A Plan for Your Family: God's vs. the World's, Part 2

When the divine pattern is followed, the whole relationship is right. The woman is not to usurp the authority and dominate the husband. The husband is not to unkindly and insensitively rule over her. Somebody is responsible to lead the other to fall.

It has nothing to do with inferiority at all. It only has to do with harmony. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. One Christian man described his marriage as harsh, cold, and loveless. Every day he lingered at work rather than go home to his wife. Both he and his wife wanted a divorce, but they remained married, though only to keep the vow they made till death do us part. Sadly, someone you know, maybe even in your church, could be facing that situation right now. What can you do to repair a marriage that's starting to crumble, or one that seems beyond repair? Consider that today as John MacArthur shows you how any family can thrive if it follows God's plan.

Stay here now as John continues his series, The Fulfilled Family. The solution to the conflict in marriage is spiritual, and it starts with letting the Holy Spirit control your life, letting the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, obeying the Spirit of God as reveals His will through the Word of God. Only the power of the Holy Spirit can reverse the curse in a home. Where you have a Spirit-filled person in the home, you have hope. You ever try to pick a fight with a Spirit-controlled person? Ever try to pick a fight with a totally joyful person that just has rising joy in their heart? Ever try to pick a fight with somebody who's thankful for everything, even the conflict? Ever try to pick a fight with somebody who's totally submissive?

Very difficult. Where that exists, there's hope, and it's a spiritual issue. Conflict goes where the Holy Spirit dominates.

Now, as we look at the text before us, we've already kind of talked about this foundation, and Paul in verse 22 is going to launch into the specific conduct of a wife, a husband, children, and parents, and we're going to look at that in detail in the next few weeks. But before we do that, it wouldn't be fair and it wouldn't do justice to the apostle Paul if we didn't, at least for a few moments, consider the kind of world that he was writing to because certainly the argument comes up, well, you know, this stuff is ancient history. This stuff is way back.

It really doesn't comprehend the kind of world that we lived in, that we live in. They lived in a different time with different perspectives, and I think you need to understand what was going on. So I want to give you a little bit of history.

I know that I may indulge myself on this from time to time. I happen to love history. When I went to college, I decided that I couldn't make up my mind about what I wanted to minor in.

I wanted to major in religious studies and so forth, and I did that, but I couldn't decide what I wanted to minor in, so I double minored in history and Greek. And I've always had a fascination for history, and I think through the years, if I'm ever very interesting to listen to, it's probably because I have gone back into history and reconstructed some of the backgrounds that make the Bible live, and that's very, very important so that the Bible speaks for itself. And it was written in a time and in a context which demands our comprehension. So let's set a little of the scene to which the Apostle Paul was writing, and you'll see some amazing parallels. Let's talk about the Jews, first of all. Obviously, there were Jews in the church in Ephesus, and this was a circular letter, and got around to all the churches, and eventually not only all the churches in Asia Minor, but all the churches everywhere, and is still getting around to all the churches everywhere. But there were many Jews in the early church, and they too needed to understand the biblical view of marriage. The Jews themselves had a low view of women. It did not come from the Bible, but then a lot of their religion by the time of Paul and Jesus did not come from the Bible. They had developed their own apostate religion, and part of it was a very low view of women.

In fact, there are Jewish prayers used by Jewish men every morning of their lives. And in one of these prayers, there was one line that illustrates their attitude. This is what it was, God, I thank you that you have not made me a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. Now, they perceived a woman as lower on the human level than a man. A woman was an object, not a person.

A woman had no legal rights. She was in the absolute power of her husband to do with her whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. In New Testament times then, among the Jews, divorce had become tragically easy and tragically common. And they supported it with a passage from the Old Testament, you know, wanting to be fastidious about their devotion to the Mosaic Law. They quoted from Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1, when a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that...and I'll give you what the old translation is, she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her, N-A-S translates it indecency, some uncleanness, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out from his house.

Stop right there. Now, you'll notice that that's really an apothesis or merely an introductory statement to something else, but they took it as if it was a command basically or certainly an allowance. And they simply said, if you find...if your wife loses favor in your eyes because you find some uncleanness in her, then you can write her a divorce and send her out of the house.

There's a lot more to that passage than that. It was not intended to permit that. It was intended to forbid the fact that if that happens and she remarries, she can never come back and marry you.

That was really the issue, but they didn't get that far. They just said, there it is, if you find some indecency, some uncleanness, uncleanness, ship her out, give her a bill of divorce. Now, the question became, what is the uncleanness? What is the indecency? Strict rabbis, most familiarly represented by a rabbi named Shimei, strict rabbis said it refers to adultery and that's all it refers to.

