The Theology of Marriage, Matt Slick

And able to direct me and guide me and things like that. We're live, okay. All right, and here she comes, Miss America, my wife. I could put the camera on her, but she would get me, I'd get in trouble.

The Theology of Marriage and Its Foundations in the Trinity

All right, so what we're gonna do tonight is the theology of marriage. I wanna tell a little bit of a history about this, but before we do, we're gonna pray, talk about it, and then I've got stuff to go through, all right?

There's a lot here. This is probably gonna be a two-hour study, and, but there's a lot here, and we'll say, let's pray, and then we'll get into it. Lord Jesus, we thank you for the opportunity, Lord, to study your word, and I ask, Lord Jesus, that you would, let's just bless us and bless the hearers.

Lord, that your truth would go forth, that you'd be glorified. I just ask, Lord, for wisdom and the ability to communicate what needs to be communicated according to your grace and by your standard of righteousness that is revealed in the word and through the person of Jesus.

We thank you, Lord, and we ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so if you guys can hear me in, I just wanna verify the audio. Just type in that you can hear me, and hopefully it'll be good that I can hear, I can see people, just takes a few seconds, but we'll continue.

So the reason I'm doing this is, for one, I like theology, I just have. And also, years ago, okay, thanks, Kevin. So Nick and I, my wife and I, we had problems in our marriage early on, a lot of problems.

We went to a marriage counselor. I might talk about that later. So I've sat on both sides of the desk being counseled and counseling. And over the years, if my memory serves me right, I've counseled 36 couples, marriage couples.

And 32 of them, the man has been the problem. The male's been the problem. But majority of the problem, it's never the case that it's only one or the other, okay? It's always the case that there's two, but it's like, usually it's 80 the guy, 20 the girl, you know, that kind of thing.

And this started having an effect on me, and I started noticing things. And I talked to my wife about it, and she'd say, well, how'd the counseling go? And my counseling sessions were two to four hours.

Would never be, you know, just a half hour, we're done. Oh, the time's up, see ya. I'd say a minimum two hours, just because we just take time to talk, and I would never accept any payment. I don't accept payment.

However, I was successfully bribed by one woman with chocolate chip cookies. She got treated really well that night. And I would give homework, and I would ask intimate questions, but I'd only counsel when they're both there.

And if one wanted to be counseled in private, I generally would say no, and unless it was a special circumstance. And then I had to ask the spouse for permission to do that, under certain conditions. I would never be alone with a woman, you know, et cetera.

All right, so I started discovering various things about the issue of marriage, and I started discovering that I was teaching counseling, and I had to keep backing up to lay foundations down. And I kept backing up, well, this is because of that.

And then I'd talk, well, that's because of this. And then it just came down to the doctrine of the Trinity. So what I'm gonna do is start with the doctrine of the Trinity. I'm gonna go through some issues of the Trinity, and then move into theology.

You just got to bear with me. I'll say this, at once, I remember this very clearly. A couple was sitting before me, a marriage couple, and they were having problems. And I said, let me teach you theology for 20 minutes.

Just let me teach you theology for 20 minutes, and then we'll get into this. And they're like, well, don't we want marriage counseling? And I went, just bear with me. So I did this for about 20 minutes, and when I was done, the guy looked at me and he said, now I know what I'm doing wrong.

And it was very clear, because the theology of marriage is based on the theology of the Trinitarian union of God. So let's get into that. So I've been working on a statement for a while now on the nature of God, and I've already expanded it past this, and it's becoming an interesting study.

I think it might be worth just going through this, but nevertheless, there is only one God in all place and all time. There are no gods before him and no gods after him. He is the one and only uncreated, necessary, Trinitarian being, eternally consisting of three simultaneous and distinct persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The three persons share the same divine nature. Neither person derives his substance from the other or both of the others. The Trinity is not comprised of parts. Each of the persons have different functions involving election, redemption, and application of salvation.

The Trinity is spiritual in nature, non-contingent, unchanging, transcendent, and sovereign. God has nothing against which he may be compared and defined, therefore that which is good is revealed by God's nature and what is consistent with his holiness and righteousness.

There is no condition in which the Christian God might exist or could not exist, since that would not be the God of the Bible. He is self-revealed in creation, scripture, and Jesus. He is the ultimate source of all truths, all actualities, and all potentialities.

