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Our scripture reading and the
text for the sermon is Ezra chapter 10. Ezra chapter 10. In order to understand this chapter,
we need to have a bit of historical background to this book. The book of Ezra is a historical
account of the captives who returned from Babylon after some 70 years. And the theme for this book really
is found in chapter 1 in this amazing record in chapter 1,
the very first verses of the chapter in Ezra 1. Now in the
first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of the
lord by the mouth of jeremiah might be fulfilled the lord stirred
up the spirit of cyrus king of persia that he made a proclamation
throughout all the kingdom and put it also in writing saying
thus seth cyrus king of persia the lord god of heaven have given
me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has charged me to build
him and house at jerusalem which is in Judea. Amazing proclamation
by an unbelieving king that God used to set the captives free. As the king goes on in this proclamation,
anybody who's interested in building the temple should go back to
Jerusalem and begin this work. He provided them money and supported
the cause And so the people went back to Jerusalem and began to
build the temple. And the building of the temple
was really a picture, because the temple is a picture of the
church. And by that I don't mean the church building, but I mean
the church itself. the people of the church and
it's a picture of reformation of church reformation bringing
the church back to what it should be according to the scriptures
so the the captives did that they built the temple it took
them many years they went through many obstacles opposition from
many different places but eventually it's built and they can settle
down in the land. About 60 years later, Ezra comes
on the scene, the one after whom the book is named, and he has
now been appointed by the king to be ruler in the land, and
he has come as a scribe, as a teacher, to instruct the people in the
law of God, and he discovers that things are not good. There
are many things that people have departed on, and one of them
is that they have given They've taken to themselves women of
the land, non-Israelites, heathen women, and brought them into
their homes and were living with them in their homes either as
wives or concubines or simply in a relationship of fornication. But they are living with these
women. And it's in that context that
we read chapter 10 of Ezra. Let's read that together. Now
when Ezra had prayed and had confessed, weeping and casting
himself down before the house of God, there assembled unto
him out of Israel a great congregation of men and women and children.
For the people wept sore. And Shechaniah the son of Jehiel,
one of the sons of Elam, answered and said unto Ezra, We have trespassed
against our God and have taken strange wives of the people of
the land. Yet now there is hope in Israel
concerning this thing. Now therefore, let us make a
covenant with our God to put away all the wives, and such
as are born of them, according to the counsel of my Lord, and
of those that tremble at the commandment of our God, and let
it be done according to the law. Arise, for this matter belongeth
unto thee. We also will be with thee. Be
of good courage. and do it. Then arose Ezra and
made the chief priests, the Levites, and all Israel to swear that
they should do according to this word. And they swear. Then Ezra rose up from before
the house of God and went into the chamber of Johanan, the son
of Elishaib. And when he came thither, he
did eat no bread nor drink water, for he mourned because of the
transgression of them that had been carried away. And they made
proclamation throughout Judah and Jerusalem unto all the children
of the captivity that they should gather themselves together unto
Jerusalem. That whosoever would not come
within three days according to the counsel of the princes and
the elders, all his substance should be forfeited and himself
separated from the congregation of those that had been carried
away. Then all the men of Judah and
Benjamin gathered themselves together unto Jerusalem within
three days. And it was the ninth month on
the twentieth day of the month. And all the people sat in the
street of the house of God, trembling because of this matter and for
the great rain. And Ezra the priest stood up
and said unto them, Ye have transgressed and have taken strange wives,
to increase the trespass of Israel. Now therefore make confession
unto the Lord God of your fathers, and do his pleasure, and separate
yourselves from the people of the land, and from the strange
wives. Then all the congregation answered
and said with a loud voice, as thou hast said, so must we do. But the people are many, And
it is a time of much rain, and we are not able to stand without,
neither is this a work of one day or two, for we are many that
have transgressed in this thing. Let now our rulers of all the
congregations stand, and let all them which have taken strange
wives in our cities come at appointed times, and with them the elders
of every city, and the judges thereof, until the fierce wrath
of our God for this matter be turned from us. Only Jonathan,
the son of Asahel, and Jehaziah, the son of Tikva, were employed
about this matter. And Meshulam and Shabbatai, the
Levite, helped them. And the children of the captivity
did so. And Ezra the priest, with certain chief of the fathers,
after the house of their fathers, And all of them by their names
were separated and sat down in the first day of the tenth month
to examine the matter. And they made an end with all
the men that had taken strange wives by the first day of the
first month. And among the sons of the priests
there were found that had taken strange wives, namely of the
sons of Jeshua, the son of Josedek, and his brethren, Maasaiah, and
Eleazar, and Jareb, and Gedaliah. And they gave their hands that
they would put away their wives, and being guilty, they offered
a ram of the flock for their trespass." Now we have the names
of some of the descendants of these priests. And if you will
go next to verse 23, we see, and also of the Levites, and
names of the Levites are given there. Verse 24, of the singers
also, those appointed to sing in the worship services at the
temple. And then of the porters, those
who would care for the building and the furniture of the temple.
