Marriage is one of the single greatest journeys any of us will ever take. It is capable of taking us to places of emotional and relational and physical and spiritual fulfillment that are hard to reach by any other means. That doesn’t mean people not so called are stuck incomplete. God calls and cares for them in special ways that go beyond what marriage can offer. But for those called to it, it can be absolutely incredible. At the same time, marriage is hard. It is hard enough that most marriages don’t make it for the lifetime the man and woman promised to each other at the altar. Everyone needs a little help and encouragement along the way. For the next few weeks, we are going to be doing just that in a new teaching series called, The Journey of a Lifetime. In this first part, we are going to identify the primary problem besetting our relationships. Let’s talk about it!

Identifying the Problem

Most of the stories we heard growing up ended with “happily ever after.” And, if the story involved a prince or princess in any way, what was it that likely preceded that famous tag line? A wedding. The characters fell in love, they got married, and they lived—say it with me—“happily ever after.” But did they? I mean, what happened after the credits rolled and the happy couple started to discover that one of them snores and one of them hogs all the covers. One prefers to sleep right in the middle of the bed surrounded by 8,000 pillows, while the other wants just a sheet and a pillow that’s only a step above putting a piece of paper under your head. One showers in the morning and the other at night. One is a morning person, and the other doesn’t honestly function until after the second pot—not cup—of coffee has been consumed. One is content with a bit of chaos, while the other likes to have everything neatly in order. One is always right and the other is never wrong. In other words, they start to find out that marriage is hard. Sometimes it’s really hard. And somewhere along the way, they are tempted to just throw up their hands and walk away because something created by God for our good and His glory couldn’t possibly be intended to be this hard. 

Now, marriage is not a journey that everyone experiences. Some are called by God on another path that is equally capable of honoring Him, of seeing His plans to advance His kingdom through their life fully realized, and of seeing them become fully who He made them to be. But most folks are called to this journey of a lifetime, and all of those who are occasionally need some help and encouragement along the way. Fortunately, the Scriptures offer us a lot of both. Some of it is direct and clear. Some of it is more indirect and requires a bit of application to tease out the full wisdom of what it has to say. All of it was intended by God for our good if we will take the time and do the work to receive it. Well, this morning, and for the next four weeks after this one, we are going to endeavor together to do some of that work in a brand-new teaching series called The Journey of  a Lifetime. We aren’t going to look at every single thing the guys who contributed to the Scriptures have to say about marriage. We aren’t even going to look at all of the most famous “marriage passages.” But we are going to look at several ideas that are crucial to understand if we are going to get marriage right. 

Over the course of this journey, we are going to start by defining our terms. We’ll talk today about the primary challenge we face in marriage, and next week about what God’s intention for marriage was in the very beginning. From there, we’ll shift gears to get more practical. We’ll explore some key points we have to get right in our own hearts and minds if we are going to get the absolute most out of our marriage relationships. Now, just as a disclaimer here, getting our hearts and minds around all of these things isn’t going to be a cure-all for anything that might be ailing you in your own marriage. It may be that you need help from someone specifically trained and equipped to walk you both through those issues, and that’s always a good and okay thing to get. But if you will take it all thoroughly to heart and put it into practice, I do believe it will make a difference for you in truly profound ways. 

Well, if we are going to understand how to fix something that is broken—and all of us have places in our marriages that are broken to some degree—we first need to understand what the foundational problem is. When it comes to marriage, we could point to all sorts of different things that are problematic in our relationship. One partner is overly harsh with the other. The other is constantly insecure and handling that by tearing the one down. Maybe one of you has some bad habits that are causing the other constant stress and frustration. One likes to check out while the other gets too involved in everything. There could be unresolved issues from your past that are working themselves out through your present. It may be something as simple as personality differences. The list of things that contribute to strife and tension in our marriages is long indeed. Yet there is one thing that undergirds all of these different things. It is the fount from which all of these other problems spring. Until we get our head and heart wrapped around this most foundational problem, we’ll only ever be putting band-aids on a failing dam. Those might hold for a while, but a great collapse is coming. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me right near the beginning in Genesis 3. 

