yes.” Then Margaret says, “Then say the words of the oath and in your heart think otherwise.”

More says, “What is an oath then but words we say to God?”

So Smedes says, “An oath, a promise—are words we say to God.” And Margaret says, “That’s very neat.”

More says, “Do you mean it isn’t true?”

“No,” Margaret says, “It is true.”

So then More says this: “Then it’s a poor argument to call it neat, Meg. When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his very hands like water. And if he opens his fingers then he needn’t hope to find himself again.”

So what Moore is saying, and what Smedes is saying in this article, is the oaths we make binding ourselves in the name of God—for instance, in marriage—is part of our very identity. We’re holding ourself like this. And if we let go of that promise and let it fall to the ground, then we really will have trouble finding ourselves at all anymore.

And so the power of promising is that it gives us our identity.

Another writer named Hannah Arendt wrote this: “Without being bound to the fulfillment of our promises, we would never be able to keep our identities. We would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each person’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocations.”

Smedes himself, as a case rather of study, says: “When I married my wife, I had hardly a smidgen of sense for what I was getting into with her.” That’s true of most people getting married, of course. “How could I know how much she would change over twenty-five years? How could I know how much I would change? My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were married, and each of them has been me. The connecting link with my old self has always been the memory of the name I took on back then. I am he who will be there with you.”

When we sough off that name, rather when we lose that identity, we can hardly find ourselves again. So when we change through life, what keeps us in a sense of who we are? These promises we make. And those promises are also the basis for true freedom. Promise says, “No matter what comes.” What’s how does the line go in “Moulin Rouge”? I don’t remember now. But what?

“Come what may.” Thank you very much. “Come what may,” right? Love makes a commitment that come what may, we’ll stay in fidelity to the promises we make, to the covenants that we pledge one to the other in the context of marriage.

Smedes says this about promising and its relationship to freedom. “When I make a promise, I bear witness that my future with you is not locked into a bionic beam by which I was stuck with the fateful combinations of X’s and Y’s in the hand I was dealt out of my parents’ genetic deck.

“When I make a promise, I testify that it was not routed, that I was not routed along some unalterable itinerary by the psychic conditioning visited on me by my slightly wacky parents.

“When I make a promise, I declare that my future with people who depend on me is not predetermined by the mixed-up culture of my tender years.

“I am not fated. I am not determined. I am not a lump of human dough whipped into shape by the contingent reinforcement and aversive conditioning of my past. I know as well as the next person that I cannot create my life de novo. I am well aware that much of what I am and what I do is a gift or a curse from my past. But when I make a promise to anyone, I rise above all the conditioning that limits me.

“No German shepherd ever promised to be there with me. No home computer ever promised to be a loyal helper. Only a person can make a promise. And when he does, he is most free. He’s most delivered from contingent conditions.”

Now, this promising is also what our society is based upon. If you think about it just a little bit, obligations, covenants, the oaths that we enter into are the essence of binding a culture together. T. Robert Ingram has a quote on the relationship between promisemaking, covenantkeeping, essentially, and culture. Ingram says this:

“Public witness to mutual consent and pledges of truth. These are the things that make a marriage. The integrity of the whole moral argument of the Ten Commandments begins to stand out even more clearly in this. The mystery of making and keeping a pledge of loyalty, a promise to God, to a spouse, the taking of the name of God in a solemn oath. These are the things upon which the moral law is built. These are the foundations of society. These are the things that are kept alive and in force by the inflicting of penalties for breaking them.

“Promises, vows, pledges, loyalties all vanish if they are broken with impunity. Society turns on keeping pledges and punishing violations. Credit is an extension of the principle into the business world. The contract is established by a spoken word and is no better than that word. The bond of loyalty, or the effect of a pledge, lies in what we might call the spirit world. It has no shape or weight or size. It cannot be touched, seen, or heard. But it controls human life.

“What an adulterer really does is to break a particular solemn vow. And by his act, he tramples upon marriage itself, mocks God and society, and figuratively tosses that particular promise into the trash can, making it of no value.”

That’s T. Robert Ingram on adultery. But what he said is relevant to the relationship between promising and covenant.

R.J. Rushdoony, commenting on this, says this: “God makes certain promises and threats to man and society conditional upon the fulfillment or violation of his law word. Man’s studied disregard of that law word is an implicit or explicit declaration that man replaces God’s authority with his own. That moral submission is denied in favor of autonomy.”

