Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: “Embracing the Other”

Genesis 2:18-25 | November 11, 2012 | Pastor Dennis R. Tuuri
Marriage, Part Ten

So to speak of vanity and rulers in the gate seems somehow strangely appropriate. Today’s sermon, really while not a political sermon, gets right to the heart, I think actually, of what’s happening in our country with the division. Today we’ll be talking about the effects of the atonement on the relationship between the sexes. This is our tenth in a series of sermons on marriage, and we’ve been tiptoeing around the elephant in the room—roles within marriage—but we go right at it today.

So today’s sermon text is found in Genesis 2:18-25. Most of the New Testament texts that talk about roles in the context of marriage go back to the creation account. So let’s do that ourselves. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Genesis 2:18-25:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that 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 was asleep, he 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. And 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 your scriptures. We thank you that you brought us here today to give us the great gifts of glory, knowledge, and life. We thank you for restoring us to glory through the forgiveness of our sins. And we thank you now for the gift of knowledge that you impart to us through the preaching of your word and our prayers and offerings in response to that word. Prepare us for this table by giving us knowledge that might bring us to rejoicing in life together as a community united around the truth of your word and the truth of the revelation of the very person of God through our Savior Jesus. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. Now, the first thing I want you to do—maybe you don’t have to do it, but do it in your mind at least—the front of your order of worship says “Embracing Each Other.” And actually, what I’d like you to do is change the word “each” to “the”: “Embracing the Other.” That’s really what the sermon will be about. And what I want to do is set marriage roles in the context of male-female roles, which is in the context of the greater idea of the other and embracing the other in our relationship to the other.

So what do I mean by that? Well, this has become a sociological topic of quite a bit of discussion in the last decade or two—this discussion of the other. And the idea is that fallen man frequently will seek his identity by differentiating himself from the other. So he sees somebody that’s different from him. He doesn’t like somebody that’s different, and he self-justifies himself by putting down the other.

Okay. So fallen man is inevitably racist, for instance. You know, he likes his skin color. He self-justifies himself. That’s what fallen man wants to do. He wants to be right somehow, but he doesn’t want it through Jesus. He wants to do it through his own method of salvation and justification. And he justifies himself by looking down on people that are other from him. And so races do that. Different vocations do it. There’s all kinds of ways this is reflected. And all you got to do, again—you know, everything we needed to know we learned in kindergarten. Well, plus Genesis. Genesis plus kindergarten gives us the major themes of life. And if you watch small children play, this is what they do. If you bring in a child that’s different, they don’t like that person and they begin to express that dislike of the difference.

The height of sinful man in the scriptures, I think, can be seen in the crucifixion of our Savior at the hands of the Jews. And the Jews, of course, were God’s chosen people. They were to be the head, as it were, to serve the world, right? To serve the Gentiles and to bring everyone to the knowledge of God. But what they did instead was they differentiated themselves. They self-justified by saying, “We don’t like the Gentiles. We’re pure. We can’t even eat with them,” when the scriptures didn’t prohibit that, etc. And so this was a kind of extreme example of disregard, dislike for the other that happened and actually ends up in crucifying the one who wanted to bring and who did bring both sides together.

So the rejection of the other is a very important, strong sinful tendency that all men and women have. And so when we get around to talking about men and women, we are talking about the other, right? We are talking about people that, at times, if we admit it to ourselves, are incomprehensible. Women are incomprehensible at one level to men and men are incomprehensible to women. And that’s because we’re different, as we’ll talk about today. And so I think that before we can talk about roles in marriage, we really have to talk about this idea of sexuality as the scriptures define it, and then see that in the context of embracing the other via difference, rather than hatred or disregard for the other.

So I hope that makes sense to you. I think it’s quite important, and really, in one way, it can be said that this is the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. When we come to this table, we come to the table of the one who came, became incarnate, and died for the other. He was different. He’s differentiated from us in many ways, but one way is that humanity had fallen and was sinful, and we were the ultimate other. We’re the ultimate unlovable ones. And Jesus Christ, rather than disdaining the other because he wasn’t sinful—no sin was in him—embraced us, embraced the other through his death on the cross.

There was a theologian named Moltmann who said this: “On the cross of Christ, the love of God is there for the others, for sinners, the recalcitrant enemies. The reciprocal self-surrender to one another within the Trinity is manifested in Christ’s self-surrender in a world which is in contradiction to God, and this self-giving draws all those who believe in him into the eternal life of divine love.”

Christ embraced the ultimate other—fallen humanity. And he does this because it is the nature of God to love the other. Within the Trinity, we have, you know, an equality, but we have a diversity of persons. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are other to each other, right? They’re different. They’re eternally different. And rather than rejection, what we see in the Trinity and the divine dance of the triune God is this embracing the other and placing others before ourselves. And so we see that in the very nature and person of God. He’s not ultimately selfish. He’s self-giving. And when Jesus comes to the world, he reflects not just who he is, but the eternal person and character of God in all three persons. And that is the self-giving, sacrificial embracing of the other.

