The Sovereignty of God and the Sanctity of Marriage

Well, good evening. It is indeed of the light to be here. I always look forward to being in G three. I meant to ask Josh before I came up here if I was at the first or the second G three. I think I was at the first G three. Since he didn't tell me, I'm just going to declare it I was at the first G three. But it is good. It is always good to be here. And I'm grateful to these brothers and sisters for the work that they do to make this event what it is, to make this conference what it is and what it has been over the years every time. And I know you are always blessed just as I. I'm always blessed by the work that they do. And it takes a lot of people doing a lot of work to make this happen. Well, a couple of things. My assignment today is to address the sovereignty of God and the sanctity of marriage. The sovereignty of God and the sanctity of marriage. If I had to title this marriage this message, it would be not the sovereignty of God and the sanctity of marriage, but the sexual revolution as a war against the sovereignty of God. The sexual revolution as a war against the sovereignty of God, and particularly a war against the sovereignty of God and the sanctity of marriage. And what I want to do is I want to look at a couple of passages of scripture and want us to start in Genesis, and then we're going to go to Romans one, and we're going to look at Romans one in light of what God has done, what the sovereign God of the universe has done in creation as it relates to man and woman and marriage and family. Genesis Chapter one, beginning of verse twenty six. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God. He created him male and female. He created them, and God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiplied, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, with the birds of the heavens, over every living thing that moves on the earth, and God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed and its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the heavens, and everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath, the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so, and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning the sixth day after we see this view from thirty five thousand feet of God creating man in his image in chapter two, wet granular picture of how it is that God created man and woman, and why it is that God created man and woman, and the context wherein man and woman is created, which gives us the foundation upon which the sovereign God has built the reality of marriage and the union between men and women. So then we look at chapter two, beginning the verse eighteen. Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock, and to all the the heavens, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found to help her fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, And while he slept, he 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 bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Did you pray with me? Gracious God, our father, We thank you, and we praise you for your goodness and your kindness and your mercy toward us, and particularly your great kindness in giving us this incredible gift of marriage. In the family, Lord, will live in a day and in an age that is in open rebellion against that which you have made, that which you have created. Grant by your grace that we might be sober minded in our understanding of this great gift, that we might be bold in our defense of it, that we might be careful in our use of it, and that we might be effusive in our praise of You, the God who gave it to us, for your glory, for our great joy, and for our good. We pray these things in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. Well, it is obvious that the sovereign God is the one who has given us marriage. Obvious to you and obvious to me that is, but not obvious to those in the world who are an open rebellion against this God and against this institution that he has made, this fundamental institution, this foundational institution, this institution that is the very bedrock of civilization. War against this institution is a war against civilization itself, as well as being a war against the God who created it and gave it to us. And yet war is exactly where we are. Listen to this from Andreas Costenberger measured against the biblical teaching of marriage and the family, it seems undeniable that Western culture is decaying. In fact, the past few decades have witnessed nothing less than a major paradigm shift with regard to marriage and the family. The West's Judaeo Christian heritage and foundation have largely been supplanted by a liberation ideology that elevates human freedom and self determination as the supreme principle for human relationships. In their confusion, many hail the decline of the biblical traditional model of marriage and the family and its replacement by new competing moralities as major progress. He's saying that there are people who are at war with the biblical model of marriage and the family, and they are hailing its demise, and they are hailing its replacement with competing realities as progress. Like the video that I saw a couple of days ago. It's a series called My Extraordinary Family, And this particular video was about a thrupple in Orlando. Now, if you don't know what a thrupple is, a thrupple is like a couple, except there are three people in it. But wait, there's more. This thruple was comprised of three transgender persons. One of them was a biological woman, and then the other two were biological men. But the biological woman identified as a man, but she still