Dr. Joel Beeke discusses the Puritan view of marriage, which is more biblical and focused on a close, loving relationship between husband and wife in comparison to the traditional view that considered sex within marriage as a necessary evil. According to the Puritans, the three purposes of marriage are procreation, restraining lust, and providing mutual assistance and comfort. They believed that marriage is the most important foundational relationship in society, as it influences the family, church, nation, and world. Mutual submission in marriage refers to both the husband and wife submitting to each other under the authority of God, with the husband being the head of the wife and the wife submitting to the husband in the Lord. The Puritan view of marriage encourages husbands and wives to focus on serving each other and carrying out their duties in a God-glorifying manner.

It's great to be with you all. And my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed doing this marriage seminar a few years ago. And it seems like it's grown bigger and younger, which is great. And what I'm called upon to do is to take the wisdom, the wisdom of the Puritans who wrote 29 books on marriage, And I'm going to distill that and try to communicate that to you in four addresses because they were light years ahead of our society, partly because they were so biblical on the subject of marriage. I want to just read one verse to you because Scott already read Ephesians 5, 22, I think you started out with, didn't you?

Yeah, I want to read just verse 21. Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Let's pray. Gracious God, we ask for thy help now as we seek to expound a variety of principles tonight and tomorrow to help ourselves and these dear couples to establish and build and continue to build ever better God glorifying marriages, incorim deo marriages, marriages lived in the face of God, marriages that bring honor to thee and happiness as we just heard to one another and our lights on the hill and salt in the earth for society in general. Lord we pray that our marriages will be so bright, so loving, so joyous, so Christ-centered, so God-glorifying, so word-based, that even the world would sit up and say, they have something I want to have.

So help us, Lord, as we expound now what the Puritans have to teach us and grant that it would be very usable material for us to digest and then to prayerfully implement. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Alright, so we just passed out an outline. You can see where I'm going here. I wanna do scriptural mutual obedience tonight with three thoughts.

Mutual obedience of submission, that's Ephesians 5.21, mutual obedience to Christ's church principle, a bit shorter because of what Scott already said here, but I think there's some important things to say that the Puritans have to teach us here, and then mutual obedience to the covenantal principle, which is the second great principle of scripture. You find it in Malachi 2.14 to use as a pattern, an overarching pattern for marriage, that you actually covenant your lives to one another as you covenant yourself to God who covenants himself to you. And then tomorrow, the Puritans really divided up all the practical stuff on marriage into three sections. Mutual duties, that's my first address tomorrow. And then the duties of the wife, that's my second address tomorrow.

And then the duties of the husband, third address. So In the Puritan mind, the word duties was not a bad word, it was a very good word. Because you have to know your duties and then you have to do your duties if you're really going to live to the glory of God and live marriage as he designed it. So that it brings you also genuine happiness in the process. So first then, a couple introductory remarks that very, very few people realize.

When you think of the Puritans, okay, I'm talking now about this latter half of the 16th century movement all the way through the 17th century, spilling over a little bit into the 18th century, about 150 years, a movement of great spiritual vitality in which men and women under the leadership of wise pastors wanted to purify their lives, wanted to live out of pure worship of God, pure daily life, pure marriages, purity everywhere. That 150 year period of so much zeal for God, the Puritans said we've got to be white hot flames for the glory of God. What do you think of them when you think of marriage? What do you think of them when you think of sex in marriage? See, most people would say, oh, they're prudish, they're killjoys.

This is what you hear out in the street, always said by people who haven't read the Puritans. You read the Puritans, there is None of that. The Puritans are the most happy, joyful people because they're the most biblical people following the Lord's instructions on how to live in every area of life, including marriage, that I believe, I have my PhD in church history, so I've studied church history. I believe that I've ever lived on the face of the earth. So when it comes to marriage, the Puritan purpose was just very simple.

We've got to follow the Bible. We got to follow the kind of principle Scott Brown just sent out from three different sections of scripture, and they went all over the Bible for their teaching, and they said if you follow the Bible, you will have a truly happy marriage, and you'll have loving sex in marriage to the glory of God. So instead of being prudish and frowning on sex in marriage, it was exactly the opposite. And what most people don't realize is that even in the ancient church, some of the ancient church fathers already, prior to the beginnings of Roman Catholicism in the 5th or 6th century, had already said that Sex within marriage was a necessary evil, so that you can procreate, because that's your duty. And God forgive me that I had sex to do that.

