If God is a Father and we know He is, it must be like my having children. I didn’t have children for the purpose of serving me! And Jesus says, “I did not come to be served but to serve.” (Matthew 20:28)

 The way Christ submits Himself to the church and the way the church submits herself to Christ are the same. The church submits to Christ in order to follow His leadership. Christ submits to the church in order to exercise His leadership in humble service to the church. When Christ said, “Let the leader become as one who serves,” He did not mean, let the leader cease to be leader. Even while He was on his knees washing their feet no one doubted who the leader was. Nor should any Christian husband shirk his responsibility under God to provide moral vision and spiritual leadership as the humble servant of his wife and family.

 According to Genesis 2, God created Adam first and put him in the garden alone. Then in verse 18 the Lord said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make a helper fit for him.” I don’t think this is a charge against Adam’s fellowship with God; nor is it a hint that the garden was too hard to take care of. The point is that God made man to be a sharer. God created us not to be cul-de-sacs (dead ends) of His bounty, but conduits. No man is complete unless he is conducting grace (like electricity) between God and another person. Only a person can be a fellow-heir of the grace of life (1 Pet. 1:4-7). Only a person can receive and appreciate and enjoy grace. What man needs is another person with whom he can share the love of God.

 God made another human from man’s own flesh and bone to be like him — and yet very unlike him. He did not create another man. He created a woman! And Adam recognized in her the perfect counterpart to himself. “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.” So God made a woman and not another man. He created heterosexuality, not homosexuality. The joy Adam has in being presented with the woman. “At last this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh.” In other words, in the beginning God took woman out of man as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, and then God presented her back to the man to discover in living fellowship what it means to be one flesh.

 Paul says, “This is a great mystery, and I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.” Marriage is a mystery. There is more here than meets the eye. What is it? I think it’s this: God didn’t create the union of Christ and the church after the pattern of human marriage; just the opposite, He created human marriage on the pattern of Christ’s relation to the church. The mystery of Genesis 2:24 is that the marriage it describes is a parable or symbol of Christ’s relation to His people. God doesn’t do things willy-nilly. Everything has purpose and meaning. When God engaged to create man and woman and to ordain the union of marriage, He didn’t roll dice or draw straws or flip a coin. He patterned marriage very purposefully after the relationship between His Son and the church, which He planned from eternity. And therefore marriage is a mystery — it contains and conceals a meaning far greater than what we see on the outside. What God has joined together in marriage is to be a reflection of the union between the Son of God and His bride the church.

 There are many scriptures that connect Jesus with the Church as in marriage. Ephesians talks about marriage being a mystery but actually is talking about Christ and the Church; talks about the intimacy between a husband and wife how fruit comes forth from that intimacy and how the husband serves the wife and how the wife submits to the husband allowing him to love her in a way that is natural easy for him.

So the first implication of the mystery of marriage as a reflection of Christ’s relation to the church is that wives should take their special cue from the church and husbands should take their special cue from Christ. And wherever you find a marriage like that you find two of the happiest people in the world because their lives conform to the Word of God in Scripture and the Word of God in Jesus Christ.

In His love,
Elizabeth