- Chapter 2: Naked and Not Ashamed
- Scripture – Genesis 2:25
- Questions & notes/quotes
- The natural man cannot understand the gospel (consider 1 Corinthians 2:14)
- Dawkins: “I provided . . . cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable—but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don’t see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial.” (p. 29)
- Piper: “Those who regard Christ and his incarnation and death and resurrection and lordship over all the universe as parochial cannot see the wonder of the gospel woven into marriage.” (p. 29)
- Piper: “It is a miracle that any of us has seen this glory in the gospel. God alone can “give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).” (p. 30)
- Review: marriage is fundamentally the doing of God, and ultimately the display of God.
- Review: Piper: “o I argue that staying married is not mainly about staying in love. It’s about covenant-keeping. If a spouse falls in love with another person, one profoundly legitimate response from the grieved spouse and from the church is, “So what! Your being ‘in love’ with someone else is not decisive. Keeping your covenant is decisive.”” (p. 31)
- What is the point of Genesis 2:25?
- Why were Adam & Eve not ashamed? Because they had perfect bodies (pre-fall)?
- 3 reasons why having perfect bodies is not why Adam & Eve were naked and unashamed:
- 1) No matter how beautiful or handsome your spouse is, you can make comments that shame them; the one who is looking at you must be morally upright and gracious to avoid shaming you
- 2) The way Jesus uses Genesis 2:24 in speaking to the permanence of marriage implies that verse 25 also maintains its relevance after the Fall of manking into sin, when none of us have perfect bodies
- 3) Verse 24 is the foundation of verse 25 – the creation of a lasting, covenant, “one flesh” relationship
- So why were Adam & Eve naked and unashamed?
- Because of the fullness of covenant love - “even though I am imperfect, I have no fear of being disapproved by my spouse.” (p. 33)
- Piper: “The first way to be shame-free is to be perfect; the second way to be shame-free is based on the gracious nature of covenant love. In the first case, there is no shame because we’re flawless. In the second case, there is no shame because covenant love covers a multitude of flaws (1 Peter 4:8; 1 Cor. 13:6).” (p. 33)
- Even before the Fall, marriage was designed to display the covenant between Christ and His church, because Christ's death & resurrection were part of God's plan before the foundation of the world, before the creation of marriage
- Do doctrines like “justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone” have any application in marriage?
- Piper: “Justification creates peace with God vertically, in spite of our sin. And when experienced horizontally, it creates shame-free peace between an imperfect man and an imperfect woman.” (p. 34) – more on this in chapter 3
- So what happened when Adam & Eve sinned? Why did Adam & Eve suddenly become ashamed?
- Piper: “The foundation of covenant-keeping love between a man and a woman is the unbroken covenant between them and God—God governing them for their good and they enjoying him in that security and relying on him. When they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that covenant was broken, and the foundation of their own covenant-keeping collapsed.” (p. 35)
- 2 ways they experienced this broken covenant:
- 1) “the person viewing my nakedness is no longer trustworthy, so I am afraid I will be shamed.” (p. 35)
- Eve has declared her independence – she's no longer a servant of God, but wants to be God; so Adam has no reason to trust that she will love him with a pure covenant-keeping love
- 2) “I myself am no longer at peace with God, and I feel guilty and defiled and unworthy—I deserve to be shamed.” (p. 35)
- Adam is also selfish & rebellious and unsafe; he feels guilty and defiled and unworthy – because he is; and so he's vulnerable to shame
- We're vulnerable to shame because of the sinful actions of our spouses, and we are rightly shamed because of our own sinful actions
- Why did God clothe Adam & Eve?
- What significance does our clothing have? Is there any spiritual significance to our wardrobe?
- In clothing Adam & Eve, God is “doing something with a negative message and something with a positive message.” (p. 37)
- Negative message – you ought to feel shame, you are not what you ought to be, clothing is an admission/confession of that
- “Clothes are not meant to make people think about what is under the clothes. Clothes are meant to direct attention to what is not under them: merciful hands that serve others in the name of Christ, beautiful feet that carry the gospel where it is needed, and the brightness of a face that has beheld the glory of Jesus.” (p. 37)
- Positive message – a testimony that God would one day make us what we should be
- “God rejected their own self-clothing. Then he clothed them himself. He showed mercy with superior clothing.” (p. 37-38)
- Genesis 3:15 – first sign of a Savior to come; God ultimately deals with our sin & shame through the blood of Christ; here he points to it with the blood of the animals slain for their skin; He will clothe us in righteousness and radiance of His glory
- “The design of marriage, the fall of marriage, and the implied redemption of marriage all serve to tell us what marriage is for.” (p. 38)
- Chapter 3: God’s Showcase of Covenant-Keeping Grace
- Scripture – Colossians 2:13-15; 3:12-19
- Questions & notes/quotes
- Review: Marriage is the doing of God – Mark 10:6-9 - “what God has joined together”
- Review: Marriage is the display of God – Ephesians 5:31-32 - “the covenant involved in leaving mother and father and holding fast to a spouse and becoming one flesh is a portrayal of the covenant between Christ and his church.” (p. 42)
- What is the most important thing you could say about marriage?