Augustine, the great church father Augustine, had so much struggle with the lust of the flesh that he even yielded to this. That sex within marriage wasn't just pure and God glorifying, but there was something evil in it. Now, we can make it evil by our sinful thoughts and our sinful actions. But you see, it was the Puritans who came along, the very first major group in church history, who said, marriage is exalted, marriage is honorable, and sex is to the glory of God within marriage when it's done rightly. And it's a due benevolence, is their language, picking up on Paul, that you owe to one another.

So It's hard for us to realize this, but for 1, 500 years of church history all the way up to the Reformation, there was not really developed a robust biblical view of the beauties and the glory and the honor of marriage. In fact, for all those 1, 500 years, if you were really godly, you were really holy, you would ask God that you could rise above the lust of the flesh, and that meant that You don't get married at all. And then you're a little bit more spiritual than the next guy. And that's how this whole idea that priests can't get married arose. It arose in that context.

And so this is crazy. And the Reformers began to realize it. Now the reformers in the 16th century, they're hammering out all the major doctrines, right? They're revisiting worship. What is pure worship?

They're working with justification by faith alone. They're working with sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, sola scrista, sola deo gloria. They're too busy hammering out all these new doctrines, cleansing the church, purifying the church on the major doctrines to deal with all the practical applications. It's the Puritans who come along sitting on the reformers' shoulders who say this, we are thoroughly reformed in our theology, every jot and tittle, we agree with everything the reformers said, but we want to know now how do you practice that? How do you practice that in your marriage?

How do you practice that in your work? How do you practice that in your interrelationships with others? How do you practice that in the community of the church? And so, I mean, let's take the three greatest magisterial reformers, just a moment. Martin Luther, the Lutheran wing, Ulrich Zwingli, founder really of the Reformed church, and John Calvin, second generation organizer, systematizer of the theology of the Reformation.

All three of them got married. All three of them, by the sheer grace of God, had wonderful marriages. But all three of them got married for totally wrong reasons. I mean, Luther, he emptied a nunnery, and Katie was the only one left, and well, he said to Katie, what am I supposed to do with you? And she said, well, why don't you marry me?

And he, that was so funny, he told his friends, he said, you know this woman thinks I should marry her, and they said, well, maybe you should, Martin, you'd make the pope angry. He goes, well yeah, that's a pretty good reason. Katie, will you marry me? I mean, but Katie was a wonderful woman and they had a godly, beautiful marriage. Luther actually did write a couple sermons on marriage.

I'll give him credit for that. Zwingli comes along and he's kind of sickly and lonely and his friend said, you know, you need a wife. So he hears about this widow, Anna Reinhardt, and he just marries her to satisfy his needs and she's just a wonderful, God-fearing woman, and they have a wonderful marriage. Calvin comes along. He's got diseases raging through his body, like 20-some diseases, And his friend said, you need a good woman physician, so you better get married.

Sort of like his wing leg. And they bring him a kind of an aristocratic woman, and he can't handle all this high class stuff. And he goes, no, this woman's not for me. And then, well, Edel had Deborah, a widow, but just a really God-fearing woman. He knew, he stayed in their house, he saw how godly she was.

He married her because she could meet his needs and give him health. Wrong reason. Side benefit maybe. Wonderful marriage by the grace of God. Only nine years though before she died.

And Calvin was so upset when she died, he said, I can scarcely go on. I force myself to discipline myself to go on with the work of the Lord. That's what he wrote to his dear friends. So much for the cold Calvin. Now the Puritans come along and they take everything the Reformers said about all the doctrines and they apply it, uses, uses, uses is their word.

How do you do it, What are our duties? So they write 29 books on marriage. 29 books. It took a lot to write a book in those days because you have to do all the type. I mean, you just write a book and publish it or I have self-publishing team behind you.

This is huge. So James LaBelle, an Orthodox Presbyterian minister from Massachusetts and myself, we got these 29 books And we read them and we collaborated and he did even more work on it than I did, but we put together a book on living in a godly marriage that summarizes what these 29 books say. And as we read these books, we realized as we read them, this is revolutionary. These Puritans are so far above and beyond where we're at. And really embracing and living out consciously, intentionally, every day a biblical view of marriage.