In the Trinity are unity and diversity, which are, you guys won't get this, which are equally basic and mutually dependent upon one another. That's a philosophical thing for some other stuff. God's incommunicable attributes stress his transcendence, and his communicable attributes stress his imminence.

I'll get into that. God is neither included in space nor absent from it. God created the universe as well as people. He does whatever he pleases and ordains all that occurs. He possesses infinite knowledge, wisdom, presence, and power that manifest out of his good and holy nature.

Therefore, that which is good is known by comparison to God's nature, which is also holy and righteous. Since he is the ultimate standard of all that is good, he will judge all people. Those who have, by faith, trusted in the self-revealed atonement of Jesus, who is God in flesh, will be saved from God's righteous and eternal condemnation, and those who have not will face eternal punishment.

All right, now I'm gonna go through a couple things here. I'm gonna scan through this and bring up some points, because you need the foundation of truth in order to understand the foundation of marriage.

So God is a trinity of persons, three persons. There's a doctrine called the perichoresis. The perichoresis is the teaching that the three members of the Godhead, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, all interdwell each other and subsist inside of each other.

Yet there's not three parts. There's one thing, as we call this divine simplicity. And so they indwell one another. Now think about this in relationship to husband and wife becoming one flesh. Now, of course, we don't have a perichoresis in our essence because we're separate in person, but we are made in the image of God, Genesis 1, 26 to 28, what's called the communicable attributes, and I'll get into that.

So we can see the perichoresis, don't forget, the Bible says the two shall become one flesh. And so the hint here is that the union of marriage and sexual union implies the oneness of the married couple who are also two, not a trinity, but they're two.

This is emanating out of the essence of God. So I mentioned what's called the communicable attributes. The communicable attributes of God are those attributes that he possesses that we can participate in.

So God loves, we can love. God hates, we can hate. God is rational, we can be rational. They can be communicated to us, and this is what it means to be made in the image of God. The non-communicable attributes are those attributes that belong to him alone that cannot be communicated to us.

God is all-knowing, we are not all-knowing, unless you're, no, bad joke coming up, I won't do it. He is everywhere, at all places and all times, and we are not. So the incommunicable attributes demonstrate and reflect his transcendence.

Transcendence means that God is not dependent upon space and time or limited to space and time. So these incommunicable attributes, his omniscience, omnipresence, they demonstrate that transcendent quality.

Imminence means the involvement of God in the world and how he relates to that world and is a provisior of the world and its upholding. So the communicable attributes are where his attributes become ours inside that world.

And so the incommunicable reflect his transcendence and the communicable attributes reflect his imminence, his relationship to us in creation. And, good, someone's putting in words there, good. Referring to the relationship of the three persons of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to one another.

Good, Jeff, I hope that's, keep putting good ones in there. I hope he's not a, we have cultists sometimes who come in and Charlie's recovering from surgery. So hopefully he'll be good. If there's any problems, people can just signal me and I'll kick them out.

All right, now, so that is that. Now, Jesus said in Matthew 12, 34, he says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. So God spoke, he said, let there be light. And God created the world and he put Adam in the world and then had Adam do things.

He had Adam name the animals. And then we found out that there was a problem. And the problem was that he could not carry out what we call the dominion mandate. So this is found in Genesis 1, 26 to 28.

Then God said, let us make our man, excuse me, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds in the sky and over the cattle and over the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So this is what we call the dominion mandate. The dominion mandate is the statement of God, what he wants for Adam and ultimately Eve to do, man and woman. But notice he says man first and then man and woman.

There's a reason it has to do with federal headship, male headship and representation. Now, so it says in Genesis 2 .15 that God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.

So he gave man a responsibility of work. This is what men are supposed to do, is work. And he said, do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So this is a demonstration of the submission of Adam to the will of God.

Now we're gonna go to Genesis 2 .18 to 25. Then the Lord God said it is not good for the man to be alone. He's talking about this one man, Adam. I will make him a helper suitable for him. Now, stop right there.

So Eve's purpose is to be a helper for him. This is important because a lot of women don't realize this and a lot of men don't realize this. So what we're supposed to do is man, normatively speaking, the man is supposed to carry out the will of God in his creation and his work in the world.

