Clough Divine institutions Lesson 8
Divine Institution #2, Maintenance and End of Marriage – 1 Corinthians 7-10:16
Tonight we come to the last section of the second divine
institution. We have been dealing with
these various divine institutions, institutions which are designed features of
God’s creation with the express purpose of providing for man and his spiritual
welfare. These divine institutions,
number four; first, responsibility or volition; second, marriage; third,
family; fourth, national government.
Each of these are institutions that are not Christian; they are
institutions for every member of the human race, believer and unbeliever, and
therefore they are not to be called Christian institutions. They apply equally to both believer and
nonbeliever. Marriage, we defined, as
the personal relationship between a male and a female member of the human race
which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believer.
Throughout the three weeks that we’ve worked on the divine
institution of marriage I emphasized that last part of the definition; I said
it’s going to be important and tonight we’re going to see where and why that is
important. It says, “which typifies the
saving relationship between Christ and believers.” Therefore when we deal with the maintenance
of marriage or the dynamics behind marriage it comes out that it must be
maintained and the energy of maintenance comes in and through the pattern that
God has set for this divine institution.
We have the analogy; Christ and the believer, so we have the analogy,
the husband and the wife. We said that
there are three basic facets to these relationships. The first one is that there is an ultimate
purpose in the divine institution as well as there is an ultimate purpose
behind Christ and His relationship with believers. In other words, there’s a goal, there’s a
pattern, this is not some random design of history. It’s been designed to produce something.
The second feature in the analogy between Christ and the
believer and the husband and the wife is in the matter of union; the sum is
greater than the part, namely that the marriage results in a union that did not
exist before, so you do not just have two individuals but you have something
new brought into existence by this marriage. So as we have believers in Christ together
form something greater than just believers in Christ; they form a new entity
known in history as the Church or technically in the New Testament “the
Christ.” So “the Christ” is actually the
new thing that is brought about.
The third analogy between Christ and the believer and the
husband and the wife is in the sphere of the grace and faith roles. We found that Jesus Christ has the role of
grace; believers have the role of faith.
The two are different. Grace
means that Jesus Christ does the giving; Jesus Christ does the providing. Faith means that the believer does the
receiving and places his confidence in Christ.
And so we found that the husband’s role typifies the grace role of
Christ and the wife’s role typifies the faith roll of the believer. And it’s no accident that certain patterns
are there; they’re there by deliberate intent of God.
And so when we deal with the maintenance of marriage
tonight we are going to deal with each of these three analogs and we’ll work
through them in the order in which I’ve just given them. First, the sphere of ultimate design. In other words, within the divine institution
of marriage there is an ultimate purpose and this means that God’s plan for the
man in team ship with his wife must be accomplished in history. It is God’s will that the man plus the plan,
plus his helper accomplish the plan.
It’s as simple as that. It was
God’s will, for example, to accomplish a certain task in and through Adam with
the help of Eve. So with each marriage
it is the role or the design for that marriage not just to exist but to produce
something dynamic in history, something active, something such that history
would be different if that marriage didn’t exist. So the marriage exists to bring about a
purpose.
And in 1 Corinthians 11:7-8 we found that in here, in a
very strange passage, Paul refers to the man, or the husband actually as the
glory of God but the woman as the glory of the husband, and so we have this
interesting pairing. Why is this? Why is the husband placed under God and said
to be the glory of God, whereas the wife is said not to be the glory of God but
she is said to be the glory of her husband.
It means the [can’t understand word] glory, a revelation or a projection
into history so that when we say a man, therefore, is the glory of God we say
that God is reflected in the man’s life.
God is reflected in the things the man does and the things that he
follows and so on. In other words, that
man reflects the light from God and he becomes the glory of God. So, the Bible says, when we have the woman
and deal with her role in marriage she is not the glory of God, she is the
glory of her husband, in that she takes what she receives from him and projects
that. And so she is projecting not
herself, she’s projecting actually her husband as the man should be projecting
God. The analogy means in the area of
behavior pattern, in the area of priorities, in the area of character and so
on. In other words, one can tell a believer
from an unbeliever. How? You tell a believer from an unbeliever in
that the character of Christ is manifested in the life of the believer, so
similarly the character of the woman’s husband is manifested in her life. And so we have this dual relationship;
Christ’s life is manifested to the man and the man’s life is manifested to the
woman.
Now this is not to say that the woman doesn’t have her own
priesthood before the Lord. We’re not denying that, but in this particular
discussion of the divine institution of marriage it comes out that the analogy
must be in this way; we’re only dealing with this analogy. Turn to 1 Peter 3:7 we’ll see this analogy
again as to the ultimate design behind marriage. Notice the last part of the 7th
verses, “as being heirs together of the grace of life,” “as being heirs
togther” or fellow-heirs, it’s one word, “as being fellow heirs of the grace of
life.” Now this is the gift of life and
refers to salvation, not physical life; “heirs together of life” refers to the
fact that both the husband and the wife at this point have received
Christ. Together, then, they become
heirs; heirs of what? If you’re an heir
of something you don’t yet possess it, and that is usually used of eternal life
in the New Testament, you possess it in one sense but not in its totality; not
in its final form. So therefore we’re
said to be heirs of eternal life. And so
here the husband and wife together are fellow heirs of this eternal life. Now this means therefore that when God look
upon the marriage relationship and He sees two believers united, He is looking
not just at two individually saved individuals; He is looking at that marriage
as a saved union. In other words, both
the husband and the wife together contribute eternal life; the husband has
eternal life because Christ indwells, the wife has eternal life because Christ
indwells, and together, not as two individual units but together themselves
they are heirs together in this relationship of eternal life. Paul says and Peter too here in this passage
that this is absolutely crucial to understand. There’s a teamwork, in other
words before God; God’s plan involved a teamwork.
