Is Marriage Eternally Futile?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.000 | Podcast listener Sarah writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, I just got married to a

00:00:08.880 | wonderful guy and we just celebrated our first six months of marriage."

00:00:13.000 | Congratulations Sarah. "That being said, I'm confused by 1 Corinthians 7 verses

00:00:18.080 | 32 to 34. I understand Paul is making the point that you can live a more free life

00:00:23.680 | for the Lord if you're single. But he says this, 'But the married woman is

00:00:28.520 | anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.' That language makes

00:00:33.800 | it seem as though pleasing your husband or wife, serving them, loving them, laying

00:00:39.160 | your life down for them, is pointless or a lower calling than being a missionary

00:00:44.680 | like Paul. Pastor John, can you help me understand this text better?" I don't know

00:00:52.040 | if I can. I will try my hardest, and I totally resonate with how difficult that

00:01:02.240 | sounds. Let me read a few verses to just make sure everybody's seeing what Sarah

00:01:10.680 | saw and what I see. Paul sees in 1 Corinthians 7 a fragile world liable to

00:01:21.280 | come to an end soon, and he says in verse 31, "The present form of this world is

00:01:28.360 | passing away." That influences significantly how he thinks and talks

00:01:32.480 | here. So verse 29 goes like this, "From now on, let those who have wives live as

00:01:40.880 | though they had none. Let those who mourn as though they weren't mourning. Those

00:01:45.680 | who rejoice as though they weren't rejoicing. Those who buy as though they

00:01:49.620 | had no goods. Those who deal with the world as though they were not dealing

00:01:53.640 | with the world, for the present form of this world is passing away. So be married,

00:01:58.120 | mourn, rejoice, buy, deal with the world with a certain detachment because this

00:02:05.800 | is a fragile, short-lived world." Those are very striking, strange descriptions of

00:02:13.720 | how to live. Live in the world as though you're not in the world. Be married as

00:02:16.860 | though you're not married. Cry as though you're not crying. Be happy as though

00:02:20.240 | you're not being happy. That's really strange, and it's just telling us

00:02:25.280 | don't sink your roots too deep here in this world, whether it's happy or

00:02:29.760 | whether it's sad. That's the backdrop for her verses that she's drawing our

00:02:35.600 | attention to. So here comes some instructions then about marriage in this

00:02:40.640 | context, and Paul commends his singleness. He loves being single for ministry, and

00:02:48.600 | he talks about its distinct advantages, and they're of course not all advantages.

00:02:55.880 | Every single person knows that. So here's where the difficulties come that

00:03:00.120 | Sarah's asking about, and I'll read the verses. Verse 26, "I think that in view of

00:03:04.520 | the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is, married or

00:03:08.920 | single. Are you bound to a wife? Don't seek to be free. Are you free from a wife?

00:03:13.480 | Don't seek a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned." Now, pause,

00:03:21.120 | exclamation point three times. That's an amazing statement. He's going to commend

00:03:26.000 | singleness as what he prefers and what he wishes more people would do, and then

00:03:31.000 | he says, "But marrying is not a sin." Now that's a big statement to say, because if

00:03:35.960 | you're not sinning, you're pleasing God, and if you're pleasing God, that's

00:03:38.900 | glorious, because sin is to displease the Lord. There's no neutral place here, like

00:03:45.320 | halfway between pleasing the Lord and marriage or something. There's

00:03:51.560 | no neutral place. If you're not sinning, you are pleasing God. So he's saying to

00:04:00.160 | marry is not sin. And then he adds, "Yet those who marry will have worldly

00:04:07.560 | troubles, literally tribulation in the flesh, and I would spare you that." So it's

00:04:13.840 | strange for Paul to say as a single man, because his life was so full of

00:04:19.960 | tribulation. Like he's saying, if you get married, you're gonna have trouble. That's

00:04:23.160 | all he knew was trouble. So he has some special ideas in mind here. We need

00:04:29.120 | to try to get to the bottom of it. He clearly does not mean singleness is free

00:04:34.520 | from tribulation. He was in prison every other week, and shipwrecked, and

00:04:39.480 | dangerous here and there. I mean, his life was just tremendously burdened, and he

00:04:44.020 | knew what it was to burn in the flesh. So he's talking about something peculiar

00:04:49.160 | about marriage here, which has got Sarah worked up, and me too. He says, "I want you

