Bitter Marriage

Bitter Marriage and Esau’s Canaanite Wives

Well, there's more people than I was expecting to see, which is good. And if you've looked at the bulletin, you'll see the title for our focus this morning, which is verses 34 and 35 in Genesis 26, is bitter marriage.

So we assume the families that are not here have the marriages that are sweet and that we're the ones that need the instruction from God's word. We'll assume that for now. Now, we're continuing, of course, in chapter 26, and we began chapter 26 by looking at the parallels between Abraham and Isaac, like father, like son.

We saw that really in the past two weeks, between the deceit in the land of Gerar, passing off his bride as his sister, and then also the well digging and the disagreement that he had with Abimelech, and then ultimately the covenant that resulted from that disagreement.

And so we've been watching this mirrored relationship, like father, like son, like Abraham, like Isaac. And this morning, in verses 34 and 35, we shift our attention to Esau, and in light of what we have seen in chapter 26, we now look at just how unlike a father can be from a son.

Esau, in this passage, bears almost no resemblance to Isaac, his father, nor Abraham, his grandfather. And so we begin in verse 34. When Esau was 40 years old, he took as wives Judith, the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bassamath, the daughter of Elon the Hittite.

Now the detail of Esau's age when he's married brings us back to Isaac, and perhaps this is the only parallel between Esau and Isaac in this chapter. When Isaac married Rebekah, he was 40 years old. When Esau marries, he also is 40 years old, but the parallel stops there.

We remember, of course, the grand effort of Abraham when he sent out that servant to seek a bride for his son, and how it must not be among the women of Canaan. It must not be among the idolaters, the pagans.

Whereas Esau literally doubles down with Canaanite women, with idol worshipers. He doesn't marry just one, but two. He marries Judith and Bassamath. We'll call them Judy and Baz for short. And they're both Hittites.

They both worship the gods of the Hittites. They're polytheist idolaters. And so here Esau defies the way that his father and his grandfather had ordered their way before the Lord. Here Esau ultimately defies God's promise concerning the land and his place within it.

Remember what Abraham heard in Genesis 24, verse 3. This is what Abraham said to the servant, I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell.

So the servant had to swear this. Isaac would have been deeply influenced by this. And of course, we consider that great scene when Rebekah came from afar. And we find Esau here who has just come off the heels of despising his birthright, now also despising and disregarding the way of God toward his own father.

As Jeff Thomas points out, there's often newly converted Christians. They haven't grown up in Christian homes. They haven't experienced Christian influence in their upbringing. And when they come to Christ and they give their lives over to Him, they have a whole new world to learn.

They don't understand the baggage that they have. They don't understand the issues in their relationships that Christ needs to correct and redeem. And so they have a pretty steep learning curve about what it means to be a Christian and how to have Christian conduct in relationships, in the workplace, in the home.

But we can't say that of Esau. Esau, of course, had the direct influence of Abraham, at least for the first part of his life. And then the godly influence of Isaac, his father. And Isaac was not a perfect man.

We'll see that just in a few minutes. But according to Hebrews, he at least foretold his two sons of the things to come. Of course, he bore testimony to them of the way of the Lord. And we see Esau, what Hebrews says, a profane and godless man, resisting this direction, this influence, this guidance from his father.

He really was a favored man for being born into this family at this time. And yet he deliberately pursues a polygamous pagan marriage, a godless marriage. And what of his wives? We read in the next verse, verse 35, they were a grief of mind to Isaac and Rebekah.

Grief of mind here in Hebrews, literally a bitter spirit, a morat ruach, a bitter spirit, a profound sadness, might even be expressing overtones of hostility they showed toward Isaac and Rebekah. Perhaps all smiles at the beginning and then sneers or open hostility.

Perhaps they were provocateurs in those family dynamics. And so they were continually this bitter spirit, this grief of mind to Isaac and Rebekah, who had heartache now for their son Esau. They're watching him slip further and further away.

It must have been like David watching his son Solomon slip further and further away. We have here another case of leaving and cleaving gone horribly wrong. This is not how it should be. Imagine how happy Abraham was when Rebekah came across the horizon to be united with Isaac for the first time.

When the servant's mission was successful, Abraham's heart must have leaped for joy. Now he knows that his son will be secure in the way of God, that his wife will not undermine his devotion to the Lord, but rather enhance it.