And verse 25, moreover of Israel, in a long list of names which
we will not read. And finally, verse 44, the last
verse of the chapter, all these had taken strange wives, and
some of them had wives by whom they had children. So far we
read God's holy word, and there we end the text for the sermon. Beloved in the Lord Jesus Christ,
this chapter is part of a book that has as its theme the building
of the house of God, as we pointed out. And the house of God was
under extreme attack. It wasn't the attack that you
might recognize immediately. It wasn't like Nebuchadnezzar
coming with his armies and pulling down the walls of Jerusalem and
destroying the temple so that there was no building left for
them to worship at. It wasn't an attack such as the
Jews had faced earlier when the nations around them opposed the
building, tried to prevent them from building the temple. It
wasn't that kind of attack. In fact, many people in Israel
didn't even recognize that it was an attack on the house of
God. Amazingly, it's the Israelites themselves, the Jews, who were
the instruments of attack on the house of God. Satan is behind
this, seeking to corrupt the Church of the Old Testament in
this day and bring God's wrath upon the Church. This is something
that Satan used many times in the history of the Church, to
attack the Church, bringing ungodly people into the Church, corrupting
the Church, polluting the worship of the Church, and thereby bringing
God's wrath upon the people of the church. It is noteworthy
that when Satan seeks to introduce godless living and bring unbelievers
into the church, this is an attack on the house of God, on God's
own church. Ezra recognized the attack, recognized
the danger. When Ezra heard that the people
had been marrying heathen wives, taking women into their homes
from the heathen around them, His response to that was astounding. He grabbed a hold of his hair
and he began to rip out pieces of his hair. And he grabbed a
hold of his beard and began to pull out the hair off from his
face. And he took his outer cloak and
ripped it. And took his inner garment and
ripped that. And he sat down, astonished,
staring. in front of the temple of God. He understood the seriousness
of this. Chapter 9 is a confession of
sin wherein he reminds the people by this prayer and confesses
the sins of the people that this is exactly what Israel had done
in the past. And God had brought them into
captivity for associating with the heathen and living like the
heathen. And now they had gone back and
done the same thing all over again. This was a very serious
matter. Those who had returned from captivity
were in danger of losing the house of God and everything that
God had restored to them once again. It was that serious a
matter. And therefore, because the sin
was that serious, it would call for a solution, a remedy, which
was extremely hard. And that is God's word to us
tonight. We consider these verses under
the theme, putting away the strange wives. We'll notice in the first
place, the danger of strange wives. Secondly, the hard remedy. And finally, the abiding lesson. The danger of strange wives,
the unbiblical marriages that Israel had engaged in, And perhaps
even we could broaden it, we need to broaden it, and say that
it isn't merely marriages, but the unbiblical sexual activity
of these people was grievous in the sight of God. Understand
that the word take to themselves, when this speaks of lives, is
not the ordinary word for marriage in the Old Testament. And the
word for putting away in the chapter, as it's found only once,
is not the ordinary word for divorce, for putting away. They
were taking women. Some of them were marrying them.
Some of them were simply living with them. But it was a grievous
situation. They were disobeying the command
of God from every perspective. Before Israel even entered into
the land of Canaan, God warned them, you're going into a land
that is polluted with the abominations of the heathen. Do not associate
with them. Do not marry them especially. Do not bring them into your homes.
Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters
for your sons because they are idolaters and they will corrupt
you as a nation. Prostitution is associated with
their idolatry and even taking children and burning children
to the idols that they worshipped. This is what was found in the
land of Canaan. But Israel did not listen to
the commandments, to the strong warnings that God gave them before
they went into the land. They intermingled with the people.
and began to marry their beautiful women of Canaan. And now, after being thrust out
of the land, the captives have returned to the same sin. Even the priests were marrying,
were taking these women into their homes. Priests who were
to be holy unto the Lord, who before they would go to work
had to wash their hands and feet to symbolize the fact that they
had to be holy, sanctified unto the Lord. And the Levites who
assisted them, who had to be holy unto the Lord as well. And the chief offenders were
the princes. Those are the elders. The elders
of the congregation of the church in the Old Testament were guilty
of bringing these women into their homes. It's astounding. And this is
why Ezra is so shocked. He confessed the sin. And the
people gathered more and more to the temple, weeping because
of the grief that this was in Israel once again. You understand
that this is an attack that Satan uses and the same sins today
are found in the church and are grievous offenses against God. Paul had to warn the church in
his day of the same thing when he wrote to the Corinthians,
there were those in Corinth who still were committing fornication. Some of them even with prostitutes. So he has to warn them in 1 Corinthians
that this was a grievous sin that they were committing. In
1 Corinthians 6, verse 15, No ye not, he says, that your
bodies are the members of Christ. He'll go on to say, your bodies
are the temples of the Holy Spirit. They're temples to be kept holy. And then he says, shall I then
take the members of Christ and make them members of an harlot?
God forbid. And he goes on to show the seriousness
of it as it's connected to marriage. What know ye not that he which
is joined to an harlot is one body? For two, saith he, shall
be one flesh. And Paul was not saying that
if you would commit fornication, you are now married. But he's
saying, look what you're doing to marriage. The most intimate
love that is found in the earth is in marriage. And you're using
that in fornication with a harlot and perverting marriage and the
beautiful love that is found in marriage. Not only that, but
marrying unbelievers as the Israelites were doing is something Paul
had to warn the church in his day against. Again to the Corinthians
he said, do not be unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. And surely marriage is being
yoked together. In chapter 7 he has to tell them,
if you will marry, Marry only in the Lord. Only a Christian
is the only one you may think about marrying as a believer. There are unbiblical relationships
that Paul had to warn against. Fornication, marrying an unbeliever,
and He had to warn against the sin of unbiblical marriages after
a divorce. Jesus had already warned about
that in Mark chapter 10. Jesus said to them, Whosoever
shall put away his wife and marry another, committeth adultery
against her. Adultery against her. And if
a woman shall put away her husband and be married to another, she
committeth adultery. Paul explains that further to
the Romans in chapter 7 verse 3. So then, says Paul, if then
while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she
shall be called an adulteress. But if her husband be dead, she
is freed from that law. But so long as her husband is
alive and she marries someone else and remains in that marriage,
she shall be called an adulteress. This is a threat, this sin, these
sins of unbiblical sexual relationships and unbiblical marriages have
been a threat that have led historically to the corrupting of the church. The Old Testament examples can
be multiplied of how this happened in the church. Think of Israel
in bondage in Egypt. And some of the Egyptians saw
the beautiful Jewish girls and desired to have them as wives. And perhaps these Jewish girls
and maybe their parents thought that wouldn't be so bad. Maybe
we can escape some of the rigors of bondage here as slaves. So
they went ahead, gave their daughters to be married to unbelieving
Egyptians. But when Israel went out of the
land of Egypt, some of these unbelieving Egyptians went with
them. While Moses is up in the mount receiving the law of God
from God Himself. You children know what was happening.
They made a golden calf. They were dancing naked around
that calf, drunken and naked. Why a golden calf? Because that
was one of the main gods of the Egyptians. Those unbelieving
Egyptians led Israel into the grievous sin of making a golden
calf and worshipping it. Or think of the time when Balak,
king of Moab, tried to get Balaam to curse Israel and he couldn't
do it. But then Balaam had another plan.
