On Marriage and Chicken Sandwiches

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I want to encourage you to take out your Bibles and turn to Matthew chapter 19.
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As many of you know, I had planned this week to begin a series on Reformed Theology.
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I was going to preach on that during the month of August, however, it was laid on my heart to change course this week and I've decided to postpone that series on Reformed Theology.
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I'm going to postpone that series for one week as I go to the Scriptures to deal with something that I consider to be a bit of a more pressing matter.
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In the past few weeks and in particularly, well, in the past few years, and in particularly the past few weeks, the issue of the definition of marriage has become a major controversy in the world and in the media.
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The subject reached a new level of significance when the current sitting president of the United States publicly stated his support for the redefinition of the institution of marriage.
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The first ever to do that publicly, by the way, he was the first ever sitting president to change and to support the redefinition of marriage.
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And, of course, his remarks have since been overshadowed by a fast food franchise owner who simply stated his support for, quote, unquote, the traditional family, which led to widespread accusations of bigotry, bias, and hate speech.
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And the amazing and sad reality is that it has come to the point in our society that we are no longer able to discuss the subject of marriage simply by using the word marriage.
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Rather now we have to begin qualifying it so that people will know about what we are speaking.
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For thousands of years the word marriage had one meaning and it underwent no change.
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It had a simple and distinct meaning, yet now if we are talking about the word marriage we have to be sure to qualify it.
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We have to say we're talking about traditional marriage so as to be sure that we're not confusing or using confusing language with a culture that has begun to jettison the foundational social construct of marriage.
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So this morning I'm going to go to Scripture and I'm going to look at what the Bible has to say about marriage.
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And I want to tell you right off the bat, I want to go ahead and kind of tip my hand, I am not going to attempt to prove that homosexual marriage is wrong or that it's a sin because I do not believe that such an institution exists.
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The Bible does not recognize an institution of homosexual marriage.
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It is an oxymoron.
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It is the two things that go together that are opposites and the whole idea that we would somehow qualify it or to say this is or is not.
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Here's the thing, it might be necessary for us to try to prove that homosexuality is a sin or that homosexual behavior is a sin.
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And I've done that before.
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I've spent many hours from the pulpit preaching on that particular subject and those sermons are available online.
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That's not my purpose today.
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My purpose today is to show that the Bible is very clear in defining what marriage is and those who are trying to push for a perversion of this definition are not seeking for equality.
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They are seeking to redefine an institution which is as old as humanity itself.
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So it's not about whether or not homosexual marriage is wrong.
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It's about a redefinition of what that word means.
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So please remember, this is not about taking away somebody's rights.
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The subject is about redefining what an institution is.
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It's not about rights.
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It's about redefinition of marriage.
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Now the passage I've chosen today actually deals with another serious blight on the sanctity of marriage and that is the subject of divorce.
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And I've chosen this particular text because I believe it is the singular place in Scripture where Jesus gives the most eloquent definition of what marriage is supposed to be.
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He does it in view of the antithesis or the devaluation of marriage which is divorce.
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He does it in response to the question of divorce and he talks about what marriage is supposed to be.
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So I've chosen this text because I believe it has the best definition in the Scripture.
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And where attacks on the definition of marriage have come and produced potential damage from outside, divorce has done a lot of damage from inside.
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So really, if we're going to talk about the sanctity of marriage, we have to talk about the sanctity of marriage from all sides, don't we? We can't just talk about how bad one aspect of the profanation of marriage is.
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We have to look at it as a whole.
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So what we're going to see is that marriage has a very clear definition and built into that definition is a lifelong, absolute, uncompromising and complementary.
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Keep that word in your mind, it's going to come up again.
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It's a lifelong, absolute, uncompromising and complementary commitment of a man and a woman to one another.
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That's the thesis for today.
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So let's stand together, we'll read the text.
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Matthew chapter 19, we're going to read verses 3 through 9.
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And the Pharisees came up to Him and tested Him by saying, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? He answered, Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female? And said, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
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So they are no longer two, but one flesh.
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What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.
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They said to Him, Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away? He said to them, Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
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And I say to you, Whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery.
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Father, I thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You for the eloquence in which this subject is spoken.
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And Father, the clarity which we have in this text.
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And I do pray, O Lord, for clarity of thought in my own mind.
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I pray that You would keep me from error as I preach this text.