Genesis 3 follows on the heels of Genesis 1-2 because that’s how numbers work, but more importantly, Genesis 1-2 walk us through the creation of the world and everything in it. God spoke creation into existence in a grand and glorious display of His power, His might, His creativity, and His joy. More than even that, creation bore the stamp of His goodness on every single atom He breathed into existence. And where the story starts cosmically in Genesis 1, Genesis 2 brings us in close to see God get His hands dirty in order to create the first man, and then, once He makes clear that nothing else in creation was designed to satisfy our need for relationships, the first woman. All of this is to His great glory and it’s good. So very good. But as we turn the page to Genesis 3, the beautiful and harmonious soundtrack suddenly turns sinister. 

You see, God made people to be His image bearers. Nothing else in creation was given the same honor. Being an image bearer of God means we were created to share in many of His traits. Not His divine abilities, of course, but His personal ones—His creativity and intelligence and relationalness, to name a few. Another of the traits He shared with us that was so very important to Him was the ability to love freely. This particular gift was one of the most precious He gave us because it allowed us to live in the loving relationship with Him He created us to enjoy in the first place. It also enabled us to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. But, the ability to love freely comes with a catch. It is a catch that spelled the potential doom of His beautiful, perfect creation right out of the gate. If we are going to love another person freely, we have to be able to have decided not to love them. That is, to reject them. If we are going to be able to love God freely, then, we had to have been able to have chosen other than Him as the object of our love and devotion. 

Now, we can have a whole debate another time about whether or not God should have done that. That’s irrelevant at the moment. What is beyond debate—because it’s in the text—is that a former servant of God who at some point in eternity past rejected His authority and fashioned himself as the chief antagonist of God and all He created set about exploiting this catch in hopes of bringing the whole project of creation crashing to the ground as a grand, failed experiment that God never should have embarked on in the first place. Just listen to how this all went down. 

“Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You can’t eat from any tree in the garden”?’ [As a point of fact, God hadn’t actually said that at all.] The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, “You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.”’ [As an additional point of fact, God hadn’t said that either; but while the serpent’s error was intentional, the woman’s was not.] ‘No! You will not die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” 

It’s hard to overstate the tragedy of this moment. That first man and woman made the willful decision to reject God’s authority in favor of a promise of their own autonomy that never actually materialized. It never does. Instead, they immediately became enslaved to another force, a new force in the scope of creation: sin. And because sin causes shame, they immediately hid from one another. One of the principles we see affirmed in the Scriptures time and time again is that nothing will stay hidden forever. Eventually the one who sees everything will pull back the curtain on our sin and reveal to at least us if not a great deal more of the world the nature of our sin. Adam and Eve had thought they could hide from themselves when they became aware of their nakedness, immediately undoing the beautiful intimacy they had once shared with each other as a kind of wedding gift from their Creator. In their shame, they even tried to hide from God. Verse 8 now: “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”

The scene that unfolds from here is one of the funniest exchanges in the whole Bible, setting the bar really high for the rest of the book. With the couple trying in vain to hide from God, the God from whom nothing is hidden actually plays along at first. “So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.’” Now, I’ll grant you that we knew precious little of God at this point in human history, but surely we understood that we couldn’t actually hide from Him, right? Evidently not. 

Knowing things weren’t right any longer, God asks what has happened. “Then he asked, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?’” And where the man could have fessed up and maybe things might have gone differently, instead, he started pointing fingers at everyone else. “The man replied, ‘The woman you gave to be with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate.’” So, God turns His attention to the woman, and she similarly deflects. “And the woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.’” For its part, the serpent seems to have gone suddenly silent. We don’t hear any more of what it has to say. 

Now, if your Bible uses section headings like mine does, this next part may get its own section heading. It’s probably something like “The Curse,” or “Sin’s Consequences,” or something like that. And we tend to think about a curse as something active God does to punish us for our sins. That seems to be what God is doing in this next part at first glance. But a bit closer of an inspection reveals Him to be doing something both less active, but also more challenging for us than that. What we see in these next six verses is not God’s actively pronouncing punishments for the sin that had just occurred so much as He is simply describing—with a broken heart, no doubt—what the natural consequences of our choice would be. 