So hopefully that makes some sense to you and will begin to make more sense as we go through today’s sermon.

So first of all, I want to talk about sexuality and otherness. And so we need to look at the very first statement in scripture about different sexes. And that’s found in Genesis 1. God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heaven and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them.”

All right. So what we have here at the very beginning of a discussion of sexuality—two different sexual roles, men and women—is we have the absolute equality of them, of course, because they both reflect the total image of God. We have the necessity of embracing the other in this text as well, because what he says is man is created to exist in the context of community. Remember that in the creation account everything’s good. He makes man alone—not good. So the first thing that is immature or not good is the aloneness of man without his complement, woman.

And this is talking about the creation of the whole human race. So the human race has two others to it: male and female. Those others are equally image-bearers of God. These others—it’s when we come together embracing the other in terms of male-female distinctions—that community is found, and that community is given immediately in the context of the creation of someone who will begin to exercise dominion over the world.

So God’s ruler in the world is not man. It’s man and woman representing all of man and humanity. And so man can’t really do his job successfully without this complementary human being that is woman to his maleness. Now in our text that we read, we have more information given to us. So on the basis of this first statement of equality and the necessity of community to the end of achieving man’s purpose in the world—which is not just to hang out, but to make the world more beautiful and mature—it’s necessary. And necessary for that is community. And necessary for true community is embracing the other.

So man is reflecting the very dance of the Trinity, so to speak, the life of the Trinity in his community here on earth. And that’s required. And then we have the text from that we read at the beginning. And we’re told two things about the nature of woman. And woman is first of all designated as a helper. “I will make him a helper.” Okay? And so we have this word “helpmate,” a helper suitable for him. Okay? And those are two different Hebrew terms. The first term is *ezer*. And you know, Eleazar or Eliezer. Eliezer was one of the two sons of Moses and Zipporah. And the name means Eli—shortened form of Elohim, God—*ezer*, helper. So this word *helper* is found in the very name of Eli-*ezer*. And it says in the text in Exodus that Moses named him Eleazar, Moses and Zipporah did, meaning “God is my helper.”

So what does that tell us? You know, that’s one of the first occurrences, I think it is the first occurrence apart from this verse. And what it tells us then is *helper* doesn’t mean some minor assistant that we need to help get things done. *Helper* is most of the time—I think it’s used twenty-five times, the *ezer* word—and most of those occurrences it’s talking about God, right? God is my helper. So this is not some kind of weak, quasi-necessary assistant sort of person. This is a helper without which the task of dominion is impossible. Okay. So really we don’t get the sense of weakness if we understand this Hebrew term. We get the sense of strength.

So what it tells us is that femininity is not weakness. Femininity is strength to accomplish the task. The other place this word is used is when reinforcements come, and without the reinforcements the battle will be lost. So it has this idea of strength. God is our helper. Women are our helper. They have that kind of status in terms of who they are.

And so it’s easy to kind of misread this based upon the translation “helper,” which sounds just like somebody that’s going to help out with the small things. But in actuality, this Hebrew phrase is quite important. You know, it’s interesting because in Proverbs 31, when it describes, you know, this woman—the completion of the Book of Proverbs—the summation, of course, is that description of the Proverbs 31 woman. And it says, “A good wife, who can find her?” right? But actually, that word there is the same word for “mighty warriors” but applied now to a woman. So a strong wife, a dominion wife, you know, a powerful person is the kind of wife that complements and allows mankind, together in community, to carry out the task of dominion.

So this isn’t some kind of incidental to humanity. This is absolutely of the essence of humanity, and it is of the essence of completing the task of dominion that men and women are given the call to do in our creation. Now the other thing that’s important here to note—and it’s an obvious thing—is that gender and sexuality is at the heart. It’s not some sort of incidental developed thing, culturally developed, or whatever. It lies at the very beginning of humanity. We have this gender or sexual distinction. It lies at the very heart of human nature. Okay? And women are equally blessed. They have equal relationship to men as we’ve said, and they have a strength to them that identifies them as helper.

Now, if you think about it, man is called to reflect the image of God. And what is God? God is life. You know, the Psalms talk about it. He walks and things spring to life around him, right? Flowers grow, and birds sing, and the crops grow up because God is life-giving. His very nature of who he is reflects that, and he causes life. Overflowing life is the result of the very person of God. And in isolation from man and woman—if you have man apart from woman or woman apart from man—you don’t have the very essence of the calling of humanity, which is to cause life to flow. The only way to have human life multiply is through humans living in some form of community together in the context of male and female.

