Marriage Is Not Optional

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Salvation in Christ Alone and the Coming Judgment

People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio. The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Good morning.

Marriage Is Not Optional in Genesis

We're going to be continuing our series on basic truths today and the basic truth that we're going to be learning from God's word is the truth that marriage is not optional. So if you do have a Bible, turn to Genesis 2, 18 -25, and we're going to be reading Genesis 2, 18 -25, and we'll pray.

When you have it, please stand for the reading of God's word. Genesis 2, 18. Then the Lord God said, It's not good that man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock and to the birds of the heaven and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed it up in place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of a man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for the scriptures that you've given to us, which are life to us. We know that you are there and that you have spoken and you have not left us into the dark.

Help us to learn great things from your word today. Help us to learn your purposes for humanity as centered on marriage and how it points to Christ and his relationship with the church. We thank you for all you do.

In your son's name I pray. Amen. You may be seated. Now if the person were to open up the Bible and read the opening chapters of Genesis for the first time, and if they were to conclude that God, the creator of the universe, is saying to them that marriage is not optional, they would be perhaps forgiven for coming to that conclusion.

And I do say forgiven somewhat ironically because that seems to be exactly what the Bible is saying at that point, and so therefore there's nothing that should be forgiven. I grew up in the kind of church where pastors would talk about these words that we see here, it's not good for man to be alone.

They would do so without apology, and they would do so without qualification. This is early on in my life and early on in my Christian experience, and so they would say these things and they would leave them out there hanging without really feeling the need to make all the qualifications that men seem to think that we need to make today.

They would just say these things as if they were perfectly normal, perfectly natural, perfectly good to say. So they would say that it's not good for a man to be alone. A lot of the concerns that the preachers were preaching against early on in my Christian experience were the concern of feminism as it was encroaching upon the church.

And so I would hear pastors preaching on these topics, the opening chapters of Genesis, as truths that we need to call people to, and as I said, they didn't seem to make all the qualifications that were made by pastors later on in my life.

They were working out of a Reformation tradition that upheld the goodness and the sanctity of marriage over and against a society who was basically rejecting marriage at every single point. And so, I mean, as you know, Martin Luther, when he cast off his monk garments, one of the first things that he did was he married a nun, Katerina von Bora, and they began to have children because they realized that there was a distortion in the Catholic church over against the nature of singleness and the relationship between God's teaching on marriage as a general good for humanity and the Catholic church's stance of prohibiting marriage among individuals in general, like whole classes of individuals.

As I said, I grew up under the kind of preaching where frequent quips were made about the nature of the formation of orphanages as the natural outcome of taking a bunch of single men and preventing marriage and putting them in close proximity to a bunch of single women who were prohibited from marriage also.

As I said, things began to change over time. So as you read through the opening chapters of Genesis, one of the things that is almost inescapable to come away from reading through the opening chapters of Genesis with any other thought than the thought that marriage is not optional, and then if you turn to the end of the Bible and you think about the nature of the ending of the Bible, one of the things you'll realize is that all of human history is pointing towards a marriage, right?

So God in Christ has come to win a bride for himself. That's the whole story of Jesus and his incarnation. He came to earth to purchase a bride for himself. He's gone in his inter-advental period to prepare a place for that bride, and then when he returns, we will be united with him and there will be a great marriage supper of the Lamb.

So the Bible starts with marriage. The Bible ends with marriage. If you read the opening chapters of the Genesis, you read through the Bible in a fairly straightforward way, you're going to come to this conclusion that marriage is not optional.

And as I said, I grew up under a lot of teachers early on in my life who just presented this truth in a pretty natural, normal, straightforward way without apology, and I internalized that. As a young man growing up, there was some duty that I had, some responsibility that I had to pursue marriage.

It wasn't just something that was about my own personal happiness and my own personal fulfillment. It wasn't something that I could choose if I want to, but there's many different paths that people could choose.

I mean, I saw myself as a car, right? So you think about natural analogies at this point, like cars are meant to drive, right? You look at the human design, you see that human beings are meant to marry.

It's the obvious, overwhelming, inescapable reality. I thought of this subject in the same way that you might think of a car that sits eternally in a driveway and never goes out to drive. You would think, well, that's a waste of a good car, isn't it?

That's the way I was trained to think about marriage because that seems to be what Genesis is saying, and that seems to be the storyline of the Bible. But as I said, when you look at the world, you realize that marriage is deeply unpopular.