If she commits adultery, you can divorce her. But liberal rabbis said it refers to absolutely anything and that its vagueness is intended by God to allow you to fill in the blank. This is represented by a famous rabbi named Hillel.

So, throughout the sort of rabbinic history, even till today, Jews argue over the view of Shimei and Hillel. Hillel said that it meant a man could divorce his wife if she spoiled his dinner. It meant that she could divorce...he could divorce his wife, get this, if she spilled his dinner, because of course a spilled dinner is a spoiled dinner. He could divorce her if she put too much salt on it. He could divorce her if she walked in public with her head uncovered. He could divorce her if she talked with men in the streets. I like this one. He could divorce her if she spoke disparagingly of her mother-in-law.

And this is really good. He could divorce her if she ever argued with him. Rabbi Aqaba even went further. He interpreted the phrase to mean that a husband could divorce his wife if she became unclean in his eyes because he found somebody prettier.

Now, take a guess. Which was the most popular view among men? Shimei had very few followers. Hillel had many. So, divorce became rampant in the time of Jesus.

Women were discarded all over the place, and they were victims of such discarding left with nothing. All a man had to do at the time of Jesus, the time of Paul, was simply to hand her a bill of divorce. And all it took to get one of those was to have a rabbi write it in the presence of two witnesses, and it was done. That was it. You go to the rabbi. He writes it. Might be a little cash involved.

Two witnesses are there. It's done. The only alimony or support that was required was the return of the dowry, and it was a done deal. The Jews were fastidious, by the way, about following the technical side, making sure you get to a rabbi and get the documentation, but their hearts were full of cruelty and wickedness. In Matthew 531, Jesus refers to this common custom. It was said, whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of dismissal.

That's the way you operate. You want to divorce your wife, just make sure you do the paperwork. That's all.

Just do the paperwork. And I think just in fairness to Jewish history, in different eras of Jewish history, there were different views. But at the time of Jesus, this was the prevailing view. So, divorce was the solution to any conflict, short term or long term.

And consequently, the whole institution of marriage was threatened. And by the way, prostitution was rampant in Jesus' time, even among the Jews. Now let's look at the Greeks. The Greeks had a very similar approach to this. They didn't have to worry about any Old Testament technicalities.

They didn't have to worry about finding a verse to misinterpret to justify what they did. They just lived in blatant disregard for any marital fidelity. Prostitution was an absolutely essential part of Greek life.

Their religions were just loaded with prostitutes, and it was believed not only did you commune with the gods by drunkenness, but you communed with the gods by having sexual relationships with a priestess slash prostitute. Demosthenes, no less than that famous orator said, we have courtesans for the sake of pleasure, we have concubines for the sake of daily cohabitation, and we have wives for the purpose of having children legitimately and having a faithful caretaker for our household affairs. You have the babies and you pay the bills, and that was it. The Greek man found his pleasure and even his friendship outside his marriage. His wife was a housekeeper and a baby maker. His pleasure outside his marriage sexually. His friends outside his marriage. Home and family life were almost extinct, and fidelity was nonexistent. There was no legal procedure for divorce.

You just put them out. So when Paul lays down the principles that he's laying down here, he is really running head on into the culture. This is why Paul, writing to the early churches, emphasizes the sin of fornication so strongly. As you read the Pauline letters, the sin of fornication comes up again and again. He talks about porneia, or the verb form porneuo, to engage in sexual sin. There are references to prostitution, harlotry, sexual perversions of all kind because the world was dominated by those things, the Gentile world. It's not hard to remember that when you read his epistles, how common that kind of stuff was.

It's just a part of life. The word porneuo or porneia, the root means to prostitute. Pornei is a woman for sale.

Pournas is a man who lies with a prostitute or a male prostitute, a gigolo or a homosexual. It was just everywhere, and porneia is a common word in Pauline vocabulary. According to citizenship law of 451 B.C., for example, now we're going four and a half centuries before Christ, inhabitants of Athens, for example, didn't have any citizenship rights if their parents were not both Athenians. For many, this meant material disadvantages so that non-Athenian women had no hope of getting married. If you weren't an Athenian woman, you didn't get married because you couldn't produce children who would be citizens, and no man wanted to have children who couldn't be citizens of Athens, so non-Athenian women became prostitutes. In fact, they were a professional class called heterai, which in Greek means of a different kind. So the ancient world, for example, in Athens was just loaded with prostitutes.

