Today, more than ever, society's health is dependent on the health of the family. In "Marriage How IT Works", God's intention of bringing fulfillment and freedom to a couple through marriage will be addressed. The next two related messages will focus on how the husband-wife and the couple-God relationships have been reversed as Satan seeks to launch attacks with the purpose of ultimately breaking down and destroying the family unit.
Following the bible.org model, this outline and accompanying audio message from Dr. Bill Lawrence of Leader Formation International are designed to assist users of bible.org to grow and teach quality principles of leadership in an appropriate context for their respective audience. These outlines can help you in grasping the themes of each study as well as guide you in your own teaching preparation. You can gain important insights and learn new Bible study and teaching method styles used by others, like Dr. Lawrence.
Socrates once said,
By all means marry. If you get a good wife, twice blessed you will be. If you get a bad wife, you will become a philosopher.
By the looks of things in our nation today, we are raising several generations of philosophers. There’s no doubt that a difficult marriage will turn anyone into a philosopher. And there’s no doubt that the thought of becoming a philosopher is enough to drive anyone to save a marriage.
It’s amazing that any marriage survives when we consider the kind of preparation we receive to get married. It seems to me that large numbers of people enter marriage without having the slightest idea what they are doing and, as a result, exit marriage without having the slightest idea of what just happened to them. We require hours of training for a driver’s license and years of training for a medical license, but all we require for a marriage license is a few dollars and clean blood.
How can we be so casual about the most central relationship in our society apart from our relationship with Christ?
The family is the most essential social structure we have, which means that marriage is the most important decision we make in life apart from our decision for Christ.
The family had to come before anything else could.
The family is the core of every society.
Before there could be business or education or politics or anything other social structure, the family had to be. The structure and flow of the Ten Commandments shows us how important the family is. Jesus told us that the Law consists of two major responses, love for God and love for neighbor.
The Ten Commandments break down in this way.
The first four commandments tell us how to love God and the last five tell us how to love our neighbor.
In between these two sections, right at the fifth commandment we read the words, Honor your father and mother.
How do we learn to relate to God and neighbor? Where do we learn how to love God and neighbor?
In our homes.
Over twenty years ago I had a chance and random conversation with a man named Steve.
Steve was a young man, a counselor, who worked with troubled youth. I met him one day in a park in San Jose when he was there with some troubled young people and I asked him, How many of these children come from happy homes?
I have never seen a happy home, he replied.
I wonder how many millions of others in our country would agree with him and say, I have never seen a happy home.
How do we respond in light of such desperate need in our land?
We must know and commit to God’s purposes for marriage and the family.
We must make the decision to understand God’s intention in creating marriage and the family and commit to fulfilling it as fully as He enables us to do so.
We must recognize that apart from our decision to trust Christ, the decision we make to get married is the most significant decision we make in our lives. Only our decision to receive eternal life is more important that our decision to marry.
Some of you have made that decision and it did not work out well. I’m not interested in laying a guilt trip on you when I say what I am saying today. I am interested in showing others in this room, some who have never been married, some who may be planning to be married, some who are widowed, and the rest who are married that we must take this commitment as the most serious human commitment we ever make.
I am convinced that marriage is a legitimate test of character, that, for example, the ability of a man to govern effectively does relate to his ability to be faithful to his wife and the marriage vows he took on his wedding day. I also believe that if you have been divorced you must make every effort to learn and grow from the terribly painful struggle that you face. It is more important that you grow from what you have experienced than that you remarry happily. In fact, unless you do grow you cannot remarry happily.
So, for the good of our own lives, for the good of our children’s lives, and for the good of our nation’s life, we must understand,
It is at this that we look this morning by going all the way back to the beginning of time.
We begin where God began, with Genesis 2:18, and His conclusion that, It is not good for man to be alone.
1. Everything else was good.
2. Everything else had a counterpart.
3. Only man was alone, isolated, with no one to relate to.
4. Even God wasn’t enough for man because man was incomplete and lacking.
1. Woman was man’s exact counterpart, exactly what man needed to be complete.
2. Woman was everything man was.
a. She was made in God’s image and likeness.
b. She had body, soul, and spirit even as man did.
c. She had mind, will, and emotion even as man did.
d. She was man’s equal in every way.
e. She was the crown of creation, not the after thought.