Now somehow post-Puritan, 18th, 19th, 20th century, the church has pretty much forgotten this as well. Now there's a number of books on marriage now because marriage is in trouble in so many quarters, right? But I was thinking about my parents. My parents never had, they're godly people, they never had one minute of instruction from the church or any book that they knew of when they grew up on marriage. So you're in a blessed age.

There are a lot of good books on marriage. But I want to just suggest to you this weekend, I hope you never forget it, that some of the very best stuff ever written on marriage was written in the 17th century. And it's my burden to prove that to you. And that you will leave here on Saturday night and say, wow, I really want to have a biblical marriage because that's a truly happy, God glorified marriage. So think about the negative view of marriage of most of church history and then I want to present you now, this is still my introduction, I want to present you now with just a few definitions that the Puritans gave of marriage.

Here's Richard Baxter. "'Tis a mercy to have a faithful friend who loves you entirely, to whom you may open your mind and communicate all your affairs, and tis a mercy to have so near a friend who will also be a helper to your soul and stir you up in all the graces of God." That according to Baxter is what marriage is. Totally positive. John Dodd and Robert Cleaver, by the way, all the names I'll be mentioning in these four talks are Puritans, They would co-author books as two Puritan ministers. They co-authored a book on marriage and they put it this way, thy wife is ordained for man like a little zor, a city of refuge to fly to in all its troubles, and there's no peace of conscience comparable unto her, there's no piece comparable unto her but the piece of conscience.

That's an interesting one. So the Puritans maintain that the highest relationship in life is between you and God. But right under that, you see, next to it, comparable to it, but just under it, is a relationship of husband and wife. John Downey in his book on marriage says, God is the institute or a marriage. He gave the wife to the husband to be not his servant, but his helper, his counselor, and his comforter.

Now John Cotton didn't do so well. He's the one definition that, Yeah, this is not very good. He said, women are creatures without which there's no comfortable living for man. Well, that's true. It's true of them, what is prone to be said of governments, that even bad ones are better than none.

That's not very good. He goes on to say, though some call them a necessary evil, I call them a necessary good. Well, he's starting to redeem himself a bit, but. But you see, What the Puritans did is they came along, they took the three purposes of marriage, you know the three purposes that were, the Reformers had established already, and the early Puritans took those purposes as well. Number one was procreation.

The main purpose of marriage was to have children, bring them up for the glory of God. Number two was to restrain your lusts so you don't burn, as Paul talks about. And then number three was to assist each other and comfort each other and help each other along spiritually and the natural things of life and enjoy each other and be real companions, best friends, etc. Now as the Puritans studied Genesis 2 that God gives to Adam, Eve, guess what? They began to realize that number three should really be number one.

That the two should be one, and they're to be there to help each other live to the glory of God and give joy to each other. And that that is even preeminent over procreation and having children. And that where you have a really good marriage, where husband and wife have this priority relationship of all social relationships and the Puritans said it this way, they worked backwards, they said the world is influenced by the nations, The nations are influenced by the church. The church is influenced by various institutions, but the main fundamental institution of society is a God-glorifying marriage. So as a marriage goes, then working back in reverse, as a marriage goes, so goes the family.

As the family goes, so goes the church. As the church goes, so goes the nation. As the nation goes, so goes the world. So marriage is the most important foundational relationship there is in all of society, and it's to be lived to the glory of God. So what they did by the 1640s, by the time the Westminster Assembly wrote the Westminster standards, and you can see it in chapter 24.

Number three is catapulted to number one. Of course, under God still, but it's still number one. The mutual society, the mutual respect, the mutual submission, the mutual love, the mutual joy, the mutual help in all things between a husband and wife so that you can both live to the glory of God. So that, and many Puritans talk about this in their sermons, on the day of judgment, when you and your wife are both standing on the right side of Christ as sheep saved by grace, Your wife can look at you and say to Jesus, because of this man standing here, I have been washed better by the word and I've been made more fit for this glorious inheritance because he's been my spiritual leader. He's washed me and cleansed me and nurtured me by the word of God.

Thank you, Lord, for bringing this husband to me because he's helped me in my spiritual journey. And I stand ready to spend eternity with you, Lord, because I've been sanctified by this man. And the husband can look at his wife and say, Lord, because of this woman and her love and her respect and her response to me and her wise counsel, I stand ready to spend eternity with you more than I would have been had it not been for this woman. You see there's a spiritual end to all of this. In a good marriage, in a good marriage, both of you are serving one another so thoroughly in every area of life that the two relationship of oneness makes both people more godly, more spiritual, more faithful, more humble, more fill in all the graces and all the marks of grace, than you would if you just lived alone.