To the Serpent He gives a word of judgment, but also of hope for us. Verse 15 is sometimes called the protoevangelion, or the first good news. He plants a seed here that would one day grow into the Gospel we know and love. “So the Lord God said to the serpent: Because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal. You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life. I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” 

To the man, God describes the great futility sin would introduce to all of his work from then on. Our battle against futility still rages on today as we go to work to keep a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, and food in our bellies, only to have to wake up and do it all again tomorrow in a cycle that never seems to end. “And he said to the man, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, “Do not eat from it”: The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.” 

We can talk in more depth and detail about those curses another time—and indeed we have—but I want to draw your attention to what God says to the woman. I think something He says here speaks to this fundamental challenge facing our marriages we’ve been hinting at. He starts by acknowledging that our efforts to fulfill His command to be fruitful and multiply are going to be vastly more painful than they might have otherwise been. “He said to the woman: I will intensify your labor pains; you will bear children with painful effort.” We could debate all day exactly what that means, but this next part is what I really want you to catch. Listen to this: “Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.” 

Okay, what is this? Well, at first glance, someone might think, “Oh, she will desire her husband. That’s a good thing.” Yet while the Hebrew word being translated here can refer to that kind of desire, the context doesn’t point in that direction. Over in Genesis 4:7 when God is warning Cain against doing something foolish in his envious anger toward his brother, Abel, He described sin as desiring Cain using the same word we see here. Obviously, that’s not a reference to any kind of a marital desire. Sin’s desire was to dominate Cain’s life and rule over him, rendering him little more than a slave to its terrible whims. That idea better fits the context here. When God observes that the woman’s desire would be for her husband, He was speaking of her desire to dominate and rule over him. Women were going to seek to gain power over their husbands that could be wielded to their own advantage. But was this going to work? Not perhaps as often as they would like. “Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.” The idea of his ruling over her here is just what it sounds like. This is a domineering rule focused on the acquisition of power at her expense and to suit his own purposes for her. 

What God is describing here—and I really do want to emphasize that this was God’s describing the effects of sin going forward rather than actively cursing marriages forever with this particular flavor of brokenness—is that sin is going to break the fellowship and unity of husbands and wives. Instead of each partner working to sacrificially serve one another in pursuit of the goal of lifting each other up in the direction of becoming more fully who God made them to be, they were going to be divided from each other, with each pursuing their own desires at the other’s expense. No longer would there be this mutual lifting of one another, but instead a stepping on one another, a trampling of one another in order to get what we want most. And what we want most would not be primarily the good of the other, but the fulfillment of much baser, more selfish desires. Sure, those desires might intersect with the desires of the other, or we might decide to work together toward some larger wish fulfillment, but that would be merely a marriage of convenience, not of love and respect and covenantal faithfulness. 

Come on, can you think of a problem that two people might experience in their marriage journey that doesn’t have its roots described right here in this half of a verse? She wants what she wants. He wants what he wants. And the other is either a useful tool to get there or else an obstacle standing in the way. Tools simply get used to accomplish a job. They aren’t cherished. They may be much loved tools that are well cared for, but at the end of the day, they’re still just tools. And obstacles are just there for the clearing. If initial, gentle attempts are unsuccessful, there are always stronger measures that can be pursued. Or, if all else fails, we can just abandon that particular path and blaze a new one entirely. If you are married and are currently or have ever faced a challenge of some sort in your journey together, know well that above and before anything else, sin is the primary problem. When it comes to challenges in our marriages, sin is the primary problem. 

Think with me for a minute about what this means. There are two things that stand out above all the rest for me. The first is this, because when it comes to challenges in our marriages, sin is the primary problem, any attempt to tackle a challenge or navigate an obstacle or work through an issue that doesn’t involve addressing the sin that is lying at the root of the thing will ultimately fail in its effort. Whatever happens to be the matter at hand, either you or your partner or, as is far more often the case, both, have forgotten that your primary goal is to be lifting the other up in the direction of Christ by means of the love of Christ, and have started instead trying to pursue your own agenda with the other as either a tool or an obstacle. “Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.” When it comes to challenges in our marriages, sin is the primary problem. Unless and until we address this, we are missing the mark and the issue will persist. 