3. Woman is man’s helper.
a. This is not a second rate term, a term of inferiority.
b. This term is used to describe God as our Helper (Ps. 33:20; 70:5; 115:9).
c. Unless we think of God as inferior because He is our Helper, we cannot think of woman as man’s inferior because she is man’s helper.
d. Woman is in an exalted, God-like position of being exactly what man needs to become himself.
e. Without woman, man cannot be man.
4. Woman completes man whether married or not.
a. Men are dependent on women in ways other than marriage.
b. This is obvious when we think of the role of mothers, but this still does not exhaust woman’s role as helper.
c. Think of life in a neighborhood or in a work setting and think of what it would be without the presence of women.
d. Man needs woman to be himself.
e. This puts woman on an exalted position, and she should be treated according tot he position God has given her.
God now takes another step and marries man and woman.
1. Marriage demands a commitment of the deepest nature because it requires a total identification between husband and wife.
a. Before this identification can take place, there must be a separation from other relationships which have given identification previously.
b. Because total identification is required for a true marriage, there must be some kind of a separation from any other relationship.
2. For this reason, “leave” is a very strong word.
a. It means to depart from, even abandon.
b. Obviously, it does not meant hat we should abandon our parents.
c. But it does mean that there is a change in the way we relate to our parents.
d. It does not mean that we abandon them, but that we change the way we relate to them.
e. It means that we give up our child-like relationship with them; that we no longer obey them or depend on them for our emotional strength and stability.
f. It means that we should seek to respect them in every way, but not that we obey them or allow their thinking to control us
g. It is interesting in light of the ancient culture that God speaks of a man leaving his father and mother.
h. In those days, the woman left her family and went to live with her husband’s family.
i. This meant the man stayed where he grew up.
j. It meant that there would be a tendency for life to continue exactly as it had been from his birth.
k. This meant a definite leaving of mind and heart and soul, even if his body stayed where it always had been.
The failure to do this results in disaster.
“Jimmy, can’t you do anything right?”
A woman molested by her uncle.
“There’s an ugly little girl inside me (Jan).”
“I don’t matter.”
“You’ll never be anything but a jailbird.”
1. “Cleave” portrays a vivid picture.
a. It describes glue.
b. When we marry we are stuck to (not with) one another.
2. For glue to work, there must be pressure applied to the joint where the two elements are joined together.
a. The pressure throughout history has always been society.
b. For this reason, we must restore the pressures of society on marriages so more of them stay together.
c. I do not believe women should stay in abusive situations in which they risk their lives and the lives of their children.
d. But we also do not find no-fault divorce working as everyone thought it would.
e. We must make divorce more costly, more difficult, if for no other reason than so people will think longer about getting married in the first place.
3. “Cleave” means commitment to God and one another, if for no other reason than to obey Him, help children, and maintain health in our society.
1. Oneness allows for individuality.
a. The word literally means to unify, i.e., to bring multiple parts together in a whole.
b. The basic meaning is to be untied.
c. It describes things which consist of unified parts, e.g., morning and evening which are one day.
2. Oneness allows for individuality.
a. We don’t cease to be ourselves when we marry.
b. Marriage is a uniting of ourselves with each other, a merger of ourselves in which we take the best we have (we hope) and get rid of the worst.
c. In our oneness, we retain our individuality.
d. We don’t cease to be ourselves when we marry.
e. We cannot demand changes in our mates in order to become one.
f. We only become one with one another when we commit ourselves to something greater than we are.
3. To achieve oneness, we must commit to marriage and all that God wants in it.
a. We must commit to His values, even when this means giving up our wills.
b. We must commit to His purposes, even when this means giving up our way.
c. This is not a 50/50 arrangement, but a 100/100 commitment.
4. Although one of the ways to experience this oneness is through a sexual relationship, this is not the only way by any means.
a. There must be spiritual oneness.
b. There must be intellectual oneness.
c. There must be emotional oneness.
d. There must be volitional oneness.
e. Only then does physical oneness take on true meaning.