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I pray that You would edify Your people with this discussion, and that You would use this message, Lord God, not as some kind of political move or some kind of political statement, but Lord God, as a way to encourage Your people as to the importance of what marriage is and what its true definition is as found in Holy Scripture.
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For Lord God, we know that marriage is the foundation of the family and ultimately of society.
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So I pray again, Lord, please keep me from error.
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Keep Your people's hearts in tune with the truth.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.
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This text begins in a way that's very similar to a lot of the way Jesus' situations begin.
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If you read through the four Gospels and you read through the situations that Jesus often found himself in, it was often at the questioning of the Pharisees or the Sadducees, one of those religious groups.
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The Pharisees were the ultra-conservative of the Jewish people.
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The Sadducees were the more liberal of the religious crowd.
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But yet, they would often come to Jesus and they would ask Him questions.
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And their reasoning for asking Him these questions was an attempt to sort of catch Him in something that they could later use against Him.
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Well, don't you remember the other day He said this? Don't you remember that? He's controversial or He's wrong on this.
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We've got Scripture to back us up.
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They were trying to catch Him in something wrong.
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And the subject of marriage and divorce was a hugely controversial subject even in the first century, even during the time of Jesus Christ.
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There were two famous rabbis.
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I think some of you have sat in when I taught a course on Christian ethics.
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I taught about this because there were two rabbis who had actually produced two competing schools of thought on the subject of marriage and divorce.
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One was Rabbi Hillel.
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And Hillel made allowances for divorce for whatever reason, for even the slightest of reasons.
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The Hillelian school of thought was that even if your wife's cooking did not please you, you could give her a certificate of divorce and send her away.
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That was Hillelian thought.
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As long as she didn't please you in some way, you could send her away.
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And then there was the Rabbi Shammai.
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Shammai believed that divorce was only to be allowed on the most egregious of grounds.
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He took a very hard line against the flippancy which was held in the Hillelian school.
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And his attitude towards divorce was very, very ultra-conservative in his day.
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He believed that only the most egregious of reasons could call for someone being able to separate in their relationship.
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So here you have these two schools of thought.
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You have people that are being trained, being taught by these rabbis.
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So they come to Jesus.
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Settle the score.
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Let us know what the answer is.
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What is the real answer, Jesus? And there are two ways of considering their question.
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Because they ask the question, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? And there are two ways of thinking about how they are asking that.
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When you are reading Scripture, you never get to read in body language.
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You never get to read in the use of tone and things like that.
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And sometimes those are very important.
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Because if I came to you and I said, is there any reason why somebody can get a divorce? That may sound as if I am saying, is there any reason at all? Or I might say, can you get a divorce for just any reason? You see, that would be like, can I just do it for any reason I want? It is like one might be a Hillelian question.
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Just any reason, her cooking, her unwillingness to clean, whatever.
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Or is there any reason at all? So we are sort of left in a bit of a paradox.
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And there is to know exactly the question.
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But it does not matter because Jesus' answer is going to answer either one of those.
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Because Jesus' answer is very clear.
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His response to them is to go to the Scripture, back to the book of Genesis.
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And look what marriage is supposed to be like in its creation.
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Look at what marriage was created to be and how it was created to be.
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And once you find out and once you really establish your doctrine of marriage.
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By the way, that is what we are talking about today.
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It is a doctrinal course.
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It is the doctrine of marriage.
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Once you establish your doctrine of marriage, not based on how marriage is, but how marriage was supposed to be, then you will come to a right understanding of things like divorce.
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If you understand how marriage was supposed to be, how God created it.
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You remember God created marriage prior to the fall.
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You think about that.
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Marriage was created prior to the fall.
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Which means marriage was established in the paradigm of God.
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It was established in the program of God prior to man's sinful departure from the grace of God.
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So God had a plan for this institution in the garden.
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And Jesus said if you look back at that, it will answer your question.
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If you get your definition from the source, then it will answer your question.
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So today what we are going to do is we are going to look at Jesus' explanation of Genesis.
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Because that is what Jesus is giving here.
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He is giving an explanation of what Genesis says.
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He really just repeats it, but he focuses on some points.
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And what he gives us, and I don't always give an outline, but today I will give you the outline.
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It is the plan for marriage, the purpose in marriage, and the priority of marriage.
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That is the outline for today.
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It is the plan for marriage, the purpose in marriage, and the priority of marriage.
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So let's begin looking here.
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The first one we will look at is the plan for marriage.
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He answered and said, verse 4.
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Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? And said, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife.