That's the Puritan ideal. So just the opposite of the first 15 years of church history, it's flipped around now. And now we have this close, loving relationship in which No longer is sex looked at like a double chocolate cake. It tastes so good it must be sinful. But now, you look at each other's husband and wife and say, sex outside of marriage, yes, that's sinful.

But sex within marriage is just a wonderful gift of God. It's the cherry on top of the cake of marriage that just makes me rejoice and love my spouse all the more. So the purposes of marriage are turned around by the Puritans. And what they teach is that that wonderful, wonderful, godly relationship between husband and wife will help you through this life to live godly, but also for the life to come. Now, it does mean, however, in a good marriage, that your spouse is number two, because God is number one.

And you are number three. You are number three. I often say to young couples when I marry them, and this is typical Puritan material, where both people put God as number one and put each other as number two and themselves as number three, you're almost guaranteed a good marriage. You really are. I had a woman in my church who, it's one of the most remarkable conversions I've ever seen.

She was upset with her husband, wasn't spending enough time with her, she said. And so he said, well, what do you want me to do? She said, well read something to me. She couldn't read very well, she liked it when he read. He said, what shall I read?

Well, she said, there's a sermon sitting on the end table there from your church, why don't you just read that? It was a sermon by Octavius Winslow, My times are in thy hands. As he read that sermon, she was convicted of her sin. As he read further, she was brought to Christ. And when he finished the sermon, she was weeping, and she looked at him and she said, you know, all our married life, all these years, I put all the burdens and all the expectations that you had to please me in every way.

I put all those burdens on your shoulders. But now, my dear husband, you're number two and Jesus is number one. And now I can enjoy the marriage much more. I'll actually be a better wife to you when you're number two than when you're number one because when you're number one, I expect you to meet all my needs and no man or no woman can meet all of each other's needs, only God can. See, that was the Puritan way of speaking.

So John Winthrop, for example, the New England Puritan elder and businessman, he wrote in a letter to his wife shortly after he married her, you are The chiefest of all comforts to me in this life under the hope of salvation. Under the hope of salvation. All right. Let's look then at this whole concept of mutual obedience of submission. So often when we think of Ephesians 5, verse 21 is left out.

Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. I'll be talking tomorrow about how wives are to submit to their husbands. That's a special subcategory. But what I'm talking about tonight is the duty of mutual submission, the duty of mutual submission. So what Paul is talking about here is we are to submit ourselves to one another in the fear of God.

So, husband and wife agree, agree that everything The Bible says about marriage, they will commit to with each other and they'll do that in the fear of God. And the best definition I know of the fear of God is that you esteem the smiles of God to be of greater value than the smiles of men and you esteem the frowns of God to be of greater value than the frowns of men. In other words, God is big and people are small. And so when you really live in the fear of God as husband and as wife, you're really putting God, number one, and you're saying to each other, always, as you walk down life's pathway, hand in hand, behind the Lord, Lord, what do you want me to do? What do you want us to do?

So there's a mutual submission. So in the chain of authority in the Bible, not only here but all throughout the Bible, God is supreme authority, right? If you draw a line down, he gives all power and authority into the hands of his son. His son, through his spirit, the spirit of Christ, writes the Bible. He's the ultimate author.

And The authority relationship of every relationship in life, every relationship in life, is structured by authority. Puritan saw authority too, by the way, as a very good word, not a negative word. And then, of course, you have all these branches in Scripture, right? The husband's the head of the wife, the parents are the head of the children, employers the head of the employee, government, political leaders over citizens, schoolteacher over students, office bearers over church members, and so on. And so that structure, you see, that structure is there.

But what that means is in the wife-husband relationship, if the wife submits to the husband, she does so, as the verse goes on to say, or the passage goes on to say, only in the Lord. In other words, the Lord is the highest. If you ask your wife to go rob a bank tomorrow, she better disobey you because the Lord doesn't want her to rob a bank right You encourage her to do any sin your wife had better look at you and say, honey, I can't do that with a clear conscience because this is against the Bible. And that's a gift of God that she says that to you. It keeps you from sinning by making her sin.