… two persons share everything they have, not only their material possessions, but also their thinking and their feeling, their joy and their suffering, their hopes and their fears, their successes and their failures. “To become one flesh means that two persons become completely one with body, soul, and spirit and yet there remain two different persons.”
1. Openness is the ultimate in marriage, the greatest intimacy possible.
2. Openness means there’s nothing hidden because there’s nothing to hide.
3. It means there is a total revelation of all that is going on inside of us.
4. It also means there is total freedom because both are feel totally safe.
5. There are many forces that go against openness.
a. Men live in a world where they cannot possibly be open.
To be open is to expose themselves to great loss, loss of face, loss of power, loss of position, loss of opportunity, loss of promotion, loss in every way.
Yet, this is exactly what wives hunger for more than anything else in the world.
Often, wives are hungering for something a fallen man cannot give them.
b. Women live in a world in which they are open by intuition more than by communication.
This often results in confusion in marriage.
Wives expect husbands to know things no man can ever know without help.
Most often, openness is helped if wives can learn to “bottom line” things more readily.
The greatest help to openness is to have nothing to hide.
Few realities better illustrate the ultimate reality of God’s purpose in marriage. Marriage works when we pursue LEAVING, CLEAVING, ONENESS, and OPENNESS. Then marriage accomplishes God’s intention for all of us.
Marriage Brings Fulfillment and Freedom Through God’s Enablement.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the full outline for both of the audio message for Part 1 and Part 2. There is a note in the outline below where Part 1 concludes.
I want to speak with you this morning on the subject passive men, wild women.
I begin by telling you that Satan hates you and has a diabolical plan for your marriage.
Those of you who are single may have already decided to tune me out. This message is irrelevant to me. I’m single, have been single, and, from all I can tell, I’m going to be single.
Others of you have been divorced, and you have also decided to tune me out. I’ve already had enough people tell me what I did wrong. All I want to be is single. I don’t want to hear anything more about marriage.
This message is for you in that your life may well be the product of Satan’s diabolical plan. You may now be living the fruit of his plan and you need to be aware of its impact upon you. Through understanding what he has done to you and in you, you may be able to take some steps to keep on growing in Christ.
Now do not misunderstand me. Satan is not the direct cause of our marital problems, but the indirect cause. The point is that he put in place a process in the Garden of Eden that he has never needed to change because it works. This process may be the most clever thing Satan ever did. This process simply needs maintenance from generation to generation.
He found a way to accomplish his most basic purposes that is as automatic as breathing, as certain as death, and as effective as gravity. This process marks committed Christian marriages as much as it marks unbelieving marriages. We do not willingly invite this process; we do not actively seek this process; we do not consciously pursue this process. Yet there is no marriage and no family that does not struggle with this process.
Dr. Pierre Mornell, a psychiatrist in Marin County north of San Francisco, has written a book entitled Passive Men, Wild Women, in which he describes several of his clients. Across the years of his practice many women have come to Dr. Mornell with the same complaint. They are married to highly successful men, men who drive across the Golden Gate Bridge every day and go into the financial district of San Francisco where they make their mark on the world. These men are leaders in every way and everywhere--except at home. Each night when these men come home, they cease to be leaders; the only mark they make at home is on the chair in which they sit. Their wives become widows before their time; they are widows almost before they have been wives.
The only problem is that the corpse of their dead husband comes home every night asking, “What’s for dinner? When will it be ready? Where’s the TV guide? I want to know what time the playoff game starts tonight.” These men, active everywhere else, are passive at home. And, according to Dr. Mornell, their wives go wild inside. Even though they are career women themselves, they are emotionally at loose ends. They have no anchor in their lives. They have no way to tell the difference between up and down. They are weightless in the space ship called life, drifting through the air, with no way to ever land on solid ground.
Because their husbands are emotionally and often physically passive, they are wild, wild with frustration, bitterness, and anger. They feel as if they must take over and carry the entire marriage.They make all the decisions concerning money, concerning the children, concerning where they go out for dinner, concerning what they do for vacation--everything! In their minds their husbands aren’t involved in any way in their lives and they struggle greatly with the deep feelings of loss that this passiveness brings.