Continue in this devotion to Yahweh. Continue in this encouragement into the promise in the land. Abraham could have lived out his years in contentment with the marriage of Isaac to Rebekah, but now Isaac has to dwell with grief and regret.

This is not how it's meant to be. Rather than a joyous marriage that the parent can rejoice over, Isaac here has a bitter sorrow at the decision of his son. Instead of thanking the Lord for new mercies and hopes for the generation to come, now he has this bitter regret.

And you wonder if Isaac and Rebekah often at night would discuss where things went wrong, perhaps blaming themselves in many ways. And perhaps they should have. This is a narrative setup, ultimately not for Esau's sake, but for the sake of Jacob.

This is giving us the contrast between the line of Esau, the line of the serpent, so to speak, the sword running through that tent, and the line of God, the sons of God, ultimately the Son of God. And so we read in the next chapter, in chapter 27, verse 46, how this contrast begins to develop.

Rebekah says to Isaac, I'm weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth, right, one of the Canaanites. If Jacob takes a wife of the daughters of Heth like these, who are the daughters of the land, what good will my life be to me?

So she's already so grieved by what Esau has done in marrying these two women, and he'll go on to marry two more, according to the genealogy in chapter 36. She says, if Jacob goes down this path, my life is over.

I've got nothing left to live for if Jacob continues in this direction. If Jacob does what Esau has done, my life is as good as over. And then in verse 28, interestingly, we read Isaac calling Jacob, blessing him, and charging him.

Notice that language. He charged him, saying to him, you shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. Arise, go to Paddan Aram, to the house of Bethuel, your mother's father. Take yourself a wife there of the daughters of Laban, your mother's brother, keeping it within that family, within that covenantal lineage.

Now here we see an Isaac that we have not detected so far in Genesis 26, 34, and 35. Here he seems to step up to the plate, where we can read between the lines, perhaps he had failed with Esau. We never read of Isaac charging Esau or giving this kind of specific instruction.

Here, Isaac sounds a lot like Abraham, but Esau never had that benefit. As far as we can tell, Isaac charges Jacob to avoid a mixed marriage. But we get the sense Esau never had such a charge. For instance, we keep reading in 28, beginning in verse 6, Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan Aram to take himself a wife from there.

And that as he blessed him, he gave him a charge, saying, you shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. And he saw that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother and had gone to Paddan Aram.

Also, Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan did not please his father Isaac. And so Esau went to Ishmael and took Mahalot, the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham's son. You see what's going on here? Esau's recognizing, oh, my father has blessed my younger brother.

And not only has he blessed him, he's charged him not to marry a Canaanite wife. And I've already got two of them. And oh, I can tell my father does not approve of these wives. And I want to please him.

And I want that blessing. And so I'm going to go marry within the Abrahamic household as well. I'm going to go to Ishmael and marry a daughter of Ishmael. So you get the sense here that Isaac had dropped the ball with Esau.

That Esau had never been charged. That Esau was not aware of this displeasure of Isaac toward Canaanite women. We get the sense that Esau had been failed as a son. Now, that doesn't mean he did not act brashly.

We don't know if he never sought appropriate counsel from his parents. He's a man driven by his belly, a man driven by the needs of the hour. And we can perfectly be consistent with his character for him to charge off into marriage against the wishes or even the counsel of his parents.

But we also get the sense that Isaac was miserably passive here. And that the failure of Esau's marriages woke him up to charge and command Jacob to not take a similar path. And so there's a lot hanging into this bitter spirit that has come about.

We live in a day, brothers and sisters, where a parental blessing on a marriage is something despised. We live in a culture where that is something to be discouraged. It's old-fashioned for a young man to go and seek the approval of the father.

And so how does our culture do things? How does our world do things today? Well, you go off to college, and they meet, and they live together for years, and the parents are completely detached, only on specific holidays or get-togethers will they ever even meet this lover to one of their children.

And then they'll find out, perhaps after friends have found out, that a proposal has taken place. And the counsel is never sought, a blessing is never given nor received. We live in a day when this parental blessing is despised.

And Christians must be sure, must be quick to understand that this parental blessing is part of our theology of marriage. It's part of our understanding of the authorities that God has established for his people.

And that means that even when, perhaps, a young woman that you're seeking is a relatively new convert to Christ, and her parents don't know Christ, and they really want nothing to do with her relationships, and they would almost feel uncomfortable if you even sought to ask for their approval for their daughter's hand in marriage, well, you still do it.