So it shows us the absolute requirement of the other, and that should break down our typical reactions against the other. Okay. So woman is this helper, and secondly, she is fit, suitable. Some of the translations—and you probably know this if you’ve been here very long—but you know, the Hebrew term is a compound word and it means “like opposite him.” So “like opposite,” so she’s not so opposite that she’s totally other from man. She’s like him, but she’s not identical to him. She’s opposite. In fact, she’s not just a little different, right? Not just a little different physical makeup. She is the opposite of him as well.

So, you know, one thing that can be said about this is that she is complementary to man. And that puts it a little too weakly, I think. Again, the significance of this is that she completes him, right? So she’s like him but opposite him. And so they are together the completion of humanity, and this is quite important, too. It means that there are certain distinctions between male and female that are not just, you know, male and female are not unisex realities that cultures then determine and grow in a particular way.

When we look at women in the context of our culture, for instance, or men, we don’t just see the result of social conditioning by which toys we gave them to play with when they were young. You know, it’s not environment. There’s no doubt that environment plays a role in different cultures and their aspects to masculinity and femininity. But what the texts tell us here is that she’s opposite of him. And so, down to the very nature, of course, of the genetic strands that make you up, you’re either XX or XY. So down to the itty-bitty little parts of you, you are distinguishable sexually from the other sex.

And that’s very significant. It’s very significant. It, you know, clearly there are certain things that the woman can do in that are opposite to the man, and the man can do that are different from her. But the important thing here is, again, that if what we have—if life is about reflecting the community and life-giving essence of the triune God, and that great dance that occurs within the triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—if humanity is given to reflect that, then we see the necessity of two people dancing together, not the same, doing different roles, but accomplishing the dance through that.

You can dance by yourself, but that’s not the way the Bible likes it. The Bible says there’s a great dance involving two distinguishable roles, complementary to one another, fully equal with one another. And only in that dance will you produce the kind of joyous, life-giving reflection of the divine Trinity.

Now, clearly, at the creation, and part of it being this life-giving ability—women are particularly gifted, or rather, they’re the only of the two sexes gifted to be able to bear children and to nurse children. Okay? So there’s physical characteristics that we can immediately point to that are completely distinguishable between the sexes. And what that points us to is we’re not, of course, just physical organisms. And masculinity and femininity don’t stop at just the physicality of things. We can expect, then, differences—big differences—not just between physical characteristics but between emotional characteristics, psychological characteristics, etc., decision-making characteristics. We would expect those to be different, wouldn’t we? Because the woman is not just given, you know, with physical distinctions. Her very creation is given as someone who is like opposite male. And so the male is like opposite female. And so the distinction between the two sexes certainly goes far beyond simple physical characteristics.

In other words, that describes her entire creation. It doesn’t just describe her physical makeup. And so we would expect to see all kinds of distinctions between male and female. And you know, it’s interesting because in the last, say, thirty years in America, we’ve seen a radical shift or a big turn in the way sexuality is discussed in our culture. When I was coming out of the sixties, the women’s liberation movement was primarily about just saying that the distinctions are pretty minor. They’re on the surface. They’re no big deal. We’re interchangeable, unisex units, and you’ve got that child-bearing thing, but we’ll work on it. We’ll be able to bring men along on that task as well.

But what’s happened since then is there’s just been a flood of research in the last thirty years that says no, these are quite different creatures. The way women and men think are distinguishable based on scientific evidence, right? There was an article, for instance, written in the New York Times—an op-ed piece from a woman director, right? A choir orchestra conductor—and the whole thing was about how different she as a woman conducts an orchestra than when a man would conduct it. And the orchestra is distinguishable based upon whether it is a woman conducting it in terms of her feminine giftings or a man with his particular masculine giftings.

Now she wanted to assert that women are better conductors and that music is better when a woman is conducting the music. But the point she’s making really reflects what we read in Genesis 2. There are these “like opposites,” and we would expect people who are other from each other to do things differently. Not everything necessarily, but all kinds of things. And when you get to high-level decision-making processes, we would expect, and we now see, big differences between the way men and women go after tasks. There’s been a flood of research along this line, as I’ve said. And it all buttresses these truths.

Now, this is pretty important, and it sets us up really for a flourishing of discussion amongst the Christian community and affecting our broader culture in terms of male-female roles. You know, there’s sort of two ditches that we could fall into here. And one ditch, based upon the equality of men and women in the creation order, says they’re just the same. And what that usually results in, as women, for instance, are encouraged to enter the workplace—and as women go after corporate positions—is that women are kind of taught, and were taught for twenty years, just be like a man, be a faux man. And that’s a ditch. Because the reality is that women have distinctive giftings, and they can lead an orchestra, or they can be involved in management and business with a completely different perspective, right? A different set of skills coming to bear that may well be, and likely are, the food or the mechanism by which flourishing in that business will occur.

