of help to them. So even if your marriage is healthy, it is good for you to be armed in this way. But then there's also the fact that a number of us are on the opposite end of life. parents, grandparents, and so on, and will every so often be asked to simply advise. Maybe it might be at weddings, say a few words of counsel to a married couple and so on, or a couple that's getting married. It's good for you to have the lay of the land so that you are not just going around in circles repeating phrases that you picked up from other people and so on, but that you'll be able to give basic keys to those that are joining in the context of marriage. And sometimes it's simply not a few words at a wedding, but doing pre-marital counseling. It's good for you to at least see the bigger picture as you are talking to others. So hence the topic, God's design for marriage. And strictly speaking, that's what we will be beginning with as we deal with the topic, what is the purpose of marriage and how did God design it to meet this need? And I want us to begin from Genesis. And Genesis chapter 1, so we're really going at the beginning of creation. And the basic point I want you to underscore there is the fact that marriage is God's idea. We need to begin from there. It was not our idea because of some need that we sensed, but it is God's idea. And because it's God's idea, he has the blueprint for it. So, Genesis chapter 1 is about the creation of the world, and the very end of God's creation is what we find in verse 24. rather verse 26, verse 26, then God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and 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. And then we read in verse 27, 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 multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And it was on that score that God wrapped up the creation of the entire world. So what we have there, first of all, is something that was common to the rest of creation. There is the fact that God was making the animals as well, and in making them, He was making them male and female. But it is primarily in the creation of human beings that God actually makes that point. Male and female, He created them. And whereas previously, He has spoken in terms of being fruitful, It is primarily here that he speaks about dominion. In other words, I am bringing you onto this planet in order to fulfill a task as my deputy so that that which I have brought into this world is going to be under your rule, under your stewardship. And we need to capture that as we are thinking in terms of marriage because often we tend to think purely in terms of me and my need instead of recognizing that this is an avenue in which God's world is to be looked after. Well, let's quickly then with that go into chapter two. And I want us to primarily consider verse 18 to the end. Chapter 2 of Genesis, verse 18 to the end. The Bible says there, 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 had formed, so that's going backwards, before that point that is being spoken about. He had 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. After all, he has made man his regent, his deputy in the world. So here they are, mentioned what they should be called. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the heavens, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, There was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he slept, 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 born of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Verse 24 and 25. Therefore, a 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 we're not ashamed. I've mentioned the fact that marriage is God's idea. And that passage that we have just read makes that point pretty well. Because prior to the statement that we find in verse 18, which says it's not good that the man should be alone, basically, Adam is continuing to deal with that which God has given him as his work. And the work that God has given him is what we find in the 16th verse. Well, I can begin from verse 15. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. Okay, so the task of being his regent or deputy. And then he commanded him in verse 16, saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall die. So he gives him the responsibility to look after the natural world. He also gives him the responsibility to look after the covenant that is there between himself and the human race. But it is in the midst of that that God then speaks about Adam needing a partner, and that's We're talking about the purpose of marriage. I've got three Ps, and I'm sure most of you can guess what they are. OK, so there is the issue of partnership. Partnership. And we find it there when God says, it is not good that the man should be alone. And I always make the... comment that God is not saying it is not good for the man to be lonely. That's not what you find in the text whether it's Hebrew or English. It is that it is not good for him to be alone. In other words, I have given him work He should not do it alone. He should do it with somebody else. And that somebody else is referred to not as a mere companion, someone to enjoy time with, but a partner in the work. as we read, I will make him a helper fit for him. And it's crucial that we don't lose sight of that, that it is a helper that is being given to him, a partner, somebody to enable him to function as God's regent in a more efficient way. That's what a partner is. And when I was working in the mines, the very first job I had was that of a section boss. That's the smallest unit that you manage underground, a section boss. And what I noticed was that my success as I was working as a section boss always depended on who my assistant was. It always depended on that. Because these guys, they used to change. And some of the assistants were very good. You literally went into sleep mode with guys like that, because they knew what they needed