And the woman is to help him do that. That's normally, that's norm. Now, sometimes the men die early, the wife's got to take over. Sometimes there's divorce and we understand there's exceptions and there's issues.

But what we're talking about here is the normal state of things and how God designed it. And this is before the fall. And the fall is gonna have a deleterious effect on everything. Deleterious means hidden harmful effects.

So he wants to make a helper suitable for him. Out of the ground of the Lord formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.

Now, this is designation of authority. He had the authority over the animals because he named them. And this requires a bit of intelligence and knowledge and some other stuff. And incidentally, think about this.

98 of all species that have ever lived are extinct. 98 are extinct. And so, when it says, people have said, well, how can you name all of them? It'd be like bird, frank, tortoise, fig, cricket, you know, for like three days.

Straight. There's all these names, all these creatures. And so they think he probably did it by species, you know, like canine or bird or whatever it was. He would do stuff like that. And then you get to leftist wackos and call them cultists.

And so, the man gave names to the cattle and all the birds of the sky to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was no one found. It was not found a helper suitable for him. Now, this is a designation, a differentiation between man and the animal realm.

There's a difference. They're not to blend, hence bestiality is wrong. So the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept. Then he took one of the ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib, which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. And the man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Now, in Genesis 2 .18, God said, it's not good for man to be alone.

Now, I could launch into some stuff and I think of what's a little bit about the nature of the Trinity and what personhood is. I've done this before. I'll do it a little bit again right now. The Trinity is three persons and in the persons you can have fellowship.

If God was one person, it wouldn't make any sense because if God is one person eternally, then how does he have fellowship? How does he manifest a trueness and completeness of personhood? Fellowship, intimacy, communion, awareness of others, things like that.

And so the very nature of the Trinity designates that it's not good for anyone to be alone. It's not a good thing because God says, out of the abundance of his heart, it's not good to be alone. It's not good for the man to be alone.

Now, God in the inter-Trinitarian communion forever had this intimacy and this mutual fellowship and well, we'll get into that stuff. And so God took a rib from Adam and Adam named her woman, signifying his positional authority.

Now, this rubs a lot of women wrong and I just say to them, too bad. And women say, well, you know, that means the guy is the boss. Not necessarily, you gotta understand and it'll come in, you'll see how it works later on when we get into this.

And so, but he has that authority. And then in Ephesians five and we're gonna Colossians three, there we'll go through some scriptures that talks about the wife being a submission to the husband, but we'll get to that.

Now, the dominion mandate is where, excuse me, the dominion mandate is where God said to Adam, you are to go out to the world. You're to cultivate the garden and subdue everything. Now, this cultivation and subduing is not to be done the way it's done here today.

We rape and pillage the land and garbage and heaps and all this kind of stuff. It's not how it's supposed to be done, but that's another topic. The Bible talks about various issues related to that, but nevertheless.

So he cannot carry out the dominion mandate because it says, he said, subdue the fish and the birds of the sky, cultivate the garden, take care of the earth. One guy can't do that, but he can do it if he has children, but he can't have children by himself, hence the woman.

And so this designates and reveals that the woman's purpose is to help the man carry out the dominion mandate, and of course she bears children. Men can't do that. I don't care what the wacko liberals say.

And so in this, God set up marriage. The marriage is then created by God for the purpose of carrying out the dominion mandate. Not end, it's not good to be alone. And so it's also a fulfillment of the inter-Trinitarian fellowship represented in the communion of persons in the communicable attributes that we have as people.

So you can see, you go, oh, marriage is very much, and the fellowship inside of marriage is very much a reflection of the Trinity. It makes sense. If God is not a Trinity, you're having problems. You almost have an arbitrary establishment by God for marriage, but I won't get into that, a side note.

So in Genesis, that's where we find the first marriage, Adam and Eve, and its purpose, dominion mandate. And the complementary roles of male and female, of man and woman, he's to work and take care, she's to help him in the provision of children, et cetera.

Now, as you guys know, I run karm .org, and I've been working on it for 25 years. And my wife helps me in that. She does stuff I would hate to do. She is nice to people. She cares about people, you know, all that gushy bushy stuff, you know, I like theology.

Now, what she does is she answers the phones and she does, oh, the thought of just sitting here all day and getting a data entry and putting it into a field and then do as I feel, no, thank you, no, thank you.

