In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, welcome. As we have gathered here for another wedding, we are reminded of God’s continuing and continuous kindness to us. He established marriage at the very foundation of the world, and He did so because it was a key instrument for the accomplishment of His purposes for our world.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:27-28).
We do have to remember that our race fell into sin, and that this affects how we are to understand and appropriate the blessing mentioned here. But we must also remember, always remember, that God sent His Son to be a second Adam, to start us over again and to set the human race off on the right foot this time. So because of Jesus, and the forgiveness that God provides us through Him, we are enabled to come back to this passage and claim all the treasures in it.
Notice that man and woman together constitute the image of God. Having created us male and female, the very first thing He did after that was pronounce a blessing. Because man and woman together bear the image of God, God is blessing something which reflects and mirrors Him. This means that when a man and a woman live together in the kind of harmony that Scripture calls us to, we are a blessed reflection of what our triune God is like. And later in this ceremony, as a minister of Christ, I am going to pronounce a blessing on this couple, and this blessing will be a direct lineal descendant of the first blessing that God Himself pronounced at the first wedding.
The next thing God told them was to be fruitful and multiply. But if we limit our thoughts on this to filling up the spare rooms in our house, we fall short of God’s intention. God created man so that we would establish cultures, cities, and gardens. And He wanted this done throughout the entire earth. He said to replenish the earth, and subdue the earth. He told us to exercise dominion over every living creature, and to do so throughout all the world. But notice that what He established as the instrument for accomplishing this was not corporations, or factories, or masters of high finance. He placed marriage as the cornerstone of all godly dominion. Of course it is lawful for us to create other secondary instruments as we seek to exercise dominion, but it is not lawful for us to create them as substitutes for marriage.
God created mankind as a culture-making creature. We cannot function without it, and we are not displeasing God when we turn naturally to the task of cultural dominion. But the reason I am talking about this at a wedding is that He is displeased when we forget that marriage and family are central to His objectives. But we have to keep moving toward the real center. The primary thing here is not to say that the home should be a place filled to the brim with violin practice, woodworking, athletic training, and so forth, though of course all these sorts of things will be there. We have seen that marriage is at the center of culture making, but what is at the center of marriage?
The apostle Paul tells us that it is the love of the husband for the wife, imitating the love of Christ for the Church, and the respect of the wife for her husband, imitating the submission of the Church to the Lord. There it is—at the center of marriage is self-sacrificing love, and self-sacrificing respect.
But notice that these are not presented to us as stand-alone character traits. Paul is saying far more than “husbands, be nice,” or “wives, be sweet.” He is saying that husbands must imitate Christ’s love for the Church, and this cannot be done is the husband despises the Church. If the husband is thinking to himself, “I don’t know what He sees in her,” he is in no position to love his wife properly, as commanded. And if the wife has no interest or stake in seeing the Church submit to Christ properly, then she is in no position to imitate that respect in her own station. The husband and wife are not being called to imitate the relation of Christ and the Church, a relation which is somehow “over there.” They are doing this from within, they are doing it as members of Christ, as participants in the union between the last Adam and His bride, the last Eve. Another way of saying this is that at the center of every godly marriage, we find the Church.
David, you are assuming an important office today. That office, the office of husband, is one which has one fundamental responsibility assigned to it. You are about to vow that you will take up that one fundamental responsibility gladly and for the sake of the joy set before you. You are promising, in just a few moments, that you will be the one who takes the initiative in dying. You are the husband, and so you must die first. This is what Jesus did for us—we love Him for He loved us first. We die to sin because He died first. And so love here is not a saccharine business, but rather a bloody vocation. At the same time, it is not gloomy. It is not sad. It is not self-pitying. You are to die in imitation of the one who now has a torrent of pleasure at His right hand. You are to be a cavalier, a knight, a glad warrior. In all threats to your family, whether those threats are great or small, your first impulse, your first instinctive move, must be to step in between that threat and your bride, between that threat and your family.
Katie, as David does this, your calling is to follow him as he leads the way. As you submit to him, you are not submitting to the one who wants to be the bossy-boss, but rather submitting to one who clearly has shown, by his willingness to lay down his life for you, that he has led the way in submission. He submits to Christ by imitating Him. You submit to David by imitating Christ . . . and imitating David as well. In doing this, you will become David’s glory and crown, just as the Church has become the glory of Christ, filling out His glory and silencing all the principalities and powers.
The reason women are beautiful is because God wants them to present that beauty back to the world, and to do it in a way that humbles the world. The reason you are a beautiful bride is because God wants the world to know that the Church is beautiful, and the Church is the place where the gospel and our salvation reside. The world wants its women to be beautiful for reasons that are largely deranged. The Scriptures want Christian women to be beautiful because it makes a powerful declaration of the gospel, and the Word says that the feet of those who preach the gospel are beautiful.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.