All right, let's bow for prayer. Our Father in heaven, we are so thankful to be here this morning. Lord, we're thankful to offer unto you praise and thanksgiving, Lord, giving you our service of worship. We thank you, Father, for this opportunity, Lord, to hear from your word. And we pray, Lord, that you would bless this study, that you would teach us, Lord, and that we would grow in sanctification, even in our marriages as we start this new this new study. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Alright, so as you heard in the prayer, we're starting a new study today and I'm not sure how many lessons this will be. All I know is this is lesson number one. So, anyway, we're going to be taking a look basically at the institution of marriage and start from the very foundation, from the beginning. and kind of work from that theology of marriage into some practical application. So today we're kind of focusing on the foundations. So we're going to go back to the beginning and talk about the institution of marriage out of the Bible, out of the book of Genesis. Now, if you're a young person, you've probably noticed that husbands and wives don't always live together in harmony. If you're seeking to get married, you probably have some ideal in your mind of how it will be. something along the lines of I'll marry my sweetheart and we'll live happily ever after. Then you get married and you realize that peace and harmony in marriage is more elusive than you at first thought. Your idealistic view comes crashing down to the reality that there are struggles, hurts and pains that you didn't initially account for. The disharmony that plagues so many marriages in a lot of cases ends up in divorce. In fact, in our country, the divorce rate is somewhere around 45%. And it would be greater if you were to account for the fact that many people aren't getting married anymore. They're having illicit relationships and then breaking up. They're skipping marriage altogether and living in sin. So if marriage proves to be challenging, often breaking down into struggle and then giving way to coping with problems for the duration or even divorce, why then is marriage desirable? Why is it something that we should seek? Yet we see the institution of marriage among basically all the peoples of the world. We see it among the Christianized peoples of the world. We see it among those who've been influenced through scripture, such as the Jews or even the Muslims. And even pagans and irreligious people get married. Marriage has been the norm for all peoples from the beginning of time. And this is true largely because God made us incomplete. Even before sin, it was God's design that man and woman need each other. Marriage was God's idea from the beginning. It's the primary institution of our civilizations. Without marriage, society begins to fray and to fall apart and to disintegrate into chaos. It's no secret that cultural groups who have largely abandoned marriage are rife with serious problems and they face existential crisis. If we have witnessed troubled marriages, it is also the case that we have seen beautiful examples of marriage where the husband and wife live together in peace and harmony. We have witnessed the life, the joy, the productivity, the strong foundation that such marriages supply. These exemplary marriages stand out as hope to others that it is possible to overcome the obstacles that so often plague the marriage relationship. The study has a very practical purpose. I want to strengthen the marriages in this congregation. I would like to strengthen my own marriage. Anytime you teach on marriage, and teach from the Bible, you're preaching to yourself in a lot of ways. I don't think any of us have arrived, none of us are perfect spouses, and we all could stand to learn. And so we're gonna go back to the beginning. I also wanna disabuse us of the worldly notions that have been at work undermining marriage in modern times. I want us to build our marriages upon the timeless truths of scripture. And as we will see later in this study that our marriages can be a small witness to the great marriage relationship that Christ has with his beloved people, with his church. The place to begin a study on marriage is in the beginning of the Bible where God first created man and woman and put them into marriage. So let's turn to Genesis 126 if you have your Bibles with you as we begin to consider this topic of marriage. We'll start at verse 26 and I'll read through to the end of the chapter. Genesis 1, verse 26. And it says, and God said, let us make man in our image and after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him. Male and female created he them. And God blessed them. And God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it. And have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed. To you it shall be for meat, and every beast of the earth, and every fowl of the air, and everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat, and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Now this passage that we just read is set in the broader context of the creation week and it speaks of the creation of mankind in general terms, if you will, while chapter two takes a step back and goes into more detail as to the order and manner of how God created man and woman. But we don't need to overlook the foundational significance of the words that