Personal Matters

Being conscious of personal failures often makes it difficult to speak of one’s own marriage, and even harder to talk authoritatively of the marriage between Christ and the Church. Yet upon returning from Vietnam the heavenly Groom spoke to me about men and marriage in a way that made me feel out of my depth. I strangely sensed the Spirit telling me to “rotate the image”. This was a call to a fundamental reorientation of how I am to see my own identity through a new insight into how Jesus sees himself. As a real human being (1 Tim 2:5) a central part of the Jesus’ own sense of personal identity is that he sees himself as a Husband through having a Bride, the Church (2 Cor 11:2). To share “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16; Phil 2:5) means to be deeply dependent for a sense of identity upon someone(s) radically different from oneself i.e. those of the opposite gender. This is a crucial message today.

Crisis in Identity

There are numerous fronts generating a crisis of gender identity. The push for gay marriage and family is not primarily about the legitimacy of certain sexual acts but about human identity itself. Western cultures are attempting to self-create a new type of human being where the meaning of gender is set solely by us rather than by nature or God. This is a satanic attack on the foundations of what it means to be created. Simultaneously we have a national inquiry into institutional sexual abuse, though in practice the focus of community interest is on scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church. More subtly, “political correctness” has blurred issues of equality with those of sameness leading to a crisis in masculine identity. Many young men seem unable to initiate genuine intimacy with women. Some speak of a “feminised” Church through the female dominance in music and intercession. Such fundamental human issues require an answer from the Bible, not just history or culture.

The Fallen Image

Adam and Eve are uniquely both the first married couple and the first Church (people of God). This symbolises the very deep interconnection between Christian marriage and Christian community expounded by Paul; “husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Ephesians 5:28-32 ESV)

Eve’s call as Adam’s helper was to teach him wisdom in the ways of God. She rightly discerned that “the tree was to be desired to make one wise”, but failed to help her husband “who was with her” (Gen 3:6) gain godly wisdom by refraining from the tree. Neither did Eve seek her man’s counsel and partnership in excluding the serpent from the Garden. Immediately Adam Fell into sin he projected onto Eve through his sense of guilt blame for his own evil.  No longer was she a source of rich delight (Gen 2:23) but darkly experienced as a cause of shame (Gen 3:7). This foundational masculine resentment with women (cf. Gen 3:12) flows through history into anger with mothers and especially with wives. Nothing, work, alcohol, mateship, money etc. can heal the disgrace and shame fallen men conscious of their failures feel around women.

The Transforming Power of the Cross

Jesus took the darkness of all human shame into himself in the cross and made it his own, “And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice…“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?””(Mark 15:33-34 ESV). The cross means Christ takes into himself the infinitely ugly truth that he was crucified by the Wife of God, Israel (Hosea 2). The depth of the shame of Christ’s betrayal and murder by his spouse is immeasurable; but it is through such sacrificial suffering for Her that the Son of God fully becomes “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). Shame is transformed into glory through substitutionary suffering, so that when Jesus now looks at his covenant partner he is overcome by the wisdom and goodness of the counsel of the Father. Jesus as a man and Husband devoid of resentment or anger sends forth the Spirit to glorify the Bride (Acts 2:33; Eph 3:20-21). In seeing his own image in the Church Christ is overcome by the beauty of his Bride and the wisdom of his Father in perfecting Her though his suffering. Full of Christ’s reflected glory she cannot be to her Bridegroom a source of shame (2 Cor 3:17-18).

Ministry Marriages

All Christian marriages are “ministry marriages” for they all share in Christ’s view of the Church. Instead of men seeing wives in terms of our own self-centred interests, Christian husbands need to “rotate the image” and see our identity in terms of the wisdom that God would give through our wives. This involves seeing wives (indeed all women) through the lens of the cross, where all is beautified. It is to see the woman as God’s gift in Christ, as the bride given by God for making us Christ-like. Living in such a revelation the wife can no longer be experienced as a source of shame but one of glory. Our relational failures are an occasion for forgiveness and growth with Christ, not resentment and anger. This has nothing necessarily to do with women treating their men as blameless, for Jesus was glorified through the wickedness of his Woman!

Teachings on the temptations to which leaders are exposed e.g. money, sex, power, are common. I have yet however to hear a teaching which explains that where men submit to any such temptations their marriages must already be in disorder. It is impossible for a man to receive godly wisdom from a wife e.g. about money, sex, work, emotions, relationships and also to fall into sin.

Conclusion

This teaching is not just for married people, for each of us is likely the product of a marital union and we are all surrounded by the opposite gender. This word is a challenge to see ourselves and our identity in a new way, the way Christ understands himself, through his Bride. Mature Christian marriages possess great powers of discernment; it is impossible to appreciate the role of the Word to sanctify Christ’s Bride “by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:26-27 ESV), and to tolerate shallow irreverent preaching in Church! Where the “rotation of the image” of oneself is experienced through Christ, there will be a strong expectation that the marriages of Christian leaders will manifest godliness and purity (2 Cor 11:1-3).

This teaching may be a “hard saying” (John 6:60) but the manifestation of the image of Christ in our very confused world hinges on it.