1 Corinthians 7 8 thru 16 - pub

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1 “Made Holy By Marriage,” 1 Corinthians 7:8-16 (February 9, 2014) 8

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion. 9

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To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife. 12

To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. 16 For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife? PRAY We continue this morning our city-wide series on marriage. Several local churches in the area, as an attempt to display our agreement, our unity, on the essentials of the gospel and Scripture, are working together this month by focusing on marriage on Sunday mornings. The pastors of these churches are preaching from the same text – 1 Corinthians 7, we came together and worked on outlines together for these sermons. And two weeks from tonight – Sunday night, February 23 – we will all, Lord willing, meet at First Baptist, in their auditorium. We’ll sing some songs of the faith, pray together, and then the pastors will climb on stage and answer the questions the people in our churches have about marriage. Hopefully, these sermons will cause a few people to think and they’ll have questions on some area we didn’t cover, want us to elaborate on certain subjects. And the way you can participate that night is, first, by attending – so please make plans to come on February 23 – but second, you can ask a question. So if any of the sermons this month prompt a question in your mind, text it to… So we are in 1 Corinthians 7 all month, looking at marriage. Last week, we talked about the essence of marriage, the foundation of marriage, in our sermon. So I’ll assume a lot of things about marriage that we went over last week – each of the next three sermons build on what we said last week. If you have a question about some fundamentals about marriage or how logically I got to a certain point, particularly when we get to divorce today and you want to know why marriage is wrong, you may want to go back and listen to that sermon and it’ll tie up a lot of loose ends.

© 2014 J.D. Shaw

2 Today we’re in verses 8-16, and this morning I should like to point out to you two things about marriage, and to some degree family, from these nine verses. And to be clear, in truth, this sermon isn’t like last week’s sermon because it’s not really a how-to sermon on marriage. Rather, it’s a sermon on the blessings that come from a Christian understanding of marriage, even if you’re not married. Even if you never get married there are blessings that accrue from a Christian understanding of marriage. Two points: first, marriage, when understood from a Christian point of view, protects you from the forces of culture. Second, marriage provides people with holiness. First, marriage protects you from the forces of culture. When I use the word “culture” I mean the sociological forces in society that push people to behave or live in certain ways. Every culture encourages certain activities and practices, while it discourages others. But Christianity will always, to some degree, be countercultural. To be a Christian, to live as a Christian, you will find yourself always to some degree going against the cultural forces. From this text, we can see two ways: first, a Christian view of marriage takes a higher view of singleness than most cultural forces. In the ancient world, and in traditional societies today, family was everything. No one in the ancient world thought of themselves as an individual – instead, everyone thought of themselves in terms of nation, or tribe, or clan, or family. Family was everything; you could not conceive of individual success the way we can in modern America today. Family was such a huge deal in antiquity such that if you couldn’t have a family on your own, you were considered accursed. Your life wasn’t worth living. Maybe you remember the story of Jacob and Rachel from the book of Genesis. Jacob and Rachel are married, they love each other very much, but she can’t have children. She’s barren. And she doesn’t even really have Jacob, does she? She shares Jacob, because Jacob is married not only to Rachel but to Rachel’s sister, Leah. And Leah is the fertile Myrtle of the ancient near east. Leah keeps having baby after baby after baby after baby. And every time Rachel receives another birth announcement from her sister, it crushes her, until we read this in Genesis 30:1: “When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!” Why? Because family is everything – life isn’t worth living if you couldn’t have a family of your own. But then we read this in 1 Corinthians 7:8-9: 8 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. 9 But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion. 1 Corinthians 7:89.