And it was these analogies, incidentally, in history that
revolutionized marriage. If you could
study marriage into the Roman Empire and under the Greek civilizations and
would compare it with the ideal of the New Testament you’d soon realize the
tremendous impact that Christianity has had on history and these loudmouths
that you hear going on spouting off about all the horrible restraints that
Christianity places on the marriage relationship and all the other song and
dance, if you could study history you would immediately flush this down the
drain where it belongs because Christianity has liberated and transformed marriage
back to the original design that God has for it. So we find then, immediately, in one of these
analogies between Christ and the believer and the husband and the wife the
ultimate purpose. The ultimate purpose
surrounds God’s plan for both of them together as saved individuals.
Let’s be practical about this. Let’s take one of those areas, a problem in
this area, if we say that they both have a role or have a plan, the marriage
itself has a plan, the man has a plan for him, the woman is a helpmeet, then
obviously one phase of the man’s plan is his job. That’s one phase of it, and that’s a phase
that he has to prayerfully consider; that’s a phase that he has to consider in
perspective, he has to seek God’s guidance because the New Testament says your
human employer isn’t your employer, Jesus Christ is your employer. Jesus Christ gets you the job, you work for
Jesus Christ and He’ll get you off the job.
But throughout the relationship Jesus Christ is considered to be the
real employer of the Christian.
Now, we find in many marriages how the job takes precedence
and becomes something that competes with the family. Now that means that the family is not
oriented to God’s plan in this regard.
We find husbands chafing at the bit because they feel the intense
pressure of their family against their job and it becomes a ping-pong ballgame
between home and job, home and job, home and job; where is the tension? And the tension comes because they have
failed to see that in God’s plan God means to include that man’s job in this
plan so the job is included and therefore if the husband has decided that this
is the leading of the Lord and God has gotten him this job, this is his job and
his wife is to help him in this job. Now
this means the husband has to keep it in perspective but it also means that the
woman is to stop trying to compete with this and change it.
She can pray to God, for example, let’s take the situation
where the husband had made a mistake, or at least the wife thinks he has made a
mistake. So we’re not sure but it looks
like the husband has made a mistake. He
has made a mistake in the kind of job; he’s making a mistake in all sorts of
things associated with the job. So what
does the wife do? The wife has recourse
in the Scripture to a powerful thing which very few take advantage of and that
is instead of carping and instead of attacking and ridiculing the job, when in
fact this means she is stepping out of line because God has designed her as the
help fit for that man, instead of that she is to take it before the Lord. She cannot do anything by way of carping,
criticizing and maligning but she can do one thing that’s more powerful than
all of the criticizing that she could possibly do, and that is to lay it before
the Lord and ask God to change it, ask God to work in the situation.
She has that out, but instead we find many women trying to
operate in effect as though their salvation depended on works and so instead of
leaving it in the Lord’s hands, in the area of grace, they take it upon
themselves to try to straighten out the husband. And of course, it results in disaster. First of all, no man is going to be
straightened out, if he’s in his right mind, by any woman. And the second thing is that he will
negatively react and you will have a worse situation in the end than you had in
the beginning. Therefore, what’s the
problem? The problem is that the woman
is stepping out of her boundaries in this area and she wouldn’t if she would
realize that in this area God does have an ultimate plan for that marriage and
does have an area in which he wants that man to produce for God. And that the woman is to produce as his team
partner.
The second area of analogy between Christ and the believer
and the husband and the wife. First we
said there’s an ultimate design in marriage.
The second thing is in the sphere of union. We said that throughout Scripture there is
testified as a union or the one flesh concept of marriage, in that something is
created in the marriage relationship that did not exist there before, just as
when Christ died and He rose again from the dead, He sat at the Father’s right
hand and he sent from the Father’s right hand, from the throne room He has sent
the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, there was something new that came into
existence in history. The people didn’t
change, they were the same people before Pentecost as after Pentecost but
something was added; something changed, there was something brought into
existence and so the Bible says that marriage brings something new into
existence and we find this concept in 1 Corinthians 7. So not only does marriage have the ultimate
design or ultimate job or ultimate roll in production but it also brings
something into existence in this area of the union. So in maintaining marriage, then, this area
or the dynamic behind the union must be maintained.
In 1 Corinthians 7:1-5, “Now concerning the things whereof
ye wrote unto me, it is for a man not to touch a woman, [2] Nevertheless to
avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife and let every woman have her
own husband. [3] Let the husband render
unto the wife due benevolence; and likewise also, the wife unto the
husband. [4] The wife has not
authority,” literally, “over her own body, but the husband; and likewise also
the husband has not authority over his own body, but the wife. [5] Defraud ye not one the other, except it
be with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer;
and come together again that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency. [6] For this I speak…” and he goes on to
describe the gift of celibacy.
But in verses 1-5 you have a definite mandate to maintain
the sexual union of marriage and this mandate is apostolic and this is a
mandate that all these idiots that talk about Christianity being something of
the Victorian era that never talks about sex, they ought get in here and if I
had one of them I’d make them write it one thousand times, I want you to write
for me 1 Corinthians 7:1-5. And if after
writing this down one thousand times you can still say that Christianity is
against sex, then your next stop will be the funny farm. But Christianity has a tremendous amount to
say about sex and here it is. Here it is
commanded and here it is said to be the thing that in the physical area
generates the union. I’m not talking
about some abstruse thing; this is talking about that physically the union is
strengthened in the sex bond. And therefore
this is to continue.
Notice something else about verse 3, for example, it is
said here that there is such a thing as “due benevolence.” Now that’s a sweet little term from the King
James but what it means in the original legal language of the times was a legal
debt and so the Bible is so strong and so fantastically insistent upon this
relationship it says literally this is a legal debt. In fact, whether you like it or not it is a
legal debt. In fact, Paul goes on to say
in verse 5 that if this does not occur it represents “defraud” and the Greek
verb here, “defraud,” means to steal. So
therefore far from playing down sex the Bible plays it up; it plays it up
within the boundaries where it should be.