So the Lord's authority is always above you as a husband, which means that you are to talk together about things and you have mutual submission, submitting yourselves one to another, verse 21, in the fear of God. So what that means is that we are to put ourselves into two positions. First, the Puritan said, each of us has been assigned a place by God, not so much for our own good as for the good of others. So not only the woman submits to the man, but we both submit to the Lord so both of our lives, all of our lives, should be oriented towards service and duty. And therefore the apostle, says William Perkins, describes the church or body of Christ as being so composed by God that each one may care for one another, 1 Corinthians 12, and thereby serve not his own interests, but the common good.

That's in society in general. But in marriage, it's focused on each other. You're serving the common good. You're looking and saying, how can I serve my wife? How can I serve my husband?

How can we submit ourselves to one another under God? And second, the Puritans would say, having these places assigned to us by God, we are each husbands and wives responsible to be faithful to Him, to be faithful to Him and His calling to us in marriage. Which means, and this is a big Puritan insight that I've often thought this, if the church today would grasp the principle I'm about to tell you, 90% of the marital difficulties between husband and wife would disappear. And here it is. Husband, It's not your business how your husband treats you.

It's your business to show him the respect, the reverence, the submission that you are called to do. Now I'm not talking here about extreme cases of physical abuse or intense verbal abuse. Then other people need to become involved, it's another ball game. But I'm talking about normal problems in marriage. I've been doing marital counseling for 47 years.

And I cannot recall a single instance where both people were focused only on their own duties, where there was any substantial serious difficulties in their marriage. It's always, yeah, but she's not treating me right. Yeah, but he's not treating me right. I can't respond well because, no, no, no, the Puritan said. You have your duties, husband.

You have your duties, wife. You do your own duties. And don't look across the fence at how your wife is treating you So In this context of mutual submission Then you say the Puritans go on and talk about the rest of Ephesians 5 about the Christ-church relationship and how that is predominant in marriage. This is, as Scott already said, the greatest blueprint in all of scripture for marriage. And basically, the way they expounded it was a fourfold task for you men.

I'll do it briefly here. On verse 25, if you look at verse 25 a moment, husbands love your wives even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her. You're to love your wife absolutely. Marriage is not a 50-50 thing, the Puritans would say. It's a 100-100 thing.

You give yourself absolutely to your wife for 100%. He gave himself for it. There's a wonderful story of a young Puritan couple and they were kind of doting on each other. They were newlyweds and the pastor, Those were the days when pastors could go to people and kind of rebuke them and exhort them without fearing repercussions. And so a pastor went to him and said, you know, it's wonderful to see you married, wonderful to see you happy, but you know, maybe it's wise to restrain yourself a little bit in public.

And oh, the man was devastated. He's a very tender soul. He went home, he started searching the scriptures, and he came across this verse, and Christ gave himself for her. He says, because the minister said, you know, maybe, that was wrong of the minister, but he said, maybe you're making an idol of your wife, you better search your conscience. Maybe you're putting your wife before the Lord.

But he said, Christ gave, Christ gave his blood, I haven't given my blood for my wife. I don't love my wife enough So he went back to the pastor and these are the days when pastors were even willing to receive rebuke from their parishioners And he said pastor look here at Ephesians 5 25. I don't think I love my wife enough. The pastor looked at him, looked at him, he said, you know what, you're right, go home and love your wife. You love her absolutely.

As Christ loved the church, absolutely. Number two, you are to love her, the Puritan said, purposely, look at verse 26, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with a washing of water by the word, that he might present to himself a glorious church. Now I want to ask you men, also you newly wedded men, how many of you can say, raise your hand, this is why I married my wife that I might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word to present her on the judgment day as a glorious church to God. I didn't expect any hands. But this is actually why we are to marry our wives.

It's an other centered reason. It's not a real love for her in her eternal destiny and her preparation to meet God in the righteousness and peace of Christ. So the Puritans said, purposely, purposely, in marriage, you're calling, men, you're calling. It's to sow water your wife, sanctify her, cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, " that's in daily family worship, right? As well as your whole way of life.

"...so that you might present her to God on the day of judgment, a glorious church." So you love her absolutely, you love her purposely. Number three, you love her realistically. Notice what verse 27 says, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So in other words, as you wash your wife by the water of the word, you realize that just like you, she also has spots and wrinkles, that is she has faults and flaws, that's what it means figuratively. And so you love her realistically, You don't expect her to be a total angel.