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Some texts say cleave unto his wife, but hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
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You see, in God's plan, from the very beginning, marriage was designed this way.
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One man, one woman, one relationship that would last until both of them died.
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Well, of course, in the ultimate creation, God didn't create us ultimately to die, so it would have lasted forever.
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But then when sin came in, death entered in, and we understand that.
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But the ultimate idea was you had one man, one woman, one relationship for life.
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Now, I know some of you are thinking, hey, I saw that on a bumper sticker one where, or I've seen that in political ads and things like that.
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Well, I'm not here to push a political agenda, but in the reality, this is not something those people just came up with on a whim.
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This is actually how the Bible describes marriage is supposed to be.
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It is a lifetime commitment to each other that doesn't end.
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And that is God's creationary design.
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And an immediate question that comes into a lot of people's minds, an immediate objection, and it might be on the tip of your tongue, so I'm going to go ahead and deal with it now, because I like to, as Paul does a lot of times in Scripture, I like to anticipate the objection.
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And the objection that a lot of people have is, hey, wait a minute, Pastor, there's a lot of men in Scripture that had more than one wife.
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There's a lot of guys in Scripture that had multiple.
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I mean, look at Solomon, right? He had over a thousand women, if you include concubines and wives that he had in these relationships.
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I mean, there's a lot of relationships that he had, even though most of those women, they were simply marriages, political marriages, but they were still there.
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And many have used those polygamous lifestyles of the early patriarchs as proof that God permits that type of action.
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In fact, the Mormons argue that point.
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Now, your modern Mormons have gotten away from polygamy because it's not politically popular, but there are still many in the Mormon church who believe that that is a righteous way to live, that one man should have multiple, multiple wives, and that's just the way God designed the world to be.
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However, when you think about the way God designed the plan for marriage, how did He design it? Did He design Adam, Eve, and Shirley, and Catherine, and Megan, and all? No! He created one man, and He created one woman, and He didn't create any spares.
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I always loved that phrase.
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Sproul said that.
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He said, it was one man, one woman, and no spares.
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There wasn't a couple extra Adams out there in case Adam didn't cut the mustard, and there wasn't a couple Eves out there in case she didn't do what she was supposed to do.
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They had one relationship, one to the other.
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And looking back at Matthew 19, I want to show you something in the text, because He says in the text, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
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And then it goes on in verse 6 to say, so then they are no longer two, but one.
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So, Jesus in this statement is making a statement about the plan.
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It's two people.
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It's not multiple people.
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It's only two people, and these two people come together and they make one flesh.
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But why did God then allow the practice of polygamy? Because in a sense, there was an allowance for it.
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There was an allowance for polygamy in the Old Testament.
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And that question has been wrestled with by pastors and theologians, and it is not an easily reconciled question because we see men who are blessed of God who were polygamists.
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However, I want you to note something in this text that I think helps answer the question.
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Look at verse 8.
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They ask Him the question.
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By the way, when Jesus was asked about divorce, His answer was, you shouldn't get a divorce.
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And then they ask the question, well, why did Moses allow divorce then? And Jesus said, well, because you're sinful, you have hard hearts, and Moses allowed for this because of the hardness of your hearts.
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I think that same answer can be used to apply to the polygamy question.
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God didn't design it for polygamist relationships.
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Why did He then allow it? Because men are sinful.
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It doesn't mean God approved of it.
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It doesn't mean it was the way God designed it.
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It doesn't mean it's the way it was supposed to be.
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However, culturally it was acceptable and it was something that was not condemned directly by God, but it was not a part of the plan.
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It was not a part of the design.
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It wasn't the way God wanted it to be.
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It wasn't the way God purposed it to be.
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It wasn't the way God designed it to be.
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It was, in fact, a profanation of what God designed.
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God designed marriage to be between a man and a woman.
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And it does not mean just because David was polygamist or Abraham was polygamist, this does not mean that God condones or that He encourages that act.
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In fact, if you go forward into the New Testament, what do we find in the New Testament about polygamy? The New Testament is very clear.
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First of all, elders of the church.
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What is the first command of the elder? That he be a one woman man.
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That he have that relationship, right? What else does it say in the New Testament? Jesus said the two shall become one.
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Matthew 19 also says that over in Ephesians.
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It says those two shall become one.
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It's very clear in the New Testament that the idea of polygamy is not something that is in accord with God's plan.
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So, no question there.
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But the question does come up.