to do, they were motivated, they got on with the work, and you made a lot of strides. But every so often, you were given somebody who, because he had been working in the mines much longer than you were on earth, literally, They always felt they knew, so shut up. Just watch. And then they were useless. So did not matter how much you said to them, but look at the results that are coming through. They were passing the blame to everybody else when you really knew they were the cause. The point there is that there was helpers, but often they were helpers who were unfit for the job and for you, and they cost you a lot. So it's more than companionship here. It is partnership in order to be fruitful to God. And it is because of this that the whole subject of headship and submission becomes vital to the marriage relationship. It's not simply tossing a coin in order to see who should be head and who should be submitting. It is in the DNA of the man and the woman. And so we see, for instance, in Ephesians, and we can also see the same in Colossians, but we'll just use the Ephesians one, how the woman is told to submit to her husband, and the man is not told to hate, but is told to love his wife. Just quickly read that, and then I will make a few passing comments. So Ephesians 5. Verse 22 says, wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. We can read more than that, but that's adequate for now. And then verse 25, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Those two aspects are crucial. because of the very way in which God engineered marriage, the way in which he wired it. Remember, it's about a partnership, and that partnership should not be a two-headed beast. It has to be one in which there is someone leading and there is somebody following. And the one who is leading by definition in Genesis chapter 2 is the man because of the fact that the one who has been given to him is a helper, a suitable helper. Again, going back to the context of the work in the mines, what used to happen is that when you arrived, you took over a shift. So other people had worked at night, or they had worked during the day, and you were handling night shift. So when you arrived, the first thing you did was to open a log book. And you read what those who were there before you had done. And once you've read, you also had a job card. The job card told you now what your role was going to be in your shift. And essentially what you did is that when your assistant arrived, you simply sent him off to go and collect the various tools and supplies that you were going to need. And you say, in 30 minutes, let's meet at the cage. And then we go down and get cracking. While he's gone, you are dealing with other administrative matters, hoping that he is going to do exactly as you have told him. So in that way, you functioned as a left and a right hand together. Well, as I already said, every so often you arrive at the cage, you're about to go down, and you sort of say, OK, so where are these things? And the guy is supposed to be a lot more smarter than you. I don't know, that wasn't necessary. And this, I forget this, and so on. And you realize you are in serious trouble with a person like this. You need someone who is submissive. Someone who recognizes that I am a second fiddle, to borrow another expression. Somebody else is calling the shots. And that's a submissive wife. But then, the man is not just head. He has a role to play with respect to the wife, and it is that of love. love, or as we often say, tender, loving care. Love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. So the man who is providing headship is one who is sensitive. to the needs of his assistant and deliberately, therefore, plays a role that makes the assistant feel. not just cared for, but feel that someone sees me as worthy of the role that I have been given in his life. So he's not trying to trample over me, but he is one that is sacrificially caring for me, sacrificially loving me. I want to suggest to you that this is an all-important balance in the marriage relationship as God designed it to be. Often, when I am dealing with oversight visits, the way in which I ask the question is quite simple. I turn to the husband or wife. Let me begin with the wife this time. And simply ask the question, does your husband love you with tender, loving care? And then I say, feel free to add but. So the wife will say, yeah. Yeah, he loves me with any loving care, but, and then she adds something else. I wish she could do this. And I often say, that's the homework for the man. In other words, just make sure that in your marriage, the words after the but continue to diminish, and diminish, and diminish, and diminish. Because ultimately, there should be no but. if you are doing your job well. And then I turn to the man, and I say, does your wife submit to your leadership in the home? And then I see a man sort of go like this. And then, of course, he realizes that if I say no, I'll be in serious trouble here. So he finally says, yes, but, and then he adds the extras. And that extra is the work that the wife has to handle going forward. I do want to assure you, brethren, and I've been married long enough, I've been a pastor long enough to say this, that where each one concentrates on the words after the but, you will have a healthy marriage going forward. You have a healthy marriage going forward. That's God's design for this relationship. The problem that Adam had before having a wife was precisely the absence of a suitable helper. We see it at the end of verse 20, back to Genesis and chapter 2. We see it at the end of verse 20. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him." That's where the frustration was. He was enjoying naming animals. But the animals were not a fit replacement for a wife. There is need for partnership. But secondly, there is need for pleasure. And this is pleasure in the context of love, the context of love. You can't miss it, back in Genesis chapter 2, you can't miss it from the words that were coming out of Adam's lips. But even before the words is the way in which God uses the picture language of a rib from the man. Verse 21, so the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, 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." It's interesting that the Even in a physical sense, the rib is the closest part of a person's skeleton to the heart. God deliberately gets that part to form the woman that is going to be part of this man's life. And then also, again, when you think about it, those of you who are already feeling cold here, you are like this, isn't it? You're keeping warm by embracing your actual ribs. Nobody has told you to do it, but it's almost instinctive when you are in cold weather. I think God was saying something. to us by using the picture language here. This is not an accident. He did not use a firmer from the thigh because it's a strong bone in order to create the woman. He used a rib. And it's not a bone that is from the skull. It's not a bone that is from the feet. It's a bone that is somewhere in the middle showing, again, something of a sense of companionship even there that is to be enjoyed in the marriage relationship. But then as he brings her to the man, look at the way the man responds. Then the man said, this at last is born of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. It is the first song. that we have in the whole Bible, at least out of the lips of a human being. And it is not when Adam is relating to the animals around him. It is not while Adam is relating to the vegetation around him. It's not even while Adam is enjoying probably very tasty food from the garden. But it is when he sights the woman. that he breaks forth into this song. At last, here is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. There is romance that has immediately been introduced into the context of this person's life. And that's not an accident. It is the very way in which God has made us as human beings. He's made us in such a way that what he wants us to fulfill is something we enjoy to do. So for instance, whatever career you might have chosen for your life, I am sure it wasn't simply that it pays well. But it was also that this is something I enjoy doing. It's the same thing with food. God deliberately put test buds, B-U-D-S, on our tongues so that we can enjoy the food that we eat. And that's why it's so difficult to eat when you are sick, because your test buds simply fail to do their job. and you hate the process of eating. It's the same thing with marriage. God has done it in such a way that romance is an integral aspect of marriage. When your child begins to go through teenage years, suddenly the members of the opposite sex become very important to them, very important. You know, I've never forgotten the disappointment I once had. I used to sort of bring clothing for my children whenever I'd go abroad. And then coming to give this, what I thought were good clothes, to our sons. And one of them said, Dad, I can't put this on. I said, why? The girls will laugh at me. So I thought, when did girls become more important to you than me? OK, so things change along the way. Members of the opposite sex become more important than you, dad and mom, whether you like it or not. That's why they even abandon your home to go and get married. It doesn't matter how nice your home might be. It is because there is this pleasure in love that makes up marriage. It's the way God designed it to be. God made us male and female, and part of the pleasure is in sex itself. It is the way in which God made that relationship. And so we must never forget that. We see it in the statement, a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave or hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one. One flesh, the one flesh union. Sex is meant to be the climax of the pleasure that is meant only for the marriage relationship. So there's partnership, and there is pleasure. And by the way, before we move away from pleasure, it's incredible, but it's true, isn't it, that some of the best songs that are ever created by human beings are about marriage, rather, about love, about romance. It's incredible, but it's true. Children will be going through nursery rhymes and so on and, you know, Jack and Jill did this and that and so on. But when they get into their teenage years, somehow the nursery rhymes, They now want to sing about chigelo. That becomes the topic of the songs. They invent songs specifically, or poems specifically, for that loved one. Again, God intended it to be so. The third aspect that I, maybe before I get into that because I've already begun verse 24, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. I think it's important in dealing with that text to emphasize that The nature of God's design for marriage is that it is an exclusive relationship, an exclusive relationship. It is one that overrides the relationship that was there between a child and his parents. It gets into first position. And one of the ways in which this has particularly struck me is at funerals of a person who has died. The way in which they make it clear as to who will be the first person to lay their wreath. They make it clear. It's not the parents. It doesn't matter how big they are in society. It's always the spouse who lays the first wreath. And even in the estate, when the person has died and they're now dealing with the estate of the one who has died, they don't begin with the parents. Even if the person did not leave a will, they begin with the spouse. Because the person left father and mother to begin a new unit, an independent unit within society. It is in the design that God has placed in the marriage relationship. But what it also means is that this leaving and cleaving includes girlfriends and boyfriends. It's an exclusive relationship in that sense. And it's been added to our