- Noel: “You cannot say too often that marriage is a model of Christ and the church.” (p. 42)
- 3 reasons (at least) that she is right:
- 1) “This lifts marriage out of the sordid sitcom images and gives it the magnificent meaning God meant it to have” (p. 42)
- 2) “this gives marriage a solid basis in grace, since Christ obtained and sustains his bride by grace alone” (p. 42)
- 3) “this shows that the husband’s headship and the wife’s submission are crucial and crucified. That is, they are woven into the very meaning of marriage as a display of Christ and the church, but they are both defined by Christ’s self-denying work on the cross so that their pride and slavishness are canceled.” (p. 42-43)
- first reason was covered in chapters 1 & 2
- chapter 3 begins to look at the second reason
- “the main point in this chapter is that since Christ’s new covenant with his church is created by and sustained by blood- bought grace, therefore, human marriages are meant to showcase that new-covenant grace.” (p. 43, emphasis added)
- “And the way husbands and wives showcase it is by resting in the experience of God’s grace and bending it out from a vertical experience with God into a horizontal experience with their spouse. In other words, in marriage you live hour by hour in glad dependence on God’s forgiveness and justification and promised future grace, and you bend it out toward your spouse hour by hour—as an extension of God’s forgiveness and justification and promised help.” (p. 43)
- All of life, not just marriage is to display God's glory; we should live this way in all of our relationships
- But marriage is a unique display because it is a covenantal relationship
- Tie to chapter 2: “The key to being naked and not ashamed (Gen. 2:25)—when, in fact, a husband and a wife do many things that they should be ashamed of—is the experience of God’s vertical forgiving, justifying grace bent out horizontally to each other and displayed to the world.” (p. 44)
- What does the wrath of God have to do with our relationships/marriages?
- We should never think that our wrath/anger (or our spouse's) is too big to overcome, because of the Gospel – the righteous & just wrath of the infinite, eternal, holy God against the sins of His created people was overcome through Christ's death on the cross. If Christ died for my sins, for my spouse's sins, how can I either hold on to my own anger, or fail to forgive my spouse's sins?
- Colossians 2:13-14 – God canceled the record of debt against us, nailing it to the cross
- “When did that happen? Two thousand years ago. It did not happen inside of us, and it did not happen with any help from us. God did it for us and outside of us before we were ever born. This is the great objectivity of our salvation.” (p. 45)
- “Be sure you see this most wonderful and astonishing of all truths: God took the record of all your sins that made you a debtor to wrath (sins are offenses against God that bring down his wrath), and instead of holding them up in front of your face and using them as the war- rant to send you to hell, God put them in the palm of his Son’s hand and drove a spike through them into the cross. It is a bold and graphic statement: He canceled the record of our debt . . . nailing it to the cross (Col. 2:14).” (p. 45, emphasis added)
- My sin and my wife's sin and the sin of all who would trust in Christ were nailed to the cross – in His hands. He substituted Himself, absorbing the wrath we deserved for our sin. Piper: “God condemned my sin in Christ’s flesh.” (p. 45)
- Besides forgiveness, what else does justification mean for us?
- “Not only are we forgiven because of Christ, but God also declares us righteous because of Christ.” (p. 46)
- “Christ bears our punishment, and Christ performs our righteousness. And when we receive Christ (John 1:12), all of his punishment and all of his righteousness is counted as ours (Rom. 4:4–6; 5:1, 19; 8:1; 10:4; 2 Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:8–9).” (p. 46)
- Tullian Tchividjian: “God demands perfect righteousness; God delivers perfect righteousness.”
- This is sometimes spoken of by theologians as the law/gospel distinction
- Rod Rosenblat: “The law is what God demands, and the gospel is what God gives. And what he gives in the gospel is what he demands in the law.”
- In order to be a display of the covenant keeping nature of Christ's gospel, our marriages must take our justification from God (vertically) and bend it out to our spouses (horizontally) – see Colossians 3:12-13 (also Ephesians 4:32)
- ““As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” your spouse. As the Lord “bears with” you, so you should bear with your spouse. The Lord “bears with” us every day as we fall short of his will. Indeed, the distance between what Christ expects of us and what we achieve is infinitely greater than the distance between what we expect of our spouse and what he or she achieves. Christ always forgives more and endures more than we do. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Bear with as he bears with you. This holds true whether you are married to a believer or an unbeliever. Let the measure of God’s grace to you in the cross of Christ be the measure of your grace to your spouse.” (p. 46)
- “if you are married to a believer, you can add this: As the Lord counts you righteous in Christ, though you are not righteous in actual behavior and attitude, so count your spouse righteous in Christ, though he or she is not righteous.” (p. 47)
- This truth does not reduce the need for the Holy Spirit, for prayer, for meditating on the Bible, for wisdom, for compassion, for community, for counseling, but this truth serves as a foundation for struggles in our marriage
- Three reasons to emphasize “living vertically from the grace of God and then bending out horizontally in forgiveness and justification toward your spouse are” (p. 48):
- 1) “because there is going to be conflict based on sin and strangeness (and you won’t be able even to agree with each other about what is simply strange about each other and what is sin)” (p. 48)
- 2) “because the hard, rugged work of enduring and forgiving is what makes it possible for affections to flourish when they seem to have died” (p. 48)
- 3) “because God gets glory when two very different and very imperfect people forge a life of faithfulness in the furnace of affliction by relying on Christ.” (p. 48)
No comments:
Post a Comment