Lesson for March 17, 2019
The Doctrine of Christian Marriage
A Christian marriage is a union between a Christian man and a Christian woman. Successful Christian marriage is a union between a believing husband and a believing wife, who are executing God’s plan, purpose and will. It actually takes three to make a successful Christian marriage – a believing husband, a believing wife and Jesus Christ. When God is removed from a marriage, the marriage fails to present to the world a testimony for Christ. (Ephesians 5:22-33)
A believer is no better in marriage than he or she is as a person. For this reason, it is important that a believer choose wisely before getting married to another believer. The Bible is very clear about avoidance of marriage to an unbeliever or a believer who is not positive toward God and His Word. You cannot change another person, only God can do that. And God can change a person only if that person recognizes the need for change and allows God to change them. (II Corinthians 6:14-15; Romans 12:1-2)
Christian marriage begins with two believers in Christ bringing into the relationship their individual sin natures. Since people are no better in marriage than they are as people, believers should never assume a person is going to change when they get married or that you can change them. People who are winners in life are normally winners in marriage. People who are losers in life are normally losers in marriage. Losers are not believers who occasionally fail, but believers who do nothing with the life God has given them in Christ. Only the execution of the Protocol Plan of God and application of Bible doctrine can change a loser believer into a winner believer. You can only change yourself by allowing God to change you, and you cannot change your spouse.
Do not expect your marriage to be perfect – there is no such thing as a perfect marriage. Even if both husband and wife are living their Christian lives, they both still have a sin nature. The resolution of disagreements and disputes through the application of Bible doctrine is a key to maintaining a happy home. Spiritual growth by both spouses is extremely important if you want to have a happy, peaceful home. When both spouses are operating from the status of spiritual maturity, conflicts will be few and far between. Staying in fellowship with God and filled with the Holy Spirit for a spiritually mature believer means each partner in Christian marriage understands their role as assigned to them by God and operates on that basis.
God has assigned the role of spiritual leader in the home to the husband. This does not in any way suggest that he is to “lord it over” his wife. Quite the contrary, the husband is to love and nurture his wife in the same manner that Christ does the Church. The role that God has assigned to the woman in marriage is that of a supportive partner. In following the lead of her husband (if he is living his spiritual life), the wife fulfills her role in marriage. If the husband is not living his spiritual life and fulfilling his role as spiritual leader, the wife must defer to Christ as her spiritual leader for the home. Understanding these roles is extremely important if a Christian marriage is going to be successful. This means that Christian marriage is actually a partnership where both spouses contribute equally by fulfilling the role that God has assigned to them.
So, why do marriages fail? The answer can be summed up in one word – arrogance. While most people cite unfaithfulness, money, personality conflicts, relatives, children, etc., as the reason for failure in marriage, they are describing symptoms, not causes. For Christians, the cause of failure in marriage is lack of spiritual growth by one or both of the partners from ignoring what the Word of God teaches, which leads to self-absorption and selfishness, which is arrogance. This simply means a believer has gotten their eyes off the Lord and on to self. Eyes on self means your eyes are not on the needs of your spouse. The greatest cause for failure in marriage is also the greatest cause for failure in life – arrogance.
One of the greatest difficulties people have in marriage is unrealistic expectation. Marriage is not all “peaches and cream.” Unrealistic expectation means that a believer enters marriage with certain expectations that are often not met because they are not actually possible to meet. Entering marriage with this attitude results in nothing but disaster. Remember that marriage brings two sin natures into a relationship under one roof. Without Bible doctrine as number one priority in the home, Christian marriages are on the road to disaster and failure.
Another problem in marriage is role-model arrogance. Role model arrogance is making a role model of your spouse. Unfortunately, most people do not live up to the image or role model assigned to them by their spouse. When anyone departs from their assigned role, there is reaction by the other person. This is why people try to change their spouse. This is why some wives badger their husbands, and why some husbands bully their wives. People often expect their spouse to be perfect or to fit into their unrealistic expectation and they judge their spouse by a different standard than they judge themselves. This is the function of arrogant subjectivity (you are being unrealistic).