Now today it’s been played up in the other areas and played down within
the area where it’s legitimate. And here
in the legitimate domain the Bible turns up the volume and says yes, this is a
mandate from God and is the very mechanics behind the maintenance of the
marital union.
And it says, particularly in verse 5, the last part of it,
it says “and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your
incontinency.” Now we can draw at least
two implications out of that little phrase of verse 5. It means by way of apostolic revelation that
Satan himself will attack the marriage relationship in this area, that Satan
himself is first of all, in a general sense, against the second divine
institution. We know this because he’s
against all the divine institutions. So
he’s interested in breaking down the marital relationship and this verse
teaches us one way in which he usually does it.
This is one central area where Satan operates and so therefore Paul says
guard against it because he says no matter what happens, he says Satan is there
to take advantage.
So therefore far, far from suppressing this area of sex and
causing all these things that are attributed to Bible Christianity, all you
young people that get this static in the classroom in high school, you are
being taught by ignoramuses; you are being taught by people who are absolutely
stupid, who do not know anything about Bible Christianity and if you read the
textbook carefully this would be very evident.
But you are being taught by people who are making these dogmatic
pronouncements in the classroom, who haven’t the foggiest idea of what they are
saying, and we have discovered this in Lubbock Bible Church, that the students
that finally get rooted in God’s Word and are able to handle themselves in the
classroom find much to their amazement when they challenge on certain points
the teachers don’t even know what’s going on, and therefore it’s been a
tremendous ministry to watch what happens when you teach the young people some
Bible doctrine and they begin to spill this out in their environment and all of
a sudden they discover these people aren’t the big authorities they think they
are, they can’t even handle this problem, that problem or another problem. Amazing!
And it’s been a tremendous thing for people to see that these so-called
self-appointed authorities do not understand and really are not even qualified
to remark on what Christian says and what Christianity does not say. So my advice if you get this in the classroom
is just tune it out because you’re listening to an ignoramus and you can listen
to other things, you can look at the ceiling until this man gets through with
all of his nonsense and returns to the subject.
So in 1 Corinthians 7 we have the second are of the
maintenance of marriage and that is in the area of sex and the Bible is strong
on this and it is in no way suppressing it; it’s in fact amplifying it.
The third area, 1 Peter 3:1-7, these are the grace/faith
roles of the husband and wife. In 1
Peter 3:1-7 we have the third analogy used and that is the analogy between
grace and faith, where the man or the husband acts functionally in the area of
grace and his wife acts functionally in the area of faith. When we covered this in detail we amplified
this and said there are at least four characteristics that we can find to this
grace/faith relationship, and you remember when we spoke of the grace relationship
we said first this means that the man or the husband is the initiator. He is the one logically that must initiate
the love. This doesn’t mean each moment
or each occasion but it means in the broad overall perspective, he is the one
that logically initiates it, just as, for example, Christ loved you before you
responded to Him; there’s your analogy. When did you first love Christ? Did you first love Him and then He loved you
in response? Or did Jesus Christ love
you first and then you responded to His love.
Obviously the latter, therefore it’s the same thing with the roles, the
man or the husband is the one that logically initiates and the female is the
one that logically responds. So we then
have the husband as the initiator; the female or the wife as the responder,
just as the Church responds to Jesus Christ.
The second thing we discovered by way of analogy is that
the husband can do everything to woo the woman except he can’t make the
decision. In other words, and we bracket
therefore volition, just as Jesus Christ dies on the cross, just as Jesus
Christ provides for every need, except Jesus Christ cannot make the decision
for you; you have to make a decision yourself.
And so similarly the man can do everything he can but he can’t force
compulsion; he can’t force the volition.
He can win it but he can’t force or compel it. Then we find the woman, of course, this is
the point where the positive and negative volition is made in response.
The third area of analogy is that the man is acting as
Christ did and he is a revealer; he is a revealer of his character. And the woman is a truster, just as, for
example, in the area of the spiritual realm Jesus Christ reveals His
trustworthiness by His words and His works, therefore I as a believer respond
to this revelation by trusting Christ’s character. And so afterwards as we grow spiritually we
begin to trust the Lord more and more. Why?
Because we’re more successful at self-hypnosis? No, because we are more confident that Christ
is able to do what He claims to do. Our
confidence grows in His trustworthiness, so similarly the man basically acts as
a revealer and the woman basically acts as a truster in that she responds to
the man’s revelation of himself.
Then we dealt with the fact that as with Christ the man has
to have patience, the hardest of all four.
He has to have patience; Christ didn’t ram, cram and jam Himself down
the throat of every unbeliever; He patiently waited and He patiently wooed the
unbeliever to Himself. Similarly the man
may require times in which he has to be patient and has to stand by until
there’s a response. And finally the
woman has to grow; our response is a matter of growth, it doesn’t occur
overnight; you didn’t respond fully to Jesus Christ at the point of salvation;
you didn’t make what is commonly known in fundamental circles as “Christ Lord
of all or He’s not Lord at all,” that’s not theologically correct; it’s not
correct at all. Christ can’t be “Lord of
all” when you first accept Him as Savior because you don’t know what “all”
means; you don’t know what all His plan is for your life; you don’t know what
all the details are so how can Christ be Lord of all? He can’t be.
He can’t be Lord of all until you grow so similarly the woman can’t
respond totally until she grows.
So here then we have some, just some of these analogies of
the Word of God. Now when we come to the
grace/faith relationship of 1 Peter 3, Peter is going to build on these
analogies as a way of maintaining the marriage relationship. First the woman in verses 1-6; notice
incidentally six times as much material is devoted to the woman as devoted to
the man. Why is that? It’s not just that Peter is a man and he’s
preaching to the women; that’s not the point.
