In this piece we are going to be considering as briefly as we can that I am passionate about because I am a beneficiary of and God is committed to. We want to look at: The Strategic Intent of God for Marriage. That is why I opined from the beginning that I am passionate about this subject matter because I am a beneficiary of the institution of marriage, marriage has been a blessing in my life, marriage has been something that has multiplied me, grown me, improved me, and sharpened my focus. And so, if this looks like I am marketing marriage, then you are welcome to Marriage Marketing 101, read on and be blessed in Jesus’ name.
My wife told me sometimes ago that truly, gifts make one to have friends. There are things that happen to you, that can instigate excitement in you. When God looks at you, you that could be nobody in your own eyes, and gives you a woman, suddenly, you will be happy and feel important. David was a king, he was still feeling a sense of emptiness, and he longed to have Abigail for a wife. When Abigail came into his life, he began to feel like a king. So, I believe there is a man who has not been feeling like a king who needs a woman in his life. Let us examine together the book of Genesis chapter 6 from verse 1, see what the Bible says:
“Now it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, 2 that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose.”
There are many things loaded in those few verses. I believe we have read this portion of the Scripture, perhaps for many reasons, but we are reading it today from the angle of marriage. Bible says, “Where men began to multiply on the earth…” there was an increase in the population of the earth, “and daughters were born unto them” not just men as boys and male children, even female children, women were also plenty on the earth. Now, a time came when “The sons of God saw the daughters of men.” There are many theological approaches to and perspective to this very matter, but we will not go into the theology.
“The sons of God saw the daughters of men.” Even though the phrase looks harmless, the sons belong to God, the daughters belong to men, there was already an abnormality. And look at it again, the Bible says, “And they saw that they were beautiful.” There's nothing wrong with choosing a life partner on the basis that the person is beautiful, but that should not be; that is not the ideal. You know, we're looking at the strategic intent of God, that is not the primary way to find a wife. The fact that a woman is not beautiful in your eyes could not mean she could not the will of God for your life. They saw that the women, the daughters of men, were beautiful. And because they saw beauty in them, Bible says they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.
You wouldn’t hear God in their consideration. The only thing and the only place where God was identified was that these sons were of God; they were sons of God, and that was all. The daughters were daughters of men, that was all too. The next thing we realize is that the sons of God took the initiative without being led by God or inspired by God or guided by God. They used beauty as the yardstick for making their choices. The Bible says, “For whatever they chose, they took for wives of the daughters of men.” So, you are looking beautiful, you shall be my wife, there was nothing like the Lord had said to me that you are my wife. That is an anomaly already. Immediately after this incident see what happened:
3 And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” 4 There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterwards when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
I'm not sure if there's anybody on the earth who wants to pick a wife, and expects his child or the children of the marriage to be nonentities. But this is not the issue; if this was where the Bible stopped, I know that even you would not have any issue with it. The sons of God saw the daughters of men, and they took wives and then gave birth to mighty men, is that not good? It looks good, but there is something else that is underneath the phrase “the mighty men” that we read. Genesis Chapter 6 from verse 5, “5 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth…” What men saw was that children were born in the marriages; the marriages that involved the sons of God and the daughters of men produced mighty men, that was what men saw. But that was not what God saw.
God saw that the wickedness of man was great and that every intent of the thought of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth and He was grieved in His heart.
7 So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. 9 This is the genealogy of Noah. Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah begot three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.
If you read further from verse 13, God began to speak to that man called Noah. If you think they were more corrupted than us, then you might need to look very well at our generation. What has led to that corruption? The Bible didn't leave us in a state of confusion or ignorance. The Bible made us see from the beginning of chapter six, that the moment there was a population growth on the earth, then suddenly there began a series of mixed breeds. People began to marry outside the will of God, so marriage was corrupted first. And as soon as that was done, it was only a matter of time, God began to see corruption on the earth. As God began to see corruption on the earth violence became prevalent. Whether you were looking at a small town or a small family, or you were looking at a village or a city, you would see violence. And what was the genesis of it? Marriage was tampered with.
Men and women thought they were having fun. They thought they were the ones in control, they thought they saw beautiful women, and they took them as wives. There was no God in their decision; they were not led by God, they were not inspired by God, and they didn't care, they went to pursue their own goal. Even though it was an armless decision, and it was just a matter of a man and a woman, it became a generational problem. Perhaps, we are wondering how we get here as Nigerians or as Africans or as a people on the earth; a point where there is so much violence, and people don't even care about the lives of other people nor are they sincere with other people — people don't care that they bring down others for them to rise. What has produced the violence that we see across societies?
It is easy for us to think that violence is common with the people because the devil is inspiring them, the devil didn't begin with inspiring them, the devil began with tampering with the institution of marriage. So, until marriage was corrupted, the earth was not corrupted. So, if you can make the tree good, you can make the fruits good also. If marriage was corrupted, and it led to the corruption on the earth; if you want to clear corruption out of the earth, you need to come back to marriage; fix the marriage, make sure that marriages become uncorrupted, then it can become a tool in the hands of God for cleaning or repairing the earth. Make the tree good and the fruits shall be good.
