We serve and worship the incomparable God. The triune God revealed to us in Scripture is boundless, infinite, immense, and beyond all human ability to conceive. He is contained by no boxes, whether they be ornate temples built by industrious hands or intellectual temples build by clever minds. He is contained by no creaturely boxes. And yet, we were created in His image—male and female represent that image (Gen. 1:27)—and this means that what we are doing here today is communicating something about Him.
“For who in the heaven can be compared unto the Lord? Who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the Lord?” (Psalm 89:6).
Not only is He incomparable, but He is incomparably gracious and good. Try to imagine something that we know we cannot imagine, but where the attempt to imagine it is edifying anyhow. The grace of God, the goodness of God, is an infinite cataract of grace, having no top, no bottom, no front, no back, no sides. The fountainhead of this cataract is the infinite Father, Himself without beginning or end, the falls themselves are the Son, and the pool below is the infinite Spirit, and all of it boundless.
I said that contemplation of this incomparable grace is edifying, but how is that? The apostle Paul himself urged us in this direction with his prayer for the Ephesians. He prayed that they . . .
“May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us” (Ephesians 3:18–20).
Note that his prayer is that the Ephesians come to know that which passes knowledge. That their finite little cups might be filled with all the fullness of God—that an infinite Pacific of grace be poured into their little thimbles. That they would be able to grasp the breadth, length, depth, and height—in short, to grasp that which cannot be grasped. That is quite a prayer.
One of the glories of the incomparable God is that He can communicate His grace to us through comparisons. How can infinitude even talk to finitude? It can, and that is one of its incomparable glories. Even beyond that, how can an infinite God become a finite man? That is a wonderful question in its own right, but this is a July wedding, and it is a bit early for a Christmas meditation.
The incomparable God can give incomparable gifts, and He can even bestow them in a world of smoke and vanity. Marriage is one such gift.
“Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 9:9).
Now Scripture teaches us that this boundless grace is how God “presents” to all those who have faith in Him. We should know that all that is in God is God, which means that God does not have justice, but rather He is justice. He doesn’t just have grace, He is grace. He doesn’t have goodness, He is goodness. And it also follows that His justice is His grace, and His goodness, and so on. Just as all the colors of the spectrum blended together give us white, so also the attributes of God taken together give us holiness. The seraphim have nothing else to do but sing about that. Holy, holy, holy.
So the way God presents to us, we who are finite, is dependent upon whether we come to Him dressed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ—whether we look to Him by looking to Christ. And so that is the ultimate grace of God to us—imputed righteousness.
And if we are recipients of that foundational grace, we can see that all of God’s intentions toward us are for good, and not for evil. This enables us to receive, by faith, all of the lesser creational graces as graces, chief among them being the grace of marriage. The incomparable God is capable of giving incomparable gifts, and marriage is most certainly in that category.
When we face Him, understanding by faith who He is and what He is like, then the Lord does in fact build the house. And those who labor to build it—in this case, Iain and Grace Ann—will not labor in vain.
The joy that Paul solicited from the Philippians will be the same kind of joy that the apostle would be blessed by were he to see it in this marriage—like-mindedness, being of one accord, no strife or vainglory, and humility of mind suffusing the household—and nowhere are these graces more fitting than in a marriage.
“What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:31–32).
All of this is the kind of thing that God can freely pour into a marriage, and He loves to pour this grace until the whole thing overflows. Never forget that for finite beings, God is always the God of overflow.
Iain, you and your bride are both musical. I want to charge you to see to it that your marriage harmonizes. You should want a Bach household, not a Schoenberg household. Now men and women are different enough that the only way this can really happen is when Christ is the composer, the arranger, the conductor, and the one who comes in beforehand and tunes all the instruments.
Grace Ann, as the two of you are both under the ultimate authority of Christ, you as the woman are under the authority of Iain. This does not mean a servile or craven role for you, but rather a complementary and responsive role. Iain provides the structure and framework, but you are to be the descant. You have no doubt experienced times when a descant, a secondary line of music, provided a true fullness of meaning to the primary line of music. I am charging you to be that descant for Iain.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.