Peter is dealing with the woman because the woman, as far as her role,
this side of the fall it is more difficult in one way than the man; the woman
finds it more difficult to submit than the man does to fulfill his role. Why is this?
Because of Genesis 3; remember at the curse when God said “thy desire,”
He said to Eve, “shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.”
In other words he was saying from now on as a result of the
fall, as a result of the catastrophe and the confusion and so on that’s been
introduced into history, into man’s psychic structure, into his soul, into the
way he behaves, with all these other areas as a result of the fall, the net
result is the woman finds herself in tension.
She finds herself in tension between she wants to fulfill her role as a woman
but it becomes painful in matter of fact to do it, because obviously she has a
husband with an old sin nature and so therefore God said we can’t have a 50-50
relationship, it has to be 51-49 relationship and I’m putting the man in charge
and it’s going to be painful for the woman.
He is going to rule over her, it’s going to be painful for the woman to
assume her position because she is assuming her position under a person who has
a sin nature. Of course, if it would
make it any easier she too has a sin nature, but nevertheless there is the
source of pain.
So therefore Peter says, in 1 Peter 3:1-6, he devotes an
entire discussion to the problem the woman has in actually fulfilling this role
in the marital relationship and then only one verse for the man, so let’s look
at these six verses. “Likewise, ye
wives, be in subjection to your own husbands, now Peter deals with a special
problem here, we’ll comment on it as we go, but first let’s look at general
principles. “Likewise, ye wives, be in
subjection,” and the word “subjection” here is hupotasso and it means the military word to take your
position. In other words, everybody has
a position and a place, “take your place.”
Now that’s far, far different than be inferior to your husband. That’s now what he’s saying; he’s not saying
you have to lick the dust, that’s not what he’s saying here. He is saying, however, within the form of the
second divine institution, within this form, there you have a position, there
you have a role and that is the role that you must take.
So in verse 1 Peter says the first way of maintaining
marriage in this area is for the woman first to see what her role is by a study
of the second divine institution and then secondly take that roll; it’s going
to be painful but you take it. And Peter
says this is such a powerful thing in its effect that it is able to convert the
unbeliever, and that’s why he says the rest of verse 1, “that if any obey not
the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation,” now it’s
not conversation, the worst possible translation of the word because that’s
exactly what is not in view here; it’s behavior patterns; the King James used
the word conversation, it’s tragic, it should be behavior pattern. So therefore Peter says that if the women
would latch onto the true structure of the second divine institution, and
assume their position before God in that divine institution, the effect would
be revolutionary on their husband. And that’s what he’s saying; and that’s what
he’s saying when he says “if any obey not the word,” this is a husband who has
not accepted Christ. Now how did this
happen?
The Bible tells us never to marry an unbeliever; I always
try my best in counseling with people to find out if the fellow and the girl
are both believers. I can marry two
unbelievers and I can marry two believers but I cannot marry one believer and
one unbeliever. And this is why if you
are smart and you are single you won’t get mixed up with one of Satan’s
children. If the person is an unbeliever
you just clear out; you can have a friendly relationship and you just keep it
on a pretty cool friendship basis until you see some spiritual evidences of a
person being born again. Otherwise you
are asking for trouble and I mean trouble!
I’ve sat in my office hour after hour after hour counseling with
disaster cases because people couldn’t make the simple decision to obey the
counsels of the New Testament, which state “be not unequally yoked.” Therefore, if you are single, application to
you, stay away from unbelief; you can have friendships with them but that’s as
far as you let it go. That doesn’t mean
you have to be a prude, it doesn’t mean you have to be a separatist, but it
means you keep in control of that relationship and you don’t ever let an
unbeliever start dictating to you some relationship. You dictate to the unbeliever but you don’t
let the unbeliever dictate to you; you just keep those relationships under
control if you don’t want trouble.
But here Peter faced the problem in the early church where
you had people who were both unbelievers to start with and as the apostles
would move in with the gospel one of the partners of the marriage would accept
Christ, the other would reject Christ.
Now what do we do? Now we’ve got
the problem on our hands of a believer and an unbeliever. So Peter says one of the most powerful forms
of evangelism is for the woman to keep her big mouth shut and assume her
position inside the marriage relationship.
Now why do I say that? I’m not
just trying to be smart by saying keep your mouth shut; I have met more
turned-off men because their women couldn’t keep their mouth shut and had to
start preaching at them and had to start nagging at them, why don’t you do this
and why don’t you do that and all the rest of it. And finally the guy just gets full of it and
he says forget it, and that’s it. And
now you try to reach that man; just try to reach him for Christ and see what
you do; he won’t go two inches, not two inches.
Now I can give you a very interesting illustration of verse
1, how it happened in experience. As you
know pal around with … and we share different things in the ministry, things
that only we as pastors can share with one another, and one of the stories he
was telling me about one of the situations he had to deal with was a woman who
was a believer and married to an unbeliever who had a drinking problem. Not only did this man have a drinking problem
but he was an alcoholic, almost, he was just getting on the point of being an
alcoholic. This woman had come to her
pastor for advice and he pointed her to 1 Peter 3:1; for six years that woman
took position and took her knocks in that marriage relationship and took all
the stuff that goes with it, and some of you have had contact with people that
drink and you know what happens to the family budget, and you know what happens
to the stability and peace in the home relationship; you’ve seen it happen,
perhaps in your own home or with relatives so you know what I’m talking about. This woman took that for six years and then
one night, constantly trusting the Lord on the basis of this promise because
she said if I take my position in the divine institution, then God is going to
work in this man’s life. And so one day
this man about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. was inebriated down at the local bar with 3 or
4 of his drinking buddies and they were just kind of waltzing around from table
to table as only inebriated people can do at 2:00 a.m. in the morning, and one
of the men said to this guy, he said say, I wonder who has the best wife.