And she does that, she does a good job at it, all right? And so it really sets me free to be able to do what I'm called to do. I just, a small example, and variations of that can happen in marriage, you know?

So a man could be a mechanic, he could be a pilot, it doesn't matter what he is, and a wife, generally speaking, will stay home and raise children because this is something I really don't like about what the world is doing nowadays is how it degrades women for having children or even being in the home, and raising children is one of the most important things to do in the entire planet.

And women need to be revered for that ability and that calling, and I'm not just saying this because there's, one, two, three, because we're outnumbered here by women. I'm saying it because it's what I've said before, it's what I believe.

And I also say when I'm talking about this that I like the idea of when a woman comes into a room that the men stand up. And I think about it, the woman, the female, is the gender that bore the Messiah.

And it's a wonderful thing, and I remember when Anique, my wife, gave birth the first time, you know, I watched her go through travail, I watched her go through contractions, I remember her laying there, I remember the pain, I remember the moaning, I remember so much of it, and the yucky stuff that goes along with all of it and all the stuff, and then after hours of this, there's this brand new baby, and then I remember being stunned as I watched this baby come out, and here I am observing, I'm distant.

And she's doing all this, this baby comes out, and then they check the baby really fast, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and then gave it to her, immediately she held this baby, it was just inside of her, and then soon was breastfeeding.

And I remember being very impressed. You know, you hear about it theoretically, but I watched it. I remember thinking, my wife did this, what did I do? A little something nine months ago. She's the one who carried, and she's the one who went through all this, and now she's nursing, she's giving life to this baby.

And I remember this, because I was up all night, and I was whiny and complaining because I lost a little sleep that night. And so she, yeah, you gotta whine a little bit, you know. And so I went home at like nine o 'clock in the morning, and I actually worked at the very hospital that she had the baby at, so it was kind of cool.

I could get in and out when I wanted and do all kinds of stuff, and in fact, I even wheelchaired her from the entrance up to the delivery room, which was, you know, for me was, I gotta do something. Okay, well, anyway.

So after having watched this miracle, truly miracle, I went home and I couldn't sleep because I'm amped. I turn on the TV and I'm watching something, just whatever, not paying attention. Like I said, baby, you know, I gotta go to sleep, I'm gonna go back, maybe I'll get a baby.

And I'm focusing on the TV, and all of a sudden I realized, there's a woman, a foxy babe woman. She's gorgeous, sexy, she is advertising a car. And I immediately remembered my wife, hair looked like a bird's nest, and the clothes were disheveled, and she had this baby, and I thought, which one is more beautiful?

Well, that was easy to answer. And I looked at that woman on the screen, and I said, she's drawing lust out of men to sell. And it's the opposite of what she's there for, what women are for, to be nurturers, and caring, and giving, and said she was taking.

I never forgot that, I never forgot that. But marriage, you know, is a great thing, and inside of marriage is the bearing of children. And I honestly believe that women have a great privilege, and my wife can verify this, that when we were in San Diego, and before we moved here, we had what's called the moms group.

It was a bunch of moms that got together, and then it evolved into the guys going to the husbands, and called it the moms group. And whenever the moms group would get together, 10, 15 families, whatever it was, the guys would invariably go into one room and talk about sports, and the women would be in there talking about babies, and I was in there with the ladies.

I was, and it took them a while to get used to this guy going, and what about breastfeeding? You see, if you talk that, how about that? And you're delivering, did you have an episiotomy? How about, what was that like?

And I was truly interested. And they're like, and after a while they go, yeah, it's just mad, you know, because I really just love the idea of birth. It's a wonderful thing, and this is how it needs to be revered.

It does need to be revered, and it is. It's a wonderful thing. All right, now, a little more theology. In the Trinitarian communion, in Hebrews 13, 20, it talks about the blood of the eternal covenant.

What is the eternal covenant? The eternal covenant, what I believe it is. The Bible doesn't say what it is. I've formed it out of my studies, that it is where the, in the, here in communion, or choose for salvation, that's Ephesians 1, 4, 2 Thessalonians 2, 13, and that he, to the son, the elect.