You still do it. Because you're a Christian. This is how Christians operate. This is how Christians understand authorities within their lives. For every Esau in the church, there are passive parents like Isaac's.

For every defiant, stubborn child that refuses to heed the wisdom and concern of their parents, there are also passive parents that refuse to confront or direct or guide their children. And so there are parents like Isaac who would rather endure decades of bitterness in their children's relationships than do the hard work of training up their child in the way they should go, directing them, even, perhaps, confronting them when they're going astray.

And it has to be this understanding that children recognize where God's blessing is found, and therefore, they seek the parents' blessing in their relationships. They seek their parents' counsel in their decisions.

When it comes to the most important of all human relationships, a marriage between a man and a woman, Christians seek to marry in the Lord. A few holidays ago, I had ordered a gift for Alicia from a website I found that sold some Scottish goods, loyal to the motherland, as always.

And I didn't know anything about the name of this website. But they had all sorts of things about marriage, and you could buy all these different anvil ornaments. And I'm like, this is kind of strange, whatever.

Must be some tourist attraction. Didn't think too much of it. Well, the website, the storefront, the destination is called Gretna Green. And Gretna Green has its fame, since I've learned, due to runaway marriages in Scotland in the 18th century.

In 1754, there was a Marriage Act that was enforced in England and in Wales. However, it was never ratified and enforced in Scotland. The Marriage Act required children or those under the age of 21 to have their parents' approval in marriage.

And if the parent didn't approve, then it was legally vetoed. A binding marriage could not be legally recognized. But since this was only in England and Wales, and in Scotland this act was not legally binding, it was possible to follow the Scottish law, which at that time was a boy as young as 14 could marry a girl as young as 12.

You know, how mature is that marriage going to be? Well, the times were different, I suppose. And that's without parental consent. So what do you think a lot of young English boys and girls and a lot of young Welsh boys and girls did?

They ran to the first stop across the English border into Scotland, which happened to be Gretna Green. And Scotland recognized irregular marriages, meaning anyone that could be there with two or three witnesses to an exchange of a marital covenant could authorize that marriage.

And so you had blacksmiths, hence the anvil, ordaining marriages. Thousands, tens of thousands of marriages that were sought without any parental approval. In fact, in defiance of perceived disapproval from their parents.

Matthew Henry says this well, children have little reason to expect the blessing of God, who do that which is a grief of mind to their good parents. God has so ordered his world and established relationships in the life of a believer that we should expect not the blessing of God when we seek not the counsel and the blessing of our parents.

This is part of what is redemptive about Jacob's character up to this point. As deceitful as he is, he's actually seeking his parents' blessing. And as we watch God's grace begin to untwist the twister, God's mercy begin to lay hold of the heel grasper, we'll see that God's grace is going to purge these deceitful tendencies out of Jacob and, in fact, enhance his desire for the blessing, not through Isaac, but from God himself.

That's really the climax of the Jacob cycle. The question stands before us, do we recognize that God's blessing follows the ordered relationships he has put in our lives? Young men and women, do you recognize that God's blessing is not irrespective to your parents' blessing?

Do you recognize that? That even ungodly, unbelieving, and deceived parents still have your best interests in their heart, however misconstrued. And like Jacob, you want to humble yourself and seek their favor, their blessing as you are able under the terms of the gospel.

How seriously will you heed this warning? When you get older, you start seeking relationships, and relationships start seeking you. I look forward, yes, as a father of three young girls, I look forward to the young men that are going to have to court me and court my favor in order to get close to one of my daughters.

I have all sorts of things planned, and I have more years to plan yet. Perhaps some of you young boys here, you know, will have that experience. That'll be fun. Do you recognize that God's blessing follows the authorities that he's established in your life?

This is something that Jacob has to learn the hard way. He's going to learn it the hard way under Laban, that God's blessing is going to come under authority, and even when that authority brings about unfair treatment, he submits to it, and he finds God's blessing.

And this is a vital lesson for especially a young man or a young woman to learn, but it's a lesson life teaches you all along the way. When you submit to difficult circumstances because you're following God's way, you will find God's blessing.

When you seek blessing by avoiding what God has given, you will never find it. We live in a world that screams to us in almost every cultural outlet imaginable that our instincts are inviolable. What do my parents know?

They're old-fashioned. They have ulterior motives. What do they know? I know in my gut what's right for me because I've walked the earth for 18 years. I have all this wisdom, right? What do my parents know?