There was a generation of preachers who preached against this for a while, and then as the situation began to decay in society, it seems like they shifted tactics away from preaching on marriage as a duty, a responsibility, in the way that most people thought about it throughout the history of the world.

Even pagan people thought about it as a duty to propagate the species. They thought about it that kind of way. But as I said, over time, as feminism encroached upon society, as the ages of first-time marriages began to rise, the tone of pastors began to change, and there's a lot of evidence to point to this fact.

So in the 1950s, the age of first-time marriages among men was 22 .8 years old, and among women it was 20 .3 years old. So that's in the 50s, the average age of first-time marriage. By 1990, what do you think it was?

By 1990, the average age of first-time marriage for men was 26 years old. 26 .1 years old. For women, it was 23 .9 years old. 2022 to 2023, the recent data is the average age of first-time marriages for men is 30 .4 years, and for women it's 28 .7 years.

And obviously, as the world goes, so goes the church. The tones of pastors have changed on this. If you look around at the broad kind of teaching that's being put out there today, there are endless articles on the idolatry of marriage and family today.

The church seems to have rediscovered Paul's instruction on singleness, almost as if it's a silver bullet that removes all sense of obligation with respect to marriage, returning to a new variation of the Roman Catholic era that the Reformers cast off.

I do plan on talking about what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 7, but we're still in the intro at this point, and so I'm not going to give you the full discussion of that right now. But you are living in a church environment right now that seems to have totally redefined the sense of obligation towards marriage and seems to present singleness as not a trial that the vast majority of people have to endure, but almost a good state, an alternative lifestyle.

The church sounds just like the world at this point, and as I said, there's endless articles and books that are being written on this topic asking us to totally rethink our basic intuitions at these basic points, totally rethink the basic intuitions that the God of the universe has produced in us as he's given us these opening chapters of the Bible on the basis of verses that we always knew were there and knew how to understand but no longer understand anymore.

So here's some quotes. Here's Matt Hodges from the Gospel Coalition. Without meaningful involvement of single brothers and sisters, our churches will suffer. So notice with these quotes, there's like good things that are smuggled in there with conclusions that are pretty extreme.

So without meaningful involvement of single brothers and sisters, our churches will suffer. We would do well to teach the dignity of singleness and its unique blessings, and then to structure our ministries in such a way that shows we believe our words.

And so the author is very concerned about the nature of churches being so centered on marriage and making that the foundation that we have to totally reinvent the church, restructure all of our things to accept this new permanent class of single people.

So where do you think these words are coming from? Well, think about the statistics that we just pointed to. So as the average age of first-time marriages rise, then we need to totally think what we're doing, restructure everything that we're doing, rethink our basic intuitions at this point, teach the dignity of singleness as a good in of itself, as an equal good in contrast to marriage.

Here's some other quotes. This is Elizabeth Woodson from the Gospel Coalition. We need to dethrone our idol of marriage and learn to define our identity the way God does. He views singleness and marriage as equally blessed gifts to be stewarded for His glory.

So if you think about the nature of that quote, there's a lot in that quote. There may be some things in there that you might agree with, but then there's a lot that's being smuggled in and a lot of expectations that are being smuggled in.

And I would say that the main point of these kind of quotes is to basically overturn the normalcy of marriage. Chris Nowney wrote a book, Single Woman, A Challenge to the Church. Instead of Helen Wilcox writing a familias review that's critical of this book, there's a glowing praise of this book that is written in her article.

So here's the summary. She argues from these scriptures that the gift of singleness is not a calling for a select few, but all who are not married. It may not be permanent, but viewed this way, singleness becomes more than a period of waiting for a marriage partner.

This also means the church must repent of any idolatry of marriage and the unthinking encouragement of people into pairs. That's pretty extreme, isn't it? Repent of any unthinking encouragement of singles into pairs.

Marriage, she argues, was the order of creation, but singleness is the order of the new heavens and the new earth. I think they missed the book of Revelation at that point. I don't know what to tell them.

She suggests that one of the reasons why God allowed this for a large number of single women is not their rebellion against the created order, their rejection of God's purposes. It has nothing to do with feminism.

It has nothing to do with the sin on the part of passive men. Nothing like that, right? One of the reasons why God has allowed this for a large number of single women in the church is to redress a lost balance between the past and the future, right?

