3. Marriage

Marriage

Talk 3 of 16 in the series: The Bible’s Challenge to a Dead World (Genesis 1-11)

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“Let marriage be held in honour among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”

Hebrews 13:4

1. Marriage in Conflict
2. Genesis
   • Life: Creation ch 1 and 2
     1. 1:28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it,
     2. 2:24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
   • Death: Sin and judgement ch 3 and 4
     1. 3:16 To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
     2. 4:19 And Lamech took two wives. 4:23 Lamech said to his wives: “Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. 24 If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”
3. The Dead World’s Alternatives
   • marriolatry
   • sexual solutions
   • structural solutions
   • abandonment
4. The Recovery
   • but but but 1Corinthians. 6:9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
   • as Christ and the church –Ephesians. 5:22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
   • the life of faith- Ephesians 5:31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.