Learning God's Precepts

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Or as the NKJV puts Colossians 3:3 – For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 

Hi and welcome to the Marriage Episode! My name is still Josephine, and this is still Learning God’s Precepts or LGP for short and today we’ll be talking about marriage.

Seeing as I’m currently single, I do not feel quite qualified to speak about this topic, but then I do not feel qualified to talk about every other thing I talk about on this podcast. The only thing I know is that which God has taught me, and I decided that if I could share every other thing I’ve been taught, why would I hold back on this? God’s Word in my mouth qualifies me, and so I’ll speak.

Now that we have out of the way, let’s back track to when I got my marriage lesson. You see, I’d never really gotten the fuss about marriage. It made no sense to me, and just seemed like a lot of stress with the occasional peck that did not make up for the stress.

Then Jesus saved me, I got into church, and there’s this umbrella graphic that they share in church when they speak about marriage that annoyed me even more. I’ll look for a picture and attach it to the blog, but in this picture, there’s four umbrellas in graduating sizes with our Lord Jesus being the biggest umbrella, the husband being the next in size, the wife the next, and the finally we had the kids. This was the communication and reporting hierarchy (we human beings love power so much), where they say God speaks to the man, and the man to the wife and the wife to the kids. 

All I kept thinking was who in their right minds would meet Jesus and then decide to put a human being, a man between them?? Why would I give up Jesus, for a human being?

Do you know that Eve was only relegated to mother of all children after the fall? When sin had entered the world and Adam no longer had the life of God in him? Before the fall she was bone of Adam's bone (i.e., one with him, so whatever Adam was, they were together or as Peter puts it, she was his partner.) Motherhood is great, but women being called only to motherhood is a result of the fall of man. 

Anyways, one day, I’m reading my Bible and I’m awed by the perfection of God’s plans. I’m blown away by how intricately entwined everything thing is. By how complete and purposeful everything God has ever done is. And I say exactly this to God, but then I also say that though everything was perfect and good, marriage stood out as a sore thumb to me. I remember saying that I knew that because He (God) is good, everything H e does is good, but I had examined marriage and I couldn’t seem to see that same completeness and perfection as I saw in everything else. I did not get an immediate response.

About two weeks later God calls me into a 3-day retreat. I had been praying specifically about something else, and I thought that that was what He was calling me to receive. Alas it was not, it was to address what I had said a couple of weeks earlier. I’m going to try and summarize what I was taught over the course of 3+ days in about fifteen minutes.

Now I’m going to ask that if you’ve not listened to the very first episode please stop here and go listen – it’s called our identity in Christ. I’m going to be assuming that you’ve listened to it as that is the foundation upon which this is built.

So, Let’s begin

Genesis 1: 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 

From the above, we can see very clearly that both male and female humans, were made in the image of God. Today, I’m not going to try to define what that image is, I just want to establish it as a fact.

Then 1st Corinthians 11:7b says – forasmuch as he (the man) is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. But then I began to wonder why men got to be the glory of God, but we women were the glory of the man? I was not a happy camper

So, let’s go back to Genesis, shall we?

Genesis 2:22-24 and the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. 

You see when God wanted to create Eve, He took her out of the man, He basically turned Adam from single to double. (This is why I really need you to listen to that first episode). In order to create Eve God removed something from Adam. What exactly was removed from him? What does this mean for Adam? And for eve? And for marriage as an institution.  To explain this, I’m going to be examining 3 or maybe 4 stories in the Bible.

Let’s start with Abraham. In Genesis chapter 15, God made a covenant with Abraham and promised him that his servant would not be his heir but that he would birth his own heir. This was where God told him to look now towards heaven and count the stars, that if he is able to number them, so shall his descendants be.