They're so outmoded. They just don't get it. They're not with it. I know me, and they don't even understand this relationship. They don't know us. I still, I mean, I was already into the flow of walking with the Lord and, you know, desiring to build a Christian marriage when I sat down in front of Pastor Larson and Alicia and I, and we just went over some of the basics of marriage, and I just remember in the back of my mind thinking, I know you're supposed to do the whole preamble about common issues in marriage and, you know, let down expectations and difficulties that come, and I'm just thinking in the back of my mind, we got it, you know.

Alicia and I, we're just, you know, we're unique. Not going to have those kind of issues. We delude ourselves. We delude ourselves. Young men and young women are especially prone to deluding themselves and ignoring the wise concern, the wise counsel of their parents who know them better than they know themselves and who know life more than they know it and who understand the difficulties and hindrances of relationships.

Do you believe that God works through the authorities in your life, or do you follow the way of the world that says, go with your gut, your heart's never wrong, obey your feelings? That will be your guiding compass.

Muzzle any voice that is older and wiser and more experienced. And more concerned for you and more desirous of your good and has sober discernment and is not caught up in the flow of things, who knows you and knows your whole life.

Ignore that and follow your gut. It's foolishness. How do you understand the blessing and will of God to come about in your life? So that's the question, and it's one that we'll see again being asked in the life of Jacob.

Intermarriage, Covenant Separation, and the Reformation of the Family

Now, we turn our attention over to the matter of intermarriage itself. Intermarriage, of course, is a constant refrain throughout Scripture. You cannot read much of Scripture at all in terms of the story of Israel without seeing this as a central concern of the Lord for His people, that they would separate themselves from the peoples of the lands, that the holy seed, so to speak, would not be mixed, would not be polluted.

We have this not only contained really in seed form here in Genesis, but flowering beginning in Exodus. The Lord said, Behold, I make a covenant. This is Exodus 34. Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you're going, lest it be a snare in your midst.

You shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, cut down their wooden images, for you shall worship no other God, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. Verse 15, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land and they play the harlot with their gods and make sacrifice to their gods.

And one of them invites you and you eat of his sacrifice and you take of his daughters for your sons and his daughters play the harlot with their gods and make your sons play the harlot with their gods.

And so Joshua can say the same thing. He says there'll be snares, traps to you, scourges on your sides, thorns in your eyes until you perish from the land which God has given to you. This is how serious these subtle relationships are.

And God is screaming the alarm at his people. We read, of course, the sad tale in Judges, beginning in Judges three, the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, and they took their daughters to be their wives, they gave their daughters to their sons, and they served their gods.

And so they did evil in the sight of the Lord and they forgot the Lord their God from serving Baals and Asherahs. They forgot the Lord their God. I know, I know men my age whose choices mimic that of Esau and whose life right now could be described by that verse.

They forgot the Lord their God. They forgot the name of the Lord under whom they were baptized, the name of the Lord whose bread they broke and cup they drank. They forgot the Lord their God. And so, of course, the point wasn't that God is obsessive about strangers in the land, he's somewhat xenophobic.

The point is crystal clear in Judges three, isn't it? The point is about his people's relationship to him. This is why you must not intermarry, because I have called you to be separate. I've made you holy.

You are my special possession. And so because of your relationship to me, you must not be led astray. You must not intermarry. If we can paint the history of Israel through Judges, through the dynastic period, think of the great refrain of all these kings, whether of Israel or Judah, that did evil in the sight of the Lord, were led astray to serve false gods, or even under the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah.

Remember in Ezra 9 when it's reported that among the priests they were intermarrying. The summary would be something like this. The reformation of a society begins with the reformation of a church. The reformation of society begins with the reformation of the church.

The reformation of the church begins with the reformation of the family. And the reformation of the family begins with the formation of a godly marriage. This goes in either direction. Marriage, a marriage between a man and a woman, is within the creational paradigm the original society of humanity, and so it is the keystone to all human society.

Marriage is the bedrock of human civilization, and so this vital connection between the reformation of a society and the formation of a godly marriage, or the disintegration of a society because of the disintegration of marriage.

It goes in either direction. If you want to change the culture, you need to change the church. If you want to change the church, you need to change the home. If you want to change the home, you need to form a godly marriage.

In other words, there's a multi-generational aspect to a mixed marriage. Whenever God addresses his people about mixed marriages, it's never just about the husband and the wife. It's also about that which comes from the husband and the wife.