You love her realistically. You overlook some of the minor flaws. If there's some serious sins, you've got to deal with that, we'll talk about that tomorrow. But you don't expect too much because you married a sinner and you're a sinner. There's no one else to marry but a sinner in this world.

So don't expect perfection. And then the Puritan said, don't only love your wife absolutely, purposely, realistically, but also sacrificially. Versus 28 and 29, you're to love her the way you love your own body. And since she's a tender, tender spouse, you're to compare it like a tender spot in your body. Like say your eye, right?

You get something in your eye, what do you do? Well, You go to the mirror and you try to get it out. You don't say, oh well, I realize you got a problem. I'll deal with you two days from now. No, you take care of it right away.

When your wife is in trouble, you sit down with her ASAP and you work with it and you treat her, her emotions, her affections, her troubles, her trials, her problems, her burdens, you treat it like you would your own body. You love her sacrificially. And then, for you women, you see, when your husband hopefully loves you like that or even close to like that, the whole problem of submission ought to be easy work because he really loves you. But even if he doesn't love you like that, you see, the Puritans are saying, you've got to do your duty and you've got to show respect and submission and reverence back to Him. And this is not a matter of hierarchy in the Puritan, the Puritan stressed that as well, but it's a matter of function, it's a matter of function.

This is the way God designed man, this is the way God designed women. And so it works together. When it works rightly and well, you see, one of the Puritans said this, God created man and woman spiritually equal. When both fell into sin, she did not become more degenerate than he did from the primitive goodness. Yet in marriage one of the two must have final authority, since differences will arise and so the one must give way and apply unto the other.

This God and nature lays upon the man." So it's a voluntary submission on your part, and we'll talk more about that under women's duties tomorrow. Number three is mutual obedience to the covenantal principle. Mutual obedience to the covenantal principle. What does that mean? Well, if you turn with me to Malachi 2, 14, Malachi 2 verse 14, we have that second major pattern for marriage.

The pattern of covenant. 2, 14, the Lord has been witnessed between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously. Yet she is thy companion and the wife of thy covenant." Covenant. So God covenants with His people. They respond by covenanting themselves back to God.

God covenants to give us His Son. They respond by giving their whole lives back to God. And what God is saying is that a parallel covenant happens between husband and wife, where you both covenant, you husband covenant and you wife covenant, that you will follow all the principles of Scripture to develop a good marriage. You will do the will of God, you will walk in the Lord's ways, you will walk in the fear of God, and you will follow the Bible. Bible is still the best marriage textbook on the market because it's an infallible one.

You will follow the principles of scripture in your marriage. Now, Scott went to three places in his last talk, which I thought was interesting and helpful. The Puritans, of course, in writing these whole books, they went to many more places. J.I. Packer put it this way, the Puritans went to Genesis for the institution of marriage, to Ephesians for its full meaning, to Leviticus for its hygiene, to Proverbs for its management, to several New Testament books for its ethic, and to Esther, Ruth, and the Song of Solomon for illustrations and exhibitions of the ideal.

So they ransacked the scriptures. And when they spoke about this covenant principle, here's what they meant. And this is the words of Edmund Morgan, who studied Puritan view of marriage. He's a 20th century writer. He says this, speaking of the Puritan view, Every proper marriage since the first was founded on a covenant to which the free and voluntary consent of both parties were necessary.

Since time began no man and woman had ever been allowed to fix the terms upon which they would agree to be husband and wife. God had established the rules of marriage when He solemnized the first one in paradise. And He's made no changes in them since then. So the covenant of marriage in the Puritan mind became a promise of both parties to each other and to God to obey all those rules Scripture lays down about marriage without condition and without reservation. Which means that you say tonight, you renew your vow as it were in your own conscience and say, Lord God, help me to study the scriptures about marriage and I commit myself to following all that scripture says about marriage as a response to Thy covenant faithfulness to me in the spiritual marriage that Thou art preparing me for in everlasting glory with the Lord Jesus Christ.