So Jesus said, as many as the father has given me, of them I will lose none, John 6, 8, 9, and that, and the Holy Spirit would convict the world and apply the redemptive work, he would indwell us. So it is the covenant, the eternal covenant, a redemptive work, where he would set, there we go, it's back.

Oh, you missed it, it was really good. And so the father would elect and give them to the son, the son would become incarnate, and then, I don't believe for everybody, but for the elect only, and then the Holy Spirit would apply the redemptive work.

There's a covenant. So a covenant is a pact or an agreement between two or more parties. So when I do marriage ceremonies, as I almost did yours, but I've had an emergency, I couldn't do it, a month ago, just about, okay.

And so when I've done marriages, what I try and do, okay, that's interesting, making sure the technology's working. What I try and do is make sure that people understand that the bride and groom-to-be understand the covenant aspect of their marriage, and I talk about that.

And I try showing them what that is, because it's a contract, it's an agreement. Now, the 10 Commandments are a covenant document. The 10 Commandments, let me get in here, and there we go. The 10 Commandments are what's called, the 10 Commandments are what's called the Suzerain Vassal Treaty Pattern of the third millennium BC.

And that means that there's, this is who I am, this is what I've done, the stipulations of the covenant requirements, that I, Lord, your God, have brought you out of the land of Egypt, you know, did this, you shall have no other gods before me, for if you do, I will, you know, visit the judgment on them.

So each of the party got a copy of the covenant, and the 10 Commandments were a covenant sign. In marriage, here's my covenant sign, it's a ring. And so covenants have signs biblically, that's just how God works.

Now, covenant is reality because of the nature of God, because God, who knows all things, and is holy, can never lie, he can only always speak truth. Therefore, he can never break his word. Therefore, when he speaks, whatever he says is always true.

The only way you can know absolute truth is if the infinitely knowledgeable God reveals it to you. And since the infinitely knowledgeable God has revealed it, then we can trust that what he says is absolutely true.

All right. Okay, good, I'm just making sure the technology, because it looks like it's a little wigging over here. And I think what I'm gonna do is leave this right here, and I'll still be in there. All right, I'll go in later.

Marriage as Covenant, Dominion, and Complementary Roles

Now, marriage is a three-way covenant. Like I said, a covenant is a pact or an agreement between two or more parties. So when a man and a woman marry, not a man and a man, not a woman and a woman, not a man and a transgender something, or transgender, but a man and a woman, they get married, they're covenanting with each other.

They make it a covenant. They're promising to, I'll be faithful to you, you be faithful to me, I'll provide for you, sexual relations between us only, no one else, things like that. And that covenant is there.

So that's one form of the covenant. The other part of the covenant is, and you will accuse yourself and not others, you're not gonna have relations and do all that for everybody else, okay? And also, we Christians, we do it properly, we have a covenant with God, because we're promising before people, before God.

Now, the nature of that covenant is very, very serious. And I'll tell you that my wife and I had marital problems early on, pretty bad ones. And the reason we're still married is because we have a covenant before God.

And neither one of us was gonna abandon the other, and neither one of us was gonna commit adultery. So we were stuck, and we had to work it out, and we did. Now, I'm not saying everything's perfect, but we worked it out, and here we are, 34 years later, well, we've been married 34 years.

All right, so when we have a covenant that we base upon the nature of God, we realize that God takes that marriage covenant very, very seriously, and we as Christians have to do the same thing. We take it very seriously.

If you don't feel like being married, too bad. You are in, you make it work, and there's ways to do this, that's where counseling comes in. So this is what marriage is. And, all right, got that, got that.

So, initially, the marriage covenant was for the man to provide and to work, and the woman to bear and be a helpmate. There's more, but those are the basic things. So when the fall occurred, when sin entered the world, those things were messed up, but the jobs are still the same, the roles are still the same.

So God said to Adam, he said, well, there you go, now your work will be by sweat and toil, and thorns and thistles in the ground as well. That's the proof that the sin entered the world because thorns and thistles were there.

And then the effect upon the woman was childbirth pain, and something very interesting. To the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain, you will bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

That is a really interesting statement, and we're gonna get into that later. And I've seen this, I've read commentaries, I've studied the Hebrew, I've looked at it, and I have an opinion about what it means, because why is that statement there?