The other thing here that stands out so clearly in light of this truth about the challenges we face in our marriage journeys is this: If sin really is the primary problem, then the Gospel is the primary solution. Friends, the Gospel is the only thing that has ever proven to have any power to deal with sin in our lives and in the world around us. In fact part of the very core of the Gospel message is this problem we have been describing: We are sinners in need of saving. And in this passage—thinking about marriage, in this very half of a verse—we see the roots of this. Until we grapple with this fundamental problem—both cosmically, but also personally and relationally—we’ll keep trying our hand at solutions that don’t ever actually solve anything. Ever been there? 

But fortunately, the Gospel message doesn’t stop with conviction. It goes on from there to offer us a solution—the solution in fact. Yes, we are sinners in need of saving, and, yes, when it comes to challenges in our marriages, sin is the primary problem. But God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, and whoever believes in Him will not die, but will have everlasting life. The Gospel solution to sin is Jesus. Jesus came, lived a perfect life to show us what getting all of this right actually looks like, and then sacrificially laid down His life on our behalf, rising from the grave on the third day, such that if we are willing to place our faith in Him (a gift of trust that is entirely reasonably to give for a host of reasons we can talk about in more detail another time), He will extend to us the blessings of freedom from sin and a right relationship with God that He earned, transforming us from the inside out into the kind of people who can properly live with all the perks of His kingdom. And one of those perks is right relationships with the people around us; relationships that are no longer defined primarily by sin, but by grace and the covenantal love of Christ. 

In other words, although you may be facing some pretty intense challenges in your marriage relationship, there’s hope. There’s hope for redemption and restoration and reconciliation, all borne on the back of genuine repentance made possible by the empowering grace of God through Christ and by the work of the Holy Spirit. When it comes to challenges in our marriages, sin is the primary problem, and the Gospel is the primary solution. If you will both as husband and wife give yourself entirely to Christ, fully submitting to His command to love one another after the pattern of His own sacrificial love for you, you will give yourselves an incredible leg up on working through whatever the issues you have been dealing with happen to be. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that Jesus is a magic wand that will just make the problems go away. Depending on the nature and extent of the issues, there may be a very long journey yet from where you are to where you can be together in Christ, but the Gospel makes walking that path together a possibility that simply doesn’t exist without it. This path may involve a number of challenging conversations, ongoing repentance, a great deal of prayer for the Holy Spirit’s help in addressing the deep roots of selfishness in your individual hearts, a whole mountain of forgiveness that you will only be able to move one day’s work at a time, and more still than this. At times the path from here to there will seem daunting to the point that you aren’t even sure you have the strength to walk it. But if you will commit to taking one step at a time, doing the daily individual work you need to do to pursue Christ faithfully in your own life, the same Jesus who gave up His life to free you from the power of sin generally will make sure you never walk alone in this journey to free your marriage from the power of sin. When it comes to challenges in our marriages, sin is the primary problem. Jesus is the primary solution. 

So, what do you need to do in light of all of this? You need to decide first and foremost if you actually want to see the issues and challenges you are facing put behind you. You need to decide if you actually want to restore and strengthen your relationship. Nobody is going to force you to this end if you aren’t committed to walking it. But beyond that, you need to both recommit yourselves to following Jesus first and to living your life in light of that commitment. Okay, but what if only one of you is really willing to do that? Well, that’ll make things more difficult, there’s no way around that. But if you are the one who is willing, then you commit yourself faithfully to Christ living out of His love and His love alone toward your partner, and leave the rest to Him. Doing that doesn’t bring any guarantees of a positive outcome, but it makes the odds a whole lot better than both of you sticking with sin does. And, in the end, if you live your whole life in pursuit of Christ, then you are going to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” when it matters most. 

When it comes to challenges in our marriages, sin is the primary problem. When we are willing to acknowledge that and commit ourselves to the only solution that has ever proven itself able to actually solve anything, we have every reason for hope. May you lean together toward the hope of the Gospel, and set yourself on the path that leads to the life that is truly life.