Married women were uneducated. They were regarded as ukuraima, chattel, used for keeping the house and having children. Slavery which was rampant in that Greek world allowed men to take slave girls basically for no other purposes than sexual fulfillment, mistresses. Widespread prostitution, harlotry, sexual sin of all kinds was all over the place in Greek culture. They encouraged the Athenian women to fulfill their sexual needs with slaves and indulge in lesbian love. By the way, also spreading all over the ancient Greek world long before Paul and still there during Paul's time was pedophilia, men having sex with young children.

Prostitution existed as a form of worship in the fertility cults. That was Athens. Move to Rome for a moment. The degeneracy in Rome, if anything, was worse. William Barclay, who has done a lot of background history, writes, For the first five hundred years of Rome there had not been one single case of divorce on record.

The first recorded divorce was that of Spurius Canilius Ruga, 234 B.C. But at the time of Paul, Roman family life was wrecked. Athens was way ahead of the game, 451. It was another couple hundred years before Rome indulged. By Paul's time, Seneca says women were married to be divorced and divorced to be married.

The Romans did not commonly date their years by numbers. They dated their years by two things. Men dated their years by the name of the Roman consuls who ruled and the women by the number of husbands. Jerome tells of one woman who married the records that we have found on this, who married her twenty-third husband and she was his twenty-first wife.

That's kind of how it was. Emperor Augustus demanded that one woman should divorce his wife...or one man should divorce his wife. This is Emperor Augustus, while she was pregnant so he could have her. Jerome Carcopino has written a little book called Daily Life in Ancient Rome and in the book he says there was rampant feminism in early Rome that led to continual demoralization. Some women, he writes, avoided having children for fear of losing their good looks.

Sounds familiar? Some took pride in being behind their husbands in nothing and even vied with them in tests of strength. So he had women involved in building up their physical strength so that they could compete with their husbands. Some women carried on lives apart from their husbands and never blushed to charge into a male world to compete.

By the end of the second century, Carcopino writes, many Roman marriages were childless. He writes, if the Roman women showed reluctance to perform their maternal functions, they devoted themselves on the other hand with a zeal that smacked of defiance to all sorts of pursuits which in the days of the Republic men had jealously reserved for themselves. Women didn't want to be at home again.

This is the curse working itself out. They wanted to dominate, they wanted to be defiant, and they started charging into areas where only men up to that time had been allowed to go. They quit their embroidery, he writes, their reading, their songs, their playing of instruments, and they put their enthusiasm into an attempt to rival men if not to outclass them in every sphere.

Does that sound familiar? Some plunged passionately into the study of legal suits or current politics, eager for news of the entire world, greedy for the gossip of the town and the intrigues of the court, well informed about the latest happenings in Thrace or in China, weighing the gravity of the dangers threatening the king of Armenia or of Parthia with noisy effrontery, they expound their theories and their plans to generals clad in field uniform while their husbands silently look on. Juvenile, another writer, criticized the women...listen to this...who joined in men's hunts with spear in hand and breasts exposed, they took to pig sticking, especially those who engaged in fencing and some...would you even believe...in female wrestling.

I don't know if they did it in the mud or not, but they did it. He writes, what modesty can you expect in a woman who wears a helmet and delights in feats of strength? These women took to gluttony and they took to drunkenness. Before long, writes Carcuppino, women began to betray the pledge which they should have made to their husband and which many of them in marrying had had the cynicism to refuse to make. To live your own life became the formula which women had already brought into fashion by the second century B.C. We agreed long ago, says one lady, that you were to go your way and I mine. You may confound sea and sky with your bellowing, she said to her husband, but I am a human being after all. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Equal rights, equal everything. Unhappy marriages were innumerable. Divorce was epidemic. Juvenile again writes, this is an ancient Roman writer, thus does she lord it over her husband, but before long she vacates her kingdom.

She flits from one home to another, wearing out her bridal veil. Marriage literally became a form of prolonged prostitution. Divorces were so common from Roman jurists that a series of them not infrequently led to the lady returning after many intermediate stages to her original bridal bed, he writes.

Well, you get the picture. It is against this kind of background, which is basically because of the fallenness of the human race, it is against this kind of background so similar to ours today, a background of infidelity, a background of divorce, a background of incest, homosexuality, adultery, prostitution, pedophilia, all of that stuff. It is against that background that Paul writes. He is not here saying what everybody believed.

He's not reciting the common view. He is calling men and women to a kind of life that was the absolute opposite of what they were involved in. It reminds me of when I went to Northridge, Cal State Northridge, to speak in a philosophy class. The professor was a former rabbi with a Ph.D. in philosophy. He asked me to speak to the class on biblical, Christian biblical sex ethics, knowing that that's a great way to get your head chopped off in a secular university.