And you say that as wife as well. So this is the covenantal principle. You're going to follow God, and husband and wife are going to promise to perform all the duties that God has assigned to each. And what that means in the Puritan mind is that when you actually said, I do, in your marriage ceremony, that the Lord himself was the witness that you have entered the marriage covenant, and the ring you received on your finger, and you gave to the finger of your spouse is a promise that you are entering into that covenant and you are swearing an oath. The Lord has been witnessed between me, thee, and the wife of thy youth, that she is thy companion and the wife of thy covenant." So one peer can put it this way, marriage was instituted by God, blessed by God for those who honor Him in it, and it is also witnessed by God, and therefore you covenant to obey God and his rules for marriage.

So marriage is not only a covenant between husband and wife, it's a covenant with God which he witnesses and seals to you in your marriage. And that results in this. Here's the Council of Another Puritan. This is a little longer quote, but it's a good one. Your marriage stands not upon what man and wife shall agree upon, that there may be peace and quietness.

But it goes deeper. It stands upon what order God has prescribed for you to be obeyed in your respective places as husband and wife, so that you must look unto God's wisdom, God's order for household government, and not what may seem right and good in your own eyes. You must turn to Scripture. Each must keep their place, their order, their heavenly order to which God has called them in the marriage. The husband be made the head and the wife resembled to the body.

May the head of a natural body be turned upside down? Can the whole person so continue and live well in that estate? How unseemly and unfitting this is. No more can a body of household government be in peaceable or blessed condition if God's order is inverted. Now, two caveats here, and then I'm going to close very soon.

Two caveats. First, the Puritans said that since both husband and wife have obligations to fulfill in the marriage covenantally, neither is to wait for the other. Instead, each must seek to be faithful before the Lord, irrespective, here it comes again, of how the other is treating him or her. So William Gooch, Scott Brown and I worked on that. William Gooch has these incredible statements.

I don't have them right here, but I can almost repeat them verbatim. It says to women, you know, your husband may be a son of Belial. He may just be obnoxious and arrogant and rude and crude and ugly and just detestable in so many ways. But you're to treat him like he's the most handsome, kind, loving prince in all the world, because this is the man God has given you, and you've covenanted to give yourself away to him. And then, when you read that, you think, wow, the poor woman.

But then he turns around and says to the man, you know, you may have an argumentative wife, she may be like the woman with the dripping roof in the attic that Proverbs speaks about. She may be just a pain in the neck all the time. She may be homely, she may be unthoughtful, she may be self-centered, but you're to treat her like she's the most lovely princess in all the world because this is the woman that God has given to you and you've covenanted to love her the way Christ loves the church. It's that same principle, you see. It's not your business how your spouse treats you.

You are called to do your duty covenantally before God. And then second, neither the husband nor the wife is to define his or her rights by the other's duties. The husband may be tempted to demand his wife's total submission and therefore behave as a tyrant, while the wife may be tempted to demand her husband's radical sacrificial love. Such demands are sinful in themselves. Neglecting one's own duties is the root of the demand that your spouse fulfill hers.

Happy, happiness in marriage is not bound up with what your spouse does, but with fulfilling your own duties willingly and cheerfully because you do them as to the Lord. And see, sex itself, just the Puritans would say, is a beautiful illustration of that. If you go to have sex with your wife and you're focused on you getting the satisfaction, your sex won't be all that great. But if you really are both focused on your duty to please the other, your sex will be far greater. And now expand that to all of marriage.

When you're really in marriage to please the other. It just overwhelms each partner, how much they're getting loved, how much they're getting respected. And so that's the way to live marriage. God first, each other second, and yourself third. So, in conclusion, the Puritans are teaching us this.

Marriage is a tender flower planted by God. If we neglect our duties towards it, Our flower will soon wither and perhaps even die. But if we treat marriage the way God tells us to treat it, and we're thankful to Him, and we live out of the Christchurch principle and out of the covenantal principle, we will be committed to mutual obedience, mutual obedience to God. And then our marriage will be beautiful, as one Puritan put it, then we will preserve marriage's enduring beauty, fruitfulness, satisfaction, pleasure, and honor, all for the glory of God. Let's pray.

Gracious God, we thank you so much, so very much for this time together tonight. And we pray that as Scott and I have tried to lay the foundation of marriage tonight, that we will be able to flesh that out tomorrow in many more specifics that will be helpful to every married couple here. Help us to learn also from these wise soul physicians of the past who knew so well how to take scripture and apply it to each of us in our respective duties in every area of life and help us to do that tomorrow, especially in the area of the duties of husband and wife. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.