If human life flourishes when male and female are performing complementary but united tasks, then as women exercise their gifts, their unique giftings, and men are exercising their unique giftings, we would expect human flourishing to happen. And so that’s what we expect. And the world is sort of coming along, just because of, you know, the research. And the Christian church has to speak into this arena and say, “Yeah, we want to avoid that ditch. We’ve said all along that male and female are completely different.”

Now, there’s another ditch. And the other ditch is this: you lose the gift of woman over here, right? If all she does is engage like a man would engage and tries to be just as tough as a guy, that’s a ditch. But the other ditch over here is you also lose women if you keep them out of any roles of leadership. If you take the complementary nature and say, “Well, as a result of that, the only thing women can do is be at home and not engage in positions of leadership anywhere.” Now, if the Bible had taught that, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t. It teaches almost the opposite. It teaches this complementary nature, and it says that culture will flourish as both roles, both sexes are who they are, embrace who they are, and work in the context of that distinction.

So embracing the other in terms of sexuality—rather than hating the other or distinguishing the other and thinking lower of them. So, you can see the fallen woman says her conducting is better than any man could do. So she’s rejecting the other. And men say, “Well, women should never conduct orchestras.” And they’re rejecting the other. And what we need to do is embrace the other and say, “Well, there’s particular giftings.” And if we’re going to have a culture that really flourishes, we want men and women, we want masculinity and femininity, to be fully engaged in who they are in relationship and in cooperation with the other sex.

Here’s a quote from one of the articles that talks about this. Let me see. This article was by Carol Gilligan, called “In a Different Voice” in 1982, and reflections on that. Okay. So she basically is saying—using all the qualifiers in the world—in general, as a whole, and across the spectrum, men seem to have a gift of independence, a sending gift. They look outward. They initiate. Now, we would say as Christians that under sin, those tendencies, those traits can become an alpha male individual, right? So you’re going into sinful masculinity by having a radical individualism. If the capacity is turned into an idol of complete independence—apart from necessary dependence—or on the other hand, if masculinity is rejected, then instead of being this sending, initiating thing, you can have an undue opposite embracing in rebellion of independence, or rather of dependence, and a failure to act at all. So you can either have hyper-masculinity or a rejection of the masculine role. Either one are both ditches apart from the middle, which is exercising masculinity in a biblical way.

And again, based on her article—we read using all the qualifiers in the world—on the whole and across the spectrum, women have a gift of interdependence, a receiving gift. They are inwardly perceptive. They nurture. Now, again, under sin, here, then, these traits can become either a clinging dependence—if attachment is turned into an idol—or radical individualism if the calling is utterly rejected and the opposite embraced in rebellion. So just a little hint of what these differences can be perceived as being and the necessity of them.

All right. So the idea here is that there is this otherness created that’s absolutely good and proper and necessary for human flourishing and dominion in the context of carrying out our task. And in fact, it’s impossible to carry out the task without the “like opposite” of a man and the “like opposite” of a woman operating in our culture.

All right? And sin, of course, changes all of this, right? In Genesis, we don’t have it printed out. Well, in Genesis, of course, what happens is that sin enters the world, and rather than the man and woman now fulfilling their responsibilities and getting ready to exercise great dominion, sin enters the world, and in the fallen state, what happens? Well, fingerpointing happens. Blaming happens. And we have an explosion of rejection of the other, starting with the man, right? And the man rejects the other—the woman—and blames the woman for what’s going on that’s wrong. And she points the finger at somebody else.

So what we have in the fall is a rejection of the other, and in fact a blaming of the other for the sad state of affairs. What also we have in the fall is, and it’s kind of hard to quite know how to fully describe this, but in the curse placed upon the woman—we’ll talk about this in a little bit when we talk about marriage roles—it seems like the curse involves her sin now will reflect itself in a twisted sense of dependence, over-dependence, upon the man and upon his overly becoming authoritarian in leading her. So sin twists the whole thing. Sin creates fingerpointing and blaming the other and rejection of the other rather than accepting their oneness.

Now the world breaks down into the sort of polarizations that we see. And so, you know, the sociological idea that rejection of the other is the cause of an awful lot of our problems in the world is all comes, or comes from the fall. I mean, think of racism, right? I’m white, you’re black, I don’t like you. I’m black, you’re white, I don’t like you. I’m Japanese, you’re Chinese, I don’t like you. I’m Chinese, you’re Japanese, I don’t like you. History is replete with racist wars, fights, because they reflect what happened in the garden. They reflect the fingerpointing at the other and blaming the other and justifying yourself. Adam’s justifying himself by casting the blame at the other. And races do that. Racism—that’s what is at the heart of it.

