Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - God's Purpose for Marriage | Torah | Genesis 2:18-25

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here to grow in your faith this year. Why did God create marriage? Is being married better than being single? What should a godly marriage look like? In today's episode, Keith uses Genesis 2:18-25 to look at the first-ever marriage to see God's design for marriage. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast Passages: Genesis 2:18-25 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. I'm Jensen Holmick-Nair. And I'm Patrick Miller. We're digging into the stories found in the first books of the Bible. They're not just some of the best stories in the Bible. They're some of the best stories in all of human history.

Right now we're in the Book of Genesis. Are you as much of a sucker for a good email newsletter as I am? I have to admit I love them because they keep me informed. Unfortunately, they don't really help me grow in my faith. What if you gave Jesus access to your inbox? 10-minute Bible Talks is starting a weekly email newsletter. It will have a variety of things inside of it. Each week will be different.

Sometimes it'll have cultural background about the topics that we're talking about. Sometimes it will have insights into what it means to practice the spiritual disciplines. I think you're going to like the variety. All you have to do is go to the show notes and hit the link there. and you can sign up for the new 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. In Genesis chapter 2, we read about the first wedding. Some kids were asked questions about marriage. Here are some of the questions and their answers.

How do you decide who to marry? Alan, age 10, says, you got to find somebody who likes the same stuff. Like if you like sports, she should like it that you like sports, and she should keep the chips and dip coming. Alan obviously grew up in a completely different home than I did. Kirsten, age 10, no person really decides before they grow up who they're going to marry. God decides it all way before and you get to find out later who you're stuck with.

Kirsten obviously has a strong conviction that God is sovereign over everything in her life. How can a stranger tell if two people are married? Derek, age eight, you might have to guess based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids. Parents of young children can tell you that, unfortunately, that is, sometimes true. Next question. What do most people do on a date? Martin, age 10, says, well, on the first date, they just tell each other lies, and that usually gets them interested enough to go on a second date. Is it better to be single or married? Anita, age 9. It's better for girls to be single, but not for boys. Boys need someone to clean up after them. Last question. How would you

make a marriage work? Rick, age 10. Tell your wife she looks pretty, even if she looks like a truck. A lot of wisdom there from Rick, a 10-year-old, imagine that. Here's the deal. Kids believe crazy things about marriage, but they're not the only ones. Adults have their own crazy ideas about love and marriage. We're going to look at Genesis 2 to see if we can bring any clarity, any understanding to our thinking. See if we can gain God's perspective on marriage. So Genesis 218 says this.

The Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. So the story goes on to say that God brings all the animals before Adam so that he can name them. And in the process of naming the animals, Adam realizes there's no suitable helper for him among the animals. So verse 21, God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib that he had taken out of the man and he brought her to the man. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis is a book of first, and here we see the first wedding in the Bible. Now, in my opinion, weddings are overrated. Look, they're special. They're important days. I just say they're overrated because our culture has taught us to emphasize weddings way too much. Every miserable couple started with a happy wedding day.

When it comes to marriage, like most of the world, things in life, it's not where you start, but where you finish. I've done my fair share of weddings as a pastor, and no one has ever come to me and said, Pastor, our great desire is to have a miserable marriage. Can you tell us how to live in misery? No one talks like that. And yet there are a lot of couples with miserable marriages. So why? Well, maybe it's because marriage is a lot harder than most people realize at the start. Maybe it's harder than a lot of young people realize. And one reason it's difficult is because we don't know the purpose of marriage. We don't know why God designed marriage. Now, the Bible says a lot more about marriage than what's found in Genesis 2. But what we see in

Genesis 2 is really important. One of the things we see in Genesis 2 is that God created marriage for companionship. That's one of his purposes in marriage. Now remember, up to this point in the story, sin has not entered into the world. God has created and declared his creation to be good. So it's quite a surprise to read in verse 18. It is not good for the man to be alone. This is the first time we've seen something that's not good. Evidently, there is problem in paradise. God isn't enough. Now, that sounds weird, doesn't it? Especially given how much we emphasize that God is all we need. And that's true. And yet, God has created us, not just to need him, but also to need other people in our life.

