Joshua and Julia

Everyone who has ever wanted to grapple with the reality of the human condition has needed to deal with two profound realities. The first is the nature of the Divine personality, what the triune God revealed in Scripture is actually like. The second is the reality and depth of the human apostasy and fall, with all the implications that follow from that.

God is infinitely holy, and eternally merciful. The divine attributes are what they are, and are in no way negotiable. God is what He is, and this is what lies behind His great revelation of Himself to Moses when He gave out His name as I Am That I Am. The character of God is constant, without variation or shadow due to change.

Man’s nature is mutable, changeable, but one thing about it does not change. It is always fallen. We are always dealing with the disappointing reality of our own selfish choices. We do bad things because we are bad people. Something is wrong, and we would like to be located in our circumstances, but it always turns out to be located right at the center. The problem is located in every human heart.

Now if you are wondering why such cheerful topics are being addressed at a wedding, I hope to make that clear in just a few moments.

When we consider these two truths together, one thing that becomes manifest is this. If we are to be saved, then God will have to be the one doing the saving. If we are to be put right with God, it will have to be God who puts us right with Him.

In the New Testament, the message about how He has accomplished this wonderful thing—for He has accomplished it—is called the gospel. The word for gospel in the Greek literally means good message or good news. But how can this be? What I just shared a moment ago about man’s rebellious and fallen condition doesn’t sound like good news at all. That is right—it is bad news. But it is bad news that provides the context for a particular kind of good news.

There are two different kinds of “good news.” The first doesn’t really require much context. If you were surprised by a massive inheritance, this would simply be good news. If you found out that you had been awarded a huge promotion at work, this would be good news. But if you heard that a cure had been developed for a particular kind of cancer, you would not hear it as good news personally unless you had previously taken in the bad news that you had that particular kind of cancer.

Now one of the central images that God uses in Scripture to talk about this gospel is the picture of a wedding. The Bible begins with the story of a wedding in Genesis, and the Bible ends the book of Revelation with a glorious description of a wedding. The apostle Paul tells Christian husbands to embody Christ’s gospel love for His church by loving their wives in the same way. He also tells wives to exhibit a response of gospel loveliness to that love.

God created the human race to be in fellowship with Him forever. That is the first kind of good news we were given. As sheer gift, God created us and here we were. Imagine Adam looking around five minutes after God breathed into him. The mere fact of existence is good news that requires no antecedent context. We were created in God’s image, which meant that God always had marriage in mind. Apart from sin, we don’t know how we would have been taken up into the divine life, but it appears clear that we would have been.

This creational gift, unfortunately, we threw away. We were engaged to the Son of God by sheer creational grace. But we were unfaithful to Him. We cheated on Him. We were banished from the garden, and fell into a disgraceful state. That is the bad news.

But here comes the second kind of good news. Right after the fall, God gave us His first promise that He would send a Messiah who would put everything right again. His Messiah would bring us back to Him. The seed of the woman would crush the head of the seed of the serpent. He told us that in Christ, we could come back to Him. Forgiven—because Christ died for us—our engagement with Him is not off. This is nothing but grace, nothing but goodness, nothing but everlasting kindness. And everyone who hears the sound of these words is invited into that kindness.

Joshua, as I mentioned earlier, the apostle Paul tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. In the same passage he tells them to love their wives as they take care of their own bodies. Now men tend to define love as not giving trouble to others, but in this instance, men are told to take trouble for their wives. Not only so, but you are to take this trouble to what you might think are ridiculous lengths. You don’t really have to worry about over-shooting the goal. If you are told to love your wife as Christ loved the church, surpassing Him is not likely to be the problem. You are to be solicitous, careful, attentive, tender, and underneath all of it, sacrificial. By living this way in your home—and you will have opportunities to live this way every day—you will be preaching the gospel. This is your charge today. You are a Christian husband, which means that you are summoned to be a living reminder to everyone who knows you that Christ died for His people.

Julia, in the passage I just referred to, it says that Christ loved the church and this is why He died. Elsewhere it says that Jesus died because of the joy that was set before Him. Putting these together, we see that the church was the joy set before Him. The church was to be His promised inheritance. And we are told this explicitly at the end of Ephesians 1 when it refers to “riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints” (Eph. 1:18). Now your charge is this. Josh has been given the charge to imitate the Lord Jesus in His sacrificial love. You are given the charge to imitate the joy that is set before him. He must lay down his life, that is true, but you are given the solemn responsibility of making it all worthwhile.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.