looked like a woman trying to pretend to be a man. And the biological men identified as women, and they look like men who were costplaying as women. This thrupple also has two children that they are raising, and they are raising these children as anti gender and non binary. They are waiting for these children to grow up and decide what their gender is so that they can then tell the Thrupple what their gender is before the Thrupple starts gendering them. And again, this is in a video series called My Extraordinary Family. Let me read the last part of that quote again. In their confusion, many hail the decline of the biblical traditional model of marriage and the family and its replacement by new competing moralities as major progress. And that's exactly what's being said, that this is major progress. That we are breaking the bonds and the shackles of traditionalism. We are breaking the bonds and the shackles of this culture that has held us down by trying to enforce biblical morality. Because We've got something more. It's not just these people who are running away from the idea of the traditional biblical model of marriage and the family. The feminist movement has been running away from it for a long long time. Listen to this from Linda Gordon. The nuclear family must be destroyed and people must find better ways of living together. Whatever it's ultimate meaning, the breakup of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. She goes on to say, families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people's needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor or any external roles at all. But that's just Linda Gordon. Of course, Linda Gordon must be an exception. One more before we look at our texts. This is from the Declaration of feminismteen seventy one. How many of you knew there was a Declaration of Feminism in nineteen seventy one where there was Listen to this from the Declaration of Feminism. When somebody tells you what they are, believe them, and this is who feminists are. Marriage has existed for the benefit of men and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women. We must work to destroy it. Nineteen seventy one. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore, it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not live individually with men. There is a war, a rebellion, and it is a rebellion against the biblical model of marriage and family, and it's a war against everything that we see clearly in the texts that we examined, these texts that give us a number of clear truths, for example, that marriage is God's idea, not man's amen. All of these movements have in common the idea that marriage is something that has been invented, and particularly it's been invented for the oppression of women. It's one thing to tell a lie to shade the truth. It's another to tell a lie that is the exact opposite of the truth. Man did not invent marriage in order to oppress women. In fact, without marriage as we know it, women would actually be oppressed by men. Can you imagine how that discussion would have gone. Imagine according to their own worldview. According to their worldview, men just you know, sitting around during that time in the era when they used to just be able to take a club and go knock a woman over the head and drag her into the cave, have their way with her, and then leave her to deal with the results. Apparently got together and had a he Man Woman Hate Caveman club meeting that went something like this, men were not oppressing them enough, but I've come up with a way that we can oppress women even more. Tell us your idea. We should invent an institution whereby instead of us just go in and take in any of them that we want, we limit ourselves to just one wait and be responsible for her and her offspring. That'll show them that's the dumbest thing in the world. If we know anything about marriage, it's that men didn't invent it. Amen, somebody God did this. God invented marriage. The second thing that we have this war against is the idea that principally God gave us marriage for the purpose of procreation. A man belonged right there, that God gave us marriage primarily for the purpose of procreation. Amen, be fruitful and multiply. It's the first command that he gives be fruitful and multiply. He gives us this relationship, this man woman for life relationship, so that we might procreate. And procreation is not just about having children. It's about bearing children that are image bearers, but bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. That's why he creates this marriage relationship, so that procreation doesn't just involve men and women coming together like other species out there in the world that come together just when it's time to procreate and then leave one another. No, He's given us this marriage relationship where we come together and stay together in order not just to have children, but raise them, disciple them. Another thing we go before we go to our other tax is that clearly we see male headship here. I know that's a bad word. We see male headship here, and if that's not a bad enough word for you, we see patriarchy. Male headship. The man was made before the woman. Male headship. The woman was made for the man. I will make him a helper suitable for him. Male headship. The woman was brought to the man. Male headship. The woman was named by the man twice. First he gave her a categorical name she's a woman, and then later he names her Eve. In all of this we see male headship. And if you don't see male headship here, all you have to do is go to Romans chapter five. And in Romans chapter five we see that sin entered the world through one man Adam. Now if she ain't