Paradise isn't paradise if you don't have significant relationships. That desire, that hunger you have for significant relationships was given to you by God. So God's response to Adam's loneliness, God's response to Adam's isolation, God's response to Adam's desire to have a relationship is to create Eve. Adam and Eve become the first husband and wife. This has a lot to say about the purpose. of marriage. But let's just stop for a second and say verses like this have understandably, but unfortunately led to the myth that marriage is best for everyone and that somehow

singles are second class. We have this very wrong idea that if you're married, you're normal, and if you're single, well, something is wrong with you. Too often I overhear conversations between married people and single people, and those conversations are filled with subtle and to be Frank, sometimes not so subtle, pressure on single people to get married. Now, here's what's ironic. These married people who are complaining about their spouse, who are complaining about their marriage, are pressuring singles to get married. It's just kind of weird.

But know this. Jesus himself lived a single life. If Jesus was in a church, he wouldn't be in the young married group. He'd be in the single group. Jesus had a full, complete, meaningful, fantastic life without a, ever being married. And his plan is for his church to be a community of married and single people, where they value each other and respect one another and honor one another's struggles and growth, that we are there for each other. Okay, so now back to Genesis 2. It's not good for man to be

alone, and in response, God creates Eve to be united in a one-flesh relationship with Adam. What does this mean for us? Well, if you're married, it means, that one of your primary roles is to be your husband or wife's friend, hopefully their best friend, at least a good friend. In other words, marriage isn't just like a business partnership, trying to run a household, or it's not just a division of labor trying to raise kids. One of the primary purposes of marriage, at least in God's eyes, is to combat the aloneness that Adam felt by creating a wife, a spouse,

for him to share life with. Now, when you're dating, or even at the beginning of a marriage, that kind of companionship comes relatively easily. But as life goes on, it proves more difficult. Part of that is because when we are dating, we put our best foot forward. So maybe the woman who loves to watch sports before her wedding loses that love for sports after the wedding. And of course, the same goes for the husband. But another reason is that life gets busy. Work and careers take off, kids come along, life gets more complicated. So every married couple has to ask, what are we going to do to help cultivate a relationship? Our culture tells us that our work is central, or that maybe children

are central in our marriage. But God tells you, that's wrong. The husband-wife relationship should be the primary human relationship for every married couple. It is second only to their relationship with God. Another purpose of marriage is that marriage should make us holy. It should make us more like Jesus. Most couples get married expecting their marriage to make them happy. But God says he wants your marriage to make you holy. Now this is a tricky issue because a good marriage will bring a lot of happiness, but it's the kind of happiness that's a mature happiness. It's the kind of happiness that comes from making Christ the center of your life, not yourself. So marriage isn't about satisfying ourselves. It's about dying to ourselves. We see that in Genesis too. Remember that the Bible says that there was no

suitable helper found for Adam among the animals. So the Lord God caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep. And that deep sleep describes a kind of a near-death experience. It serves as a picture or a metaphor of death. If Adam was going to have a bride, he would first have to die. Now, what does that mean for you in your marriage? Well, just as God designed Eve for Adam, so God has designed each spouse for the other. But the only way to get your wife, the only way to get your husband, the only way to live in that God-ordained relationship in a God-honoring way, is first to die to yourself. See, you say, I want a loving marriage. Well, guess what? The essence of love. is self-denial. The essence of love is to die to yourself. Marriage is not a you scratch my back

and I'll scratch yours kind of deal. It's not a 50-50 partnership. It's not about meeting in the middle. It's about dying to yourself. There is no love without sacrifice. Let me try to make this concrete. Love is dying to a predictable hassle-free life and instead allowing your life to be complicated by the needs of another person. Love is dying to the right to spend your money the way you want to spend it, instead to hold your money together and make those decisions in a way that honors both of your values. Love is dying to your self-righteousness, where you get to proclaim your goodness and look down on your spouse because he or she has not measured up to your level of righteousness. Love is dying to self-protection.

It means being vulnerable and transparent, not putting up walls, but tearing down walls. Love is dying to your desire to focus on your own needs. Love says that you put other people's needs above your own. Love is dying to the right to say whatever you want. Sometimes the loving thing to do is to keep our mouth shut. Always the loving thing to do is to speak the truth in love. love is dying to the demand that your spouse be deserving of your love. You should love your spouse in just the same way Christ loved you.

And you never deserve Christ's love, did you? So your spouse doesn't have to earn or deserve or work for your love. You want to love your spouse in the same way that Jesus loved you. So here's one of God's purposes in marriage, that we die to ourself, that we become people who are more loving and that in that process we experience the joy and happiness that God has for us

living for yourself makes you as a person miserable it will make your marriage miserable surely you know that by now why not try it God's way hey before you forget make sure you sign up for the new 10 minute Bible talk newsletter just hit the link in the show notes