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People ask, why was it allowed in the Old Testament? Because men were sinful.
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It was not something God created marriage to be.
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Neither was it something condoned by God.
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But it was practiced.
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And the Bible tells us about things that were done that were wrong.
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You know, the Bible never hides sinful actions.
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That's one of the reasons why we trust Scripture.
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Because if you read the history of many cultures, they will leave out the bad actions of their kings and their princes.
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And they will only put forward the good actions.
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But if you read through the Scripture, what do we read about David? David was a polygamist.
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He was an adulterer.
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Ultimately, he was a murderer of Uriah.
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You know, we see these things because the Bible is honest about its history.
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It's honest about these people and their lives and the things that they did wrong.
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And polygamy is a part of the history of the Scriptures and Scriptural saints.
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But that does not mean it was part of the plan of God.
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From the beginning, God had a singular plan for marriage.
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He created Adam.
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He created Eve.
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He did not create any spares.
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It was two of them, man and woman, in a complementary relationship for life.
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Now, moving on.
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We've seen the plan for marriage.
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That's the plan for marriage.
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What is the purpose in marriage? What is the purpose in marriage? Well, look with me at verse 6 here in Matthew 19.
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It says in verse 6, So they are no longer two, but one flesh.
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They are no longer two, but one flesh.
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Jesus gives us the most powerful example of the purpose of marriage in that short phrase.
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This is a picture of what a true marriage is supposed to be and the purpose for marriage is that two parts become one whole.
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Two units become one family.
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This is supposed to be the most powerful and most serious union that one person can ever enter into in his life.
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It is supposed to, and I do this, I perform marriage ceremonies.
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You know one of the things I put in the marriage vows, as we're speaking the vows, that this commitment rises above every commitment that you have in this world outside of your relationship with Christ.
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That your commitment is this social contract, this social relationship which you are entering into with this woman, this man that is coming together, this one thing rises above every other social commitment that you have.
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And that includes, and I've said this before to the upset of some people, includes your relationship to your outside family, to your extended family, and to your children.
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Because your children will grow up.
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Your children will enter into a relationship with another person and hopefully will have a marriage that's as healthy as yours is if you understand the point I'm making.
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It's that the relationship, husband to wife, is the primary relationship in the family.
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And everything else, even with the children, is a secondary relationship.
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And that's such an important thing for people to understand.
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Because it is taking two people and making one.
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That is what marriage is supposed to be.
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It's why divorce is so devastating.
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It truly is.
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It's why divorce is so devastating.
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Because divorce is taking two people who have become one and now breaking them apart and making halves.
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The two have become one and now that one has been broken.
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Look with me.
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I want to show you something.
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We read it already for our opening text, but I want you to go to Genesis 2.
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I want to show you something in the text that I think is so important.
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Genesis 2, we're going to start at verse 18.
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As I said, we read this for our opening text, but I want to show you something here.
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Genesis chapter 2, beginning at verse 18.
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Then the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone.
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I will make a helper fit for him.
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And then it goes through how Adam looked at the different animals and saw none that were fit.
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And in verse 21, so the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
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And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man He made into a woman and brought her to the man.
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Then the man said this, at last his bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.
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Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
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And then in verse 25, very important statement, and the man and his wife were both naked and unashamed.
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Now that is often blown right over by people.
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People read that and read right past it, and they do not consider the significance of that statement.
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Because the first thing we think about when we think about nakedness is we get sort of childlike in our thought.
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You know, we think, oh, they're naked, they're unashamed, they're running around in the Garden of Eden and they don't have any clothes on and we sort of have a childlike innocence when we think about stuff like that.
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But the reality is it's more to it than just being naked.
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It's not about physical nakedness here.
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There's more in this than that.
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Because what happened when they sinned? What happened when they sinned? Immediately after they...
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What was the first thing that happened after they sinned? They covered up.
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Who were they hiding from? There was only two people in the world that were hiding from each other.
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I mean, who else? Hiding from the goats? Hiding from the giraffes? No.
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You might say they were hiding from God.
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Well, they tried to hide from God, but it's more to it than that.
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There was a divide that came and they felt ashamed and they covered themselves.
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One of the things I often try to remind people when I'm counseling about marriage is that when we talk about the sanctity of marriage, the reason why it is so sanctified, the reason why it is so important is because it's the one relationship that we have in the whole world that is Edenic in nature.
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It's the one relationship wherein we are supposed to be able to be naked, not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and mentally naked and unashamed.