© 2014 J.D. Shaw

3 Paul says, “You know it’s fine to get married. That’s a great life – you can please the Lord that way, you can do much good that way. But it’s also fine not to get married – that’s also a great way to live as a Christian. You don’t have to be married and raise a family of your own in order to matter as a Christian.” Paul goes so far as to say this in 1 Corinthians 7:29: “This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none …” Now, I’ll wait until later in the month to explain precisely what Paul means by that, but at the very least we can agree that if Paul would write a sentence like that, he can’t view marriage as the end-all, be-all of existence. In the Christian worldview, to be an adult and unmarried is a perfectly acceptable, good form of existence. It’s valuable. According to the Bible, you are more than your family background. You have inherent rights and dignity as an individual human being. It’s no accident that our modern-day notion of individual rights came out of a Christian understanding of human beings as having worth in and of themselves, regardless of family or race or nationality. And that’s a philosophy that goes against the flow of culture of almost every culture that’s ever existed on the planet. So, again, verse 8: “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am.” But, some of you really know your Bibles, so you know that in 1 Timothy 5 it appears on the surface that Paul gives widows different advice. “So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander.” 1 Timothy 5:14. Which is it? Does Paul want widows to get married, or does he not? We talked about this last week. In 1 Corinthians 7:6-7 Paul talks about marriage and says, “6 Now as a concession, not a command, I say this. 7 I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.” Paul says he has a certain gift from God – the gift of celibacy. He is not concerned with sexual fulfillment – he thinks he can live happily without that in his life. He is not worried about raising a family of his own. But he also recognizes that not everyone has that gift; most people, in fact, don’t have that gift – including the young widows he writes Timothy about. Most people want sexual fulfillment. Most people want to have a spouse and children. So he says to them, “Get married. Marriage is hard, I’d like to spare you from marriage if I could, but I can’t because we have different gift sets. You’re going to be happiest with a family of your own; I’m going to be happiest without having to take care of a nuclear family of my own. So if you don’t have the spiritual gifts of celibacy, you need to get married – things won’t go well if you don’t. But if you do – great – for there is a high view of singleness in marriage.” Second, a Christian view of marriage takes a higher view of women than the forces of culture. In the ancient world, women were legal non-entities. They could not own property, they could not make decisions for themselves (let alone for their people). In Jewish society women could not divorce their husbands, but men could divorce their © 2014 J.D. Shaw

4 wives for almost any reason. And while in Rome either the husband or the wife could initiate a divorce, once a woman got married her property became her husband’s, so few women would have the means to get a divorce if they wanted one because they would wind up destitute. Typically, girls were married off by their families at a very young age (most women in the ancient world got married at around 12, just before or after the onset of puberty), and if their husbands died they were often forced to remarry (either by law or by necessity). We know that Caesar Augustus in the Roman Empire had women fined if they did not remarry within two years of the death of their husbands. Why? Because (and I don’t know how else to put it) women were in the ancient world (and in some parts of the world today) viewed not just as second-class citizens, but really as almost sub-human. To the extent that women have mattered in many cultures that have existed in world history, they only mattered because of their wombs – because in the eyes of society their value consisted almost entirely in their ability to populate their society with more men. You may say, “Don’t you mean more children? Why do you say more men?” Because in many cultures little girl babies were treated differently than little boy babies. Archaeologists have found a letter dated 1 B.C., right around the birth of Jesus, written by a Roman man, Hilarion, to his wife, Alis, and it goes like this: “Know that I am still in Alexandria. And do not worry if they all come back and I remain in Alexandria. I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered of a child [before I come home], if it is a boy keep it, if a girl throw it out. You have sent me word, ‘Don’t forget me.’ How can I forget you? I beg you not to worry.” This man evidently loved his wife, but he couldn’t care less about having a baby girl. In ancient Rome, killing healthy female babies was legal and morally very acceptable. Why? Because what was important was sons – sons could take care of you, sons could provide for you, sons could serve the empire as soldiers, but girls were a drain on the family. Boys would bring money into the family; girls would cost the family money. The forces of culture have historically been almost uniformly aligned against women. But then Christianity comes along, and it elevates the status of women such that they are seen as having equal worth and dignity as men. Very famously, and rightly so, the apostle Paul says in Galatians 3:28: “28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In Christianity, men and women are inherently equal – you cannot value men above women, or vice versa. To the point that Paul says this: 10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain © 2014 J.D. Shaw

5 unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife. 12 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him… 15 But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. 1 Corinthians 7:10-13, 15. To the extent Christians look at this passage today, it’s typically to get “the rules of divorce.” To find out when it’s ok and when it’s not ok to get a divorce. And they learn a couple of things: first, you cannot get a divorce just because you find yourself married to someone who’s not a Christian – if the unbelieving spouse wants to stay in the marriage, they you must stay in the marriage. But, second, if the unbelieving spouse abandons the marriage, then it is ok to get a divorce. Now that’s well and good, that is what the passage teaches, there are certainly times when Christians need to know that kind of information and I’ve had to counsel more than a few people through those kinds of times. But if that’s all as a pastor that you teach from this passage then what you really have is a terribly boring sermon. What you should notice about this passage is not just the rules of divorce but that Paul gives the same instructions to you no matter whether you are a man or a woman! And that would have been radically countercultural in Paul’s day. Men and women have the same burdens and rights in marriage – there is no difference in how Paul instructs men or women in this text, and that would have been unheard of in the ancient world. Plus, Paul accords women the place of honor in this text by addressing them first! He does the same thing in Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and Peter also does it when he teaches on marriage in 1 Peter 3. Here’s what I want you to know, own, shout from the mountaintops: wherever Christianity has gone, it has elevated the view of women above that of the existing culture. Now, I know some of you have to be thinking: ok, J.D., but is that true even today? Because hasn’t it been the church that’s held women back in modern-day America? Isn’t it the church that’s taught that it’s a sin for women to work outside the home, especially if they have young children (oh my goodness!)? Hasn’t the church basically said that women need to be barefoot and pregnant, in the kitchen happily whipping up whatever their men want to eat? And when women do work at home, stay at home and take care of their children directly, hasn’t it been the church that’s said that the man’s word is law and the wife needs to obey whatever her husband says? And the simplest answer to that is: yes. Yes, often, pastors and Bible teachers have done an awful job of communicating or are sometimes just flat wrong in how they have instructed women to live as Christians. I remember hearing one marriage counselor talk about how he was working with a Christian couple, and the couple was so confused on how a husband and wife should interact that when the husband and the wife were in their © 2014 J.D. Shaw