In role-model arrogance, a husband may excuse himself (self-justification) for his sins, failures, and flaws, and at the same time condemn his wife for the same sins, failures, and flaws. In self-justification a spouse doesn’t see his own flaws but sees his spouse’s flaws perfectly. When a husband makes a role-model out of his wife, and she does not meet his unrealistic standards, he judges her for her failures. While being guilty of many things himself, he blames his wife (like Adam did in the Garden). The wife does the same thing to her husband by assigning to her spouse the role-model of the perfect husband or father.
Role-model arrogance rejects or neglects the Protocol Plan of God and substitutes Human Viewpoint Thinking for Divine Viewpoint Thinking. Arrogance always exaggerates unrealistic expectations into illusions. The attraction stage of romance is the most vulnerable stage for creating a role model. A believer takes an attractive person, and from either delusion, idealism, or romantic illusion creates an idol/role model of perfection out of them. Then they marry “the idol of perfection” which they have created from their own imagination and emotions. They have created an illusion and assigned to it a role-model. Once the role model’s flaws emerge, the spouse begins to destroy the idol which they created. This is called iconoclastic arrogance, which is defined as the characteristic of attacking cherished beliefs or institutions.
Iconoclastic arrogance is total divorcement from reality. It is unrealistic preoccupation with other people resulting in disenchantment and disillusion. Iconoclastic arrogance is unrealistic expectation because it assigns perfection to another without considering the fact that all of us have sin natures. Therefore, perfection is an illusion. When this kind of believer discovers some sin or flaw in their spouse, they become disenchanted with their marriage and react. The arrogant iconoclast never takes responsibility for being arrogant. Arrogance destroys what arrogance creates.
The Bible commands a wife to respect her husband, not to make an unrealistic role-model of him. Respect from your wife is infinitely more important than her “love” because human love can get tangled up in emotions and irrationality. A husband can gain a wife’s respect by living his life on the basis of the Word of God. When a wife respects her husband, her attraction to him is based on his character. Following the lead of her husband will not be a problem for a wife who respects her husband. Many problems in marriage come from the mistake of getting married in the attraction stage of romance.
Personal love in marriage has neither strength nor staying power to make a success of marriage apart from virtue-love. Virtue-love is a combination of personal love and impersonal love. Virtue-love in marriage functions effectively in the three stages of spiritual adulthood: spiritual self-esteem, spiritual autonomy, and spiritual maturity.
Virtue-love is based on the doctrine a believer has in his soul. This is the basis upon which a husband is to love his wife. Ephesians 5:28, “So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies.” The husband loves because of his own virtue-love, which is the basis for fulfilling the principle of loving his wife. One of the greatest benefits a wife can have is a husband who is spiritually mature. Ephesians 5:29 illustrates the principle, “For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the Church.” Jesus Christ loves the Church with perfect personal love because He loves His own righteousness, which is divine self-esteem. In spiritual self-esteem the husband loves his wife as he loves his own body. True virtue produces both love and happiness in marriage. The problem is that people put love before virtue, and that is backwards. Entering a marriage without virtue in your soul can be a disaster unless virtue is developed very rapidly from the study and application of God’s Word.
Divine virtue belongs to God, and only God can give it to a believer. Virtue is that quality of divine good that can be manufactured only by God the Holy Spirit and Bible doctrine. Virtue is not proving one’s worth; a believer who is trying to prove something cannot improve. Everyone sins, but not everyone is virtuous. Marriage is designed for virtue, and virtue is designed for happiness. Whatever destroys virtue in marriage destroys happiness in marriage and turns love into a disaster. Unhappiness in Christian marriage is simply a manifestation of one’s failure to execute the Protocol Plan of God.