So promising has a tremendous significance to it. It determines who we are—our promising and fulfillment of it. It makes for stability. It makes us free to be committed in the context of marriage, specifically, apart from the contingencies of the world around us that may change or the change in the people involved. And finally, promising is really what society is built upon—men giving and keeping their word. And without that, everything is up for grabs.

As I mentioned last week, Søren Kierkegaard talks about the relationship of promising, then, to moving from childhood to maturity. The aesthetic—whether it’s, you know, talking now about adults—but people that are prone to things, not because of this or that, but because they’re interesting to the child or interesting to the person. The aesthetic. But the adult, the mature person, is the ethical religious person. He’s learned to move away from the stimulations of the moment into pledging and obligations and long-term commitments.

And in doing that, he finds much deeper fulfillment. He leads a much more interesting life than the aesthete who bounces here and there in immaturity. We’re not to be children in that sense of the term. We’re to be grown up into the image of God, who pledges and keeps covenants and is the very essence of covenantkeeping in the context of the Trinity.

Now, the implication of this is that law is not in opposition to love, and in fact that law undergirds love in the sense of love being a verb. If we read about love in 1 Corinthians 13, it’s a verb. Sometimes love is a noun, but very frequently in the scriptures, to love someone means to be acting toward them in a particular way. And so actions have a priority over feelings.

Husbands are not told to feel like loving their wives. Husbands are told in Ephesians 5 that they ought to love their wives. And the word “ought” there in the Greek is a strong, powerful word of obligation. Husbands are obligated. They have a duty. Some of you were there at family camp years ago, and Richard Meyer and Jamie Souls and some others sang a song about our wives, and the idea was we don’t love them because we want to, we love them because we have to. Do you remember this controversy? Anybody? Some of you do. The wives were not happy.

I’m going to try to redeem the song here. The idea is that covenants are pledges of obligation to love people. When we get married, you don’t say, “I love you right now deeply. I will love you in the future.” The love in the future, yes, it has this personal aspect to it, but it’s a covenant of love that has a structure to it. And if we wait for the feelings before we love one another, we’re not going to have as much love as if we just act in love toward one another. And as a result of that acting, the feelings come.

The feelings come. Action first. Why does God command husbands to love their wives? That they ought to do it. Because that’s the way we work. We have these ethical obligations, and our hearts, our emotions, follow our ethical actions. Okay? So when we love people by acting in terms of that love, when we love them by being kind and patient and sympathetic, even though we may not feel like it inside, what we find is that we indeed become more feeling, or having a feeling of like, toward that person.

And so love is action, but it produces the kind of love that is emotional as well. C.S. Lewis talked about this. This is a quote from C.S. Lewis:

“Though natural liking should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture attendant feelings. The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor. Act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you’re behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love them. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. And if you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

“Whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self made like us by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it—at a little love it a little more, at least to dislike it less.

“The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he likes them. The Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even imagine himself liking at the beginning.”

Isn’t that the way it is in church? You know, as a minister of thirty years I have to love people that I don’t like. I get strange people. We all get strange people in churches. People that are coming from varied backgrounds, some of them quite difficult. And I may not like the people I’m ministering to. But if I love them, if I try to help them, and if I visit them and pray with them and, you know, marry them and baptize their kids and all that stuff, what I find is I end up liking every one of them. That’s the way it is.

And you’re in a church body here. You know, there are people here that you would never choose for a friend outside of the four walls of the church. And you may not even like those people. But if you obey God’s commandment to love one another, to be patient, not to think you’re patient, to be kind, not to think, you know, about how much you like the other person, but to actually engage in kind acts, useful acts, toward them, right? If you engage in those actions toward other people here at RCC, you’re going to find yourself liking them.

And conversely, if you don’t engage in those actions, you’re going to find yourself disliking them. And if you start doing bad things to other people, you’re going to dislike them more and more. And Lewis said, “This is the key to Nazism. This is how they did what they did.” At first, they didn’t hate the Jews. They just did things to them. “You got to live here and not here. You got to put a sign on yourself.” They did hateful things, unloving things, to the Jews and to other groups as well. And the end result was the more acts of dislike they did to someone—to the Jews particularly—the more they ended up hating them, until finally they could do the horrors that we all know that happened.