6 home together, the wife would have to call out to her husband for permission to move from one room to a different room in the home. That’s just nuts. Sometimes it starts before marriage. I remember one time speaking to a college student who was really concerned that his girlfriend was going to graduate school because, after all, she was just going to stay home and take care of the children once they started having babies, and why should they waste all that money on her education? You’ll hear professing Christians and pastors say all kinds of crazy stuff about women. It’s very nearly an epidemic in American evangelicalism. Many pastors need to shut up when it comes to women and their place in society, because they do more harm than good every time they open their mouths. And it’s also true that today, in our modern-day American culture, there are unprecedented opportunities for women to either stay at home and care directly for their children or to have a career in law, in medicine, in politics, in academia, in business. So how can I say wherever Christianity has gone it has elevated the view of women above that of the existing culture, if it doesn’t seem to be true right now where we live? Here’s how: first, there is nothing in the Bible that would forbid a woman from reaching the highest levels in any given career field. You may not like the idea of women being CEO’s, or attorneys, or surgeons, or the President of the United States but if you think that just know there’s nothing in the Bible backing up your views – nothing. But, second, even though our American culture has opened up lots of opportunities for women in some ways, it works incredibly hard in other ways to destroy women. Every time you go and buy groceries at the supermarket, what do you see? You see these magazines, and on all their covers there are these images of women, and what is the message behind those images? At some level they are saying, “Unless you look like this, then in our culture, there’s no way a man will love you.” That’s what they’re saying. I saw last week that nearly one in five women between the ages of 12 and 25 have an eating disorder. Why do I mention that? Because an eating disorder is not a choice; it’s an illness. It’s a first-rate example of how our culture gets into the heads of women on a subconscious level and says, “You’re not worth anything unless you lose more weight.” It’s a cultural assault on women. Last summer I read an article in the New York Times on the hookup culture. For those of you who don’t know, traditional cultural practices of dating and certainly courtship have for all intents and purposes ceased to exist on many college campuses. They have been replaced, instead, by sexual encounters between young men and women who barely know one another and who have no expectation of any kind of relationship (not even the expectation of a friendship) either before or after the encounter.

© 2014 J.D. Shaw

7 Now, the author of the article and many of the social scientists interviewed tried very hard to paint the hookup culture as a victory for women in our society; in fact, the title of the article was “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too.” You can almost hear the author saying, “You go, girl!” But I thought the most telling part of the article was this: more than sixty young women at the University of Pennsylvania were interviewed (so these were very bright girls; no offense to Ole Miss students but the standards for admission at Penn are tougher than for Ole Miss) – more than sixty young women were interviewed, and they all said that the hookups could not take place without alcohol, because these girls could not bring themselves to pair off with strange young men without being drunk. If the only way you can bring yourself to do a certain activity is by being drunk, it can’t be healthy. If you’re here this morning and you’re not a Christian, welcome – I’m glad you’re here, particularly if you are a woman. I know that the reason a lot of women in Oxford aren’t Christians is because they’ve felt completely devalued and degraded by some of the things they’ve heard from professing Christians about women and their place in our culture. I’m not saying I can in one sermon overcome all that. I just want you to consider that maybe our culture (for all the opportunities it affords women) works even harder to tear them down (which would make it just like every other culture that’s ever existed on the face of the earth), and that perhaps if you got into a Christian community that rightly understands what the Bible teaches on marriage and family and women in general, you’d find yourself more valued, more understood, more at peace with who you are as a woman made in the image of God than you’ve ever been before. Second, under the Christian view, marriage provides people with holiness. Look back at 1 Corinthians 5:9-10: 9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. Paul wrote an earlier letter to Corinth which has been lost and in it he told the Corinthians not to associate with sexually immoral people. Some in Corinth took that to heart, and so some Christians began to divorce their unbelieving spouses, because they took Paul to mean that if they continued to live with their spouses these Christians could never be holy. They could never be pleasing to God, because they would somehow be infected, contaminated, by the uncleanness and unholiness of their pagan spouses. That’s the default attitude of worldly notions of religion. When it comes to holiness, almost every religion on the planet says this: watch out! There are certain people you must not go near, or you’ll be defiled. You’ll be unclean. You must stay away from the sinners, stay away from the bad people, stay away from the sexually immoral and greedy people, stay away from those people who don’t believe like you do – because if you spend too much time around them, or let your children around © 2014 J.D. Shaw