What is the work of Jesus Christ? The work of Jesus Christ is creating unity, right? It’s creating at-one-ment. That word, I think it was Wycliffe who coined it, just came up with to reflect that the propitiation of Christ’s sacrifice creates at-one-ment and unity. It creates the embrace of the other as Moltmann said in that quote we gave earlier. All right.

Then marriage roles can be seen in this context, right? So Ephesians 5 tells us the roles in marriage. And what does it say? Well, we read this. They’re to submit to one another, verse 21, out of reverence for Christ. “Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. Why? For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her.”

So the marriage roles, in essence, are given as headship and submission. That’s what they’re clearly identified as here. Now, as I mentioned earlier, it’s very important to say here that what does that mean? How does it work itself out in marriage? We wish we had more rules. We don’t. But marriages have to reflect biblical marriages—Christian marriages—embracing the other, embracing femininity in your wife or masculinity in your man. It has to reflect headship and submission. That’s what the text rather clearly points us to, and it simply can’t be avoided. Nor should we wish to avoid it.

If the idea is that sexes are complementary, if they’re like opposites of each other, that means that men are created, or rather, called to headship somehow, and women are created, or rather, called to submission. Now, it doesn’t mean each of those roles is any better than the other, but it means they’re called into these particular callings by the very creation of the sexes themselves. So ultimately, men should have this idea of headship and embrace it, and women should have the idea of a desire to follow and enhance and nurture leadership, or headship, in the home. And that’s the basic roles. And beyond that, we’re given a little bit of detail, but really not much.

And so, if we’re going to be helping one another in marriage, then we’re going to reflect these particular roles as given to us in Ephesians 5. So the otherness of sexuality is reflected in an otherness of particular roles in the context of marriage, and these roles are just given to us. Okay, they’re just given to us. Now, if we understand that these roles are given in the context of the advance, the reflection, as the text told us, of Christ’s headship, then you have to ask yourself: what? How does Christ accomplish what he’s doing? And what Christ is accomplishing is not his own. He’s not being selfish, right? We’ll look at this, but for Christ to act selfishly is not what the scriptures portray for us. Christ is self-giving.

So the headship of Jesus Christ is not a selfishness, and that means that as men reflect headship in the family in direction, they’re never to do that for selfish purposes because that’s what fallen man will do, right? He’ll take biblical justification and he’ll turn it into doing what he wants to do for his purposes, not for the well-being of the family or for the benefits of the kingdom of God.

What we see instead is a call in the text before us in Ephesians 5 to embrace Jesus as our model, Jesus as our Spirit-empowered model. Ephesians 5. Remember, we began our series with talking about this—that to get to the accomplishment of what Ephesians 5 tells us about marriage, we go through Ephesians 4. And Ephesians 4 is about the Spirit-empowered life. It’s about being filled with the Spirit and how to accomplish that. Jesus is gifted by the Father with the Spirit, and the Spirit empowers Jesus to fulfill the roles that he’s calling men and women to do.

Jesus is a servant leader. What kind of leadership does he portray? Well, we just read it. We read that he is a servant leader. He is sacrificial. Even as he’s the head of the church, he dies for the church. He serves the church. And I’ve got a lot of scriptures listed for you on this, but the scriptures are quite clear that this is what Jesus is. He is a servant leader.

For instance, one of the things that Jesus does, of course, is he teaches us in Matthew that we are not to exercise leadership the way the Gentiles do. And the Gentiles rule over, “lord it over.” I wonder what does that word “lord it over” mean? Well, we read in Acts 19:16 the same word used for “lord it over.” We read about a man in whom was an evil spirit. The evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. That’s “lording it over” somebody. The scriptures give us a demonically-filled man overpowering somebody else as an example of what it means to “lord over” people.

And so as Christian husbands, we’re not to lord it over our wives. Rather, we’re to exercise servant leadership as Jesus did. Secondly, so he’s both a servant and a leader. And if we’re going to embrace our masculinity as husbands, we have to embrace that masculinity, right? For some of us, that means that we have a shortcoming in terms of leading. Our wife is a better decision maker. There’s nothing in the Bible that says she may not be a better decision maker. Right? I mean, it doesn’t say that. What it says is, whether you’re the best at making decisions or not, you ultimately have to decide at the end of the day what direction the family will take. You have to embrace leadership. You have to accept your God-given role and embrace leadership.

And some men, a lot of men, are going to have a hard time doing that. And other men, if they embrace leadership sinfully, are going to have to work on the other side of it, which is to embrace the idea of service and being self-sacrificial so that your leading happens the way Jesus does. Jesus is this self-effacing leader. We’re told that Jesus is that role, and that one we’re kind of familiar with. But we’re also told that Jesus is the model for wives and their submission.

