Worthy Woman, Worthy Man: God’s Design for Marriage

Introduction

Let’s open our Bibles this morning to the wisdom that’s contained in the book of Proverbs at the very end of chapter 31, where we read about part of the topic that we’ve been engaged in during this weekend. It’s a pleasure to have been with you. I want to express on behalf of Betty and myself the opportunity to be with you to talk about something that we think is very important and that needs to be discussed with regard to our marriage relationship, particularly as it relates to the model that the Lord gave us regarding Jesus Christ and his church. And we’ve been pursuing that topic during the weekend. We appreciate very much the kind uh attention that you’ve paid to these various lessons. I want to talk this morning about the idea of worthy men and worthy women, particularly as it regards God’s design for marriage.

That’s the topic of the workbook that we’ve passed out. There are still copies, I think, available for those who might not have gotten one. We found them together instead of just handing them out piecemeal so that they might be a continuing resource for individuals who are married or contemplating marriage or working with children or grandchildren who are contemplating marriage, and we hope that they’ll be useful and valuable for you.

1. The Worthy Woman Does Her Husband Good

But I want us to start here in Proverbs 31, where we read about something that we call an individual who’s stylized here, modeled really as a worthy woman. And so if you’ll read with me, really beginning at verse 10 an excellent wife, who can find. For her worth is far above jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. She looks for wool and flax and works with her hands in delight. She is like merchant ships, bringing her food from afar. She rises while it is still night and gives food to her household and portions to her maidens. She considers a field and buys it.

From her earnings she plants a vineyard and girds herself with strength, making her arms strong. She senses that her gain is good. Her lamp does not go out at night. She stretches out her hands to the distaff and her hands grasp the spindle. She extends her hand to the poor and stretches out her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are clothed with scarlet. She makes coverings for herself, and her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them and supplies belts to the tradesmen. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she smiles at the future.

She opens her mouth in wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and bless her. And her husband also praises her, saying, Many daughters have done nobly, but you excel them all. Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain. But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. Give her the product of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates. I hope that husbands feel that very same way about the wife that you have chosen. As we’ve discussed this weekend, sometimes it’s easy to fall into a pattern where we’re too critical of shortcomings, or where sometimes conflicts arise, and we don’t really know quite productively how to deal with them in ways that we’ve tried to give and some give some practical uh advice and tools in order to be able to deal with those kinds of situations.

But this woman is described here in a lot of different ways. She does her husband good, is one of the main ideas that I want to stress. His heart safely trusts in her.

I don’t mean that this necessarily, I don’t think this means that she went and hired a maid cleaning service, but this woman has individuals who work with her. She’s engaged in commerce.

I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a real estate agent, but she engages in buying and selling. She’s not limited just to what happens in the house, although I want you to notice that is the central focus of what she’s about. She’s focused on her family, on her husband, on her children, on what does good for them, even when she’s out in the marketplace, even when she’s buying and selling, even when she’s engaging her maidens and so forth, her gain is good. This is a dynamic, outgoing, active, contributing woman, not only to the social atmosphere in which she buys and sells and engages and gets and gets gain and so forth, but for her family. She has talents as a seamstress, as a merchant, as a teacher, as a counselor, and all of these things come together.

2. The Worthy Man: A Covenant With My Eyes

Whatever she does, she does with the intention of doing good for her husband and for her family, and because of that, her children rise up and call her blessed. That’s a rock, that’s a keystone around which a marriage can be built. And husbands, if you have a wife like that, you need to praise her and support her and give her whatever it is that she needs to be able to continue to do good for you and for your family. But I want to suggest that there’s another stylized or model kind of an idea about, in this case, a worthy man that’s also found in chapter 31. In this case of the book of Job. You’re probably aware that Job, because of God’s leniency with Satan, his allowing Satan to put Job as it were under a microscope, and to test him in ways that most of us will not ever be tested, to lose his family, to lose all that he had worked his life in order to gain, to lose everything that made him who he was, a man of substance and standing and status in his community, and now it’s all gone.

And even his wife looking at him sitting out on the ash heap, scraping himself in his boils with a broken pottery shard, wishing to die. And in fact, that’s what she says: curse God and die, as she observes this bleeding, oozing hulk of what used to be her husband and the father of her children. And Job is visited, of course, with his three friends, who come and at least do something right. They sit for a week and say nothing. If you’ve ever been with someone in deep grief, you probably wondered, what do you say in a time like that? And sometimes nothing is the best thing, maybe the only thing that you can say. If you look at the book of Job, of course, what happens is we get into these cycles of speeches that start with this idea that Job must have done something wrong, excuse me, and then proceed to the idea that he must have really done something wrong.