The Bible tells us that Abraham believed, he actually believed God. But then he went home and slept with Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant. I don’t know about you, if God speaks to one half of a couple that they’re going to birth a child, the assumption is that you know He’s speaking to both you and your partner. But when you don’t see you and your partner as one, you take the vision that God gives you for you guys’ life and destiny and personalize for yourself only – making it all about you, with your spouse as an extra in the movie where you’re the star act. I want to let you know that the result will always be Ismael. And don’t forget that Ismael was a miracle, a miracle child! But God said he was not His will.

Abraham was called to be the father of nations, through Isaac. He had many other children, but through none of them would his destiny – the reason God called him in the first place – be fulfilled. Sarah had only one child in her womb – Isaac – and he was the child of promise. But had she birthed him by anyone other than Abraham  he would not have been the child of promise.

This brings me to the next point I want to quickly make – if you think God called your wife to be a mother, then he called you to be a father. And vice versa. I’m not saying God called you to be the same thing – since Adam was divided into Adam and Eve, I very much doubt that it’ll be the same – but you are two halves of one vision. And those 2 halves merged at the point where you got married. For God to make Eve, he took something vital out of Adam, this means that whatever you have in your hand; though very important, is the incomplete half of something of which a vital part is in the hand of your spouse - be you male or female.

Let’s take a quick detour to Isaac himself when he married Rebecca. In Genesis chapter 24, when Abraham’s servant found Rebecca – just as he was about to leave, Rebecca’s brother blessed her with the following blessing in verse 60 - “Our sister, may you become the mother of thousands of ten thousands; and may your descendants possess the gates of those who hate them.” Does this sound familiar? This is basically the exact same promise that God made with Abraham in Genesis 22:17 that was to be fulfilled through Isaac. This means that immediately Rebecca said I will (or in our case, I do), the same covenant came upon her too. These 2 incidents happened years apart, in 2 entirely different places.

My next example is Moses.  Moses knew that God had called him to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, and he was right. But he grew up in pharaoh’s palace, and he only knew the way of the palace, but the way of the palace is not God’s way. And when he tried to apply the things he knew and learnt from his time in the palace, it backfired and next thing you know he was on the run.

Thankfully, because God is the God of providence, he ran into Jethro’s daughters who were shepherds – one of whom he married. You see God had called Moses to shepherd the people Israel out of Egypt, everything else (the miracles and signs) God would do through him, but he needed to learn to be a shepherd, and to think like one. Remember that Joseph had told us that Egyptians found shepherds to be an abomination, and Moses had been raised by Egyptians. This means that for Moses to effectively lead shepherds, he couldn’t still hold the mind set that found them abominable. Moses needed to learn new skills and to have his mind renewed.

So, Moses had the vision, but his wife had the methodology.  

She was the shepherd that taught him how to be a shepherd; how to pick out the right shepherd stick, good places to rest and feed the sheep, amongst many others, and it was after he had fully embraced this role that God appeared to him in the burning bush and sent him.

Finally, I’ll end with Mary, the mother of Jesus and Joseph her husband.

Mary may be called the mother of God, but Jesus is referred to in the Bible as the son of Joseph, who is a descendant of David.  Now, according to prophesy, the Messiah must be a descendant of David and since Jews are patrilineal, Jesus’s father had to be a descendant of David. So here we have Mary, chosen to be the one to carry the Messiah, but had she been engaged to anyone but Joseph, who was a descendant of David, and who had also been chosen to be the father of Jesus, there’s no way we’d know who she is today.

Also, there’s Joseph – good Jewish man, a descendant of David – but he was probably one of thousands just like him in his day. Why do we know who he is today? He married Mary. Had he married anyone else but her we would not know who he is today. He was called to be the father of our Lord, and Mary to be the mother of our Lord.

This brings me to the comment I made at the beginning of this episode about 1st Corinthians 11:7b which says – forasmuch as he (the man) is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

We’ve already established from Genesis that both men and women are made in the image and likeness of God, but this verse introduces something new – glory. It states that men are the glory of God but women the glory of men. Why do we women get to be the glory of men and not of God? What does it really mean for women to be the glory of man?