It's about the legacy of that marriage, about the issue from that marriage. There is no in-between. You either have multi-generational faithfulness or multi-generational compromise. As with everything in life, there's no neutrality, and so the Bible urges us to be earnest about this.

Psalm 78, he establishes a testimony to Jacob. He appoints a law on Israel which he commands our fathers, that they should make them known to their children, that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they might arise and declare them to their children, so that they may set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments, not to be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that never set its heart aright and whose spirit was not faithful to God.

This is verse 4, going back a bit, in Psalm 78. This is the confession of the psalmist. We will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord and his strength and the works he has done.

Psalm 145, one generation shall praise your works to another, they shall declare your mighty acts. So not just proclaim, but praise, and one of the ways that God's works and name is praised is in the context of a godly marriage.

A godly marriage perhaps is the greatest beacon to godliness that our society can see. It's a subtle, less obvious influence that we think it has, when in actuality it's one of the brightest beacons to the effects of the gospel and the difference that Christ makes in a person's life.

It's in a marriage, it's in a relationship between a husband and a wife. The world, it's not just that the world can't understand it, the world can't even compute. How is it possible for a man and a wife to be like this, for a man and a woman to live like this?

And this is the problem with a mixed marriage. Abraham Kuyper, I think I've mentioned him before, excellent theologian. Depending on where you are and understanding how Christianity engages with culture, you may have some grains of salt to pick with Abraham Kuyper, I certainly do in some respects, but more to gain than to lose with him.

He's a Dutch theologian, actually at one time the prime minister within the Netherlands, and he wrote several really important works, some of which are just now being translated into English. He wrote one work called Pro Rega, so For the King, and it's all about a cultural view of Christ's kingship.

How does Christ's kingship affect every other facet of life, every relationship or sphere of life? That's the tag for Kuyper. If you think Abraham Kuyper, you think sphere sovereignty, Christ's kingship over every sphere of life.

And he asked this question, in what sense is a family Christian? In what sense is a family Christian? And he says, you may easily be tempted to call a household Christian just because the Bible is read every morning or every afternoon, and because the members of that home pray, they rest on the Lord's day, when the situation is in fact one where the husband and wife are not one but two, and where no care is given to the way the children are raised.

Do you see what he's connecting here? He's saying what makes a home a Christian home? It's not the rituals within the home, using the Bible like a talisman, using the duties and traditions of the week, but it's actually the relationship between a husband and his wife and how they're raising their children.

Kuyper says that is what makes a home a Christian home, where the husband and the wife are not two but one, where care and thought and strategy and prayer is poured over the children being raised. That is what makes a home a Christian home, where there's not a division or a lack of unity or a lack of concern or even a lack of mission, but there's actually this great unity such that the two have become one, flesh of flesh and bone of bone, and that unity is driven with concern not only for each other but for their children, and that drives them toward mission, mission not only in their home but through their home.

That's what makes a household a Christian household. When we start connecting this to the language of the prophets, to the language of Paul calling Christians to be separated from the world, we realize there's really no difference here.

I mean we can talk about Paul spiritualizing the warnings of God to the people Israel, but ultimately he's really just doing the same thing the prophets are doing. Don't mixed marry. It's just as physical as it is spiritual.

Don't be yoked with an unbeliever. That's essentially what a prophet would say to an Israelite. Don't be yoked with an idolater. Don't be yoked with an unbeliever. What do these things have in common?

What fellowship do they have? How can you put white light with darkness? That's where Paul goes with it, and so we have this picture that Paul gives us in light of Malachi 2, Jeremiah 31, all these places where God says, this is what I've done so that I would be a husband to my people, that they would be my bride, and Paul picks that up in Ephesians 5 and he develops it, and he essentially is saying the same thing where a man and a woman are not united as one in worship.

They're not reflecting the relationship of God to his people, and this is part of the great mystery of marriage. To marry an unbeliever, to marry Judy and Boz is just dragging Baal into the temple of God.

That's what Paul says. What part has a believer with an unbeliever? What agreement does the temple of God have with idols? You are the temple of the living God, and so he quotes the same language because it's the same application for the same situation.

Come out from them and be separate. In other words, we have to have the same identity that the Israelites were meant to have, not on ethnic lines, but ethnicity and culture and religion were never and have never been neat little compartments that can be easily separated, and so while the Israelites were called to separate in an ethnic way, it was still no less a cultural and religious separation, and that's what every Christian is called to have, a cultural religious separation, because what is culture?