And what Job is responding to, his friends, by the time we get to chapter 31, that I want to look at is tell me what I did that deserves this. The whole book is a challenge to the idea that bad things happen only when people do bad things. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, as the saying goes. And there is a broader spiritual purpose, a deeper spiritual purpose in what Job is undergoing and what God is allowing Satan to do to test him. But we come to chapter 31, and Job is basically in his friend’s face. In fact, in some ways, he’s also talking to God and saying, What could I have done that deserves taking away my family and all my possessions and everything that I have?

And he begins this soliloquy, this kind of one-way conversation, in which he describes what I call the worthy man. Now, it looks suspiciously like Job. Job is saying, and I don’t think he’s saying here, well, I’m a perfect man, but he is asking, you know, what how could I possibly be so bad to deserve this kind of punishment, this extent of punishment? And so he begins by saying a number of things. He says, first of all, I have made a covenant with my eyes. How then could I gaze upon a virgin? I have been faithful to my wife, in other words. One of the technological devices that we referred to briefly in the last hour when we were talking about the challenge of pornography that plagues far too many men in our culture, including Christian men, is actually a program called Covenant Eyes, taken from this text, which is a program that installs on the computer and allows if you go try to go to a pornographic site, it registers that.

In fact, you can set it where your computer will drop dead. And it also then generates a report. Well, that’s where this idea came from. I have made a covenant, an agreement with my eyes. I am not going to be looking at other women.

And if you’ll notice a little bit later in verse 3, he describes what happens in that kind of an environment. Is it not calamity to the unjust, to someone who does not have a right to be looking at some other person in a sexual way or in a suggestive way? And disaster to those who work iniquity. Someone who starts down that path and who begins to allow the hint of whatever it may be that’s enticing you to have a relationship with someone who’s not your wife, it’s a road to disaster, is what Job is saying. But I’ve made a covenant with my eyes that I will not engage in that. Now, not only that, he says in verse 5, if I’ve walked with falsehood, if my foot has hastened after a deceit, let him weigh me with accurate scales.

I have not lied, I have not been false, I’ve not been deceitful, I’ve not engaged in any of these behaviors that we describe as infidelity or disloyalty. He also says in verse 9, I’ve not engaged in iniquity. If my heart has been enticed by a woman, or if I’ve lurked at my neighbor’s doorway, if I’ve not only begun to violate the covenant with my eyes, but actually to pursue that, that’s not the kind of person who I have been. I have tried to pursue justice. If I’ve despised the claim of my male or female slaves when they have filed a complaint against me, I’ve tried to treat my servants, my slaves as a slave culture, but I’ve tried to treat them fairly.

If I’ve eaten my morsel alone, not shared it, if the orphan has not shared it with me. If I had done that, if I’d done all these things, I might have deserved the kind of punishment that’s been brought upon me. But he’s describing a kind of a model of what we might call a worthy man who’s not materialistic despite all of the things that Job had and all the possessions that he had attained. If I’ve put my confidence in gold or called fine gold my trust, if I have gloated because my wealth was great, because my hand had secured so much, that might be a reason for me to have suffered this kind of downfall. But Job was saying, I’ve not done that. Now I’m not perfect, but I haven’t done these kind of things that would bring calamity and disaster upon one if we start down that road.

I’m not been a vindictive person. I’ve not rejoiced at the extinction of my enemy. No Schadenfreude here for me, no rejoicing in something bad that falls upon my enemy. Have I exulted when evil befell him? No. I have not allowed my mouth to sin by asking his life as a curse. Let me suggest to you that what we have in Job 31 is in some ways the male counterpart, if you will, even though Job has different purposes in describing that, uh, to the counterpart to what we read in Proverbs 31, with this uh stylized woman who is the model for a woman whose children will rise up and call her blessed. Now, there’s some New Testament text that describe also the kind of man or the kind of person that we ought to be as men, and I’m going to pick two of these because of time constraints.

3. Christ Is the Model of a Worthy Man

But if you look at Philippians chapter 2, for example, where we are suggested that we should have the kind of lowliness of mind and the absence of strife and vain glory that in fact would characterize our Lord Jesus Christ. This is an early hymn that we read in Philippians chapter 2, or fragments of a hymn, evidently, and it describes what Jesus did, how he was not willing to glorify himself, did not count his equality with God as something to be selfishly grasped and held on to at any cost, but rather emptied himself. Let me suggest that Christ Himself is the model, not just a human like Job, but he is the model for what a perfect man, what a worthy man is. And then I would suggest another important text that kind of ties this together.

