For the lesson tonite, I have purloined 2 articles by Douglas Wilson. The first is an application of the 10 commandments in marriage and the other an application of grace. Pretty basic Christian stuff, but how we apply these tenants of the faith to our marriages can provide us with some communication and survival tools we may not have noticed before. Here are the articles:
Ten Commandments
by Douglas Wilson
Many of us are accustomed to seeing those "ten commandments" of this and that which show up in sundry places, and are applied to all sorts of human endeavors. From closing real estate deals to bagging a trophy elk, we like to mimic the decalogue. So some may have been lured into this column hoping to find a "commandment three" which prohibits the practice of leaving dirty socks draped over the back of the living room couch-sort of like a masculine doily-or "commandment seven" which requires a weekly date.
But this is not about the ten commandments of marriage. We need to consider the far more important subject of The Ten Commandments in marriage. The Bible teaches us that, in terms of its content, love is always defined by the law (Rom. 13: 8-10). Since love clearly should be resident in every believing home, in every Christian marriage, this means that the law should always be seen as love’s beautiful twin sister, the two of them never separated.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me" (Ex. 20:3). A husband must love his wife less than he loves God. When a man loves God as he ought, this enables him to love others as he ought. But when a woman becomes an idol, she will frequently find herself regularly mistreated in that relationship. This is because the man who idolizes her has, in that attitude, cut himself off from the source of all genuine charity and grace, which is of course the Father. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). A man cannot be a disciple of Christ unless he hates his wife, and unless he is a disciple of Christ, he cannot learn to love his wife.
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments" (vv. 4-6). This commandment mentions the fruit of marriage, counted in the coming generations. One sure way to visit grief upon those children yet unborn is to tolerate any man-made conceptions and images of God and Christ in the name of maintaining a "pious" home.
"Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain" (v. 7). We bear the name of Christ in all that we do. If we are Christians, then our marriages are Christian marriages. But modern evangelical marriages are barely distinguishable from unbelieving marriages. We display the same evidence of pathological diseases in our marriages that are seen in the world-widespread divorce, rampant counseling, preoccupation with our marital needs, sex-on-the-brain, and so forth. We bear the name of God in vain. Until we learn what the word Christian means, we will not do well in understanding what Christian marriage is.
"Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God" (vv. 8-10). The frenetic pace of our modern culture is subsidized by husbands who have forgotten that they have a duty to give rest to every member of the household, and to do so in the presence of God. In particular, a husband should see to it that the proverb "a woman’s work is never done" is false in his household. One in authority who does not give sabbaths does not know what love is.
"Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee" (v. 12). Parents like to receive honor, but parents frequently forget that they also are children, and they are to set an example to their children through how they treat the children’s grandparents. Many children have learned how to disrespect parents from simply hearing the conversation at the dinner table. And little pitchers have big ears.
"Thou shalt not kill" (v. 13). The antithesis of the malice that ends in bloodshed is the demeanor of warmth and kindness. A man who loves his wife as Christ loved the church is demonstrating his hatred of all lawless bloodshed. Thanks to our abortion culture, the home has become a principal place where this command is despised. But the home should be a refuge of life.
"Thou shalt not commit adultery (v. 14). Of course, a husband obeys God here by avoiding infidelity in all its guises and forms. He sets a guard over his eyes, heart, and his members which are on the earth, and refuses all offers. He turns away from the covers of magazines at the supermarket check-out, he stays out of conversations with women in Internet chat rooms, he stays out of bed with other women, he refuses to daydream about being married to someone else, and any other temptation not mentioned.
"Thou shalt not steal" (v. 15). A man who does not provide food and clothing for his wife is robbing her. He owes her financial support and must never begrudge it (Ex. 21:10).
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" (v. 16). A man’s wife is his closest neighbor. He therefore must be scrupulously honest with her at all times. A man and wife should be able to talk with one another about anything.
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s" (v. 17). A happily-married man will never spend any time looking longingly over the fence at anything. He may not covet the lawnmower over there, the wife sunbathing, the car, the house itself, the driveway, the gardening ability, or anything else belonging to his neighbor.