It was a very challenging opportunity. After having laid out what the Bible says, I said, of course, none of you will agree with this because you don't have the internal commitment by virtue of knowing God, having a transformed heart, and loving Christ to be interested in maintaining these standards. But just as they are counter-cultural today, they were counter-cultural in Paul's time. It's important to realize that what we've got going on today is a whole bunch of individuals demanding to do whatever they want, living out the fall, listen carefully, without any cultural restraint. In some cultures, even in ours years back, there were some cultural restraints no more.

So now you're seeing the reality. Marriage is just a fight for rights, but not by God's definition. God has a completely different plan, and that plan unfolds here. And just to give you the basic principle of that plan, all I need to say is it is an authority and submission plan. Somebody is responsible to lead the other to follow. It has nothing to do with inferiority at all. It only has to do with harmony. The woman is not to seek to usurp the authority and dominate the husband. The husband is not to unkindly and insensitively rule over her.

Whenever this is allowed, it creates massive chaos as we are living to attest in our own day. When the divine pattern is followed, the whole relationship is right. Father, we thank You tonight for some time to think about these important things, so foundational. We want, Lord, in our marriages that the Spirit of God would be in charge of everything. Authority, yes, submission, yes, but an eager devotion to each of those roles that is absolutely contrary to the curse where a man doesn't seek to dominate but to tenderly provide, lead, sustain, cherish.

Where a woman doesn't seek to rise, take charge, but lovingly, willingly, longs to follow. And we know that this can only happen through Your power. Only in the Spirit of God can the curse be set aside and replaced with this magnificent picture. Father, may we know that the most important thing in our marriage is not the behavior of our partner but our relationship to You. And if it's right, we'll be what You want us to be in that marriage, and that's the only way the ideal can ever be met. I pray for every person here, every partner. Lord, lead us to the place where we take complete responsibility for the quality of our marriage and bring ourselves before You to be the men and women You want us to be. And we thank You, Lord, for such clear instruction in our Savior's name.

Amen. You're listening to John MacArthur as he continues his series titled, The Fulfilled Family. John teaches daily here on Grace To You.

He's also Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. You know, so much goes into having a family that honors God. Maybe when you see how often your family's in conflict, you've doubted whether you or your marriage or your kids can please the Lord. And thankfully, John, the family is not a mystery. God is the original architect of the family, and His Word tells us exactly what we need to do to make it work.

Yeah, so basic. God has designed the family in His kingdom to be the cell, to be the organism that passes righteousness from one generation to the next. And that means they have to be well-ordered, godly families. That's why back in Deuteronomy 6, the Lord said, you know, talk about me, the Lord, when you walk and you lie down and you walk in the way. This should be the conversation of the family. It should be God talk, conversation about the Word of God, the truth of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

It's not complicated, and it's not complex. I was saying to somebody today, every society is basically defined by what it will not tolerate. I mean, just look at our society and see what we will not tolerate. Once we wouldn't tolerate pornography, homosexuality, and immorality long ago. Now we won't tolerate anybody who speaks against that. It becomes hate speech. So this culture has completely flipped, but every society is known by what it won't tolerate. That's why when God talked to us, what did he say? I want to give you 10 suggestions of things I'd like you to do. He said, no, I want to give you 10 commands of what not to do, because that's how you define life.

And I think parents sometimes forget to grasp the fact that successful family life is the product of what you do not tolerate, what you do not tolerate. That's going by the wayside. So we have to go back to the basics. I've got in a book in my hand right here called Divine Design.

It takes you back to the beginning. The delicate issue of women, men, male leadership, women, working women, is that biblical? Lots of very important issues. You have to start with what you believe, but then you have to understand that your family is going to reflect the things you didn't tolerate. Those things are clearly laid out in Scripture. So here's a special offer. If you've never been in touch with Grace to you before, we'll send you a free copy of Divine Design. Just ask us and it'll be on the way. Yes it will, and this is a helpful book for newlyweds as well as for couples who have been married for decades. Again, we will send you a free copy of John's book called Divine Design if it's your first time contacting us.

Get in touch today. The number here, 800-55-GRACE and our website, GTY.org. Divine Design looks at how your marriage can honor the Lord and be a continual source of joy. It answers questions like what does God expect from husbands and wives?

How can I best serve my spouse? And how can I raise my kids to follow the Lord? Again, Divine Design is our gift to you if you've never contacted us before. Just call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE or go to the website GTY.org. And while you're at GTY.org, make sure you take advantage of the thousands of free resources that are there meant to help you better understand God's Word. You can read our blog or download any of John's sermons or read daily devotionals and much more.

To tap into those resources, go to GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Keep in mind you can watch Grace To You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378 or check your local listings for Channel and Times. And then be here Monday when John continues his study, The Fulfilled Family, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.