So this man said well, my wife is the best wife; this is
the man who’s married to this Christian woman.
And so they said well, let’s go home to your house. So they traipsed over to his house and at
2:30 in the morning dropped in and said we want some eggs and we want
breakfast, so therefore the knock on the door, this woman got up at 2:30 a.m.
in the morning, got this group of hoods some breakfast, a good breakfast, and
you should have heard what happened as a result of this. As they sat there and started eating and she
went back to bed, these men were eating breakfast and then boy did this guy get
reamed, because these other two drinking buddies of his said to him, they said
listen, if we had a wife like you’ve got we wouldn’t be drinking, what is your
problem? And so they went on and
proceeded to preach to this person as only one drunk can do to another one, and
as a result of this, this man came to know Jesus Christ as his Savior. Now what had happened? Not one word the woman said was effective in
this particular conversion …not one; it was just that one crucial act at
And then Peter goes on in 1 Peter 3:2, “While they behold
your chaste conversation coupled with fear,” and the word “behold” is terribly
important because that means, as always in the New Testament, that before God
expects us to believe the gospel He always says you deserve some historical proof
in front of your eyes. And so therefore
what this woman is providing her husband in 1 Peter 3 is confirmation in his
own historical experience that the gospel is true; it’s true because it works
even with him. And then in verses 3-4 he
goes on to say where the center of the beauty of that wife should be, “Whose
adorning, let it not be the outward adorning of plaiting the hair, or of
wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel, [4] But let it be the hidden man
of the heart in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and
quiet spirit, which in the sight of God is of great price.” Now some fundamentalists have distorted this
and have said verse 3, do you know what that means? It means that the woman should not plait
their hair; plaiting the hair in the ancient world was they just put it in
curlers and so on, had kind of a permanent operation, and you can see this in
some of the Roman pictures.
Peter’s not saying don’t take care of your hair, but that’s
what the fundamentalists are saying, and they are saying let it not be the
wearing of the gold, you can’t wear jewelry.
So in certain areas of the country the women walk around with no
lipstick, no jewelry, their hair combed with a fan and then they wonder, what
kind of a thing is this, what kind of a testimony is this for Jesus
Christ? Of course the poor deluded
legalist never looks at the last phrase because if you can’t plait the hair and
you can’t have gold, then why do you have apparel. If you took this verse the way they’re taking
it you get into a problem at the end, a very embarrassing problem and that is
that you shouldn’t wear clothes either.
So obviously Peter is not saying “let this not be” in an absolute sense,
he’s just simply saying let this not be the emphasis. And there’s a strategy involved.
Many women wonder how they can win their husbands to the
Lord or increase the spiritual maturity of their husbands. It’s interesting as you examine this passage
the sneaky strategy the Holy Spirit has inside the divine institution of
marriage. The first thing is the
position of the woman in verse 1 but I think the really sneaky one is in verse
3-4 because what he is saying here in effect, if you look at it carefully, is
that the center of beauty of this woman is concentrated, not in her fleshly
beauty in the sense of this man, the thing that attracts him to this
woman…here’s the woman now and instead of using the outward things to attract
the man she uses to attract him her regenerate nature. Now what does this do? Why does the Holy
Spirit say use the regenerate nature; that’s what’s mentioned in verse 4, the
regenerate nature, the new nature, the new behavior pattern that God puts in
our life, the new capacity to live the Christian life, and he says let it be
that hidden man of the heart. Can’t you
see the strategy? In other words, here’s
the unbelieving man, who with all of his heart says I deny Christ. Now not necessarily consciously but in his
life he is essentially saying I reject grace, I don’t want anything to do with
Christ, I don’t want anything to do with anything associated with Christ. Now watch the sneaky little strategy.
In 1 Peter 3:3-4 what this woman is doing is she is
attracting the man to herself but she attracts him to herself in such a way
that what he finds attractive in her is none other than the work of Jesus
Christ. So in the end what has happened?
The man who says I’m not interested in Christ winds up having to be interested
in Christ because that’s what interests him in her life. And so therefore the very thing that he says
he’s not interested in is the very thing that she turns into the alarmist to
gain his attention. And so in verse 4 we
are taught the strategy of dealing with the unbelieving husband, and that is
that the women according to Peter are to utilize aspects of their new nature,
their patience. If you want to know what
the new nature is? Galatians 5:22-23,
the love, the joy, the peace, the long-suffering and so on; those fruit of the
Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. And so he
says that if the woman allows this to flow out in her life, it turns out the
man will be attracted to this; once he’s attracted to this then he’s secretly
being enticed to the gospel. And so this
woman is actually, you might say, a clandestine agent for Jesus Christ in the
marriage, by winning her husband over to him through the regenerate nature.
Now there are some other points here which we haven’t got
time to develop; in 1 Peter 3:6 we have Sarah used as an example, “Sarah obeyed
Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters ye are,” and of course the great
Greek scholar A. T. Robertson has humor in some of his commentaries that in
verse 6 he says isn’t it interesting that with all the great societies and the
ladies missionary fellowship and the ladies circles and all the rest we’ve
never yet had within churches “the daughters of Sarah” society. And here in verse 6 we have the daughters of
Sarah, and of course this implies, and we’ll do this some time, to do a study
of the biography of Abraham and Sarah, and point out the principle of 1 Peter
3.
