Hi, this is Pastor Ken thanks for joining me once again for the Monday Marriage Message where we search God’s instructions to experience a highly successful marriage. We continue today with our look into the scripturally given Order and Structure of a God Shaped Marriage.
Last time when introducing the topic of this new series I presented the idea that every successful endeavor necessarily includes both structure and order. There I re-stated what Genesis chapter 1 & 2 speak of so clearly. Marriage is primarily intended to reflect the God that instituted it. God purposefully created mankind to reflect His image and likeness. Additionally, He created the first man and woman in a united condition, inextricably one, made of the same flesh and bone. Following that original union, God authored marriage as the format by which going forward a man and a woman would be joined by Him, affording them the same capacity as Adam and Eve to reflect their creator. I shared with you in that introductory episode that according to God’s Word even the triune Godhead has an order of authority. Therefore, marriage which is determined to reflect God necessarily must also have structure of authority. Finally, I shared that in 1 Corinthians 11:3 the structure and order of both the Godhead and marriage are identified and connected with one another outlining an overall framework of authority. Once again that scripture reads as follows. But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.
As we move forward in our look at the all-important God ordained structure of marriage, I want to begin with a crucial understanding. In the last edition I quickly made mention of the fact that the order of marital authority has nothing to do with the value of one person over the other. The structure of marriage absolutely has nothing to do with greater or lesser value found in a husband or wife. God’s word offers several explanations for why the order is what God has made it, but none of them have anything to do with the superiority of man or the inferiority of woman - because those ideals are completely and totally false. I want to dedicate this edition of the series on the Order and Structure of a God Shaped Marriage to dispelling that dangerous notion. Instead I hope to illustrate from God’s own word that men and women were and are created equally valuable in His eyes.
There are several errant beliefs we hold as people that cause us to misunderstand our equal value as men and women. Even in our contemporary society where many might say that a corrected equality has finally been established, our thinking is flawed, and actually takes us farther away from the truth of God’s word, instead of nearer to it. At the pinnacle of those misunderstandings is this, “Equality means possessing the same capabilities”. For all of history this thought process has been so simple to disprove that is was never even questioned until the last century. It is more than easy to see that men and women do not have all of the same capabilities. For example, women can give birth far better than men…men have zero ability to do so and with infinitesimal few exceptions, all mature women are physically able to have a baby. To that order, nearly all men are capable of fathering a child, while women have no natural ability to do so. When each of these differing abilities are joined, a man and a woman each play a crucial yet completely different role in the creation of life. Interestingly, when this takes place in marriage, that couple becomes more reflective of God who initially created life. In this as well as many other areas, men and women have dissimilar ability, yet equal value.
Following the science, there are many and varied physical differences between men and women that are not directly associated with reproduction. Some of those differences offer ability to one or the other that is easier to recognize than others. For instance, the existence of a woman’s breasts gives her the ability to nurse a child where her male counterpart has no such ability. A man’s ‘Adam’s apple’ exists because of the greater amount of cartilage surrounding a substantially larger voice box than a woman has. The increased size of the male vocal cords enable men to speak or sing in much lower octaves than the vast majority of women. Though these differences enable men and women to do things the other cannot, it does not in any way affect their overall value.
Many additional differences also exist. There are differences in the ways we think. We exhibit differences in our relational needs. There are differences in the way we use language, the ways we problem solve, the ways we resolve conflict, etc. The list of differences goes on and on. These variations between us give us many differing capabilities that can often be observed to follow along gender-lines. None of those differing abilities increase or decrease our overall val