It’s an example of covenant at work. Covenant is a personal structural bond. And when we engage in actions or structures of unloving hatred toward people, we find ourselves emotionally hating them more. The more we do bad things to do them. And conversely, God says that within marriage, we’re to love one another. We’re to engage in actions of love, even if we’re not liking each other at the time. God doesn’t command your emotions.

What he commands are your actions. How could he command your emotions? Do you have control of your emotions? Typically not. Your emotions follow. So God, knowing who we are, creating us that way, commands us to particular actions. This relationship is seen in Leviticus 19. I know we’ve talked about this text before, but one last go at it. This is the center of God’s summary of the law, the commandments in Leviticus 19, the very heart of Leviticus, the very heart of the law section, chapter 19, which is kind of a set of instructions based on the Ten Commandments.

The very heart of it is this:

“You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor. I am the Lord. You shall not hate your brother in your heart. So, do you see what he’s doing? He’s saying act this way. Don’t act this way. Don’t do unkind things to your neighbor in court or in personal life. And he says, by implication, but he says that, and then the next thing he says is don’t hate your neighbor. How can you not hate your neighbor if you do actions of unkindness to them? Hatred will happen. So when we’re commanded not to hate our neighbor, God precedes it with actions that we’re supposed to do of love to our neighbor.

And he goes on to say the same thing right here: “You shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.” If you don’t do the action speaking love in truth to your neighbor, reason frankly with him about the things you think he’s doing wrong, if you don’t do that, and instead you slander your neighbor, you’re going to hate him in your heart. You’re going to end up with bad feelings toward your neighbor.

If you talk about your wife or your husband behind their back, you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to love them less. You’re going to love them less. You’re going to start to hate them in your heart. In fact, it’s almost inevitable, because God wants you to get so isolated as a result of your sin that you repent of that sin.

So Leviticus 19 is a reminder to us: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. How do you love neighbor as yourself? You don’t slander him. You don’t show partiality in court. And you do speak the truth and love to your neighbor. And the end result of that is that you won’t hate your neighbor emotionally, but you’ll love them—not just in your actions, but you’ll love them in your heart as well.

The Lord Jesus Christ came to seek a bride. And he seeks that bride through dying for us on the cross. I’m going to close with this quote from Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand’s kind of in the news these days because Paul Ryan at one time was kind of an Ayn Rand follower, but then he, I don’t know if he converted or he got serious about his faith. And he’ll tell you now that he is much more a follower of Aquinas than he is Rand. But Rand’s in the news, and she can look kind of good, you know, radical individualism and all that stuff.

She hated the cross. Here’s what she said. I think I’m not sure. This might have been a Playboy interview, which is another interesting thing, but anyway, she says this about Jesus Christ:

“Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the non-ideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than the notion of sacrificing the ideal for the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol—the cross—that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbol is used. That is torture.”

To Ayn Rand, this symbol is a symbol of torture. She hates it. Well, I don’t know. Hopefully, she converted before she died. She’s dead now. But she hated this cross because it was a representation of the sort of self-sacrificial love that absolutely permeates every covenant, because every covenant is a reflection of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. Every headship is the calling for that head to die for the other party. And in these mutual covenants, to die for one another—self-sacrificially.

You know, Rand couldn’t stand the fact that Jesus, the ideal, died for the non-ideal, because she didn’t go on to the result of that. The result of that is to take men’s sin and do something about it, to change it, so that he has the power of the Holy Spirit through the forgiveness of sins effected by our Savior on that—what she would call—symbol of torture, horrible thing. But that lovely sign to us that Jesus Christ, what’s the great demonstration of love, is that Jesus Christ, while we were his enemies, died for us.

He acted lovingly toward us so that we could be freed from our sins and our self-centeredness to love one another in Christian community and to love each other in Christian marriage. That’s what Christ accomplished. May the Lord God grant us covenant faithfulness to the arrangements that he has brought us into in our families, in our marriages, specifically, and within the body of Christ, so that we can show that kind of redeeming love to the world.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for Jesus Christ. We thank you for the covenant. We thank you for our participation in that great personal structured bond that exists in eternity in you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Bless us in our marriages. Help us not to wait for feelings, but help us to act so that feelings will come. Help us to be faithful to the structure, the covenant, the legal arrangement, the piece of paper, so that we indeed can have a personal relationship with each other that is bonded tightness together.

Bless us, Lord God, in our homes and families and in this church. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.