Now we move to the men, we’ve dealt with the women’s role
in the marriage as the “faith” role; it means that she is a responder, it means
that she therefore as a responder does something, so let’s watch this for a
moment. Some of you, many of you have
children, and you know how you can influence the response of the child or you
can influence the child by privately responding to him. For example, an obvious thing, if a kid does
something bad you respond by pointing this out to him; in other words, you have
a negative response. If a kid does
something bad you have a negative response; if he does something good you have
a positive response. So what are you
doing? You’re responding in one way in
this point to what he has already done, aren’t you. But the way you respond in the end starts to
shape his actions and so this is what the strategy is here for the believing
wife and the unbelieving husband. It’s
true that she can’t preach to him; it’s true that she’s cast in the role of the
passive responder but that doesn’t mean that she can’t have an effect. It means that she selects her response so
that in her various selections of her response, the various things he does she
can guide. And this is what he’s saying here in verse 4 and so on. He’s saying that she responds selectively and
by her pattern of response she actually shapes…because if this man loves his
wife he wants her to respond to him. Now
if she, therefore, responds in certain areas and can guide and move him over in
ways in which only a woman can do. Now this excludes this preaching business,
this nagging business. Peter says you
women have a lot more powerful tool than that at your disposal if you’ll think
back to the Scriptural concept. This
Bible gives you the tools you need, all you’ve got to do is be aware of the
tools and have a little skill in using them and you get skill only by
using.
And then finally the woman is the truster. How is Peter doing this? Well, by trusting the man she throws the
responsibility over on top of the man.
For example, it frequently happens that we have a case where the man is
a non-Christian, he’s irresponsible, he doesn’t care for the spiritual
upbringing in the children, he doesn’t care sometimes even for the financial management
of the family budget or anything else, all these, it’s just dumped on the woman
and he just trots off on his merry way and has no control over these
things. The Bible would suggest and I
would counsel in this situation that the woman not fill in the man’s role. Now sometimes it’s true, sometimes the only
thing that you can do inside of some marriages is for the woman to gradually
take over the things and the responsibilities of her husband. But that is not the ideal, and therefore I
would say the women should strongly resist this. In other words, what I’m saying is you take
the attitude, if he doesn’t do it nobody does it. And that way you trust, this is using the concept
of her as a truster, she is trusting him to accomplish it and so in effect this
woman in this position of 1 Peter 3 is saying I trust you to do it, I trust you
to do it, I trust you to do it, not
me, I trust you to do it. In other
words, by that very stand she casts the responsibility back over on the
husband.
Now the man; we have said the man parallels the idea of
grace in the role of Jesus Christ. How
is this taught here? In 1 Peter 3:7
Peter says, likewise, “In like manner,” in other words husbands are also to
take their position in the marriage relationship, “Likewise, ye husbands, dwell
with them according to knowledge, giving honor unto the wife, as unto the
weaker vessel, and as being heirs together…” and so on. Now, what is the word “dwell with according
to knowledge?” It means two things for
the man; it means that he has to understand divine institution number two. He should know divine institution number two,
a rough outline, the thrust of the whole thing.
And he’s got to do this because if he doesn’t have the knowledge his
wife is never going to have the knowledge.
So it’s up to the man, he says, you dwell “according to knowledge.”
But the second thing is not just a general principle but he
has to know the individual idiosyncrasies of his wife, and he has to study her
as an individual and so he has a unique individual and this knowledge includes
a knowledge of her. So he combines two
things; he combines the framework that God gives him for the divine institution
number two, and then he combines that with the specific facts about his unique
woman that he has.
And then finally he says in here, “that your prayers be not
hindered.” Now why would prayers be
hindered if the man doesn’t dwell according to knowledge? What has that got to do with prayer? Well, the only way prayers in the New
Testament are hindered is when our conscience bothers us. And our conscience bothers us when we are not
fulfilling the plan of God. So therefore
what he is saying is that you can’t violate these categories that God has set
up for marriage without tubing yourself spiritually. In other words, what he’s saying is that you
will get out of fellowship. Here’s the
bottom circle, if you are a Christian and part of that circle we said is God’s
will; well if you’ve been instructed and God the Holy Spirit has taught you
what His will is for the divine institution of marriage, and you don’t follow
it, how can you stay in fellowship? You
can’t stay in fellowship; you’ll always be out of fellowship. And therefore marriage problems can seriously
affect spiritually the life that you have, seriously affect it, because if God
has a pattern and you violate that pattern, one area is the prayers that begin
to go.
Now there’s a fundamental principle or reasoning behind why
the man, acting in the role of the grace man, the person who dispenses grace,
must dwell according to knowledge. How,
if the man is to be the provider, can he provide the needs of the woman without
knowledge? In other words, the
presumption behind me if I’m going to provide is that I must know, no matter
what it is, whether it’s money, whether it’s something else, I have to know
something in order to provide. You can’t
provide anything, you can’ provide somebody with something unless you know
their needs. So therefore this is why
knowledge is emphasized for the man in verse 7; he must know his woman so that
he can provide for her needs as the provider.
Now that concludes the maintenance of marriage, and we want
to conclude the second divine institution by dealing with the problem of how is
marriage ended scripturally? What about
the end of marriage? All good things
have to come to an end, so does marriage; no marriages in heaven. Now this may shock some of you but don’t let
it bother you too much, through the regenerate nature and so on you will won’t
be missing anybody, you can have fellowship with your loved one if they are a
believer, but there will be no marriages in heaven. Marriages are terminated by death. So the first way in which a marriage union is
dissolved, obviously, is by death. There
are two other ways, however, in which the marriage union can be dissolved. Let’s look again at divine institution number
two. As that relationship between a male
and a female, that typifies the relationship of Christ, obviously the
elimination of either one through death is one way that marriage can be
ended.
The second way that marriage can be ended is through the
destruction of the plan that unites them.
We said that the thing behind the marriage is the plan that they
accomplish so obviously if this plan is destroyed then the marriage in effect
has been destroyed. And we’ll see a case
of this in Scripture.
The third way in which this marriage can be destroyed is
through a breaking down of the union relationship; obviously if that unity is
broken then the marriage itself falls.
