“It is not good that the man should be alone.” In this single sentence we have the essential meaning of marriage…as fellowship, one life together in terms of man’s calling…
Man in the Garden of Eden, Adam, learned two things before he married: the pattern of responsibility and the pattern of obedience. Until Adam served God first, he could not expect a woman to serve him...
Circumcision in the Old Testament was comparable to baptism; performed on the eighth day, circumcision signified that this child was now taken into a fellowship of grace; that he had been born into the fellowship, into the community of the church...
Full acceptance, in a sense, came only in marriage. It was the responsibility of every father, before giving his daughter in marriage to any man, to satisfy himself and his wife concerning the young man's ability to be a provider...Have you accumulated the equivalent of three years' wages...But also, the faith of the young man: What do you believe? Are you going to be under God a prophet, priest, and king?...Will you be a priest under God, leading your household in religious worship, taking all that you do and dedicating yourself, your family, and your substance unto God? Will you be a prophet--that is, will you speak for God?
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Having assumed the status of a man in marriage, though he continues to honor his father and his mother and has responsibilities toward them, he is now directly under God; and therefore, he must create an independent entity, a new home. He can no longer have anyone over him in the sense of a family relationship; he is directly under God as a man. He must leave his father and mother not only by departing from the home and establishing a new home, but he must also cease to be dependent upon them. While retaining, of course, a loving relationship, he must cut the apron strings...
The Hebrew name for the bride was the complete or perfected one. This was her fulfillment; this was her calling: to be a wife, to be a help meet. Marriage was seen as her completion and her maturity.
She who forsakes her husband in the moment of his weakness, in the moment of his trial, in the moment of his troubles does not build her house--she tears it down with her hands...
In her child's early years, it is her fingers that mold and shape that life. It is she who first must learn to walk that tight-rope of showing love and support and comfort to her babe and yet being strong enough and firm enough not to let that little bundle of life grow into a king or a queen ruling that home by tantrum.
...all who would be called 'godly' by Jesus in the Beatitudes; but meekness and the quiet spirit, particularly, is the quality that you must seek...It is that inner beauty of meekness and quietness.
We must teach them that they do not belong to this secular world. We have to teach our children that they must resist the infiltrating thoughts of this secular world in order that they might know and live as those who belong to the army of saints of God in the past, which continues to this very day and will continue to march across the pages of history till the Lord Jesus comes again on the clouds of heaven…
An idol, you know, is anything that teaches what is contrary to the word of God. Cast it out.
We are image bearers of the living God and that has something to say about everything we study: history, sociology, economics, science, the arts, literature, agriculture, and commerce--each takes on a different cast when one believes that man is the image bearer of the living God.
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