00:04:55.080 | to be free from anxieties." And clearly he means a certain kind of anxiety, because

00:05:01.840 | the very next thing he says is, "The unmarried man is anxious for the things

00:05:06.280 | of the Lord." Well, you just said you don't want us to be free. You want us to be

00:05:10.320 | free from anxiety, and now you say—and it's the very same word in Greek. So I

00:05:13.760 | want him to be anxious for the things of the Lord. So he means a particular kind

00:05:17.880 | of anxiety. He's trying to spare us. Now, here's the key phrases, the key

00:05:23.120 | words that Sarah brought up. "The unmarried man is anxious about the

00:05:27.140 | things of the Lord." How to please the Lord. "But the married man is anxious

00:05:32.240 | about the things of the world." How to please his wife. And he's divided. "And

00:05:37.760 | the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord." And

00:05:43.640 | how to be holy and embody and spirit. "But the married woman is anxious about

00:05:50.400 | things of the world." How to please her husband. And so Sarah said this made her

00:05:56.120 | her efforts to please her husband sound pointless or lower in a calling than a

00:06:02.280 | missionary like Paul, and I admit it does sound like that. But I would say it

00:06:08.040 | sounds so bad that we know it can't be what Paul means in the way she's taking

00:06:16.500 | it. So let me try to illustrate. Two times Paul contrasts things of the Lord with

00:06:23.360 | the things of the world. If you're not married, you focus on the things of the

00:06:28.760 | Lord. If you are married, you have to think about the things of the world. And

00:06:33.760 | so he says for the married person in verse 34 that he or she is divided. Now

00:06:39.080 | that's a really puzzling contrast. Things of the Lord, in the single life, things of

00:06:45.840 | the world in the married life. That's the first one. I'm gonna come back and try to

00:06:50.200 | show that those are so bizarre that they can't mean what on the face of them

00:06:54.840 | they seem to mean. Here's the second one. The unmarried man aims to please the

00:07:00.920 | Lord, the married man aims to please his wife. Third strange thing. Even more

00:07:11.320 | puzzling. I mean this is really jarring. The unmarried woman aims to be holy in

00:07:17.640 | body and spirit, but the married woman aims to please her husband. You say, "What?"

00:07:24.000 | You know, just, "What?" How can you contrast those two? Now I would say that those

00:07:31.400 | three contrasts on the face of it are so contrary to what Paul teaches elsewhere

00:07:37.680 | even in this letter, that we know they don't mean what they seem to mean at

00:07:42.120 | first. For example, I'm thinking 1st Corinthians 10 31 where he says, "Whether

00:07:45.120 | you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." So you're

00:07:49.600 | married, you're having sex, or changing the oil, or fixing the faucet, or whatever

00:07:55.480 | you're doing, do it to the glory of God and you'll be holy. So we know he can't

00:08:01.040 | mean that marriage is all this worldly, second-class stuff, and the real

00:08:07.720 | holiness and real pleasing the Lord is found outside marriage. Does he

00:08:12.640 | really mean in a marriage that we only deal with the things of the world and

00:08:18.000 | the things of the Lord are for single people? And of course the answer is, "No way

00:08:23.640 | does Paul think that. His teachings are full of implications about how the

00:08:30.440 | children and husbands and wives treat each other as concerns of the Lord.

00:08:36.720 | Does he really want us to think that the effort to please the Lord is only

00:08:43.160 | possible in singleness, and in marriage all the dynamics are different? We don't

00:08:49.560 | please the Lord there, we please each other there. He can't mean that because

00:08:53.360 | he said it's not a sin to marry, and it would be a sin to marry if we didn't try

00:09:01.360 | to please the Lord while we were married. That's what sin means, is not pleasing

00:09:07.000 | the Lord. So I'm leaving behind the sphere where I please the Lord when I

00:09:15.280 | get married and now I'm just gonna please my wife. He cannot mean that. And

00:09:20.080 | when he says a woman tries to be holy in body and spirit as a single woman but

00:09:26.080 | please her husband, as opposed to be holy, he can't mean that either, that she stops

00:09:32.360 | being holy when she gets married. So what does he mean? Like, here we are now, okay

00:09:38.600 | Sarah, you're asking the right question, I'm with you. What does he mean? Here's

00:09:44.000 | my effort. By things of the Lord he means the ministry outside of the family of

00:09:51.960 | spreading the gospel in risky evangelism, caring for the destitute, comforting the