In fact, she goes as far as saying, perhaps so many Christian single women exist in order to depict correctly to the world this tension between creation where the pattern is married and childbearing womanhood and recreation where the pattern is single womanhood.

And neither marriage nor childbearing exists. So both marriage and singleness must be supported by the church, right? So you look at these quotes and you see that there's a radical change in our intuition about the basic nature of what God has said in His Word.

Has the New Testament God pit himself against the Old Testament God? What are we to make of the opening chapters of Genesis where God seems to present marriage as a duty, right? In the language of duty, in the language of obligation, in the language of normalcy.

What do we do with the Old Testament God who's presented that? Has Christ come to fundamentally reorient our basic intuitions and cause us to reread all these things? I mean those are some of the things that we're going to be talking about today and we're going to look to God's Word to see what God has to say about this subject and it seems that what He has to say about this subject is very clear.

It's very, very, very clear. Even though it seems much more complicated today to us than it should be. Now as you look at the opening chapters of Genesis, I first want to give you some indication about what God's perspective on man and His single state is.

So what are some ways in the opening chapters of Genesis that God teaches us that marriage is not optional? So we're going to look to the Scriptures and we're going to see God's perspective on these things.

The Single State Is Not Good and Incomplete

So the first of these reasons, like what are some of the ways that God teaches us that marriage is not optional in Genesis? First one is that God describes man's single state as not good. You can't read the opening account of Genesis and not come away thinking that God describes Adam and his single state as not good.

So this not good is a very significant not good, right? So in Genesis 2 .18, the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for them. You need to read that not good in context.

When you read that not good in context, what you're going to realize is that as you read through the opening chapters of Genesis over and over and over again, God creates and declares it to be good, right?

God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. Like over and over again, that's repeated in God's created act. When He gets to man, He says, It's not good that man should be alone.

I will make a helper fit for him. God describes man's single state as not good. And by not good, He's not saying it's morally evil. He's saying it's incomplete. Man is not designed to be alone. That's the point.

Now right now, you live in a society where you can see the dramatic results of this very principle. So porn use is relatively ubiquitous among young men. For young women today, it's almost impossible to find a man who's never looked at porn before.

That's a problem, isn't it? It's becoming a significant problem among young women too. This used to be a man problem, like only a man problem. This is now becoming a significant problem among young women too.

Pornication is basically universal at this point. In 2021, there were approximately 6 ,000, or 600, well, I'm missing a comma here. 6 ,725 ,978 reported abortions. This translates to approximately one-fifth of pregnancies, excluding miscarriages.

There are temptations that are common to single men. If you want to understand some of the temptations common to single men, look to the book of Proverbs. Solomon warns his son about the dangers that he's going to face as a single man.

Proverbs 1, 10 through 19, Solomon says, My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, Come with us, let us lie wait in blood. Let us ambush the innocent without reason. Like shale, let us swallow them up alive and whole like those who go down into the pit.

We shall find all precious goods. We shall fill our houses with plunder. Throw in your lot among us. We will all have one purse. My son, do not walk in the way with them. Hold back your foot from their paths.

For their feet run to evil. They make haste to shed blood. For in vain is a net spread in the sight of any bird. But these men lie in wait for their own blood. They set an ambush for their own lives. Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy and ingests gain.

It takes away the lives of his possessors. Men typically are, a man in his single state, the temptations he generally faces as a single man are to go. He has an excess of strength. He's going to go and blow things up and destroy people.

Those are the nature of some of the temptations men face. Women face similar temptations. As a man, his temptations are towards external destruction. Often, a woman's temptations, like single women's temptations, are to destroy relationships.

So 1 Timothy 5, 11 through 15, Paul says, Refuse to enroll the younger widows. For when their passions draw them away from Christ, they desire to be merry, and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith.

Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies saying what they should not. So to have the younger widows marry their children, manage their household, and give the adversary no occasion for slander.

For some have already strayed from Satan. You see how those are kind of contrast to each other. Men's destruction is outward. Women's destruction is relational in general. The point here is just to say that God describes man's single state as not good.

There's entailments to that. There's ramifications for that. So part of that is there are temptations that both of them face. But in the language of Genesis, when God's saying it's not good for man to be alone, He's speaking the language of design.

Man is designed for a particular purpose, isn't he? So man is designed for a particular purpose. He's been given particular responsibilities. He's not going to be able to fulfill those responsibilities on his own.