A successful marriage depends upon a successful spiritual life. A successful spiritual life depends on the filling of the Holy Spirit plus Bible doctrine. No Christian can have a successful marriage apart from a successful relationship with God. Relationship with God is the basis for every blessing that comes out of marriage. Therefore, Bible doctrine must be number one on your scale of values and must be applied to every situation in life. If your relationship with God is a failure, your relationship in marriage will be a failure. There is no solution to the problems of Christian marriage in psychology and/or human viewpoint. All solutions for the believer come from application of the principles of Bible doctrine. You cannot have application without knowledge of doctrine. No marriage can truly be successful without virtue on the part of both partners.
The husband has the leadership role in marriage. Because he has the leadership role, he is mandated by the Bible to exercise that role through leadership rather than tyranny. Only the husband’s arrogance can destroy his leadership role in marriage. This is because arrogance destroys virtue. In arrogance, the wife does not recognize her husband’s leadership role; and in arrogance the husband abuses his role. There is a chain of command in Christian marriage given in I Corinthians 11:3, “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of the woman, and God is the head of Christ.” “God is the head of Christ” is a reference to the Hypostatic Union, when Christ subordinated Himself to the Father’s plan. “The man is the head of the woman” does not mean that men are better than women. But men are to function in the leadership role in marriage.
Christ as the head of the Church clearly illustrates the fact that the husband is to be the spiritual leader in marriage. Just as Christ is the spiritual leader of the Church, so the husband is to be the spiritual leader of the family. The fact that Christ is the head of the Church is taught in Ephesians 1:22-23; 2:16, 4:4-5; Colossians 1:18, 24; 2:19.
The analogy of Christ as the head of the Church illustrates leadership rather than tyranny from the husband. Christ’s rulership over us is perfect leadership. He has a perfect policy of grace. By analogy, the husband should have the same leadership. The leadership of the husband is designed to adhere to divine policy, to protect, care for, and cherish the wife in marriage, but he has no right to try to change her personal standards.
Leadership demands thoughtfulness. It is one thing to have the role of leadership; it is another thing to exercise it properly. Leadership demands a sense of responsibility, accountability and an attitude of serving others, not a sense of arrogance and domination. You cannot be a good leader without a strong sense of responsibility. The husband’s first consideration is to take care of his wife’s needs before he takes care of his own needs. Above all things in marriage, the husband must be a spiritual leader. As a spiritual leader, the husband executes the divine commands, such as Ephesians 5:25 and Colossians 3:19. This is because the husband’s motivation is to be based on the motivation of virtue-love.
God invented marriage and established the policy. The husband must understand and adhere to the policy in love, not domination. To be a spiritual leader, the husband must adhere to God’s policy for marriage; he cannot attempt to change his wife’s personal traits to satisfy himself. Good spiritual leadership recognizes that only Bible doctrine can change any of us, and that both husband and wife must take the responsibility for their own decisions regarding perception and application of doctrine. Through fulfillment of the divine rules for marriage, the husband becomes a leader with the full use of virtue-love. However, when the husband seeks to impose his standards on his wife, he is a bully in marriage.
Marriage is more than finding the right spouse; it is about being the right spouse. Each individual in marriage may have to modify personal standards as they learn doctrine. God demands that both husband and wife conform to His policies in marriage. There must be no contradiction between the role of the husband and the role of the wife in marriage. To avoid contradiction, both must be serious students of the Word of God. They must be consistent in their perception and application of doctrine. Spiritual growth in the Protocol Plan of God results in success in marriage. Success means that each partner obeys the commands of the Word of God. The divine policy in marriage can be executed only by fulfillment of the Protocol Plan of God. Spiritual compatibility is the key to compatibility in Christian marriage.
There are three divine rules in marriage: 1) Husbands, love your wives. This can be accomplished only through integrity and humility 2) Wives, be supportive of your husbands. She must respect her husband’s integrity, virtue, and humility and follow his lead as he follows the Lord 3) Forgive each other as Christ has forgiven you. This includes forgetting past failures.
All the counseling in the world cannot produce what it takes to have a successful marriage. It depends on your knowledge and application of Bible doctrine. You cannot take your problems of marriage to others with their human viewpoint and get them permanently solved. In a Christian marriage, God expects both partners to come together to solve their own problems using Divine Viewpoint Thinking and the Problem-Solving Devices.