We read in Ephesians 5:22 and 24 that just as Jesus laid down his life, right? Jesus laying down his life is submission to the Father. Okay? And there’s many scriptures—a lot in the Gospel of John, and I give them on your outline here—that talk about this. And so Jesus, over and over again, says in the Gospel of John, “I’m not doing what I want to say. I’m submitting to the Father. What the Father has told me, that’s what I do.”

So Jesus is coming in the very form of the submissive servant to a master, his Father. He’s come to do the Father’s will. So Jesus comes as the head of the church, as the servant leader who’s going to save the church, as the model for men embracing biblical masculinity in the marriage. And Jesus comes also as the submissive servant. Philippians 2, right? He lays down his life because he’s in the very person, the very nature of God, to engage in that sort of submissive, self-sacrificial action for one another.

Jesus submits to the Father and takes upon himself the death for us of sinful man. Jesus is submissive to the point of death, even. So Jesus is the model for submission in that particular role. Jesus is the model for servant leadership. And so our calling in marriage, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is to embrace the Jesus role. It’s to move into the Jesus role in the particular sex that God has called you in—male and female.

And so Jesus is the model. He’s the model in Ephesians 5 for both husband and for wife. And this is said explicitly in 1 Corinthians 11. He says, “I want you to understand. The head of every man is Christ. The head of a wife is her husband. And the head of Christ is God.” So Christ has a head, just like the wife has a head. And when you embrace that form of submission to your head, you are entering into the life of the Lord Jesus Christ in submitting to his head, God the Father. And when you lead in a sacrificial, non-selfish way in your family, your wife—and what you’re going to have to do, taking into account all the beautiful things, the gifts that she has that you don’t have, her complementary nature to you—then you’re reflecting the Jesus role in your masculinity.

So either way, both spouses are called, in these roles of headship and submission, to live out Jesus in the context of the world and in their marriage relationship. And remember, when man and woman come together, embracing their “like-oppositeness,” life flows, right? That’s the way life flows. It’s the only way life flows. So the way that your family becomes a fountain of life in the context of your culture is this same thing: as you embrace the other—who is the man for the woman or the woman for the man—in Christian marriage, and as you do that the way Jesus did, right, as the servant leader or as the submissive one to his head, God the Father, then as you come together in doing those things, that’s how life flows into our culture.

The opposite is also true. When couples don’t do that, death flows into the culture. And death in the culture, you know, isn’t when death enters the scene in the Garden of Eden. People don’t fall over. But what do they do? They fight. They become disunited. They start blaming each other and pointing the finger at each other. That’s death. Okay? That’s the way death works itself out in the context of community.

And we just had an election where fifty percent of the people are going like this and fifty percent of the people are mad at those people. And we’ve got cultures now where, uh, you know, businessmen and consumers are at odds with each other, pointing at each other. Unions and owners are pointing at each other, getting mad at each other. There’s no embracing of the other, really, going on in our culture. And there’s people that want justice. There’s people that want compassion. And they just won’t, you know, they’re pointing at each other saying, “You’re all wrong and you’re all wet. You’re wrong.” And so, as a result, our culture is just flourishing with death. It’s flourishing with contention, difficulties. And the election itself is this massive, you know, picture of that. We’re a fifty percent plus one vote sort of culture these days, where the majority decides, but it’s not really what God would have going on in our culture.

The Christian church, in teaching atonement and in living out lives of complementary embracing of the other in marriage, has a great deal to say to our culture at this particular time. So this is what we’re called to do. We’re called to reflect in our marriages the dance of the triune God. Jesus doesn’t become the Son at some point, right? The Son becomes Jesus. He becomes incarnate. But the second person of the Trinity—what you see Jesus saying in his incarnation in the Gospel of John—is eternally true. He is eternally the Son. He’s eternally submissive to the Father, and the Father is eternally the head of the second person of the Trinity.

But in that relationship, neither of them are exercising their office—we could say their qualities—selfishly. Jesus comes to do the will of the Father because he’s not being selfish. “Not my will but thy will be done.” And the Father is exalting the Son because of that very submission. Right? The Father is not doing that selfishly. The Father suffers with the Son on the cross, but he does it for the sake of embracing the other, which is us.

So in the triune dance of God, these persons of the Trinity are fulfilling their roles of headship and submission unselfishly on both sides. And in that context, life flows. And so in the context of marriage, embracing the other, recognizing the distinctions that are wonderful—and as a result of that, engaging in the Jesus role—we can say both in his submission and in his headship of the church. This is where the blessed salvation of Christ is worked out in the context of marriage. And that’s what Paul says. It’s a great mystery, but he’s speaking of Christ in the church, right? When he talks about marriage, C.S. Lewis said this: “In the imagery describing Christ in the church in Ephesians 5, we’re dealing with male and female, not merely as facts of nature, but as the live and full shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our knowledge. There are tremendous things being played out in the simple relationship of husbands and wives, embracing the other in Christian marriage, that point to something radically incomprehensible to us in its fullest extent.”