And that's true the opposite way too. This isn't just like man is incomplete without woman as his corresponding helper, but woman is perfectly fine and in no need of a man kind of thing. This is both of them are incomplete on their own.

Woman is made for man. Man is not made for woman. Man is incomplete without his corresponding helper, and woman is incomplete in the same way without her corresponding leader. You understand? God describes man's single state as not good, as incomplete.

Men and women can't, as a general rule, like as a general rule, men and women are designed for a particular purpose and particular function that we're going to talk about at some length. And on their own, they're not going to be able to fulfill that function.

Marriage as God's General Plan for the Human Race

So first, what are some ways God teaches us that marriage is not optional in Genesis? First, God describes man's single state as not good, i .e., incomplete. Second, God reveals marriage as his general plan for the human race.

Where do you see that? Genesis 2 .24. So let's read it again, okay? So Genesis 2 .24 starts after we get to Genesis 2 .18. Then the Lord God said it's not good that man should be alone. Make a helper fit for him.

We talked about this last week how God paraded all the animals and there was no helper for man found from among the animals, right? But, so what does God do? Verse 21, the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on the man and while he slept he took one of the ribs and closed it up in its place with flesh and the rib the Lord God had taken from the man he made into the woman and he brought her to the man.

Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. So Adam names woman, exercising authority over woman just as he exercises authority over the animals. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

And notice what's said there. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. That doesn't sound like the language of suggestion, right?

Does it?

Read it again. Therefore, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, hold fast to his wife, they shall become one flesh and the man and his wife are both naked and not ashamed. That doesn't sound like a suggestion.

I think that the way that we're tempted to read this is therefore a man shall leave his father and mother assuming he wants to. Assuming he doesn't have something better to do. Assuming he's able to, right?

Assuming he's able to find a wife. Assuming that maybe that's what God's called him to. We don't read this with any hint of normalcy, right? So one of the things that's happened is we're living in a time where generalities have fallen on hard times.

I started out the sermon with the generality. Marriage is not optional. When I say that generality, what you're predisposed to do mentally, psychologically, you're predisposed to reject it, right? So what you're going to do is you're going to say, well, doesn't he call some people to singleness, right?

So therefore you can't make a statement like that. So we're very hostile to generalities. We don't like the notion of generalities at all. We think that pointing out a rare exception is sufficient proof to overturn a rule.

But look, if I were to look at you and say cars are made to be driven, does it do any good to point out the fact that maybe there's a model car out there that exists solely to stay on the lot forever so that people can look at what the car is like?

Well, no, I mean, cars are made to be driven. They're obviously made to be driven. Cars are designed to be driven, right? Hammers are designed to hit nails, aren't they? So you think about the nature of a hammer.

A hammer is designed to hit nails. If you were to look at me and say, well, I mean, I guess, you know, you could hit a screw into a wall too or something like that. Well, I guess you could, but that isn't what it was made to do.

What is it made to do, right? So you think about the nature of these principles that are found here. God is very comfortable speaking the language of generalities in the Bible. God says it's not good for man to be alone.

You don't want to be the kind of person who's looking at God and saying, well, God, you know, Paul talks about the gift of singleness later. I don't know how you can talk like that. Isn't that kind of pastorally irresponsible, God, to talk like that, to say it's not good for man to be alone?

Because, you know, what about people who were born eunuchs? And what about people who have been made eunuchs by men? And what about people who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom? So God very naturally talks in the language of generalities.

And a generality is good if it's true in a significant portion of the people. You look around the world, you say, hey, porn use among young men is relatively ubiquitous. Fornication among young people is relatively ubiquitous.

What should that tell you? What should that tell you? That should tell you that the vast majority of people who are alive today have sexual desires that they need to express in the context of marriage.

And if you look around, you see the chaos that's happening because they're not pursuing marriage. What that's telling you is that people are designed for a particular purpose. When the Bible says a barren womb is never satisfied, that's a generality too, isn't it?

Is God not aware of feminism? Is God not aware of the women's rights movement? Is God not aware of the fact that one simple temptation might be that women come along and totally reject the idea of motherhood, give themselves over to shouting their abortions.

Is God not aware of all those things? No, God is obviously aware of all those things. Sin distorts everything, but God has made man in a general way for a general purpose. So you look at this verse, it says, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, hold fast to his wife.