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That we can be fully open, share our hopes, share our dreams, share our doubts, share our pains, share our sufferings, share our joys, and expect to be loved.
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And beloved, that's what makes divorce so hard is because somebody has opened up their hearts and they've been rejected.
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But you see, that's the purpose of marriage.
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Two become one.
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And that love relationship goes past all earthly problems.
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What do we say in the marriage ceremony? Do you take this man for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for poorer, for poorer? I have to remind them of that one a lot of times.
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Financial issues were major causes of irreconcilable differences.
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People often think sexual indiscretion causes divorces.
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I've found people have been, the people that I have dealt with and talked to, very, very willing to get past those things.
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But when there comes issues of just bitterness over small things, it's the little things, you know.
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It's the small things that come in.
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It's the little piece of sand that gets in the gear and causes the gear to not run right and the gear runs the engine, the engine runs the car.
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It's so dangerous.
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The purpose in marriage is two people becoming a whole.
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The two becoming one flesh.
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And from that, there does come a multiplication.
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From the two becoming one, this is God's math, two become one and from one become many.
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Because from that one relationship comes the family, the children.
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This is why it says in chapter 1 of Genesis, verse 28, And God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
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And having children is one of the reasons why we marry, but it's the collateral result of marriage.
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The purpose is that two people become one.
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And as I said in our communion service, that also represents our relationship with Christ.
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Christ is the husband.
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We are the bride.
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Christ gives Himself for us, loves us.
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And as we go and do good works, we multiply our works because of the work of Christ.
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So too in marriage do we have children and there's multiplication there.
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So the plan of marriage is one man, one woman, one marriage for life.
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The purpose of marriage is that two people become one in relationship.
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And then the priority of marriage.
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The priority of marriage is found also in verse 6.
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Because it says in verse 6, So there are no longer two, but one flesh.
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What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.
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He said that marriage is the most important union in the world.
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No one should seek to separate it.
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The reason why he said that is because, beloved, separating in a marriage is devastating.
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Did you know the Bible says God hates divorce? I told a kid that one time.
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I said, God hates divorce.
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He said, I didn't know God hated anything.
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The reality is the Bible says there are many things that God hates.
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God is holy.
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He hates sin.
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That's the reality.
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But one of those things that specifically says Malachi 2.16 says God hates divorce.
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Why? Because it is destructive to hearts.
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It is destructive to lives.
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It is destructive to families.
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This is why I said at the beginning that the profanation of marriage called homosexual marriage is not the only danger here.
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If we are truly going to proclaim that we believe in the sanctity of marriage, then we need to be honest with ourselves about what that means.
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Homosexual marriage, that's not even a question for believers.
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If I came in here and preached a message on homosexual marriage, you would all probably, oh yeah, we agree, we agree.
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And be right.
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I talked to Byron this week.
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He really helped me with this because I was trying to consider what I wanted to say.
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And he made a good point.
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He said, you know, if you just talk about homosexual marriage, everybody just, they know that when they're coming.
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Most of us don't have a question on that issue.
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But how many of us really understand the sanctity of what marriage is supposed to be? Homosexual marriage is important because it's the social issue of the day which is going to bring a lot of persecution on the church.
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I believe it.
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But we will not stand in this fight if we do not understand the definition and the sanctity of what marriage is.
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That's the battle, folks.
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It's not enough just to say they're wrong.
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We have to know what it is that is right.
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There are other dangers facing marriage in our land.
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Did you know that we now have the least amount of people ever per capita that are being married? Because people have become satisfied that marriage itself is a dead institution and they've just said living together is the way we should do it and we just won't get married anymore? Hey, why get married, man? We're going to keep separate checking accounts.
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We're going to keep separate this, separate that.
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Why get married? If I don't get married, then if I do decide to leave because that's my attitude going into this relationship, if I do decide to devoid it and leave, I won't have any paperwork to fill out.
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And that has become the attitude of the land.
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And people marry today.
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People do get married today.
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I have seen them.
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I have talked to them.
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I have heard the words coming out of their mouth.
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They will say, if things go bad, we'll just split up.
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Yeah, we want to get married.
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We want to have a wedding.
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I want to come down and have all my friends surround me and have a party.
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But when things go bad, hey, she'll go her way, I'll go mine.
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I'll keep my apartment just in case.
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Beloved, we need to understand what marriage is.
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We need to be able to define it as Jesus did, as a lifelong commitment.