So, lets go back to Genesis. (This would be easier to understand if you have listened to the episode on our identity in Christ). When God created humanity, He created them in one body, He saw that it was good and asked him to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. But male human bodies – though declared good by God – cannot on their own be fruitful or multiply so they are not equipped to fulfill the mission God gave him, thus, God said that it is not good for man to be alone, or in other words, for man to be singular.

So, what did God do? He removed something from the man, and then built what He removed into a woman who had a body when joined with the man, together, they could carry out and fulfil the mission given to them by God. As marriage is a mystery that points us to Christ Jesus, it’ll be great to go back and look at that relationship to help throw more light on what it means for women to be the glory of men.  

 In John 12:24, Jesus in reply to Phillip and Andrew said – “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

That word alone comes up here again. And in the same way that the Father said in Genesis that it was not good for man to be alone, Jesus also insinuates that it was not good for Him to be alone/singular. He wanted to multiply Himself. And He has done that by dying on the cross, crucifying our old self, and giving us new life – His own life. In the same way that eve came from Adam, when we are born again, we become body parts of Jesus’s bride removed from His side.  We become the branches growing out of Him, the Vine.  We – the church – are the bride of Christ. The Eve to Christ’s Adam.

So, how is Christ Jesus glorified on earth? By His bride. In His church. In John Chapter 17:22 Jesus said - I have given them the glory that You gave me, that they may be one as we are one. Christ is glorified in His church. people do not see Jesus, they see us His body, but when they see us, they glorify Jesus. It is in us and through us that Jesus’s handiwork is being exhibited as we are built up in and by Christ. So, just as it is in us and through us that Christ is glorified on earth, so also it is in and through the wife that the husband is glorified. Outside of that, there is no glory, what you get is Ismael.

What God removed from Adam and built up in Eve is what makes for his glory. So, it becomes their glory (i.e., The man and the woman). So, how does God want this to play out in simple terms?

Husband, all of your life must be focused on building up your wife. And as for the wife, you must recognize that all you are is his. Christ’s focus right now is on building His church, our response as the church is to let Him build us up. In a marriage, God relates to the man as the leader, and to the woman as the helper - no one replaces the other before God.

Finally, I’ve seen a lot of people insinuate, whether by words or by practice, that one is more important than the other, or that one is greater than the other – that need to be greater than or more important than another is the manifestation of the flesh and has no place in God’s marriage. Nothing can be done from the place of strife or vainglory, not even marriage – God resists the proud, and calling pride by another name like ego will not change what it is. There’s no place for self, or self-importance in the things of God.

We (male & female) are made in God’s image, and while men reflect God’s image as Leader, women reflect God’s image as Helper. You are both a reflection of God, and you are both ONE. Just as the triune God – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one and co-equal.  You both must ask the Holy Spirit to show you where both your callings merge to become one.

God made marriage good, in fact God said that it is not good that man should be alone. God wants to help you, that’s why He gave you your spouse. He wants to close up the gap in your journeys – both of you.

What about us single people? Does this mean that God doesn’t want to help us too? No, far from it. The Bible tells us that God covered up the flesh at the place where the rib was removed. This means that for men, God will cover up what is lacking in you. And for women, He (God) will continue to build you up i.e., make up for what you didn’t know you needed.

 A witness is someone who sees something and is willing to demonstrate it, both by their words and by their life.

What do you really believe?

Does your life truly demonstrate the things you believe?

 

Personally, I believe that Jesus is the only way. That there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved, and that this salvation brings about the obedience of faith. I believe that heaven is real, and so is hell.

Now, does my life truly reflect that belief?

I don’t know that the answer is yes

Because I'm not sure I demonstrate this belief to people I meet every day; the ones I cross paths with as I go about my daily life.

If the answer is no

Does this make me a hypocrite?