This is a general instruction to humanity about God's will for humanity. This is what you're designed to do. This is what you're designed to do if you're a human being. In this statement, the form of the Hebrew verb, ya 'azav, is functioning as a declarative statement that describes what typically happens or is expected to happen.

It expresses a general principle or normative behavior. After the creation of woman, this wasn't just one act. It wasn't just that God said to Adam, like, here's your wife. It's not good for you to be alone, but everyone else, you know, it's up to them.

That's not the way it's presented. That's not the way it reads. The way it's presented, the way it reads, is that God looks at Adam in a single state. He says, it's not good for you to be alone. You need a corresponding helper.

Therefore, the rest of humanity should follow suit. That's what it's saying. That's what it's saying as a general statement, which obviously there are exceptions, but the exceptions don't disprove the rule in that way.

So God reveals marriage. Here's the point. God reveals marriage as His general plan for the human race. And also, third, God blesses mankind with the responsibility for procreation. So why is it not good for man to be alone?

Because he's been given a blessing by God and a responsibility by God. So Genesis 128, God blessed him. God said, How do you read that? Like, how are we supposed to read that, brothers and sisters? Be fruitful and multiply if you want to.

If you don't have anything better to do. If you think that will be fulfilling to you. We don't do that with the rest of the verse. And have dominion over the fish of the sea, I mean, if you want.

Right?

Like, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, over every living thing that moves in the earth. Well, I mean, you wouldn't want to say it's a command to have dominion over the birds of the heaven and everything else.

I mean, it's just a blessing. You can choose to have a blessing if you want. That's not the way it reads, is it? This is what man is made to do. You understand? Man is made to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, to have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heaven, over every living thing that moves on the earth.

This doesn't read like an optional suggestion, and everyone knows it. It does not read like an optional suggestion. It's formed in the language of a command, right? And the command is given as a blessing, and that tells you a lot about the nature of what God's commands actually are.

They're not curses. They're blessings. They're the way to life, right? I'm not saying that you can pursue the commands as a means of making yourself right before God, but God's commands are blessings.

Satan comes along and tells you that God's commands are curses. Don't listen to them. God's withholding something that is needful for you, but this is a blessing that takes the form of command. You're meant to look at the opening chapters of Genesis.

You're meant to do what I did growing up and just say, well, it's not good for man to be alone, huh? Therefore, man shall leave his father and mother, hold fast to his wife, so he shall become one flesh.

Oh, okay, all right. Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Maybe I'm made. Maybe I'm a human being that God has made for the purpose of pursuing marriage. Maybe that's what God wants for me.

Maybe this is not just some optional thing that I'm gonna passively wait around until it happens. Maybe this is actually a duty and a responsibility. And do you not think that when the ages of first-time marriages were more like 22 and 20, do you not think that people looked at marriage and procreation as more of a duty and a responsibility and less of an optional pursuit?

If you looked at it, here's the point, if you looked at it today as a duty and a responsibility, would that give you more urgency to enter into that union and more confidence to pursue that union if you thought that there was a real notion of responsibility here, that not only, this is not just about self-fulfillment and your own personal desires and what you want, but the continued existence of the human race even, right?

We used to think in those terms that not just man was an isolated person pursuing his own self-interest, and he's looking for a wife so that he can be psychologically made whole and no longer be lonely, and that she's gonna be his everything for him, right?

She's gonna meet all of his emotional needs. That's the way we're taught to talk about it now, but the way we used to think about it was through the language of duty, the language of responsibility, and those terms have fallen on hard times at this point, obviously, and we're no longer allowed to talk that way, but God is presenting these things to the human race as created purposes for humanity.

This is God's general plan, and what you'll realize is that you're living in a world that's rejecting those plans. The church is trying to soften the blow. The church is trying to soften the blow, okay?

But what you're looking at, when you look around the world, you look at the abortions, you look at the porn use, you look at the fornication, what you're seeing is people are made inescapably for a purpose.

They're trying the best they can to suppress an unrighteousness, but they can't escape it. Do you know that even despite all that, 85 of people, like despite the war that's being declared on marriage, 85 of the people will get married at one point, like in America, will get married at one point in their life.

They can't escape God's plan. Even if they don't call it marriage, they enter all these pretend, like serial pretend marriages, like they call dating relationships, over and over and over again where they're trying to pretend like they're married.