Now, in fairness to husbands, it is true that many women don’t want it any other way. They complain, often bitterly, but they won’t let their husbands have a say about anything that matters. From the moment of marriage on, these wives have blocked out their husbands and won’t let them provide any kind of leadership. Some wives don’t really know what they’re doing; they don’t intend to do it and don’t realize how destructive their patterns are. Other wives have every intention of doing exactly what they are doing, and they fight for all they’re worth to be in control. In both cases, husbands become passive.
What makes husbands passive?
What makes men so passive they drive women wild?
How did this whole pattern come about?
I believe it is the product of Satan’s design for destruction, his diabolical plan for marriage and the home.
You see,
SATAN HAS A DESIGN THAT WILL DESTROY YOUR HOME AND OUR SOCIETY.
We are dealing with one of the most important issues in our society when we look at this pattern and this process.
1. God gave a positive command which Satan made a negative command (Gen. 2:16-17).
2. The key to Satan’s plan is his effort to raise doubt about God’s goodness.
a. If Satan can get us to think that God is against us rather than for us, he has gotten his plan started.
b. If Satan can create confusion about God’s truth and God’s purposes, then has moved us his way.
3. The woman’s response shows she’s starting to think Satan’s way because she also expands on God’s word.
a. Satan misused the word not.
b. The woman said, God won’t even let us touch it, let alone eat it.
Some of you wives may feel this when everything always goes wrong during one of your husband’s business trips. Or when you’re stuck at home with the kids while he goes out and plays golf for business purposes. It really is for business purposes, but you remember the days when you had fun doing business too. Where is God when you need Him?
Once Satan has the advantage he presses it by raising yet another question about God.
1. Now he makes an assertion: you will not surely die (there’s that word again).
2. Satan takes God’s exact words and inserts one word: not.
3. This time he doesn’t misuse it; he misplaces it.
4. He makes the opposite of God’s Word sensible, logical, and right.
To win, Satan now has to raise doubt in only one other area, and he just keeps on going.
1. Satan pictures God as a threatened, fearful, jealous individual who restricted them because He couldn’t handle the competition.
2. We hear the same point made in different ways in our world today.
Such an assertion totally distorts God’s true intention.
Marriage is designed to be a relationship between two co-equal and co-accountable people under the lordship of God Himself. It is the primary relationship in all of life apart from our relationship with Him. It is designed to meet our most basic human need, the need for companionship. It replaces the deepest hurt we can feel as human beings, the hurt of unbroken loneliness.
We do not have a superior/inferior relationship. Men and women are co-equal and co-accountable, not superior and inferior. Man is the managing partner in this 100/100% partnership, but he is not superior. Any man who uses physical, verbal, or sexual abuse as a means of controlling his wife is evil. Any man who has to tell his wife she is to submit to him has lost his ability to lead his wife.
We can see how effective Satan’s process is because he has successfully distorted God’s Word for generations, and his mastery is evident in these days.
And we must understand this because the home is Satan’s target area, not only in the Garden of Eden but in the garden of everyone of our marriages.
Next we see that
1. Eve had a word from God through her husband as to what she was to do 2:16-17.
a. She knew what God had said.
b. It was this word that she distorted.
2. Eve had all the resources she needed to resist Satan.
a. She had a positive experience of God’s goodness.
b. She knew God well, knew His love, His justice, His righteousness.
c. She chose to disregard the truth for a lie.
1. Eve was created as Adam’s co-equal with a responsibility to consult with him before she acted.
2. Making a decision of this magnitude was not to be done without her husband’s input.
3. When Eve chose not to trust God, she also chose not to trust her husband.
1. Satan challenged for lordship in her life and won.
a. He created doubt through his insinuating assertions.
b. Now we see he creates desire in her state of doubt, and she submits to his purposes.
c. This chain of submission is always in effect.
d. When a wife refuses to honor and trust God and take Him at His word, she chooses to trust the evil lie of Satan.
e. She does not become satanic or under his direct control; she just becomes under his general control because she refuses to trust God and obey Him.
2. Eve’s eyes are now filled with a vision of the fruit on the tree, and it appealed to her as a woman.
a. It was good for food: every wife wants her husband to eat well and to have physical well being.
b. It was a delight to the eyes: every wife wants to make things beautiful for her husband.
c. It was a desirable for wisdom: every wife wants to help her husband be a better man, to help her husband get ahead.