are written here. We see in verse 26, before he made man, God confers with himself as to the nature of man and his role in the earth. Mankind was created, it says, in the image of God. And this has great significance as to man's intrinsic makeup and purpose. So mankind was made, first of all, to be thinking. This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. That is, like God, he has the capacity to have thoughts, to contemplate, to have an existence, an experience of the mind. Man is a thinking creation. In addition, he was made with a moral nature unlike the animals. Because God is good and he is the definition of all good, so man was to reflect the goodness of God in his very nature. We see that all that God made was good, it says. So man was to think and act according to God's goodness and truth as it had been conferred to him in his very nature. He was made moral and thinking and thereby made responsible to think and act according to God's righteousness. Thirdly, man was made separate, distinguished for a special use He was made higher than the rest of the material creation. We see this in God's special care in making man and his stated purpose in creating him. He was made to reflect God's glory on the earth by being an image bearer. What a high honor to bear the image of the eternal God. Man was made holy. He was made for God. He was made for fellowship with God. and to work God's works after him in the earth. He was to be a follower of God, to bear his likeness and glory by degree in his life on the earth. And last, we see that God created man for rulership over the earth. He gave him the right to utilize and order the animal kingdom, as well as gave him the plants to manage and eat. Mankind was created with dominion and for dominion, rulership. And he was to exercise rulership as a reflection of God's own dominion over all things. So man was made for a high calling. He was made to image God in the earth. But unlike God, man is finite and cannot fulfill the responsibility to manage the earth by himself. Because of this limitation, God made man to reproduce himself and collectively they would be able to steward the earth to the glory of God. If we turn to chapter 2, more detail is given in the manner of man's creation. We see in verse 7 that God formed Adam out of the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life and he became a living soul. Then God placed the man in the garden he had planted and gave him his mission and commandment to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When we get to verse 18, we see God make a pronouncement of deficiency in Adam. He said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him and help meet for him. We see that because of Adam's deficiency, because he is alone, and that God's purposes in the earth requires companionship and reproduction that the Lord determines here. He tells us that he determines to make a helper for Adam. In my translation it says help meet. And the English word meet defined by Webster means suitable. Proper, qualified, convenient, adapted as to a use or purpose. So woman was made to be a suitable helper, a help meet, or a helper who was fit, as some translations say, she was fit for Adam. But before God supplies this helper, he brings the animals before Adam to be named. Now, to be given the right to name something is a great honor. We see great buildings and arenas and stadiums being named by principal donors in their honor. When a person discovers a new species of animal, they are given the right to name it. It's a great honor. Parents name their children. It also implies authority to have the right to name something. Nebuchadnezzar gave new names to the three Hebrew children in Daniel 1-7. which as their master, as their conqueror, he had that right. Even Jesus gives us a new name. Matthew Henry says, it is an act of authority to impose names, he cites Daniel 1.7, and of subjection to receive them. The inferior creatures did now, as it were, do homage to their prince at his inauguration and swear, tongue twister, and swear fealty and allegiance to him. Henry goes on to say, God gave names to the day and night, to the firmament, to the earth, and to the sea. And he called the stars by their names, it says, to show that he is the supreme lord of these. But he gave Adam leave to name the beasts and fowls as their subordinate lord. For having made him in his own image, he thus put some of his honor upon Adam. So the right to name was a great honor that God bestowed upon Adam which showed his authority in the earth as the namer. So God brings the animals to Adam and he names them and the narrative in Genesis in verse 20 draws attention to the fact that for Adam there was not found and help meet for him. The animals all had a counterpart. There was the male and the female. But there was nothing in God's creation that was suitable for Adam to be a helper. The way this verse is worded, it almost appears as if Adam was looking for this helper while he was naming the animals. Perhaps God had informed him of his need, and as Adam was naming the animals, he was also looking for his counterpart. To supply the solution to this problem, and to complete the creation so that God could look on it and say it is very good. As the last of the created beings, God made woman. Look at verses 21 through 25 in chapter two. It says, and the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made 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. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. Now there's a lot to unpack here. Jesus references this passage in clarifying the nature of marriage and the evil of divorce when he speaks of divorce in most cases. And Paul warns against fornication using this passage and also teaches how women are to behave in the church using this foundational passage in the book of Genesis. The first thing that stands out to me is that God didn't have to play it out in order to create man and woman. He didn't have to have this scenario take place. He didn't have to show Adam that he was alone. He didn't have to show him all the animals and their counterparts. He didn't have to then supply the need by putting him to sleep and taking a rib from his side. God created this way in order to establish the meaning of marriage. We need to pay close attention to what God did and what it entails because this is the passage that both Jesus and the Apostle Paul use, they go back to, to explain what marriage is. And it says, we already saw that God made man in his own image in chapter one, verse 27, and woman shares this image of God as does man. It says in verse 27, so God created man in his own image and in the image of God, created he him, male and female, created he them. Adam was made of the dust of the ground, but Eve was made of Adam. What Adam was essentially, so was Eve. Adam was made in the image of God, Eve was taken out of Adam, Eve was also in the image of God. Because she came from Adam, she too was made in God's image. In this ontological sense, this sense of being, Adam and Eve are equals. They were both human beings. They were both made in the image of God, though in different ways. Nevertheless, Adam and Eve, as the prototypical couple, were created for different purposes. Adam was given the responsibility for subduing the earth. And Eve was given the responsibility of being his helper. So the woman, while equal ontologically, was created subordinate functionally. There was a functional subordination of the woman. This is not only seen in God's stated purpose for creating woman, but the act of Adam naming his wife was a clear display of his headship and her subordination. Paul teaches this subjection of wives to husbands. unequivocally in Ephesians 5, 22 through 24. We read, wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, and he is the savior of the body. Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. I know in our post-Christian culture, this is heresy. It's a great heresy to say things like this, to even quote scriptures is a great heresy. But scripture gives this role to wives, not because of the fall into sin, but as the creational pattern. God has a purpose in what he has made, and this was his creational pattern. Eve was created to be Adam's helper. Now, modern feminist interpreters point out that God has many times in scripture called our helper, and he certainly is not subordinate to us. And they say this is the manner in which wives are the helpers of their husband. In other words, they're egalitarians, they don't believe in any kind of subordination. While it is true that God is sometimes called our helper in Scripture, this is not at all referencing authority or submission. The Apostle Paul confirms this fact in 1 Corinthians 11, verses 3, 8, and 9. But I would have you to know that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man. It is also helpful to point out that nowhere in Scripture is a husband called his wife's helper. If there's any doubt that scripture teaches the authority of husbands and the subjection of wives, Paul goes again, he goes back to the creation of man and woman to establish the order of authority. Only in this passage, the context that he's using is the woman's responsibility in the church. It says in 1 Timothy 2 verses 11 through 14, Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." So the Bible categorically establishes the proper arrangement for authority and submission. In this case, in the church, but the foundational principle is found in the creation of the first marriage. This pattern is seen in the way God created man and woman and is expounded by the Bible's own interpretation of this creational ordinance. Now, why is it important for us to point this out? It is important because if we're going to have healthy marriages, they must be based upon these foundational truths of what is the purpose and nature of the marriage relationship. God made the institution of marriage, and therefore, he has a right, he has the right to define its purpose. In practical terms, this means that the husband is responsible for the relationship and is responsible for his wife. You see, authority is given for the purpose of carrying out responsibilities. If you are a husband like me and as we hear about our authority as the head of our wives, if we feel some sense of pride or superiority, know this, that we have been given that position as a stewardship and it's under God and we will be held accountable. for how we have exercised our leadership. And I would like to ask us all, how are we doing with that? Rather than gloating over our authority, we need to take seriously our responsibility. Amen. We should be about the business of stewarding our families. After Adam and Eve fell, who did God hold responsible? He