first a point that Adam makes in chapter three when he says, okay, okay, see what happened was that? Remember that day when I I was, I was naming animals and then none of them was for me, and then you, and then I went to sleep. I don't know if you remember that, but I was sleep. And then when I was sleep, you did something. I don't know what you did because I was sleep. And then and then after after I, after I, after I woke up. You you had you remember you had you had you had you had you gave me her? She ate it? Then I did. But because of one man Adam? What is that male headship? Accountability? Responsibility within the context of a relationship of complete equality, which is why he can say in verse twenty three of chapter two, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. God designed this, God designed human sexuality. God designed this, God designed men and women clearly as men and women. And men are men because God says their men, and women are women because God says they're women. Enough already, with this whole idea of your gender assigned at birth, nobody assigns you male or assigns you female, as though a doctor is walking down the corridor flipping a coin and saying that one's a boy and that one's a girl. There is no assignment other than the assignment God gives. We just take a look and acknowledge the assignment that He made. So what does this war and this rebellion look like. Well, I told you we would also look at Romans chapter one, and I want us to see in Romans chapter one the pattern that this rebellion follows, this rebellion against the sovereignty of God, and it begins there in chapter eighteen. But we need or in verse eighteen. But we need to back up to verse sixteen. For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the jew first and also to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith. For faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Pay attention to that last verse and the words that he uses there. The righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith and the righteous shall live by faith. Now verse eighteen four, the wrath of God is revealed. Verse seventeen, The righteousness of God is revealed. Verse eighteen The wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who, by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. What truth all truth. By their unrighteousness, they suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made, so that they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish heart were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, animals, and creeping things. There's the first step. There's The first step the sexual revolution as a war against the sovereignty of God begins with a war against God as creator. Because if God is creator, then God is sovereign. If God is creator, he has the right to rule his creation. So if you are going to go to war against something that God has made, God has designed, and God has given, the first thing that you have to do is you have to somehow negate God's right to rule in whatever the sphere it is that you're trying to rebel. And that's where we begin, not with disagreements about whether or not the text truly says what we think that the text says. We may start off with that, but at the end of the day, where we're going is there is no God. Not just God hath not said, but there is no God to even say we are the result of random evolutionary processes. And you people are fools because you have this book full of myths that have absolutely nothing to do with the way the world actually is, and you have duped yourselves into believing that somehow this collection of myths has some sort of moral authority when the fact of the matter is, we are gods. We have the moral authority. So We are the ones who determine what human sexuality is. We are the ones who even determine what humanity is. We determine what a man is, we determine what a woman is. We determine what marriage is, and we determine it based on whatever our desires are at the moment. That's where the war starts, and it is incredibly important to note. Listen, I'm glad that people are recognizing that much of the stuff we're dealing with today is a bridge too far. I'm just like you. I get excited when I see a video some you know, parents standing up at a school board meeting and just giving them what for. I'm just like, yeah, give me all of that, right. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love to see it. I do. But what worries me is that these people are going after fruit and not root. Drag Queen's Story Hour is fruit, not root. Perverted books in the library is fruit and not root. Hiding children's gender identity, proclamations from parents is fruit and not root. At the root of all of it is there is no God. Therefore, there is no moral standard outside of whatever we determine. It begins with a war against the Creator and his sovereignty and suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. But it doesn't stay there. I want you to note how quickly this turns. Look at verse twenty four. Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchange the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. So Paul wants you to know, in case you missed it the first time. This is rooted in a denial of creation. So the first paragraph is just is an umbrella, and the umbrella says that everything that is about to happen happens because we deny that which is knowable about God through creation. And we are without excuse because it's knowable about God in creation. Anyone who stands before creation and is honest recognizes that there is someone who is greater than I who has done all of this. Amen. But once we do that, we're given over in the lust of our hearts to impurity. We're given over to the dishonoring of our body. And here here, here's here's what I wanted to say. When we think about Romans Chapter one, we always want to run to the paragraph that comes next and talk about the two s L G B, t Q I A plus. Yeah, we all of that, But notice that before we get to all of that, we just get to plain old lust and impurity. Before we ran down the road that we're running on today, we ran down the road of sexual lasciviousness. We ran down the road of destigmatizing fornication. We ran down the road of destigmatizing infidelity. We ran down the road of destigmatizing divorce. We ran down the road of destigmatizing cohabitation. We ran down that road first. And again it worries me that as we look at all of these things that are coming, and we do we do need to respond to all the craziness that's coming. Amen. But as we respond to all the craziness that's coming, we must not forget that before this craziness, there was other craziness that we became numb to. I was talking to a campus minister a while back who had been doing it for a long time here, being in campus ministry for a long time, and he said something that just stuck with me. He said, you know, twenty thirty years ago, when we were dealing with students, they would come in and they would talk to us about lust, and they would talk to us about pornography, and we would have to deal with them on that level. He said, today we've moved beyond that to this hookup culture that sees having sex with somebody as a little more than a handshack. And he talked about young women coming in and referring to their body count. In case you're unfamiliar with that terminology, the body count is how many people you've had sex with. So the things that we're dealing with now, this war and this rebellion against the sovereignty of God as it relates to marriage and family and human sexuality, it did not start with the Alphabet mafia. It goes back way further than that. It goes back to where we looked at contraceptors as an excuse to have sex without consequences, and then we looked at abortion as the backstop for when the contraceptors didn't work, so that we could have sex without consequences, and then sex without consequences led to sex without commitment and sex without consequences, and sex without commitment led to sex without any meaning whatsoever, and we became numb to it. And it is all rooted in this rebellion against the sovereignty of God over human sexuality marriage in the family. Then we get to the next part verse twenty six. For this reason, it's a continuation God gave them up to dishonorable passions for their women, exchange natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. This phrase is really important because there are many even within the evangelical community, who are trying to argue again this new gay Christian movement and so on and so forth. Many try to argue that what Paul is dealing with here is pederasty. He's not dealing with sexual or Paul didn't understand sexual orientation and the Holy Spirit wasn't smart enough to have him to address something that would be good enough for sexual orientation when it came, because apparently the Holy Spirit didn't like Foresee, yeah, you get the problem, right, But the idea that this was dealing with pederasty and this common practice of men having sex with younger boys does not account for the fact that he starts with women having sex with other women. This is not just pederaste. These dishonorable and degrading passions are unnatural sexual desires. Their women exchange the natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and likewise, the men gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Some argue that the desire is not a problem. No, being consumed with passion for one another is a problem. The passion and the desire that is unnatural is unacceptable, and trying to argue that it is acceptable is part of our rebellion against the sovereignty of God, who says I did not make you that way. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the do penalty for their error. Again, we start with rebelling against the sovereignty of God and saying there is no God. We decide what humanity is. We decide what human sexuality is. We decide what marriage is, We decide what relationships are appropriate as it relates to sexual activity. We make that determination because there is no God, and eventually you move beyond even the natural, and we are continuing to move in that direction. Twenty fifteen, The Oberger Feild decision legalized so called same sex marriage. And I say so called same sex marriage because there is no such thing, and we've been running headlong toward the cliff ever since. Now. Pedophiles have been rebranded as minor attracted persons, sort of like we did with homosexuality. We went from sodomy to homosexual to gay, and we've gone from pedophile to minor attracted person. And for those who argue that this has nothing to do with with what we've been talking about, this has nothing to do with the whole, you know, a same sexual marriage argument, what I would say to them is we're making the argument in the exis exact same way, changing the name, changing the way that we identify these people, referring to it as an orientation, and to people with it as sexual minorities. And the argument is no, no, no, we're not going to go there because it's completely unacceptable. There is nobody who would accept this. And fifty years ago you would have said the same thing about same sex marriage. And yet here we are university professors online, out in the open, making arguments that say, I don't see an ethical problem with a fifty year old man having sex with a twelve year old girl. If there is an ethical problem, it's not clear to me, tenured professors. This is what degrading passions look like. This is what it looks like when we slide headfirst down this slippery slope that begins with there is no God who can tell me what is right and what is wrong. There is no God who sets any moral or ethical standards for me. And then look at where it ends, beginning verse twenty eight. And by the way, I want you to notice that there is a progression here, that things are getting progressively worse. And I want you to see some of the things that are progressively worse. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, notice the thread. They did not acknowledge God from beginning to end. This is rooted and grounded in not acknowledging God. By the way, let me just pause here for a moment. For years and years now, people have been coming because I've been writing and speaking and teaching about these things for a long time. And for years and years people would always come to me and they would ask me a question that went something like this, can you give me an oar against same sex marriage? Or can you give me an argument against abortion that doesn't rely on scripture. Some of you all have had He's discussions with you. Right, Can you give me an argument. We want to make an argument. We want to make an argument in the public square, and therefore we want to make an argument that doesn't rely on scripture. Here's what that question is. Here's how high they hear that question. Listen, the people out there have denied God, They've gone to war against the sovereign creator of the universe. They've thumbed their nose at this God and says he does not exist. Can you equip me with tools so that I can come to them and say, Okay, that's fine, let's argue as though he doesn't. My answer is I could, but I wouldn't there because when we do this again, we're dealing with fruit and not root. Yes, let me validate your atheistic materialism and show you an argument within the context and confines of atheistic materialism that will lead you to make a decision that will have the right moral and ethical outcome without acknowledging the sovereign God of the universe, who is our source of morals and ethics. As we say in Texas, that dog won't hunt Verse twenty eight. Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. Here it is, there might be some stuff we can't even say in church right. They will be filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. And then verse thirty two. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give a proval to those who practice them. That's what the end of the road looks like. That's what the last stop looks like. We know it's wrong, but we give approval. We know they deserve the wrath of God, and we know the wrath of God is coming against them. But we give approval because our desire to be praised by men is greater than our desire to see men praise God. This is where we are. Am I saying that we do not need to be excited and applaud and be grateful to the Lord when parents are standing up and going to school board meetings and other places, or when you know people in Congress or you know state legislatures are exposing some of these things. No, we need to be grateful to God for every bit of that, and then we need to recognize that before Paul gets to verse eighteen, he starts with verse sixteen. He gives the answer to the problem. Before he gives the problem. Let's read it again. I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. To the jew first and also to the Greek it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Listen, we don't just want people to stop doing what they're doing. We want them to become righteous by faith. I remember in the abortion debate, people would say, you know, do you want women to just have legal barriers so that they won't kill their babies or do you want women's hearts to be changed so that they won't want to? And my response would always be I want both. Coach, why do I have to choose between those two. Do you want people to just stop making a mockery of the English language with all this pronoun nonsense. Do you want people to stop, you know, mutilating their children, their children, We're mutilating children now, irreversibly so, or do you want to change the hearts of No, don't present me with that false choice. I want it all. Why because Christ is Lord of all. I want it all because God is sovereign over all. I want it all because my God does not deal in half measures. I want it all because what people are doing is a manifestation of what is in their hearts. I want them to change what they're doing because their hearts have been changed. I want Christ ruling and reigning in the heart of every man. I want Christ to have the fullness of the reward for which he died. Yes, I want people to stop doing those outward things. But that will never ever be enough. God is softened, and we must live not only like we believe it, but we must live like we are pressing it forward toward a greater and greater reality in our lives, in our day, in our time, and in our world. Let's pray God we do thank you, we do praise you, and we do acknowledge the fact that we are living in wicked and evil days, and oftentimes participating in that wickedness. Grant us grace to stand firm. Grant that we might be wiseer serpents and innocent as doves, that we might be neither cowards nor fools. But grant that all that we do would be done because of our desire to see Christ magnified in our lives, in our day, in our families, in our marriages, in our churches, in our country, and in our world. For we pray this in Christ's name and for his sake. Amen. Amen,