And that plan was, send your beautiful women in among the
Israelites, cause them to commit fornication, and you will bring
God's wrath upon Israel. And it worked. God sent a plague
among Israel because of the sins of Israel in response to the
young women of Moab. But the most grievous and the
saddest example of all is Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived
on the earth save our Lord Jesus himself. We read in 1 Kings 11,
but King Solomon loved many strange women. Together with the daughter
of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians,
and Hittites of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the
children of Israel, ye shall not go in unto them, neither
shall they come in unto you. They will turn your hearts away
after other gods. Solomon claimed to them 700 concubines, 300 wives. And it came to pass, we read,
when Solomon was old that his wives turned away his heart after
other gods. Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived,
he wrote books of the Bible. And these women turned his heart
to serve the gods of the heathen, turned his heart from Jehovah
God. Not completely, of course, not that he became an unbeliever,
but he walked in grievous sin. This is the threat. The threat is alive and well
in our day and for the church. right here today. There are men, and I'm not accusing
any men here, but the reality is there are men sitting in Protestant
Reformed churches in the pews who have thousands of strange
women in their homes. It's called the Internet. It's
pornography. And they have thousands of women
that they lust after. But before we feel too self-satisfied
that we do not have that, how many of us will pay a cable company
to bring strange women into our own living rooms? Wicked women,
parading around in their movies and television programs that
have no business being in our homes. And fathers will allow
their sons and their daughters to be exposed to the wickedness
of this world. It's not surprising then that
some of those sons and daughters of the covenant will lust after
that kind of lifestyle and that kind of young man or young woman
and pursue those who have only external beauty. and have no
internal love or beauty at all. And they get married. And fathers
give their children into such relationships. And they become
part of the church, even though they do not have any love for
the truth, any love for God. And now we have fathers in the
home that have children in church. have very, very weak homes at
best. This is a threat to the covenant,
to the covenant of God, because of the families that come out
of this. Fathers, they're the head of
the home. They are the ones who set the
rules, not only, but the spiritual climate is determined by the
father. The children will imitate him.
But a father that's an unbeliever who has no interest in the truth,
obviously, does not lead his family in devotions, does not
see to it that his children learn their catechism, has no interest
in reading the Standard Bearer, the Beacon Lights, or any spiritual
thing, or to go into any society, has no interest in that whatsoever.
And that's the climate of the home. For an unbelieving wife,
they raise the children, the mothers in the home. Nehemiah
chapter 13 records exactly what happens when wives are brought
into the church that do not love God, do not know God. We read
in Nehemiah 13.23, In those days also I saw Jews that had married
wives of Ashdod, of Ammon and of Moab, and their children spake
half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews'
language, but according to the language of each people. children
in Israel who did not know the Jewish language. You could say
the name Jehovah to them and it wouldn't mean anything. You
could describe to them the God that created the heavens and
the earth. They wouldn't even understand the language you were
using. That's what happens. Children
that are brought up in the covenant, children who are brought up in
Reformed churches that have no idea of the language of the Reformed
faith, justification and sovereignty and irresistible grace. It means
nothing to them. They don't understand it. The result is the covenant is
profaned. The seed are not instructed.
Children grow up and they do not know the truth. You understand
that's not merely a sad thing that they don't understand, they
don't know the truth anymore, they can't give a good confession
of faith. But if you do not know the truth,
you do not know God. You do not know Jesus Christ
if you do not know the truth. That's how serious it is. Children
growing up in the church that do not know God. It's also true when this threat
is also a part of a church that allows unbiblical divorce and
allows remarriage. Because if you open the door
to any form of divorce and remarriage, you encourage everybody in the
congregation who's not very happy at the moment with the marriage
Well, get a divorce then. If we would open that up, I shudder
to think how many marriages we would see that are struggling.
Pastors know some of them, but there are many more. And in any
given marriage, at any particular time, we can come to the point
and say, I think I could get out of this. But few things destroy a covenant
home and the instruction of children as divorce. One of them leaves and lives
in unbelief. Now the children are required to go to him or
to her and the unbelieving spouse pumps them as full as he can
of the world and the ungodliness and a hatred of God and of his
church. That's why God hates divorce. That's what he says in Malachi
chapter 2. The Lord hath been witness, Malachi 2.14, between
thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt
treacherously. Yet she is thy companion and the wife of thy
covenant. And did he not make one? And
why one? Why did he make husband and wife
to be one that he might seek? a godly seed. It's the children that he's concerned
about. And divorce destroys that, that
unity, that instruction of covenant children and bringing them up
in the fear of the Lord. This is the seriousness of it.