said to Adam, where are you? He didn't come to Eve. He asked Adam, where are you? When Paul is teaching on original sin in Romans 5, verse 12, he says, wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men. And again, in 1 Corinthians 15, 22, it says, for as in Adam, all die. Like it or not, the husband is responsible for the family just as Adam was responsible for his. Andreas Kostenberger has summarized these responsibilities under three heads which will be developed in a future lesson. The first responsibility is that he has the responsibility to love and cherish his wife. His second responsibility is he is to bear the primary responsibility for the marriage. And three, he is to provide for and protect his wife. Likewise, the wives have a critical role in the family. The wife also bears responsibility as is seen in God holding her accountable for her sin. She has a responsibility to be the helper that God has designed her to be. to her own husband. And in her role as helper, number one, she is to be a companion to her husband. In fact, that's the first thing that scripture says, it is not good that man should be alone. He created Eve to be his companion, and she is to fulfill that role. Two, we also see in Genesis that she is to be willing to bear children. Bearing children is part of her responsibility. and she is to manage the household. We see this clearly in the New Testament. Now all this sounds neat and tidy in theory, all these responsibilities, sounds easy, doesn't it? But we also must account for mankind's fall into sin and God's curse on the man and woman and how this negatively affects marriage. There is, in fact, a struggle between the husband and the wife as a result of the curse. And until we grapple with this reality, we may never realize true harmony in marriage. If we think about it, if you look at the stories in the Old Testament and you go through and you look at each marriage that's highlighted there, It is fraught with trouble and problems. It's kind of depressing, actually, when you read through it. It's like, wow, there's some bad, bad marriages in the Bible. And it's a result of this curse that God placed on man and woman, that there was going to be a struggle. And we have to understand this if we are going to avoid the pitfalls that are in marriage. So I'm looking forward to delving into these topics in future lessons as we seek to build up our marriages in this congregation. So as we draw to a close today, I want to give a brief summary of what we've said and offer some exhortation. First, we looked at the creation of mankind and saw that we were created in God's own image, and as our catechism points out, we were created in God's image, especially in these four ways. We were created with knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion. In the Dominion Mandate, it is clear that Adam could not fulfill this mission by himself, and so God creates the woman out of Adam's body to be his companion and be a suitable helper for him in this responsibility. As such, she is made subordinate to him and oriented towards him. Adam then is responsible to subdue the earth, and Eve is responsible to help him in this great task. I went to some length to establish the idea of authority and submission in the marriage relationship, not so husbands can gloat or lord over their wives, but for the purpose of establishing the God-given responsibilities of both husband and wife in marriage. Anytime God's order is upended, chaos results, and we have seen that in our society. We have a crisis in marriages today, and it is important in the effort to strengthen our marriages to clearly define God's intended purpose for it and the roles that he's established in it. The prevalence of fornication, unwed motherhood, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and gender confusion in our society are the direct result of the abandonment of the biblical model of marriage. Neither Christian men or women should ever be embarrassed or apologize for God's design for marriage and the distinctive roles that are in it. Have you ever felt embarrassed sometimes by what the Bible says about men and women and marriage? It's easy to feel embarrassed in our culture because it's heresy. It's heresy to the modern person. Even Christians have unwittingly embraced many of the principles of this rebellion against God. This is partly because of the constant catechizing from the pedagogues of our day. Unless we have been taught from scripture and have actively resisted the lies of our culture, we have no doubt embraced some of these lies. It is impossible to go through secular primary and secondary schooling for 16 years and not be affected by this worldview without extensive education in a biblical worldview. We're going to have these false ideas in our hearts if we haven't been instructed if we haven't embraced what scripture has to say about marriage about men and about women. So I pray that the Lord uses these teachings to build up our marriages and to bring peace and harmony into the homes of every marriage in this congregation. It is possible to have a good marriage. God has set forth the great example of marriage for us in Christ's marriage to the church. And as we learn more about his example, may we be able to experience the wonder of this blessed relationship as the Song of Songs says, I am my beloved's and his desire is towards me. Amen.