It's Henry Van Til famously observed, but religion externalized. That's all culture is. It's religion externalized, and so Paul says essentially you're under the same direction for the same issue, the same circumstance as the Israelites.

Come out from among them. Do not be yoked to that which is unclean, to that which is idolatrous. You are a temple of the Lord. You are his special possession, his treasure. In other words, Paul understands the Reformation of a society begins with the Reformation of a church, and the Reformation of the church begins with the Reformation of the family, and the Reformation of the family begins with a godly marriage.

So married couples, are you projecting this sense of unity, concern, mission-orientedness in your relationship? Are you experiencing this sense that there's a higher purpose to your marriage because you are Christians, that your marriage has been made holy?

It's set apart from other marriages that God has given to humanity, marriage being a creation ordinance. Is your marriage such that that higher calling, that mission orientation is visible within your home, such that your children aspire to marry in the Lord?

In fact, they're very guarded and very concerned to not be led astray, to not do the wrong things or take the wrong steps in a relationship, and to be very quick to look for your blessing as a godly parent and influence in their life.

This is what we all want. We don't want any Gretna Greene situations in GRBC, right? Marriage is meant to be this picture frame, beholding the joy of the Lord, the joy of his union with his people. It's meant to be the sweetest gift that can be experienced on this earth, horizontally between a man and a woman.

Five Counsel for Avoiding a Bitter Marriage

So if it's meant to be the sweetest gifts, how are we going to avoid a bitter marriage? And I want to give five very basic tips to avoiding a bitter marriage. Now the first is perhaps the most vital and the most obvious.

It's always the very beginning of every marital ruffle, discouragement, and strife. The first is this, love your spouse. Love your spouse. Love your spouse. This is not advice, this is a command. It's a command given to a husband and given to a wife.

Husbands, love your wives. Wives, see to it that you love your husbands. And as with all commands that God gives us in his word, when it's easy, it's easy. It's easy to love your wife when your wife is lovely.

It's easy to love your husband when your husband is lovely. When it's hard, it's really hard. And that's why we have it as a command. When it's hard, you don't have the excuse to stop obeying. You don't obey this command to love your spouse based on the ebb and flow of how you're perceiving the relationship to be and whether your needs and wants are being met and whether you're pulling more weight.

That's not the issue here. You're commanded to love your spouse. So love your spouse. The command is given to you to love your spouse, irrespective of how your spouse is loving or failing to love you.

You are called by God to love your spouse, so love your spouse. Now I say that, and then I have to quickly qualify it as the Puritans would. Primarily, it is the husband's responsibility to be the fountain of love in the marriage relationship.

If the husband is the covenant head, if the husband is the one who cannot say like Adam, it was the woman you gave to me. If God comes looking for Adam, irrespective of what took place between Eve and the serpent and the fruit of the tree, it's the man's responsibility to ensure that he's doing his part to love his bride as Christ loved the church.

And we know that Christ loved the church even when the church was an enemy unto him. So husbands, love your wives. What does Colossians 319 say? You almost couldn't design it better. Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them.

If you don't want a bitter marriage, the husband needs to love his wife in a way that he's not bitter toward her. Husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies, Paul says. He who loves his wife loves himself.

No one ever hated his own flesh. Paul's saying if you don't love your wife, you don't love yourself, because you and your wife are one. So if you love yourself, you're gonna love your wife, because you and your wife are one.

And so love in this way is meant to be the greatest comfort, the greatest joy in marriage. There's this love. And everything in a marriage becomes high stakes. You love this person who knows you so well inside and out, and when it gets hard, when the relationship begins to face some struggles or some trials or some miscommunication or some distance, you're more vulnerable and threatened than you could ever imagine.

This person that you shared so much of your life with and so much of yourself with has power to ruin you. And if anything in this relationship, it can be mutually assured destruction, as it was between the US and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

You just proliferate words and memories and exchanges and all those spats and arguments you've had before, and it just keeps ratcheting up, because you're so threatened and so vulnerable. And love has to disarm, and love has to forget, and love has to cover, and it can't be bitter, and it can't be resentful, and it can't cling to things, and it can't say, oh, you know, yeah, on the treaty we're good, but I still have all this back here.

If we ever really go at it again, love your spouse. This is a Puritan, Richard Steele, he says, this love is not merely romance, right? Everyone knows romance doesn't last too long. And then you realize that romance isn't really true love, as our culture would lead you to believe, right?