So Eve’s doubt and desire resulted in disobedience, and this disobedience resulted in another loss of trust.
1. At this point, Satan has absolutely nothing to do.
2. Adam was the first man to say, “Yes, Dear!”
It is very important for you to understand that Adam was the responsible one in this situation. It is wrong to blame woman for all that has happened. It is wrong to misuse God’s Word to take away Woman’s dignity and her co-equality with man before God. Woman was deceived; man was responsible.
Now we see the impact of all of this.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Part 1 audio message ends here. Continue on to the next article in this series for the accompanying audio for the following section. This outline is reproduced in full on that page as well.
1. It reversed their leadership responsibilities.
a. Women tend to lead in ways men should.
b. Men tend to follow in ways women should.
c. Men become passive, and women become wild.
2. It reversed their openness.
a. Once they were naked and unashamed; they were comfortably open with nothing to hide.
b. Now they have something to hide; sin, and they work harder at covering their sin than they do at relating to one another.
c. Now there is tension and anger and bitterness because the woman controls and the husband resents it.
d. Now the husband does nothing, and the wife resents it.
e. Now, many husbands don’t mind when the wife carries all the responsibility.
f. I have been like that.
1. They lost their fellowship with God.
2. The openness between them and God was destroyed.
a. They went from freedom to fear.
b. They went from comfort to shame.
c. They went from truth to lie.
3. Neither of them would accept responsibility for what happened.
a. This is always the case.
b. We blame God.
c. We blame one another.
d. We blame Satan.
e. We blame our parents.
f. We blame our children.
g. We blame our circumstances.
h. We blame everyone else but ourselves.
It brought us Cain and Abel.
1. Every home will be attacked.
a. This pattern is a part of our very culture.
b. Understanding this is foundational to the health of our country.
c. We are facing the destruction of marriage and the family, and this is impacting our nation.
2. Trust will be destroyed.
3. Relationships will be reversed.
a. The appeal to doubt and desire always results in disobedience and death when it is successful.
b. Specifics will vary from couple to couple, but one thing never varies.
c. God has given husbands the responsibility to love by leading and the wives the responsibility to respond by trusting.
4. Openness between the couple and God and the couple themselves will be destroyed.
5. Responsibility will be refused.
This is the normal response of a husband who is a man everywhere but at home.
6. Trust relationships can be restored--at great cost to God.
This is why Jesus came to die for us. Husbands and wives must learn from God’s Word together. They must learn to be God’s co-equal and co-accountable partners in which the husband is the managing partner. And they must determine that they will have a marriage that contributes to healing in our society and not to destruction.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the full outline for both audio messages. For the accompanying audio message to the text immediately below go here. To go to the section of the outline which goes along with the audio message for this page (Part 2) click here.
I want to speak with you this morning on the subject passive men, wild women.
I begin by telling you that Satan hates you and has a diabolical plan for your marriage.
Those of you who are single may have already decided to tune me out. This message is irrelevant to me. I’m single, have been single, and, from all I can tell, I’m going to be single.
Others of you have been divorced, and you have also decided to tune me out. I’ve already had enough people tell me what I did wrong. All I want to be is single. I don’t want to hear anything more about marriage.
This message is for you in that your life may well be the product of Satan’s diabolical plan. You may now be living the fruit of his plan and you need to be aware of its impact upon you. Through understanding what he has done to you and in you, you may be able to take some steps to keep on growing in Christ.
Now do not misunderstand me. Satan is not the direct cause of our marital problems, but the indirect cause. The point is that he put in place a process in the Garden of Eden that he has never needed to change because it works. This process may be the most clever thing Satan ever did. This process simply needs maintenance from generation to generation.
He found a way to accomplish his most basic purposes that is as automatic as breathing, as certain as death, and as effective as gravity. This process marks committed Christian marriages as much as it marks unbelieving marriages. We do not willingly invite this process; we do not actively seek this process; we do not consciously pursue this process. Yet there is no marriage and no family that does not struggle with this process.