So therefore the Bible, if you look at it carefully takes these very
three conditions of the design of the second divine institution and says in
each case we have a destruction of that marital union. The first one is death and that’s obvious and
self evident.
The second one is found in 1 Corinthians 7:10, the
destruction of the plan. We have Paul counseling the Corinthians on various
problems; notice in verse 8, “I say, therefore, to the unmarried and
widows…. Verse 10, “And unto the married….” Verse 12, “But to the rest….” So as we study this Scripture let’s look at
these three categories: “unmarried and widows,” there’s verse 8; “married,”
verse 10; “and to the rest,” so there’s three classes that he’s
addressing. If you look at it carefully
you’re going to have some questions, certainly; certainly you should be saying
wait a minute, who are “the rest?”
You’re either married or you’re not married, and if the partner is dead
then they fall in the category of widows, so who are “the rest?” We’ll answer that in just a moment.
Let’s look first at “the married,” verse 10-11. “And unto the married I command, yet not I,
but the Lord,” now oftentimes in college classes the religious professors say
to the students say turn to 1 Corinthians 7 and say ha-ha, the apostles did not
believe that they were speaking the words of God. We’ll deal with that also since were in this
point. Verse 10 means that he is quoting a verbal teaching of the Lord Jesus
Christ given during the period of the incarnation. That’s what the meaning is here, “I command,
yet not I, but the Lord,” in other words, what Paul is laying down here is not
something that originated from him in history, but a command that originated
from the incarnate Christ during the three years in which He ministered. And so this is really a paraphrase or a
re-quote of the teachings of Jesus.
“Let not the wife depart from her husband; [11] But and if
she depart, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband and let
not the husband put away his wife.” In
other words, divorce here is denied; divorce is not permitted and what he is
saying the Lord said is that the wife departing means that the wife is
divorcing, for that is what the verb means, if the wife divorced her husband,
“but if and yet she divorced,” verse 11 makes it clear it’s not a total divorce
because by definition divorce means the right to remarry, divorce is not just
separation; divorce is a right to remarry, but he says this divorce is
impossible by the command of the Lord, and so therefore in verse 11 he says it
is God’s will in this case that they remain unmarried.
So here we the case of married partners who are both
believers and they have a fight or something and they break up. And Paul says,
however, it is not the Lord’s will that this marriage be broken between two
believers.
Now in 1 Corinthians
Now what is the background for this passage? The background is this: you have a heathen
situation where Paul has gone in and evangelized. He has had case after case after case after
case where one partner of the marriage responds to the gospel, the other
partner denies the gospel; so now you’ve got the mixed marriage problem spoken
of back in 1 Peter 3. So you can see mixed marriages aren’t something new to
the 20th century. The apostles had to face it. Well what then did they say? He said in verses 12-14 that the Corinthians
were not to do what they kept thinking they were supposed to do. The Corinthians were enamored with the idea
that if I am a believer and if my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, then if
I’m married to an unbeliever I am defiling my body and therefore this marriage,
this mixed marriage is a defilement. So
Paul explicitly denies it in verse 14, he says no, this cannot be used as an
excuse for divorce. He says that is not
true, the unbelieving husband, in fact, is sanctified by the wife.
Now what does this mean?
It doesn’t mean he’s saved; what it means is that the effect on the
marriage moves over from the believer on to the unbeliever; it doesn’t move the
other way. Now this is a rare exception
to a Biblical rule. In every other case
I know in Scripture whenever you have something of apostasy combined with
believers you always have the rotten apples overcoming the good apples. This is why the doctrine of separation; but
here through God’s grace Paul says in verse 14, this rule is reversed and you
have an exception. Where the marriage is
sanctified before God and we’ll get into the details of this when we get into
the third divine institution, family, for this sanctification has to do with
the children of the marriage union, this marriage is sanctified before God from
believer over to unbeliever. And so
therefore Corinthians you’re wrong, just because you’re married to an
unbeliever is not an excuse for divorce.
Well, then what about 1 Corinthians 7:15-16; verses 15-16
deal with the problem, if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. In other words, here you see the structure
again where the second divine institution of marriage cannot negate the first
divine institution of volition. Each one
is built on a hierarchy and can’t reflect that and destroy the other. So here
he is saying look, you have an unbeliever, this unbeliever is on negative
volition, this unbeliever rejects, rejects, rejects, rejects, rejects, rejects,
and finally he can’t take it any longer and he takes off. He says in this case, verse 15, “A brother or
a sister,” that is the believing partner is not under bondage; in other words,
that is a legitimate basis for divorce. That is a legitimate basis for
remarrying, and therefore they are not under bondage; what bondage? The bondage to do as in verses 10-11 with the
married people; that is, to stay unmarried.
You are not in that bondage, you have the freedom to remarry. This is when the unbeliever deserts the union
out of spiritual reasons and so on. So
Paul does give one situation.
But why is this allowed?
You say well doesn’t this break that perfect union of the marriage,
doesn’t this break the typology? No it
doesn’t, because if you have an unbeliever and a believer in the marriage
union, how can they unite on one plan?
You see, you can’t have a plan between positive volition and negative
volition; we’re going to see this in Romans 1, the two are utterly
antithetical; one is moving east and the other is moving west; one is moving
north and the other is moving south; there can’t be a basis for true unity
there, and so therefore the Bible acknowledges that this marriage in this
situation does not fit the ideal for the second divine institution; it is
broken because there is no base for the unity.
There’s one more passage in the New Testament that deals
with this problem and that’s Matthew 5:32. So we have two ways in which the
marriage relationship can be broken; it can be broken by death and it can be
broken by a violation of this unified plan.
The plan, of course, cannot be agreed upon by a believer and an
unbeliever. Matthew 5:32 and with this
we will conclude the end of marriage:
“But I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, except for
the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery; and whosever shall
marry her that is divorced commits adultery.”