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And yeah, there's a lot we could talk about on the exception clause and whether or not that exception clause is understood properly and all that.
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And I don't have time in today's message.
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And it's not the focus of the message to get down into those verses and to deal with that.
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My focus today is to make sure we understand the definition of marriage.
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And it's one man, one woman, and a lifelong complementary relationship.
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That's why homosexual marriage doesn't work.
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Homosexual marriage is not complementary.
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It's two of the same thing trying to join together.
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And that doesn't work.
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You cannot love a mirror.
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And that's what homosexual marriage...
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It's the highest form of narcissism.
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It's an attempt to love somebody who is just like me.
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And that is selfishness.
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Selflessness is to love somebody who is the opposite of me.
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Who is the antithesis of me.
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The man and the woman relationship is selflessness.
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Because we have to give up ourselves and live for them.
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Where selfishness comes when I want to love a mirror.
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One just like me.
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You see, that's what marriage is.
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Selflessness.
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It is two complementary parts joining together and becoming one flesh forever.
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Not till frustration do us part.
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Not till anger do us part.
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Not till financial difficulties do us part.
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Not till irreconcilable differences do us part.
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But till death do us part.
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It is the highest of social commitments.
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And outside of our relationship with Christ, our most important one.
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And it is foundational to our society.
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As we watch society erode, or rather, as we watch the family erode, society will not be far behind.
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If there is any hope, we must get back to a right view of the sanctity of marriage and the marriage relationship.
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The one where a man and a woman commit to each other for life.
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Any other view is unbiblical and devastating to a culture.
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And ultimately, this is a religious issue, but it's not just a religious issue.
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It's an issue that has historical significance for the health of a nation.
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History shows that as goes the family, so goes the nation.
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And when the family is destroyed, the nation is not far behind.
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Even secular thinkers have recognized this simple thought.
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Aristotle said this.
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He says, Man is by nature more inclined to live as a couple than to associate politically, since the family is something that precedes and is more necessary than the state.
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John Locke said that marriage is humanity's first society.
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J.D.
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Unwin of Cambridge University saw marriage as a crucial element in the development and maintenance of healthy societies, and he said this.
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The whole of civilization, the whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been completely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.
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Marriage as a lifelong association has been an attendant circumstance of all human achievement, and its adoption has preceded all manifestations of social energy.
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Indissoluble monogamy must be regarded as the mainspring of all social activity, a necessary condition of human development.
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End quote.
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Now here's the thing.
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Those secular people, they don't confirm the Scripture.
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The Scripture is the Scripture, and it's true whether or not they agree.
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But the reality is it's interesting that even social commentators, even people who are not biblical Christians, do demonstrate that even the unbeliever can recognize the value of the marriage relationship in our society, and how its profanation is destructive to a people.
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As believers, we have a responsibility to support the proper biblical definition of marriage, not just with our words, but with our actions.
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First, by being examples ourselves of what the family is supposed to be.
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Sovereign Grace family church.
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We are supposed to first be examples of what the family is to be.
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Second, by standing for marriage and not accepting a redefinition of this vital social building block.
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Please don't use the term traditional marriage.
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It's marriage, and everything else is not.
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Third, we need to pray.
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We need to pray for God's revival.
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His hand to move across our nation.
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For apart from God changing hearts, there will be no change in our land.
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So we be the example.
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We stand for truth, and we pray that God make a difference.
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Let's pray together.
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Father, we thank You for this opportunity to have heard Your Word, and I do pray, Lord, that I was faithful to it.
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And I pray, Lord, as we consider this subject of marriage, and just how vital it is, how important it is, that You would just move on our hearts towards a deeper understanding of it.
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Not just so that we can stand for it politically, but that in each of our homes, marriages are uplifted.
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Marriages are strengthened.
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Marriages are encouraged.
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For we know, O Lord, that many things has Satan used to destroy the marriages and the sanctity of marriage.
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But Lord God, we know, stronger still are You who created this institution to be one which people enter into for life.
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One man and one woman.
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We thank You for it, Lord.
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We thank You for the blessings that we see in so many marriages in this church which are encouraging.
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And we pray, Lord, for those going through difficulty.
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We pray that we would reach out to them in love and seek to encourage the re-strengthening of their relationships.
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We praise You, Father, for all that You've done and are going to do.
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In Jesus' name we pray.
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Amen.
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Beloved, we come now to our time for prayer.
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And if you have a need for prayer, please come as we sing.