First Peter chapter 3 and verse 7 says that part of the task, in fact, one of the main tasks of husbands of men is to dwell with your wife according to knowledge. Some translations have it. I like the way the New American Standard renders it in an understanding way. And we’ve tried to emphasize, gentlemen, that what we have to do, our task as leaders, our task as worthy men is to become students of our wives, not just women generally, but of our wives in particular. What do they need? What are their desires? What can I do to help her be the kind of worthy woman that she deserves to be, that she wants to be, that God wants her to be. But I want us to turn our attention the last few minutes of this lesson to something else.

4. Have You Not Read? What God Has Joined Together

Let’s come to the New Testament text where our Lord is describing what a relationship should look like and what should not happen in a relationship. Some Pharisees came to Jesus, and as they often did, they were testing him. They’re not looking for valuable information. They’re not trying to learn from the Lord of heaven and earth. They want to try to trick him, to trap him in some technicality. And so they said, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? Is any cause divorce? Is that legitimate? And Jesus comes back with this customary answer, have you not read? Haven’t you read your don’t you people know what the Bible, your own scripture says? And what it says, as we’ve emphasized during this weekend, is if you look at Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, both of these texts that Jesus in effect marries together, it’s on the front page of the workbook that we’ve handed out.

In the beginning he made the male and female. That’s what the image of God is. It took male and female to completely express in human terms what the image of God is. And he also said, For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh, so they are no longer two but one flesh. And what therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. Well, they didn’t like that answer. And so they come up with another response. Well, then, why did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away? And Jesus said, Because of the hardness of your heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been this way.

5. The Good News: Most Marriages Make It

And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, fornication, some versions have it, and marries another, commits adultery. Now, our culture is seemingly a wash in divorce. Part of what I want to focus on in the remaining time is the idea of hope that it’s not nearly as bad as it is portrayed in the media. But it’s bad. When we read these texts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 that the Lord quotes here, we sometimes understand that this culture has been overtaken in people who are disobedient to this divine design for marriage. They enter into a relationship, they promise to love and cherish and honor and obey and whatever the vows say, and then before long problems arise that we’ve been discussing during this weekend, and sometimes they head for the divorce court.

In fact, what we might call the bad news about marriage, this is just one sample from psychology today from an article, past statistics statistics have shown that in the U.S., 50%, half of first marriages, 67% of second marriages, and 73% of third marriages end in divorce. Now, it is true that the likelihood of divorce gets progressively greater the more individuals marry and divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry. But particularly this first statistic is simply not true.

It’s reported in the public media sometimes at 40 to 50 percent, based on projections from minor surveys or things that are not statistically significant and based on assumptions about what might happen in the future or would happen under certain kinds of conditions. And so people begin to absorb this bad news about marriage, and it becomes almost a self fulfilling prophecy. We probably won’t make it. We may be in the 50% that divorces are later, but at least we misery loves company. We’ve got a lot of company, and sometimes the thought occurs to some people, especially young people, maybe we should just avoid marriage altogether. Maybe thinking, why bother? And a part of what plays into the lower statistics that I want to talk a little bit about, I don’t want to bore you, but I want to put the lie to this idea that marriages are so deeply in trouble that it’s just an impossible standard, and that you somehow can’t have a good marriage.

I’m here to say that it is possible to do what God designed in marriage. If we will follow his instructions, if we will put the requisite amount of labor and love into the relationship, it’s possible to do that. The hardest data that we have with regard to what’s actually happening in marriage is census data. Not surveys, not polling data, not anything like that, but where the government at your expense, and actually it’s a constitutional, it’s written into the Constitution, go out and count the number of citizens and ask questions about if you’ve ever been through a survey, you’ve seen the form and so forth. And the hardest number that we have on divorce rates is that 72% of people who have ever been married are still married to their first spouse.

Now that’s not good if 28% of marriages end in divorce, and that’s not really what that statistic says, but it’s better than 50%. It’s it’s far better than that. So the good news about marriage is most marriages make it. And my message this morning is we can too. You can too. It’s not a hopeless kind of cause. And especially for those with strong religious conviction, the divorce rate is far lower than that. I mean, if you just, from your own personal standpoint, just look around the congregation. Is there a 50% divorce rate here? Or half of you divorced? Nothing close to it. And I suspect even in the broader culture in your society, in your neighborhood, among your school companions or where you work or so forth, is the divorce rate near 50%?