And we'll get into that. Now, divorce rates. I got some, actually some good news. I just did some research tonight. In 1920, there was one divorce for every seven marriages, that's 14%. 1940, there was one in six marriages, that's 17%.

1960, there was one divorce every four marriages, that's 25%. In 1972, there was one divorce in every three marriages, that's 33%. 1977, there was one divorce in every two marriages, that's 50%. Now, the divorce rate is 39%.

It's actually gone down. How about that? That'd be an interesting study to see why. Yeah. Maybe because people started realizing. Who knows? Okay. All right. Yeah. Now, the roles of men and women are under attack.

I'm gonna talk about this a little bit. I was talking about this preaching someplace, I forgot where, I was preaching, and this topic came up about men and women's roles in the sermon, and how men are under attack, and women are under attack, both are under attack, but men more.

And this woman afterwards came up to me, and she was elderly, and she made this point, and it was like a light going on. She said, guess where the first place was where the attack on men began in our society?

And I never thought about that. I said, well, where? And she said, the Flintstones. The Flintstones cartoons, you know about that. It was a cartoon, and they were people from, you know, cave men and women, you know, they're really old.

And it was humorous. And he, Fred Flintstone, was a doofus, was an imbecile, and she was always correcting him. And she said they couldn't start that directly, they had to start it indirectly. She said this, and I never forgot this.

She was an elderly woman, and I just, that's an incredibly good insight. Even before that was the Honeymooners. The Honeymooners before the Fred Flintstones? Honeymooners? Okay. Honeymooners were actually before them?

Yeah. That's true, because what was his name? I think it was Bay Spot. Yeah, he was incapable, always doing things wrong. Yeah, so that's right. So think about this. This means that the attack on men is ultimately demonic, because it goes against scripture.

Now, what I'm gonna be doing is talking like this more and more. What are the biblical scriptural roles? What are the demonic influences? And how are they manifesting in the world? There is a great deal of demonic influence.

All you have to do is watch TV, and you can see all kinds of crap. But when it comes to men on TV, men are imbeciles, portrayed as incapable, incompetent, don't do anything right. They're the objects of ridicule.

They're to be looked down upon. You tolerate them, and you put up with them. And this is how men are portrayed. The other way they're portrayed is murderers, all right? In fact, my wife and I watch Dateline, and who's the ones who are murderers?

90%, 95%, it's the guys, right? And so guys are failures. In fact, that reminds me, one of my favorite little, I used to watch Saturday Night Live years ago, but not anymore. Haven't watched it for years.

But I remember one skit, and it was funny, and it had a book title that they were gonna discuss. It was a mocking kind of a skit thing. The title of the book was Women Good, Men Bad. And I got a kick out of the title because I thought it was funny, but it still tells you, which reminds me of a comedian, a woman comedian who got up once and said that men are always the problem, menopause, menstruation, and all that stuff.

And it was pretty funny. Mental health, there you go. And their mental problems, it was funny. But things are funny because there's truth in them. And then there's an exaggeration that goes along with it.

And well, yeah, men certainly blow it, but women do too. But here's the thing. How are men to treat women lovingly? When they mess up, it's lovingly. And how are women to treat men? With respect, and most women don't know what that means.

And so there's a deficiency there. We're gonna get into that. Since the Trinity is the role model for the intimacy and fellowship and design that leads to marriage, Jesus is the role model for how we as people are to behave.

In particular, men. Now, this is where I get uncomfortable. This is where I don't like talking about this because I see how much I fail. That's the truth. I'd rather teach something where the women are always the failures and not me, which would be a short message.

But I like the idea because I'm a sinner. But the truth is when we compare ourselves to Jesus, well, we recognize our failures. That's what it is. And I wanna step back for a little bit and say something here.

This is important. When I say this, I do marriage counseling as well. Adam and Eve were in the garden. She sinned first. She rebelled against God. She then gave the fruit to Adam. He then sinned. They hid themselves, but the pre-incarnate Christ, that's who it was, came and said to the man, where are you?

Not to the woman, what have you done? Not to them, what have you done? But to the man, where are you? Because he is the one who's in the position of leadership and responsibility. He's the federal head.

Federal headship is the teaching that the male represents the descendants, not the female. Romans 5 .12, sin entered the world through one man. Romans 5 .18, through one transgression, there resulted condemnation to all men.