Dr. Pierre Mornell, a psychiatrist in Marin County north of San Francisco, has written a book entitled Passive Men, Wild Women, in which he describes several of his clients. Across the years of his practice many women have come to Dr. Mornell with the same complaint. They are married to highly successful men, men who drive across the Golden Gate Bridge every day and go into the financial district of San Francisco where they make their mark on the world. These men are leaders in every way and everywhere--except at home. Each night when these men come home, they cease to be leaders; the only mark they make at home is on the chair in which they sit. Their wives become widows before their time; they are widows almost before they have been wives.
The only problem is that the corpse of their dead husband comes home every night asking, “What’s for dinner? When will it be ready? Where’s the TV guide? I want to know what time the playoff game starts tonight.” These men, active everywhere else, are passive at home. And, according to Dr. Mornell, their wives go wild inside. Even though they are career women themselves, they are emotionally at loose ends. They have no anchor in their lives. They have no way to tell the difference between up and down. They are weightless in the space ship called life, drifting through the air, with no way to ever land on solid ground.
Because their husbands are emotionally and often physically passive, they are wild, wild with frustration, bitterness, and anger. They feel as if they must take over and carry the entire marriage.They make all the decisions concerning money, concerning the children, concerning where they go out for dinner, concerning what they do for vacation--everything! In their minds their husbands aren’t involved in any way in their lives and they struggle greatly with the deep feelings of loss that this passiveness brings.
Now, in fairness to husbands, it is true that many women don’t want it any other way. They complain, often bitterly, but they won’t let their husbands have a say about anything that matters. From the moment of marriage on, these wives have blocked out their husbands and won’t let them provide any kind of leadership. Some wives don’t really know what they’re doing; they don’t intend to do it and don’t realize how destructive their patterns are. Other wives have every intention of doing exactly what they are doing, and they fight for all they’re worth to be in control. In both cases, husbands become passive.
What makes husbands passive?
What makes men so passive they drive women wild?
How did this whole pattern come about?
I believe it is the product of Satan’s design for destruction, his diabolical plan for marriage and the home.
You see,
SATAN HAS A DESIGN THAT WILL DESTROY YOUR HOME AND OUR SOCIETY.
We are dealing with one of the most important issues in our society when we look at this pattern and this process.
1. God gave a positive command which Satan made a negative command (Gen. 2:16-17).
2. The key to Satan’s plan is his effort to raise doubt about God’s goodness.
a. If Satan can get us to think that God is against us rather than for us, he has gotten his plan started.
b. If Satan can create confusion about God’s truth and God’s purposes, then has moved us his way.
3. The woman’s response shows she’s starting to think Satan’s way because she also expands on God’s word.
a. Satan misused the word not.
b. The woman said, God won’t even let us touch it, let alone eat it.
Some of you wives may feel this when everything always goes wrong during one of your husband’s business trips. Or when you’re stuck at home with the kids while he goes out and plays golf for business purposes. It really is for business purposes, but you remember the days when you had fun doing business too. Where is God when you need Him?
Once Satan has the advantage he presses it by raising yet another question about God.
1. Now he makes an assertion: you will not surely die (there’s that word again).
2. Satan takes God’s exact words and inserts one word: not.
3. This time he doesn’t misuse it; he misplaces it.
4. He makes the opposite of God’s Word sensible, logical, and right.
To win, Satan now has to raise doubt in only one other area, and he just keeps on going.
1. Satan pictures God as a threatened, fearful, jealous individual who restricted them because He couldn’t handle the competition.
2. We hear the same point made in different ways in our world today.
God wants wives to subject themselves to their husbands, not for their good, not for the good of their husbands, not for the good of their children, not for the sake of a shattered society, but just because He favors men.
Such an assertion totally distorts God’s true intention.
Marriage is designed to be a relationship between two co-equal and co-accountable people under the lordship of God Himself. It is the primary relationship in all of life apart from our relationship with Him. It is designed to meet our most basic human need, the need for companionship. It replaces the deepest hurt we can feel as human beings, the hurt of unbroken loneliness.
We do not have a superior/inferior relationship. Men and women are co-equal and co-accountable, not superior and inferior. Man is the managing partner in this 100/100% partnership, but he is not superior. Any man who uses physical, verbal, or sexual abuse as a means of controlling his wife is evil. Any man who has to tell his wife she is to submit to him has lost his ability to lead his wife.