Do this, and you do well.
A Home in The Right Key
by Douglas Wilson
We often do not pay enough attention to what key we are in. We may know what we are "playing" and what note comes next, but not enough concern is shown for the overall effect. What key are we in?
Another way of saying this is that we defend and explain ourselves in the details, not recognizing that we have created a context that in effect completely dominates those details. There are many examples of this in theology, in politics, and in family life. Just one example from theology should suffice to illustrate the point. In Reformed theology, many have adopted a certain understanding of the "covenant of works" and the "covenant of grace" that illustrates this well. In this view, Adam was placed in the garden under a strictly legal covenant. He sinned against this covenant of works, so God established a covenant of grace. The problem is that the covenant of strict justice has already established what key we are in, and it is next to impossible to keep the works from that first covenant from seeping in to corrupt the grace of the second.
It would be far better to see that God Himself is an eternally covenanted Godhead of Persons. The Father does not love the Son in a covenant of works, but rather as a fountainhead of inexhaustible covenanted love. If we understand this as the "ultimate" covenant, then we will find that it is love and goodness and favor that keeps seeping into our lives. That is what we want; that is our sanctification. In other words, the key we establish at the beginning of our music is crucial.
So, how does this apply to marriage? In many ways, we see the same tangles we get into in our theology duplicating themselves in our relationships with our spouses. A man and his wife are bound together by covenant. This much is plain in Scripture (Mal. 2:14; Prov. 2:17). But is it a covenant of works or a covenant of grace? Paul commands husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the Church, and he commands wives to respect and honor their husbands in the same way the Church honors Christ. This means that the covenant we are to imitate is the new covenant, a covenant of grace.
But this means we must really understand grace. Not only must we understand grace, we must be able to see it as the ultimate reality in which we live and move and have our being. Because we are sinners, we can be surrounded by grace and still not be able to see it. Going back to the covenant with Adam in the garden, many theologians look at this and see a situation calling for raw obedience and strict, merited justice. But this misses the wonderful context. God created Adam, placed him in a luxurious garden, created a beautiful woman for him, gave him all the fruit in the garden to eat, with just one tree excepted. He even allowed him to eat from the tree of life. He walked with Adam in the garden in the cool of the day. This is all grace, unmerited favor. Adam had done nothing to deserve it. Like all grace, it creates obligations, but there is a vast difference between a gracious obligation and a legal obligation.
In marriage, when the keynote is works, not grace, conflict arises and somebody hauls out the contract. Imagine a husband, Bible open to Ephesians 5, his finger jabbing at the verse that says she should be submissive. "Why aren’t you keeping your end of this deal?" Let us assume for a moment that he is right about the facts of this particular conflict, and let us assume that she should have been submissive and was not. Nevertheless, his behavior here shows that he is in the wrong key entirely. He wants the right thing done on the basis of a demand, rather than wanting grace (his grace) to generate its own completely different kind of demand.
Things are complicated further by that perverse sinfulness in a man that wants to hold his wife to a covenant of works while insisting that she should see him in the light of a covenant of grace. In other words, "When I sin, what does she expect? I’m not Jesus. Doesn’t she know how to forgive?" But when she sins, he can’t believe it. "Look at this verse. What’s her problem? Can’t she read?" In other words, his sin is a human foible. Her sin is perverse obstinacy. It reminds me of the old self-serving conjugation of a certain irregular verb: "I am firm. You are stubborn. He is pig-headed."
The basic question here is whether law operates in the context of grace, or whether grace operates in the surrounding context of law. If the former, then marriage is delight upon delight. If the latter, then it is one conflict after another. In these two different marriages, the objective standards may be exactly the same, but they are played in different keys.
Now a marriage defined and shaped by grace is not an antinomian marriage. Grace has a backbone. Grace can be sinned against, and it can (and should) object when this happens. But everything depends on how this happens. Law within the defining context of grace is true law. Law outside that context always rots, and spreads the contamination to everything it touches—including what many husbands expect from their wives.