Well, let’s unpack this a little bit and hopefully get out the door with some some good messages. Most marriages, even in the survey data, in addition to the numbers, are reportedly not just so. The divorce rate is significantly lower for committed part of the population that attends worship service of some kind regularly. Most marriage problems are not caused by infidelity and what we might call big ticket items. Being in a marriage or fixing a troubled marriage does not have to be as complicated as some people think. Now, I don’t want to say that things are hunky-dory when they’re not, this is still not good. A divorce rate, even in the 20% range, is troubling. But it’s far better than a 50% rate. If you look actually at the stronger data that’s actually gathered by those who professionally have spent their career studying this, for example, the Census Bureau from various uh kinds of survey data that they’ve done, the University of Chicago’s uh univers, their social work department, which has a long and studied history of dealing with relationships.

Uh the University of Texas at Austin also has, uh but they come in at the same numbers, just about somewhere in the 20% range rather than 50%. You may not be able to read that well, so I tried to blow it up just a little bit. Of survey groups like the Barna group, for example, uh, come in at significantly less than 50%. And the hardest data, again, is this question, partly it depends on how the question is asked. But if you’re looking at people who have ever been married and ask how many of those people are still married to their first spouse, the hardest data we have is that 72%. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that 28% are divorced? No. What it means is, particularly with regard to women, that some of them are widowed.

10% of women are widows, if you look at the census data. And so if you do a balcony, in other words, they’re not married to their first, but it doesn’t mean they were divorced. It means their husbands have died. So if you do a kind of a back of the envelope calculation, about 25% of marriages, not 50%, end in divorce. And if you look at family needs survey, for example, of no longer intact marriages, 8% ended in death. And so the result is that no longer intact marriages could be closer to 20% than 25%. Now, these numbers are sometimes hard to calculate and work with. As someone said, nothing’s ever simple in divorce land. And if you’ve ever been there, had a family member, and most congregations, well, not at 50%, certainly have been touched with divorce and remarriage issues.

There’s been a declining divorce rate, of course, over the last several decades, partly because some people are increasingly not entering into marriage, but they live together without benefit of clergy, as the phrase used to be. But the percentage of first marriages that are intact, not ended through death or divorce, is strikingly lower than we’ve been led to believe. Now, the other part of the statistics that are revealing when you look at the survey data is that weekly church attendance alone significantly lowers the divorce rate, roughly by 25 to 50 percent, depending on the study. Again, nothing’s ever simple here, but again, the numbers are if you look at the U.S. population in general and ask who’s ever been divorced, you get a number around 33 percent.

If you look at the divorce rate among people who claim to be Christians of any variety now, but have attended church in the last seven days, the rate drops to 27 percent. Everyone else, including non-Christians who have not attended church on a weekly basis, the number is higher. And among evangelical, that is people who claim to be Bible-believing Christians, the result comes in at around something like 25 percent. And if you look at the survey data that’s been done when questions are asked about being happily married, would you marry the same person if you had to do it over again? 93 percent in several of these surveys say yes, only 7% no. Since you married, married your current spouse, have you ever considered seriously filing for divorce?

87% respond no.

Comes in at 97%. And so, what I’m trying to say as we bring this series to a conclusion, we spend a lot of time talking about problems and about traumas in marriage and about situations that arise, everything well, we just read the book. I don’t want to leave us on that kind of a negative note. I want us to understand that most marriages are reportedly good. The people who are in them say, Yes, I’m happily married. I’m glad that I entered the relationship. Despite whatever problems may arise, it’s a workable kind of relationship. And the reason is that’s the way God designed it. There is hope for marriages. The divorce rate is significantly lower than we’re told in the public press and the mainstream media, if you will.

6. Count on the Other When the Going Gets Tough

And it’s even lower than what’s reported there if you’re talking about the population that’s consistently church going, that at least looks to the Bible for some kind of guidance. Most marriages are doing well, and being in a marriage does not need to be as complicated as some people think. Let me do one last thing before we extend an invitation. There’s an interesting study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. We’ve tried to emphasize this week in trying to be biblical, first of all, but to be practical and personal, we brought in some different kinds of studies that have been done that help us understand some of the dynamics of marriage. This is a long-term intergenerational study that’s been done since 1938. It’s coming up not too far from being a century old.

