Sermon - Advent Midweek 1 - Luke 1

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Those beautiful words written in Genesis 2, before the fall, are God’s mandating words in which He instituted marriage between one man and one woman to be a picture of a profound mystery pertaining to Christ and His bride the church. Marriage is God’s institution. It belongs to Him. 

In fact, it’s the only institution God created among people before the fall into sin! It’s from this institution that flows every other structure among humans. From marriage you have the relationships of parent and child. From marriage you have the government, with the parents governing the childrens’ lives. From marriage you have the church, with the father being the pastor of the household. 

Thus marriage and the family is the single most important human arrangement in creation. It is the parents’ job and authority to teach their children, not the government’s or the school’s. It’s the Father’s job and authority to raise His family in the faith and ensure they’re being daily fed spiritually, not the pastor’s. The responsibility of ensuring that everyone in a family is housed, clothed, and fed falls upon the family, not the church, the government, nor charities. It’s a mother’s duty to give birth to her children, not scientists or doctors. 

All of this is to say that God blesses His institution of Marriage! God blesses this holy institution with a great deal of responsibility and influence. So while many in our culture might boil marriage down to a tax benefit, or a simple human arrangement, it’s a whole lot more than that! Because through marriage, God blesses us with the power of procreation, the strength of companionship, and the gift of our Savior Jesus Christ.

So let us look at the first blessing of marriage: procreation, children! “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” Children are a blessing! The Psalmist said it best: “Children are indeed a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward! Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” Children are a blessing, not a burden nor a curse, but a blessing! God says it, therefore it’s true! Believe it! 

We must escape from the lies of the devil here in America who has us convinced that children are curses and burdens who only hold us back from success. We must stop believing that the lies of the devil who has us convinced that if we have a lot of kids we’ll overpopulate the earth. We must stop listening to Satan who convinces us that fewer children is better than many children, because Satan is wrong. 

Children are what make us successful, not our jobs or our wealth, those things are supposed to be only in service to our children. We will never overpopulate the earth, because God told us to fill it up, not make sure it’s mostly empty. Children are a blessing and a reward from God! 

Moreover through this blessing, God actually gives us the power to join in His creation! That’s why we call this procreation, we are co-creators with God when have children! What an amazing power that God gives to us! 

This is why it’s so sad and challenging for husbands and wives who cannot have children. We see this challenge in the lives of Zechariah and Elizabeth: “They were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.” Like them, there are many couples today who struggle with infertility or barrenness, due to no fault of their own. In this way, we see that it’s not man alone who opens the womb, but God with man. As Elizabeth says, “Thus the Lord has done for me…” God is the one who gives the good gift of children to those whom He chooses, to some He gives many, others few, and others none, but in the end God still blesses all of them because He has already blessed their marriage.

In this way we come to the second blessing of marriage: companionship. When God created Adam, He said: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Since there were no suitable companions for Adam among the animals, God “caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

Marriage is a blessing in which God joins together two people into one flesh. The word for “rib” in the Hebrew there is a bit more general than just the word “rib,” it actually has connotations of a chunk of Adam, flesh and all. Thus Eve isn’t just a little insignificant piece of her husband, but she’s a chunk of him, she’s part of him, the two are of the same flesh! This isn’t to say that they’re both identical, or the same as each other, because as we’ll learn the next two weeks they each have their own blessings and duties. But to say that one is more important or special than the other is foolishness and wrong.

Man and woman, husband and wife, are created for each other as one anothers’ companion in life. Even if they received no children, the companionship which they shared to support each other is a great blessing, as it was for Zechariah and Elizabeth who were without child for many years of their marriage. 

While there are those who are never married, such as St. Paul, all are still blessed by marriage. From the marriage of Zecheriah and Elizabeth, comes forth the fruit of the womb, John the Baptist, who turned “many of the children of the Israel to the Lord their God... [and made] ready for the Lord a people prepared.” Indeed all of us are blessed by John’s call to repentance which makes our hearts ready for the coming of the Christ. All of us are blessed by him who gave “knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins” by pointing us to Jesus who is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

All of us are blessed by marriage, because through marriage comes the Christ child, Jesus our Savior whose blood washes us free of our many sins, even and especially our sins against marriage. For the Lord Jesus is our bridegroom and we the church are His holy bride. In His marriage to us we become a part of Him and receive from Him all that makes Him good. In His marriage to the church He brings forth children and the fruits of faith. In His marriage to the church He gives us a companionship which shall never be wrested away from us.

In this beautiful profound mystery of Christ’s marriage to the church, we find our only way forward in a really confusing world. Because in this marriage all of our sins against marriage find their forgiveness: our avoidance and hatred of children, abortion, infanticide, despising of marriage, fornication, divorce, abuse of children and spouse, homosexuality, all of it and more, forgiven because Christ cleanses His bride by dying for her, and giving her a life worth living eternally on earth and in heaven.