The Foundations of Marriage Genesis 2:18-25

Grace Community ChurchMarch 17, 2013

Where We Have Been• God was creating and everything He created

was declared to be good.• Man was created in a relationship with God

that resulted in:– Identity– Acceptance– Security and significance– Dignity, honor, value, and worth

What do you give a man that has everything he wants?

Give Him Something He Desperately Needs!

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”

God Sets The Stage

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

God Creates…and God Delivers

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

The Man Is ThrilledWith What He Has Been Given

And the man said,This is now bone of my bones,

And flesh of my flesh;She shall be called Woman,

Because she was taken out of Man.

God Is Again PleasedWith What He Has Created

For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed.

We Look For A Pseudo-HelperInstead of a Suitable Helper

• Pseudo-helper: fake, imitation, artificial, lacking in substance; not genuine.

• It starts with following a pseudo God• There is no foundational spiritual oneness• There is no deep emotional oneness• There is no authentic physical oneness

During an affair, she says, “The great sex…is a given. When you have an affair you already know you will have passionate sex--the urgency, newness, and the illicit nature of the affair practically guarantee that.” But then the affair came to light, and she relates, her husband had an affair as well. Finally the marriage fell apart. During the telling of the story, Wendy Plump looked at her parents.

“They have this marriage of fifty years behind them, and it is a monument to success. A few weeks or months of illicit passion could not hold a candle to it.” Finally she asks, “If you were seventy-five, which would you rather have: years of steady if occasionally strained devotion, or something that looks a little bit like the Iraqi city of Fallujah, cratered with spent artillery?”