God gathers His church in the line of continued generations.
Building the church, that's what Ezra is all about. Building the
church is something you do in your home when you teach them
catechism, when you send them to the Christian school, when
you instruct them in your own home. As you are instructing
them, you are building the church. That's what you're doing. But
you destroy that home. You bring corruption into that
home. You bring unbelieving spouse into that home. and you do tremendous
damage to the covenant seed. That's what concerned Ezra and
the people that gathered around him. Even those who had not taken
any strange women into their homes, they came to the temple
weeping, weeping because the wrath of God was upon them, weeping
because of their own children, what they would face. For the
cause of God, for His church, for His covenant, they wept. That serious sin, therefore,
all these serious sins, called for a very hard remedy. And that remedy was, put away
the strange wives and put away the children that are born of
them. This was the council of Shekinah.
We don't know anything really about Shekinah, so I can't tell
you anything about the man. He was apparently a leader in
Israel. And he first made a confession
of sin. In verse 2, we have trespassed
against our God. Literally, we have been faithless
against our God and have taken strange wives or women of the
people of the land. Yet now he says, there is hope
in Israel concerning this thing. There is a little bit of hope.
The wrath of God is upon us, but it hasn't destroyed us yet.
If we will confess our sins, if we will turn from this, if
we will do what God demands of us, there is hope. There is hope. And so we advised Ezra as the
God, as the king appointed ruler now of the land in verse three,
now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all
the wives and such as are born of them according to the counsel
of my Lord and of those that tremble at the commandment of
our God and let it be done according to the law. Be of good courage,
he says, do it. Do it. You have the authority
to make this go forward. And so they did. They called
together every single man of the whole nation. Thousands of
men under penalty of excommunication if they would refuse to come
to Jerusalem. And when the people came together,
He told them what they had to do. This is what you must do.
You must swear before God, vow before God, to put away the strange
women, to put away the children that are born of them out of
your houses. And the people agreed in verse
12. Then all the congregation answered
and said with a loud voice, as thou hast said, so must we do. It couldn't be done in a day
or two. It took a couple of months to go through one family after
another, after another, and the witness of the judges of each
city, the rulers of each city, and finally two months later
they finished the work. Making an end to it, says the
Scriptures. Obviously, there were women to
be sent away. There were children to be sent
away. There was support that had to be given for those women
and their children in particular. A hard remedy. There are principles
that apply to us. And first of all, the first thing
that we need to say here is not that we are here getting a new
ground for divorce. It's not that. Again, as I pointed
out, marriage isn't the word used here, and God is not saying,
well, if you married an unbeliever, then you have a right to divorce
her. That's not the message that He is giving us here. We'll talk
about that more later. But certainly there are things
that apply to us, and first of all, It indicates that repentance
demands forsaking sin. Repentance demands that we break
it off, that we put it far away from us. If we do not take that
sin and put it far away from us, it will continue to be a
snare. We cannot hope that we will now
be able to live in the presence of that sin and still fight against
it and go on obeying God. It will not happen. It will drag
us back. Repentance means that we make
a break, a complete break from the sin. Secondly, anything that
leads to sin in our lives must be put out of it. Jesus said
the same thing in a way that is so striking. In Matthew 5,
29 and 30, Jesus said this, And if thy right eye offend thee,
that is, if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and
cast it from thee. For it is profitable for thee
that one of thy members should perish, and that not thy whole
body should be cast into hell. And now we're thinking, really?
Take my eye out and throw it away? And if we think he's not
serious, then he says, and if thy right hand offend thee, cut
it off and cast it from thee for the same reason. Now, when
you examine that, you think there are two things here that Jesus
has just referred to that are probably the two most important
things we have on our bodies, our eyes. We need our eyes to
be able to see, to be able to function, to be able to gather
information. And we need our hands, because
this is how we do everything, with our hands. When Jesus word
to us then, It does not matter how important this thing is to
you. If it's causing you to sin, get
it out of your life. Get it out of your life. You
must. It will be a snare. No matter how painful it may
be, We must be willing to do what is necessary to root sin
out of our lives and to root sin out of the congregation,
as Ezra was doing here in this chapter. God calls us to antithetical
living. That's another message from this
chapter, antithetical living. And that's something very hard
for us, because we have a flesh that loves sin. It doesn't matter
what the world puts out there, there's a part of our flesh that
is attracted to that. And therefore, it's a desirable
thing for our flesh now that we walk as close to the line
of the world as we possibly can, without being consumed by it,
we hope, but sometimes stepping over the line, because after
all, we enjoy, our flesh enjoys some of the life of the world.