wedding vows, isn't it? When we say, forsaking all others and clinging only to him or to her as long as both of us shall live. It's in the DNA of the marriage relationship that it must be monogamous. Now, we can ask questions about the polygamous nature of marriages in the Old Testament. But we definitely can't miss it here, because God did not bring Eve to Adam and then throw in Stella and Jane as well as a bonus. It was one woman that he gave him, and that was it. You don't read, even later as you go forward, you don't read that Adam began to accumulate a few more wives. So the exclusiveness has to do with the living and cleaving. Two is company, three is a crowd. Let me also add very quickly here that the cleaving is permanent. It's for life. seriously for life. And later on, when we come to deal with the issues of marriage ending up in misery and divorce, this is where the cracks of the matter lie. This is where the testing comes in because of these causes that are bringing a strain in the marriage relationship. And for you to be able to see that in the very definition of marriage, it's meant to be for life. The ways that I talked about earlier, forsaking all others, clinging only to him or her, as long as both of us shall live. We speak about contracts when we're getting into employment. And there's no guilty feeling when you throw in your letter of resignation to your employers to go and start working somewhere else. I've quit my job once in my entire lifetime. And it was from mining. And I've never forgotten after I put in my resignation, being called into my manager's office. And as we sat to talk, he never, ever felt betrayed. Not at all. He just could not understand why I was leaving this job to go and be pastor of a church. He thought it was a mental problem. But there was no sense. I mean, he sort of was showing me my line of progression, where I was now, and where I was going to be, and the kind of salary scales that were going to come. But there's no sense that you've done something wrong. It's just trying to entice you to change your mind. Because it's a contract. And a contract can come to an end. Marriage is a covenant. It's a lifelong covenant. To try and end it is a betrayal. There's something wrong. It's supposed to end with blood, with death at the end, and not something that is stopping in between. So this cleaving here. that we are seeing in our text, holding fast to his wife. Not just holding, but holding fast to his wife. It's meant to be until death parts us. It's an organic union rather than a mechanical one, where you can just unscrew the nuts that are there, and then separate the two, and then join another one. No, this is meant to be organic, so that it is literally a cutting off that happens when a person dies. And that's the reason why it mustn't happen when they're still alive. Well, the last part is procreation. And it is also hinted within here. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. But if we cross over to chapter four, we will come to chapter three in the second session. But when we cross over to chapter four, we read this. Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived. and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again, meaning Adam knew his wife again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep while Cain a worker of the ground. Notice the product of this sexual union that is taking place there, and it is procreation. Procreation. It is by God's design. vehicle that He has provided for not only bringing human beings into the world, but it is also the vehicle that God has provided for nurturing the children into this world, bringing them to adulthood. that the man and the woman function like a left and a right hand together in order to properly bring up the children. There's a way in which the role of the woman can never be replaced by a man. Even in today's crazy sort of homosexual world, that's obvious that they are having to mechanically temper with the way in which we are made. I mean, only a woman has a uterus in which the baby is going to be for nine months. Try as you might as a man, forget it. Only a woman has nursing breasts that are going to, again, play that role of providing a well-balanced diet to a baby through just one regular liquid that is being offered to the baby. And it goes beyond that. There is a sensitivity that women have that women just don't have with respect to temperature in the home, for instance. Us men, everything is OK. And then the woman arrives and says, it's hot in here. Oh. Opening windows, stuffy, and so on. And your baby must be feeling cold here. There's need for more clothing. The man is just totally surprised about all this. It's just the way God has made us. He's made us so that we can play those different roles. And then when it comes to the issue of discipline, again, we know how we easily differ as husband and wife because the man is the natural disciplinarian. He is able to keep his emotions inside there while he's dealing with disciplinary matters. And it's not just in terms of the action. It's even in terms of the voice. Because the man's voice is like a lion. He just says, stop it. And the children know that beyond this statement, the world will be bad. And whereas the mother, they can do rounds around her. And they are continuing doing rounds and so forth. So it's a whole detail in itself, but it is definitely worth underscoring that the two play those kinds of roles. The man is the primary breadwinner. The woman is the primary breadwinner. And that does not mean the woman cannot work outside the home. It is simply where is our primary role. So there's no doubt about that. God has wired us in such a way that we are able together as a left and a right hand to not just bring children into the home, into the world. but to nurture them and to raise them. Well, my 45 minutes are over. I will end here and hand over to our brother, the song leader. Thank you.