But that’s what we’re called to do. Okay. So that’s what we’re to do in Christ: fulfill our roles. This means embracing our unique sexuality and roles in marriage. Point number five.

So, you know, God—we talked about this last week. God gives good gifts, right? Every gift of God is good. Comes from above. And God has gifted about half of you with maleness. And that’s good. That’s a gift from God. He’s created you that way. You didn’t become that way. That’s to be embraced in yourself. And about half of you out there are female. Now, you’ve been female, right? In the mind of God. We saw last week from Jeremiah 1, before you’re conceived, he knows you. He knew Jeremiah. He knew him as a male, right? I mean, he could have made him female, but he didn’t. Eternally, God has established about half of you as males, and that’s a good gift from him. And he’s given about half of you the gift of being female. And that’s a good gift of God. And that’s a gift that you want to embrace and mature. You don’t want some jerk of a husband try to turn you into a man or turn you into some kind of inferior being. Don’t let that affect you. Know who God has called you to be as a woman. Embrace your femininity and develop it.

And the same thing with men. Don’t feel so guilty about being a man that somehow you reject your masculinity. Don’t fail to lead and cause inevitable frustration and difficulties for your family. Embrace your masculinity. Do those particular qualities that masculinity involves. And in Ephesians, it tells us that one of the big headers for all that is headship and submission. Headship and submission. And in Genesis, we’re told that the wife has this nurturing, life-giving physical ability that no doubt is reflected in emotional and psychological states as well.

So the complete otherness of masculinity and femininity are both gifts from God that must be embraced first by who you are and then you must embrace the other as well in the context of your marriage and seek its development. So you want to encourage your spouse, your wife, to be feminine. And the wife wants to encourage her husband to be masculine—not faux masculinity the way the world and fallen man, not machismo, but headship, self-sacrificial servant leadership in headship. And men to encourage their wives to trust them and to develop a sense of desiring to cause them to lead better.

And if you’re going to make good decisions, you want all the input this other person—completely gifted and different than you—all the good gifts that she brings into your life. You want to know all that stuff, and you want to make ninety-five percent of those decisions jointly because that’s what’s going on. God is bringing the sexes back together in cooperation and dominion work. So you want to do that. You want to embrace your own sexuality, and you want to cause the other person to embrace their sexuality. And as a result of that, you end up better.

Now, the way this works is at some point in your relationship you start asking WWSD. So instead of “what would Jesus do,” a lot of times what I do is: what would my spouse do? What would spouse do? That’s what you do because as you know the other person and you see their unique giftings and abilities, it isn’t just for them. You’re gifted with that ability. To some sense, it rubs off on you, right? And so after a while, a wife starts thinking like her husband thinks, and a husband starts thinking like his wife thinks.

And even though you’re other, you start completing each other’s sentences. There’s this cross-gender enrichment that I talked about last week. Now, that’s absolutely impossible if you don’t embrace the other. If you don’t fully realize the full equality, not just equality, but the full blessings of femininity and masculinity—what they bring to a marriage. If you don’t do that, you’ll never get to cross-gender enrichment. But if you do embrace that, then not only, you know, are you doing what you should do, you’re also finding your completeness in a person of the opposite sex, and you’re taking on some of those characteristics in who you are, too.

I mean, in other words, men become, in our particular culture, men become more feeling-oriented, right? They begin to see into themselves. They open up a little bit more, and they see the value of that approach to life that they see from their wives. And I say this is cultural. I’m not sure that’s ultimately, you know, always true in every culture, but it is in this culture. And wives start to see that kind of decisiveness and the ability to make decisions, and that empowers them to do that kind of stuff in their particular sphere. You learn from each other, and there is this wisdom that flows from embracing the other.

You know, if the races in Christ embrace each other, we are going to have enhanced spirituality. Western Christianity needs the sort of spirituality that’s coming in the great revivals that are going on in Africa and in Asia. And those cultures are different. God has made them different, and they’ve developed differently. And they’ll bring enhancements to the Church of Jesus Christ in the same way that embracing maleness and femaleness in marriage brings enhancements to the marriage relationship itself.

Now, I talked last week about embracing the other as a single. I want to just throw that in. I’ll try to put out an email this week that sort of describes some ways to do that again. But while this happens primarily in marriage, it can also happen in the context of singleness within the church, within the family of Jesus Christ, by having sisters and brothers in the Lord and thinking about them as sisters and brothers, not as like just exactly like you.