This passage is showing us that will not work. You must not walk
as close as you can to the world, but you must rather get as far
away from the world as you can. Put that ungodly person out of
your life. There's no room for that. You
cannot live in the same home with an unbeliever and walk as
a child of God. That cannot happen. You may not
be unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. But that brings
up a very difficult question. Do you put away a wife for that? For the sake of being obedient
to God, as we just outlined here, that we repent and put away the
thing that causes us to sin, live an antithetical life, could
it possibly mean that we would actually put away a wife, send
away children? in order to be obedient to God? And the answer of the text is
yes. Under certain circumstances,
yes. Especially, of course, in this
passage when they were not legitimate marriages. They were not legitimate. But the important thing is that
we are willing to do what is necessary to be obedient to God,
no matter how hard, no matter how painful that may be. That's true of all our relationships
in life. Jesus said something else that
is astounding and something difficult to understand when He said, Whosoever
does not hate father and mother, brother and sister, husband or
wife, is not worthy of me. What does that mean? All the
children here know that we are supposed to love our father and
mother. That's the commandment. Honor
thy father and thy mother means love them. Every husband here
knows, the Bible says repeatedly, love your wife. Every wife here
knows, the Bible says, love your husband. And yet Jesus says,
whosoever does not hate father, mother, brother, sister, husband
or wife, is not worthy of me." What does that mean? He doesn't
mean, well, you have to love them less than you love me. But
this is the kind of hatred referred to in Psalm 139. Do I not hate
them that hate thee? I hate them with a perfect hatred. We're talking about a father
or mother who is seeking to lead us into sin. a father or mother
that hates God and has made that abundantly obvious and is trying
to lead us as His children into abominable activity. We're talking
about brother or sister that has turned against God and therefore
hates Him and is seeking to draw us away, or even a husband or
wife. And that's a very difficult thing
because there's a part of us that still has to love them and
say, I could wish that they would be turned from their iniquity,
but so long as they manifest their hatred of God, we must
hate them. And the same thing is true, the
same painful reality is found with an unbiblical marriage,
with someone who is divorced and then married again. This
is the Bible's position. They are living in adultery.
The only way to escape the adultery is to end the marriage. And that's hard. And that's painful. And I've dealt with that as a
pastor. I know the pain. And somebody may come and say,
really? You think the Bible demands of
me that I leave this husband of many years? What about the
children here? This is too hard. God would not
require of me that I would send that man out of my house. But
you see, Ezra 10 says God does require that sometimes. He does. Painful though that may be, God
does require even that sometimes in our lives. A hard remedy. But for us, an abiding lesson. And the lesson is, first of all,
live in obedience. That's what this chapter is all
about, obeying God. Israel was disobeying God, going
back on old commandments, turning them around and disregarding
them. Especially as regards relationships,
because that's particularly what's at the forefront here. They were
having improper relationships with the heathen of this world,
taking them into their homes, even marrying them. All our relationships,
all our relationships. Now we have to be very introspective
here and not point fingers around at the other people or at other
church, other areas of the church. All my relationships, all your
relationships must be pleasing to God. The question is not,
do I have fun with this friend? The question is not whether this
friend is popular, whether this friend can do something for me
in the future. The only question is, does God
approve of this relationship that I have with this person? Does God approve? If not, send
them away. And especially in marriage, because
marriage is the most important relationship we have in this
life. It's the most important relationship
because it is a picture of Christ and His church. And when a believer
takes an unbelieving woman and takes her into his home and marries
her, what he's doing is perverting the picture of Christ, who died
for His church, who couldn't live with this polluted bride
unless he would purchase her with his own blood and sanctify
her by his blood and spirit. Only then can he live with her.