We can see how effective Satan’s process is because he has successfully distorted God’s Word for generations, and his mastery is evident in these days.
And we must understand this because the home is Satan’s target area, not only in the Garden of Eden but in the garden of every one of our marriages.
Next we see that
1. Eve had a word from God through her husband as to what she was to do 2:16-17.
a. She knew what God had said.
b. It was this word that she distorted.
2. Eve had all the resources she needed to resist Satan.
a. She had a positive experience of God’s goodness.
b. She knew God well, knew His love, His justice, His righteousness.
c. She chose to disregard the truth for a lie.
1. Eve was created as Adam’s co-equal with a responsibility to consult with him before she acted.
2. Making a decision of this magnitude was not to be done without her husband’s input.
3. When Eve chose not to trust God, she also chose not to trust her husband.
Satan challenged for lordship in her life and won.
a. He created doubt through his insinuating assertions.
b. Now we see he creates desire in her state of doubt, and she submits to his purposes.
c. This chain of submission is always in effect.
d. When a wife refuses to honor and trust God and take Him at His word, she chooses to trust the evil lie of Satan.
e. She does not become satanic or under his direct control; she just becomes under his general control because she refuses to trust God and obey Him.
3. Eve’s eyes are now filled with a vision of the fruit on the tree, and it appealed to her as a woman.
a. It was good for food: every wife wants her husband to eat well and to have physical well being.
b. It was a delight to the eyes: every wife wants to make things beautiful for her husband.
c. It was a desirable for wisdom: every wife wants to help her husband be a better man, to help her husband get ahead.
So Eve’s doubt and desire resulted in disobedience, and this disobedience resulted in another loss of trust.
1. At this point, Satan has absolutely nothing to do.
2. Adam was the first man to say, “Yes, Dear!”
It is very important for you to understand that Adam was the responsible one in this situation. It is wrong to blame woman for all that has happened. It is wrong to misuse God’s Word to take away Woman’s dignity and her co-equality with man before God. Woman was deceived; man was responsible.
Now we see the impact of all of this.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Part 2 audio message begins here.
It reversed their leadership responsibilities.
a. Women tend to lead in ways men should.
b. Men tend to follow in ways women should.
c. Men become passive, and women become wild.
It reversed their openness.
a. Once they were naked and unashamed; they were comfortably open with nothing to hide.
b. Now they have something to hide; sin, and they work harder at covering their sin than they do at relating to one another.
c. Now there is tension and anger and bitterness because the woman controls and the husband resents it.
d. Now the husband does nothing, and the wife resents it.
e. Now, many husbands don’t mind when the wife carries all the responsibility.
f. I have been like that.
1. They lost their fellowship with God.
2. The openness between them and God was destroyed.
a. They went from freedom to fear.
b. They went from comfort to shame.
c. They went from truth to lie.
3. Neither of them would accept responsibility for what happened.
a. This is always the case.
b. We blame God.
c. We blame one another.
d. We blame Satan.
e. We blame our parents.
f. We blame our children.
g. We blame our circumstances.
h. We blame everyone else but ourselves.
It brought us Cain and Abel.
Every home will be attacked.
a. This pattern is a part of our very culture.
b. Understanding this is foundational to the health of our country.
c. We are facing the destruction of marriage and the family, and this is impacting our nation.
Trust will be destroyed.
3. Relationships will be reversed.
a. The appeal to doubt and desire always results in disobedience and death when it is successful.
b. Specifics will vary from couple to couple, but one thing never varies.
c. God has given husbands the responsibility to love by leading and the wives the responsibility to respond by trusting.
4. Openness between the couple and God and the couple themselves will be destroyed.
5. Responsibility will be refused.
This is the normal response of a husband who is a man everywhere but at home.
6. Trust relationships can be restored--at great cost to God.
This is why Jesus came to die for us. Husbands and wives must learn from God’s Word together. They must learn to be God’s co-equal and co-accountable partners in which the husband is the managing partner. And they must determine that they will have a marriage that contributes to healing in our society and not to destruction.