Finally, marriage and the gospel of universal wholeness. This is the message of the gospel. The message of the gospel—you know, at this table, what we see is Jesus embracing the other, sinful humanity, and he’s leaving us a model for what we’re supposed to do in our marriages. Via difference, don’t point and blame. Rather, embrace.

Now, Colossians 1 says this: “Through him, Jesus, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you who were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has brought near.” He’s talking to Gentiles. So the message of most of the epistles—Jew and Gentile kept separate by God for a season—brought together now that Messiah and salvation for the world to come has come. The gospel is the good news that God is healing divisions. He’s causing the embracing of the other by people who are saved by grace, embracing God himself in his salvation, embracing the other.

Jews embracing Gentiles, Gentiles embracing Jews, blacks embracing whites, whites embracing blacks, Asians, etc. That’s the gospel. The gospel is a gospel message of atonement. And atonement means that Jesus’s blood provides at-one-ment for the world. It provides the embracing of the other. This message is repeated over and over again. Ephesians 1:10—that there’s this plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. To unite them, to reconcile them.

We’re called with a ministry of reconciliation. And for Paul, that didn’t just mean reconciliation to God. It meant the reconciliation now of Jew and Gentile. That God, now the Messiah has come, makes one church out of the two bodies, and he ends the division. The law itself is talked about as being done away with, Ephesians 2. “He himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two. So making peace, and he might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross. Thereby killing the enmity.”

Killing the enmity. The law was a reflection that enmity had entered the world with the sin and judgment of God. The races were divided, or the sexes were now at odds with one another. Cultures would become at odds with one another. People would become at odds with one another. Division filled the world. And the law kept apart Jew and Gentile, and in some cases male and female. It reminded us that while salvation was acceptable—or we were acceptable in the Old Testament—still it was reminding us: Messiah hasn’t come. And when he comes, then this wall of enmity—not creating but acknowledging the enmity that rejection of the other and sin had brought into the fallen world—when that was done away with through Christ, now the two become one. That’s the great message.

The great message is what’s reflected, Lord willing, in your marriages. This week, the great message is that God has brought us through the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to a place now where there’s no Jew or Gentile. There’s no Asian or American. There’s no male or female. Well, there still is Jew and Gentile, right? There’s still Asian and American. There’s still male and female. But the point that he’s making in Galatians is that these things are not now opposites to be despised, to be rejected, to be kept away from. These distinctions are now the very nature of which will be bound together in the work of Jesus Christ.

And when you bring male and female together in Christian marriage, you have life flow out of it. When you bring together Asian and European Christianity, new life will flow out of that. When we bring together African, Asian, and Western European Christianity, new life will flourish. And so our marriages are reflection of the gospel, that Jesus Christ has come to reconcile all things in himself. Not just doing away with problems, but creating a new condition for life and abundant life in the world.

Your marriages—when we embrace our masculinity and femininity within marriage, when we encourage our spouses to embrace their particular calling, and when that calling reflects Jesus as head, as servant leader, or Jesus as submissive, then we see marriages that are part of the great proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the wonderful message that Jesus has come, enabled us to fulfill these roles. Forgive us for so often using the Bible to justify sinful selfishness on the part of men or women and rejection of the other. Bless us in our homes, Father, that we might work within the broad constructs that you’ve laid out in your scriptures through all the deep details in our particular families and relationships. Bless us, Father, with overflowing life in our homes that might indeed eventually, through the proclamation of the gospel of the atonement, bring peace to our world. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.

We have not known thee as we ought, nor learned thy wisdom, grace, and power. The things of earth have filled our thought, and trifles of the passing hour. Lord, give us light thy truth to see, and make us wise in knowing thee.

We have not feared thee as we ought, nor bowed beneath thine awful high, nor guarded deed and word and thought, remembering that God was nigh. Lord, give us faith to know thee near, and grant the grace of holy fear.

We have not loved thee as we ought, nor cared that we are loved by thee. We have coldly sought, and we long thy face to see. Lord, give a pure and loving heart to feel and own the love thou art.

We have not served thee as we ought. Alas, the duties left undone, the work with bent servers wrought, the battles lost or scarcely won. Lord, give the zeal and give the might for thee to toil, for thee to fight.

When shall we know thee as we ought, and fear and love and serve aright? When shall we out of thy brought be perfect in the land of light? Lord, may we day by day prepare to see thy face and serve thee there.

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer! Oh, what peace we often forfeit, oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.

Are we weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care? Precious Savior, still our refuge, take it to the Lord in prayer. Do thy friends despise, forsake thee? Take it to the Lord in prayer. In his arms he’ll take and shield thee. Thou wilt find a solace there.