Now this is amplified in Matthew 19:9, but what Jesus is saying simply
and briefly is this: That there is an
exception clause to “no divorce.” And
that exception clause is covered by the word “fornication.” People who have interpreted Matthew 5 always
say but wait a minute; why is fornication used; you’d think the logical thing
would be adultery. So therefore this
word is not in Matthew; he knows the world adultery, it’s not the word
fornication, two entirely different words in the Greek. Why does Jesus tack on, “except in the case
of fornication?”
Fornication is a general term which would include adultery
plus one other condition and that condition in the decrees, the forbidden
decrees of Leviticus 18, which were called fornication, this meant that a marriage
which was conducted out of bounds in the first place according to the decrees
of Leviticus 18, the problem of marrying in-laws and so on, and marrying father
and mother, these are the decrees, the Bible says that these marriages are null
and void from the beginning and therefore Jesus says it is all right to have a
divorce since there wasn’t a marriage to start with by the decrees of Leviticus
18. But the fornication would also
include adultery. So we therefore have
this…why is this, incidentally, both of these are sexual and here you have the
other way in which the second divine institution is destroyed; it is destroyed
by creating a union that destroys the union between the male and the female;
they now have a union outside which fractures that union. And so therefore it does not mean,
incidentally, divorce has to occur; it does not mean divorce has to occur, it
means it can occur.
So the New Testament, to summarize, gives us three ways in
which marriage can end; it can end by death.
A mixed marriage can end by the desertion of the unbelieving
partner. And thirdly, the marriage can
end if there is adultery, or one of these null and void things of Leviticus 18,
obviously not too much of a problem in our society but was in the time of the
New Testament.
What are we to gather as we summarize and draw all this together, the second
divine institution? Simply this: you
young people who are not yet married, you’ve seen what a serious thing marriage
is; it’s not to be entered into lightly. There’s one thing that becomes very
apostate in our society; the marriage ceremony itself is an expression of
contemporary apostasy. Why? Because what do we have? We have the couple standing
in front of a group of people who swear before God that they will marry until
death do them part. Now, this is
blasphemous because by most standards most couples today in the secular society
around us have no intention of swearing before God, and so therefore the very
act of swearing to God that this marriage will continue becomes a blasphemous
act and it’s a result of the secular apostasy of our time.
So therefore in one sense marriage ceremonies are apostate;
you can even quote me on that if you want to.
In the first place we have no business even having them in the church;
that is something left over from extra-Biblical tradition. But throughout the Bible the marriage
position is to be sworn before God who will punish, and who is there, and who
has designed this thing. If the couple
doesn’t really believe that God is there and that God is the Creator, that God
has designed this thing, this marriage ceremony business is a laugh, absolute
laugh. It would be far better in our day
if we’re going to play and flirt with breaking down the second divine
institution if we’d simply say let’s not even have church marriages, let’s just
completely absolve and separate God from it and let’s just have a secular
ceremony. After all, when I marry someone I’m not acting as a Christian
minister; who thinks I’m acting as a Christian minister when I marry a couple;
I’m not acting as a Christian minister, I’m acting as an agent of the state
where I’m marrying the person, I have to say it right in the end, “as an agent
of this state I pronounce you….” I can’t
pronounce them man and wife with the power of my clergy; my clergyship doesn’t
guarantee anything at that point in the ceremony. I have to get permission from the state of
Texas to be able to make that statement, therefore the ceremony ultimately is a
civil ceremony and so therefore I think, my own advice is to make it secular,
totally civil and totally secular and get God out of the business because the
average person in today’s society has no intent whatever at the altar of
following through with the structure of the second divine institution.
So young people, before you jump into marriage you’d better
seriously consider what you’re jumping into because if you’re a believer you
can’t treat this as a little secular ceremony that you’re going to go through
and try it out. You don’t try it out;
not if you’re operating according t the will of God.
The second thing is that we who are believers who are
married can work in various areas to show that the second divine institution
authenticates the gospel of Christ, for remember, the first place the fall
shows up is where? In the marriage
relationship; therefore, as Peter has shown us, where can the gospel first show
up most powerfully? In the marriage
relationship. And so therefore
maintenance of a Christian marriage is a testimony for Jesus Christ. Don’t consider it apart from your (quote)
“fulltime Christian service,” or apart from your ministry over in this
organization or that organization.
Oh no, your marriage relationship is part of your
testimony. And yet how many times I have
had to stop certain people in this city, who are in charge of Christian
programs, who have literally beat on the door of people who attend Lubbock
Bible Church and want them 24 hours a day to do this activity, that activity
and so on, usually it’s pick on the women, oh will you do this and would you do
that and would you do this, and they pick on some weak-willed woman who can’t
say no and she winds up having to do this, this, this, this and this. So inevitably it turns out her husband is an
unbeliever or a carnal Christian, then what happens. He comes home tired from his job, walks in to
a big fat mess; the house hasn’t been cleaned, supper isn’t on the table, she
looks like a clod because she’s been running around doing everything all day,
and you expect this to be a testimony to the man? And then these people come to me and it’s
“what can I do for my husband,” I don’t know what’s the matter, he doesn’t
believe this and he doesn’t do this and he doesn’t do that. Well, I believed that when I first started
hearing it until I started looking carefully and then I discovered, after
talking to the man, oh no, it’s completely different. The problem is, and it really wasn’t even the
woman’s fault in these cases, it’s these Christian organizations that bulldoze
people into activities and destroy the very testimony that we need today to
propagate the gospel. Tear the marriage
apart, destroy it, because we’ve got to get the gospel out, and after you’ve
destroyed the marriage you’ve destroyed the very thing it’s testifying to; it
really makes sense the strategy of evangelism in our time.
With out heads bowed…..