The Lord Jesus is the great bridegroom, the model for all bridegrooms. But He has become a bridegroom in a broken and fallen world, and this has implications for His marriage to the Church, and for our marriages as we imitate Him.
When Adam and Eve fell into sin and rebellion, this not only introduced sin into the world, it also introduced sin into their marriage. Where once Eve was “bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh,” she became the “the woman you gave me.” When we fell out of a right relationship to God, everything else was dislocated. But in the third chapter of the Bible, right after the Fall, God promised us the seed of the woman, one who would come to crush the serpent. The promised one would come to crush the head of the one who had destroyed the harmony of the first marriage. And we can see in the New Testament that God determined to restore everything by means of another marriage, the marriage between Christ and His Church.
In the first marriage, the woman was brought to the man. In this last marriage, the bridegroom was brought to the woman. In the first marriage, the woman was brought to the man who had been broken for her creation. In the last marriage, the woman—the human race—had already been broken by sin, and the bridegroom came to be joined to her brokenness, and did all this for her re-creation. In the first marriage, the woman was brought in a peaceful garden. In the second marriage, the bridegroom came when the woman had been slain and the dragon was standing over her.
In short, this means that the bridegroom came as a deliverer, a warrior, a dragon-slayer. What the first husband failed to do—protect his bride from the dragon—all Christian husbands who would model themselves after Jesus must set themselves to do, and do continually. And this means that all of us must learn to see marriage as deliverance. There are many aspects to this deliverance, but central to all of them is the understanding that the world around us contains enemies, and we must face them faithfully.
Now God has brought Jody and Nancy together as a great manifestation of His power in deliverance. As was quoted on the invitation to this wedding that you received, “The Lord has done this and it is marvelous in our eyes” (Ps. 118:23). But there are many declarations in this psalm that are just as relevant to this joyful occasion.
We give thanks to God because He is good (v. 1). We all say—Israel, the house of Aaron, and all who fear the Lord—that His mercy is forever (vv. 2-4). We have been brought from a place of distress to a large place (v. 5). What can man do to us?—the Lord is with us (v. 6). The Lord takes up the cause of the distressed (v. 7). We trust in God, not in man (vv. 8-9).
We are Christians and this is a Christian wedding. The Lord is our strength and song, and in all the songs in this ceremony we see clear evidence that the Lord is our salvation (v. 14). As we consider this marriage as it forms, and all the other married couples assembled here, we invite the Lord to open the gates of righteousness for us, and we will go into them (v. 19). In that spirit, with that disposition, we may always say that this is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it (v. 24). We give thanks to the Lord in the full and complete confidence that He is good (v. 29), and at the close of this ceremony, we will call down His blessing, which He will freely give. A moment ago, we heard it sung that unless God builds the house, those who labor to build it by themselves labor in vain. And so here is the point: “Save now, I beseech thee, O LORD: O LORD, I beseech thee, send now prosperity” (v. 25). By our presence here, we are beseeching the Lord, asking Him to pour out His prosperity upon the Jacobs household.
With all this in mind, we now come to a brief charge to the bride and groom. Jody, you first. You have a single-minded strength and focus that I have noted and admired for some time. You have a servant’s heart and disposition. You want to help, and you want to give yourself away in helping. As I have seen you, a single man, giving yourself away in the context of our church community, I have seen a lot to respect. And I do honor it, to the point of wanting to mention it here. But at the same time, you need to recognize that all that was simply training. You trained well, but that was training. This is the big game. Those who are faithful with little will be faithful over much. David was faithful in tending the flocks, and he was a faithful king. The two are directly related, but the two are not the same. This is where you will have the opportunity to surrender your life completely. This is the time when your sacrifices will begin to bear the kind of fruit that you could not have imagined before.
My charge is this: expect that fruit. Anticipate it. Make preparations to accommodate it. Pray for it. Lean into it. Long for it. But most of all, grapple with the price you will have to pay for it. That price is that you must die. Every husband who understands fruitfulness understands it to be the fruitfulness of resurrection, and resurrections require death as a prerequisite. You cannot by-pass death and go straight to resurrection. But neither is it possible—because God is good and His mercies are forever—to die as an obedient husband without a glorious resurrection. Had Adam fought the serpent, as was required of him, we do not know what would have happened. But we do know that the death of self that choosing to fight would have involved would have led to a glorious resurrection of some sort. And that refusal to fight, perhaps for fear of that kind of death, led to thousands of years of death and dying. God’s way is best—into the breach. You came here to lay down your life in this chapel, and to walk away with someone else’s life in your hands. You see? Dying bears fruit immediately.
Nancy, everyone who knows you knows that you are outgoing and gregarious, and you attract friends like no one I have ever quite seen. You are easy to talk to, approachable, and quite verbal. And everyone who knows Jody knows that he is not like this. When we think of Jody, the word chatty does not come to mind. Neither does garrulous. You might be driving along with Jody sometime and notice that he hasn’t said anything for a half an hour. You mention it, wondering if something was wrong somehow. “No,” he might say. “I was waiting until I had something to say.” Now this is a pattern we can see between men and women generally, but in the two of you it is accented. Now you are not called to go through a personality change any more than he is. But you are charged to use your great gifts in this area in a way that complements and compliments your husband.
The Bible says that wives are to honor and respect their husbands, submitting to them. You are called to this, as are all Christian wives, but you are called to understand what it means first. Do not be like those shallow interpreters of Paul, both conservative and liberal, who believe that it means wives are to be browbeaten and cowed. The conservatives who misunderstand it this way seek to apply it and come up with an idea of marriage that is more Muslim than Christian. The liberals misunderstand it the same way, but since they reject the Muslim take on marriage, they falsely assume the only alternative is some kind of egalitarianism.
Here is my charge to you. Do not seek to serve and respect Jody by trying to become somebody else. If he had wanted to marry somebody else, he would have asked her. But he didn’t. He is here today with you. So the issue is not whether you will have your particular gifts or not, for you cannot undo what God determined to give you before the foundation of the world. The only issue is whether you will use them for Jody’s aid and comfort, as a gift of respect and honor, or if you will keep them to yourself. Your gifts are a spotlight, and charge you here to point them at your new husband.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.