8 them, their unholiness, their uncleanness, might infect you and you too might become unclean. Too one degree or another, every other religion on the planet teaches the “watch out” approach to holiness. And, of course, too many Christians, too many churches, take the “watch out” approach to holiness – if we can just keep away from all the bad people, all the different people, all the questionable people, certainly all the sexually immoral people, then we can be holy. But what did Jesus do? Very early in Jesus’ ministry we read this: 40 And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.” 41 Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” 42 And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. Mark 1:40-42. Now you know that according to the laws of the Old Testament that someone with leprosy, the skin disease, was officially categorized as unclean. They were unable to participate in the worship at the temple in Israel. In fact, they were considered so unholy that according to Leviticus 13 lepers had to live away from the community, outside the camp, and if any people approached them they had to scream, “Unclean! Unclean!” Basically, the burden was on the lepers to say, “Watch out… for me! I’ll make you unholy.” But what does Jesus do? He touches the leper. And it doesn’t make Jesus unclean. Jesus isn’t infected. No, the holiness of Jesus radiates outward, and his holiness overwhelms the leper’s unholiness. Jesus didn’t take the “watch out” approach; he took the “dive in” approach. Find those who are unclean, unholy, outcasts, and serve them, love them. How could he do that without becoming unclean himself? On the cross. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, he took all the uncleanness, all the unholiness, all the guilt, all the shame of the world on himself and he sent it to hell. On the cross Jesus became thoroughly unclean; in fact, Galatians 3 said that he became a curse. Jesus became unholy, so much so that the Father in heaven had to turn his face away. But when you believe in Jesus, when you receive his cleansing touch, you don’t have to worry about being defiled or being made dirty by being around certain people – you can hang around and love the worst sinners you can find – because if you are a Christian your holiness isn’t this delicate piece of china you must protect, it’s a powerful force that radiates outward and will, by God’s grace, overwhelm the unholiness around you. So in light of that, Paul writes back a second letter to the Corinthians, our 1 Corinthians, in which he says, “Don’t leave your unbelieving spouse.” And we get Paul’s reasoning from 1 Corinthians 7:14 (and I love this verse): 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. Paul says, “If you find out you’re married to someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus, you’re in a tough spot. That’s hard, and no one should ever knowingly do this.” In fact, © 2014 J.D. Shaw

9 in 2 Corinthians 6 Paul expressly prohibits it; he says, “Do not get unequally yoked; you can’t have one spouse serving Christ and the other serving Baal.” Never knowingly unite yourself with someone who does not believe. Paul does not advocate “missionary dating” here. But if you are married to an unbeliever, Paul says, and they love you and want to remain married to you, then don’t think that somehow you’re no longer holy. Your holiness has been secured forever by the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Never worry about your holiness. “For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?” 1 Corinthians 7:16. And who knows? Paul says. Maybe if you stay in the marriage with them, they’ll one day come to love Jesus as well as you, because holiness radiates outward. Christians do not have to play defense with their holiness; we play offense with it. You don’t have to worry about becoming unclean; your holiness is secure in Christ so love your spouse, love your children, because your love has a sanctifying effect on their lives. I know there are some of you in the room this morning who want more than anything for your husband, your wife, your children, to believe the gospel. Paul encourages you – he says, “Live with them, love them, pray for them, serve them, and see what God will do. Stay with them, keep your vows, because your presence in their lives will do more than just about anything else to help them see the love Jesus has for them.” Amen. Friends, we’re about to take the Lord’s Supper. All Christians, whether members of this church or not, whether baptized in a particular way or not – we, the elders of Grace Bible Church, welcome all believers in Jesus Christ welcome to come to the Lord’s Table. I’ll pray for us, then give you some instructions on how to take it. Father, we thank you for this day, and we pray your blessing on the word as it’s been preached and on the bread and the cup as we prepare to take them and remember the work and love of your son Jesus Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.

© 2014 J.D. Shaw