And it studies people’s attitudes toward marriage over a long period of time. A sample of 700 different couples over the time. People in the strongest relationships who report being in strong marriages even have physical symptoms. They report uh protection against chronic disease, lower rates of different kinds of physical maladies, lower rates of mental illness, lower rates of memory decline because of the benefits of being in a committed relationship with a person that you’re married to. Even if these relationships had up and downs, ups and downs, and all relationships do, these good relationships don’t have to be smooth all the time, says the current director of the study. In fact, he notes that some of our octogenarian couples could bicker day in and day out. And that’s certainly true for many of us.

As I said Friday evening, we sometimes tell people we don’t need you to model how to be angry, how to argue with each other. We’re pretty good at that ourselves. We know what that feels like, what that looks like. But as long as they felt, despite this kind of low-level tension or occasional arguing or maybe even constant bickering, as long as they felt they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn’t take a toll on their memories or on their analysis of their marriage relationship. And that’s a powerful message. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the studies that show that, yes, arguing is not necessarily it’s not a good thing, but as long as there’s not contempt in the argument, where somebody is treating the other person, their husband or wife, as though they are not worthy of my attention, their ideas are not worthy of being considered, that’s one of the key elements.

Conclusion

Other than that, to have a strong disagreement about something is not necessarily a bad thing. So, in conclusion, what’s the bullet point takeaway from this whole series of lessons? Well, first of all, we need to learn what God says. Have you not read? Is the question that Jesus asked. Don’t you know what the Bible says? If we don’t, then we need to get our Bibles out and learn what it is that God wants for marriage and how to put that into practice. We need to flee fornication, 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 18, and a host of other texts teach that. We need to guard our marriages and keep them free from infidelity, not just in the sense of fornication or a sexual immorality, but in the other ways that we’ve talked about.

Keep yourself pure, Paul says to Timothy. That includes abstaining from pornography. It includes not doing anything really that would bring reproach and shame into a marriage. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Yes, that’s a high bar. That’s a high standard. He also says, love your wives as yourself. You don’t do anything for yourself that you wouldn’t do for your wife. You treat your wife with the same degree and amount of care as you would yourself. For no man ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church. So what shall we do? Again, learn what God says. Determine with commitment to obey it, that come what may, whatever the problems are that arise, I’m going to do what God wants me to do.

I’m going to try to build my marriage in a way that God wants it to be done. To marry a Christian who respects God’s law. Marrying someone who’s not a Christian, I know sometimes that works. But for every instance of that, I can probably show you ten that don’t work out that way because the commitment is not there often with someone who is not simply a Christian. What shall we do? Teach your children and others. You may not be in a marriage relationship presently. You might have been in one, perhaps you’re part of the population whose spouse has died. But you are a part of a matrix of a mentoring relationship. You may not even be aware of it, but you have an impact on the younger generation, on those who are contemplating marriage.

Teach your children and others what God says about what a good marriage is and what a devastation divorce can be. Again, flee fornication, keep yourself pure. These are scriptural ideas and scriptural, we need to acknowledge and to obey what the scripture says. I again appreciate very much the attention that you paid to these lessons and the interest that you’ve expressed. We are grateful for the opportunity. If you’ll take out your hymn now, we come to a part of the service that is traditional in some ways, and yet I believe it’s a good tradition where we extend an invitation for those who are in one way or another in need of obeying the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you’re not a Christian, you simply cannot appreciate the kind of requirement and the kind of modeling that goes into what a marriage is about.

That’s a first step toward engaging in any kind of a relationship is are you a member of Christ’s body? Are you married to the Lord Jesus Christ? Are you a part of the bride of Christ? And if that’s not the case this morning, then in a moment as we stand to sing an invitation hymn. If you want to come to the front, this is not the only time to obey the gospel. But if you know what you need to do, you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. You’re willing to act out on that confession of faith and to make the good confession and to continue to confess them day by day as you live, to be buried with your Lord in baptism, that the sins that you’ve repented of, resolved to turn away from, to turn around and go the other way, that those sins may be washed away by the shed blood of Jesus Christ as you’re buried with your Lord in baptism, which is a model itself of his own life and death and burial and resurrection to life again.

The very thing that we have reflected upon as we meet around the Lord’s table on the Lord’s day. That’s also what baptism is. If you read texts like Romans chapter 6, verses 3 and 4. As Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too, having been baptized for the remission of sins, rise to walk in newness of life. It might also be the case that there are those who have done that, begun that journey. You’ve been baptized for the remission of sins, but you have not been faithful to the vows that you made in a sense when you did that, and you’ve wandered back into the world. If you need to come back to the Lord in penitence and prayer, asking for the prayers of brothers and sisters in Christ, if you need to do those things, won’t you come?

Make it known. As together we stand and sing the invitation hymn.