00:09:57.980 | hurting saints, exhorting the wayward, and many other ministry-oriented things. He

00:10:05.120 | has in mind a focused, more formal, official ministry effort of evangelism

00:10:12.720 | and nurture. He does not mean, when he says things of the Lord, he does not mean

00:10:18.200 | fixing the leaky faucet at home to the glory of God. He's not including that. Or

00:10:23.640 | mending the dresser where the dog chewed off the edge of it, or getting home for

00:10:29.460 | dinner when you promised. These are all things that he would know can be done to

00:10:35.360 | the glory of God, but he's not including them in the things of the Lord. Those are

00:10:40.040 | the things of the world in his vocabulary. Not evil, not evil, just not

00:10:44.840 | what he means by things of the Lord. When he contrasts pleasing the spouse with

00:10:50.640 | pleasing the Lord, I think he means there is a life of simpler pursuit of how to

00:10:58.720 | minister to the lost and the hurting that does not have to be complicated

00:11:04.600 | with the demands of family. Of course, you can please the Lord by playing with

00:11:10.240 | your children, or fixing that faucet, or mending that dresser, but Paul is saying

00:11:15.520 | simply, the unmarried can be more focused on all the demands of ministry without

00:11:22.760 | the complicating demands of family. And that's true, I felt it so much during my

00:11:29.160 | pastoral days. What if I am in a heavy counseling session, and I promised to be

00:11:35.840 | home for supper at 530? This happened regularly. What if I am--and now what?

00:11:41.760 | I've got to--I want to please my wife, and I'm in the midst of this thing of

00:11:46.520 | the Lord. What do I do? What if I'm playing with my kids at night, and an

00:11:52.960 | emergency phone call comes, and somebody's terribly desperate, either

00:11:56.680 | suicidal, or somebody's been rushed to the hospital? I've got a conflict there

00:12:01.000 | that I wouldn't have if I didn't have to be concerned with my kids that night.

00:12:05.760 | What if a late-night crisis has made me so exhausted, I don't have any energy for

00:12:10.960 | the job I promised to do the next morning, and Paul would like us to be

00:12:16.600 | spared the complexity, the dividedness, if we are single and we can just flat-out

00:12:23.960 | serve all those ministerial things? He's contrasting things of the Lord with a

00:12:29.200 | ministry life with what happens if it's complicated by the demands of the family.

00:12:36.120 | And when he says that a woman aims at holiness in body and mind as single, but

00:12:42.200 | tries to please the husband when married, I think he means she loses the

00:12:48.680 | simplicity of devoting more time to the Word and prayer, and must fit those

00:12:56.320 | things in to a much more demanding life. In other words, there can be a more

00:13:04.120 | focused sense of pursuing the strategies, the disciplines of holiness, and I've

00:13:12.560 | talked with many married women, "How do you find time with all these kids to

00:13:17.460 | read the Word and to pray?" And she just aches for more spiritual time alone with

00:13:24.420 | God. But here's where we end up. Paul is recruiting radical devotion to the Lord

00:13:30.720 | that is uncomplicated by the practical demands of marriage. This is no

00:13:35.160 | getting around it. Paul wants a lot of people to be single because of the

00:13:41.200 | nature of the demands of ministry and the press of the time. And when he

00:13:46.560 | steps back and hears a question like Sarah's, "Hey, what about those of us who

00:13:52.320 | believe God is calling us to marriage?" And in marriage, Paul has a glorious

00:13:58.320 | answer, glorious truths to tell about the meaning and the ministry of marriage. But

00:14:04.200 | that's not here in 1 Corinthians 7, except you don't sin. You got to go to

00:14:09.440 | Ephesians 5 for that, and when you go there, it is glorious. Amen, it is

00:14:16.540 | glorious. Thank you, Pastor John, for that comprehensive response, and thank you,

00:14:20.360 | Sarah, for the exceptional question. We need your exceptional questions, and you

00:14:24.480 | can send them to us via email at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Well,

00:14:30.000 | there is a fear that haunts humanity, and it's the fear of death. This fear is

00:14:35.360 | universally enslaving, and it's also a fear that Jesus Christ came to conquer

00:14:40.200 | and defeat on behalf of sinners like you and me. Tomorrow, Pastor John will explain

00:14:45.040 | how. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you tomorrow.

00:14:49.480 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Is Marriage Eternally Futile?

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