And we're perverting that. Or when a believing woman takes
an unbelieving man to be her husband, she is perverting the
picture and it's like the church turning away from Christ and
turning to other lovers in this world and worshiping them instead
of Jesus Christ. It's a perverting of the very
beautiful picture of Christ and His church. It's the most important
relationship, practically speaking, because it's the single most
important decision that anyone here will ever make. Whom you
marry will determine who your friends are, what your home is
like, where you will go to church, everything. Whom you marry will
set the course of your life to the end. and the importance for the church
and covenant. Those who marry unbelievers bring
them into the church, weaken the church, will bring those
who do not delight in the truth or in a proper worship of God,
and eventually will worship idols. If they become dominant, if they
take over the church, The church turns into, the worship service
turns into idolatry, not the worship of Jehovah God. We must
not think, oh, not in Byron Center PRC. It can happen in any church. If the covenant, if the unbelievers
marry into the church the covenant seed, is affected tremendously. Will your children be trained
in the truth? Will they know the truth and
love it and be stalwart sons and daughters in the congregation?
Or will they despise the truth, want nothing to do with it, and
leave it as fast as they can? That's what we're talking about.
It's the future. It's the children. That's why marriage is so vitally
important for the Church of Jesus Christ. So it comes to us as
parents that we heed the lesson that we never ever give our daughter
to an unbiblical marriage. Never allow them to be in a relationship
that is unbiblical. That we not allow our son to
marry a woman that is an unbeliever. We may not. Husbands and wives,
parents have to be involved in their children's selection. Not
that we set the marriage, not that we determine who our children
marry, but we instruct them. And we don't wait until they're
about our height and they're about ready now to go out on
their first date. But it starts when they're this
tall. And we're telling them Bible stories such as Abraham
sending his servant off to a faraway land to find a suitable wife
for Isaac. Why? Weren't there any beautiful
women in Canaan? Weren't there any women in Canaan
who were rich and prosperous that would be a good match for
Isaac? Weren't there any women in Canaan
who were athletic and popular? That's not the question. There
were no godly women in Canaan. Abraham had to make sure that
Isaac married a God-fearing woman. You start instructing them when
they're five so that when they're 15, there's no question about
what kind of a husband, what kind of a wife they are seeking. And to us as covenant youth, we need
to hear this. It starts with keeping ourselves
pure from a sexual point of view. What we're watching, what we're
listening to, what we're reading, what entertains us, not the world. Wrong standards, wrong in every
point of view. And with dating it means that
we start with an unbeliever, we wouldn't even think about
dating an unbeliever, a Christian only. And if it's a Christian
then obviously we want a reformed Christian. We want someone who
will be one with us in the faith. Someone who is truly reformed
or who wants to be reformed so that there can be unity in the
church not only but unity in our own home. We want that. We
seek that. The way of obedience is the way
of blessing. Even if there is sin, yet there
is hope in Israel. If there's a turning away from
it, if there's doing what God demands of us, there is hope
in Israel. There is a blessing, a home that
is united in Jesus Christ. A home where father and mother
are teaching the children the same thing, so that you don't
have dad coming home from work and the children run up and say,
dad, dad, mom said this. And he says, oh no. She's teaching them that. But
rather, he can say, that's right. That's
exactly what we believe. Because husband and wife are
unified in the faith. and they're giving children the
instruction that is consistent from both of them. That's the
blessing of obedience to Ezra chapter 10. Let us heed the warning
and let us do it for the sake of God's church and His covenant. Amen. Let us pray. Father in heaven, Thou art faithful,
and Thy ways are good always. We are the ones who confess our
unfaithfulness, and we pray, Lord, that Thou will turn us,
make us to be obedient, and bless us in the way of obedience to
Thy commandments. Bless us especially as the youth-seeking
godly spouses And bless us, especially in our marriages. Preserve us,
O Lord, by Thy grace and Spirit. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen. Psalter number 27. We start out singing, O God,
preserve me. And then we sing of our love
for God's people. All the stanzas, number 27. Christ be the Lord, he looks
above, in yonder round he lies, and as the Lord he saves me, though
in his grace he lies. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you
all. Amen.
Putting Away The Strange Wives
| Sermon ID | 828161946267 |
| Duration | 56:59 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | Ezra 10 |
| Language | English |
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