Marriage: Becoming One! Introduction.

Introduction

While in Brazil in 2018 I was traveling with Art Thomas and in casual conversation he started talking about Ephesians 5 and marriage and relating that to Genesis 2. As he spoke my heart started stirring in ways that can only be done by the Holy Spirit. I started thinking, why hasn’t anyone been talking about this before. I started seeing all kinds of implications. After several years and a dream or two later I feel I need to be obedient in sharing this message or God will give it to someone else to share. What I have to share is not necessarily new or unheard of, but nobody I ever heard talked about it before. Originally I wanted to write a book but I realized part of my motivation was pride, and in reality I don’t think I have enough material to justify a book. 

I have come to a point where I feel convicted in my heart that God has given me the privilege of sharing this message so I will start sharing it even if it isn’t in a fancy book. I hope someday maybe Holy Spirit will flesh out even more of these thoughts so as to create enough material to justify a book. I really do think this paradigm shift changes a whole lot of our understanding of the scriptures we read, and how we understand our relationship with God. However, I don’t believe Holy Spirit has illuminated enough to me yet, so I will just be diligent with what he has illuminated to me. Maybe Holy Spirit, after reading this, will illuminate to you more than what I understood, and the Kingdom of God on earth will be blessed because of what you will bring to the world with what he teaches you. 

Introduction: Shadows of real things.

'They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.”’ -Hebrews 8:5

'The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. ‘ -Hebrews 10:1

“since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” -Romans 1:19-20

It was very early in the morning on March 3rd 2012. My wife and I had stayed up late this weekend trying to enjoying what we believed would be our last few weekend together as a couple without kids. My wife was 8 months pregnant and we planned on taking full advantage of the next few weekend to stay up late having fun together and sleeping in on Saturday mornings. I was already dozing off in bed when my wife came out of the shower and told me she was in labor. Fast forward 12 hours and through a lot of pain endured by my wife, and all of a sudden I am holding my first born child, a son! In a moment, a transformation came over me. For some reason while holding that wiggly, slimy, noisy baby, my understanding of love just expanded some several thousand fold.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew about love before; I grew up in a home with both of my parents who loved me and poured out love on me. Later on I was kind of a hopeless romantic in my teen years, and finally in marriage I thought I understood love, but now it was different. Now I understood a FATHER’S (a parent’s) love. I have come to realize that no matter how much I love my dad, I will never love him as much as he loves me. 

Let me take a moment to explain what happened on that Saturday morning in March of 2012. As I held my son in my arms a thought occurred to me; I love this kid beyond any logic or reason! Seriously I mean it. I had the weird thought that if someone were to burst into our labor room and say, “one person in here must die” the logical thing would be to hand the child over to them. I mean think about it; my son doesn’t really even realize he exists yet, he doesn’t love me yet, he doesn’t do any thing to contribute to society or even to the family yet. Truthfully, even at that moment, he was pretty selfish. For him, life revolved around everyone needing to take care of him, his hunger, his comfort, his need for love, his need for sleep, his need for diaper changes. The only thing he gave back to me was sleepless nights and diapers full of poop. But beyond all logic and reason I would lay my life down for him. He didn’t have to love me back. He didn’t have to give me anything. He didn’t have to prove anything. As a matter of fact he could even give me literal poop, and to me he was inherently worth dying for! A deep revelation of God’s fatherly love came over me. I understood the reality of God and his relationship with me in a much more profound way from then on out. 

In my Daddy’s (God’s) eyes, I am inherently worth dying for; not because I did anything to deserve it. I am not deserving because I was ever anything other than self-focused and self-centered. On top of that I gave my Daddy back many many sins, that in reality are way worse than poop. Get this though, I was inherently worth dying for because I am a part of him. I was created in his image, whereby meaning I was worth dying for, in order to save me from the corruption separating me from my Daddy. My value came not from me, but from His love. Someone in the room had to die because of sin, and He chose to die for me.

You see, had God not hidden his nature in the creation of a Parent / Child relationship, I would never have been able to participate in the aspect of God’s nature that is fatherly love, nor would I have ever understood His love for me. Just like I never understood my earthly father’s love for me before this experience. It is very important we pay attention to the lessons Holy Spirit is teaching us through creation, so we can better understand and live in the nature of God.

In my youth I was taught in a theological stream that did not look intently into the reality that God has hidden his character / nature all throughout creation. Scripture tells us that: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” So very much of what is in creation and ordained by God is to teach us about spiritual realties, hence the verses quoted at the top of this section.

In Hebrews the author in talking about the tabernacle (the place where Jews met with, and worshiped God), it says the tabernacle was a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. He makes the case that the reason why God told Moses to be careful to build it exactly as God told him, was because it is an earthy, physical, reflection of a true reality outside of our current physical ability to perceive. 

I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, but I feel I must make a short detour. Many reading this might not realize that the spiritual world is not wispy and shadowy. We have this major flaw in our imaginations that spiritual things are faint, ghostly things in essence with nothing solid to them, while we physical beings are solid. This could not be further from the truth. Jesus said I am real food, and I am real drink. Even food and drink are shadows of real food and drink. C.S. Lewis himself supposed that if we were to walk in heaven, the grass would hurt our feet because it would be more real than we are. This seems to be confirmed by many people who have had near death experiences. A vast majority of those people say that what they experienced while dead, was more real than what they are experiencing now while “alive”. If you want to look more into that you can read Imagine Heaven by John Burke, a christian pastor at Gateway Church in Austin.

Back to my main point. God puts reflections of reality in this physical world so we can understand the reality. Ever wonder why it was such a great sin that Moses disobeyed God by striking the rock to bring water the second time instead of speaking to it like God told him? I mean Moses was probably much more obedient than I am, so why was God so harsh on him for one mistake? Well… scripture later tells us that the rock represents Christ! (1 Cor. 10:4) Get that? In order to bring us the water of life, Christ was struck once (the cross), after that in order to get the water of life from Jesus, it was God’s intention that we would simply speak to him! Moses in following his own thoughts and being disobedient to God was messing physical representation of a reality he didn’t understand. 

In the following pages I hope to address the spiritual realities that marriage shadows, and in doing so, clear up some misconceptions that give Jesus a false bad name. I also hope to show how marriage is really just a faith institution, and why Satan attacks marriage so much in our current culture.