We see ourselves as nobodies, we are individuals, ‘I'm just one in a million. I'm just a married man; I, my wife, perhaps, and my 2 or 3 or 4 or 14 children; we are just like a drop in an ocean, we are not significant.’ The things that corrupt societies are the decisions of individual entities within the society. If we can start with taking care of one marriage after another, we can end up having a society that is even corrected by God. If you abandon marriages and you say whatever happens in a marriage is between the man and his wife, you are ultimately setting up a time bomb that will explode on the entire society. So, when we see a man and a woman that is into an unholy union, we could say it is not our business, but it will end up becoming our business.
Take for instance, in Nigeria, several years ago some people were complaining, “let there be a good attention given to the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria; don't just leave these boys and girls roaming the streets, they are time bombs waiting to explode.” Later on, some people began to say, “don't just allow people to just be giving birth to children because as the population is growing, especially without the society growing with the population, it will become a problem in the future.” Now, if mathematically speaking, or economically speaking, or biologically speaking, in every manner, looking at what happens to a society that gives no attention to the growth of the children in the society, it's a society that is about to explode, only waiting for the appropriate time.
What is it that leads to an increase in the number of children in this society, whether you call it marriage or you call it extramarital affairs, it is marriage; whether it's marital or extra-marital it leads to the increase in the number of children. If you and I do nothing about what is happening with the increase of children on the earth, and we don't even care about the mannerism of the children; the kind of children that are increasing on the earth, we are living in a generation that we don't know whether ours may be the best or the next one to come might be the worst.
God came to Noah and was tired of what he was seeing. People have become so corrupted and violence was everywhere. Have you checked newspapers any day and you don’t hear of any violence in Nigeria, for instance, or in other parts of the world? Children are born unto men; children who are not born in the will of God; at the centre of God's plan, children who are born out of wedlock, outside of the will of God, who are not born by men and women that were led by God, who has now produced and reproduced themselves in a serious dimension, that it's only God that needs to intervene.
It got to a point; Noah was in that same generation, just like you and I are here today. He was there and had violence all around him. But God said, “You have found grace in my sight,” and this is what I want to do, I want to destroy. Let us read from verse 13:
13 And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. 14 Make yourself an ark of gopherwood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and outside with pitch. 17 And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. 18 But I will establish My covenant with you; and you shall go into the ark—you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19 And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.
If we're looking at marriage before, we start thinking, Oh, marriage is about me, gratifying my myself desires; marriage is about me getting my companionship, marriage is about my fun, it's about my this and that; it's bigger than that to God. When God wanted to destroy the earth, God didn't plan the destruction outside of marriage. The collapse of marriage as an institution brought the earth to a state of corruption and violence, and when God wanted to correct the anomaly, God still needed to rely on a marriage. When God chose Noah, Noah was not to go into the ark alone. He was to go with his wife and his children. And the Bible says, “God said to him, you shall go in with yourself, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives.” I will settle your marriage, preserve your marriage, and then I will preserve the marriage of your children. And based on the preserved marriages, your marriage and the marriages of your children, I will start a new thing.
If God needed marriage to correct marriage, maybe you and I must now begin to ask the right question, Lord, what is the purpose of my marriage? What do you intend to use my marriage to do on the earth? If the corruption on the earth is because of marriages that have produced offspring of their kind that have created so much violence, and hatred on the earth, what is the role of my marriage in addressing this problem? Is my marriage supposed to just pass through this earth as if we are just passing through or we are supposed to make a major contribution? Would my marriage be a sit-down look marriage? Would my marriage be just about me and my children? I'm just about to pay school fees, I just want to take my children to a supermarket; let us just buy some ice cream? Would that be a contribution? Would that address the violence in our society?
The real title of this piece is what is the purpose of your marriage? How will your marriage address the calamity or disastrous state of the earth? What would be the contribution of your marriage? When your marriage has come and gone, what would the earth say your marriage did to solve this problem? The emphasis is not about you, the emphasis is on your marriage. You could say “no, I'm the one that God has called to follow Jesus; God has not called my wife, God has not called My children.” If that doesn't happen, the corruption on the earth will never stop. If there's going to be a reduction in violence on the earth, if the land will be healed, then God needs to start picking us up as a marriage, two by two.
Look at it, God said, ‘I want to save the earth,’ and this is what you will do, you will build an ark. The ark is going to be the platform that will save, but the ark on its own will do nothing when nobody is there in it. So, this is what you will do: get all the living creatures, a male and a female of every living creature. It shall be about a man and a woman going into salvation. It shall be about a man and a woman seeking the Lord together. It shall be about a man and his wife going for escape. It shall be about a man and his wife saying, ‘we will not be corrupted by the corruption of our generation, we shall be for God.’
Joshua said, “Choose for yourself this day whom you will serve, whether you will serve the gods that your fathers served at the other side of the river that didn't profit them anything, but as for me and my family [invariably, as for me and my wife and sons, children], we shall serve the Lord.” We shall enter the ark. We shall be saved, and we shall do everything possible to save others. Did you see Joshua doing ministry all alone like his marriage was not involved in the ministry? So, if you think God has called you, God didn’t call you alone, the salvation that God has provided is for you and your wife. Are you going to enter alone, or take your wife or your husband into it?
Gone are the days that we say, ‘our success is directly proportional to the money in our bank accounts. We abandon our families, we abandon our husbands, our wives, and our children, and we go looking for more money to keep in the bank. When we are done with that, God is going to say, ‘you are just a rich failure.’ Because you have failed to take your marriage and your family into the ark. It is not just going to be about you being fine alone. It's going to be that you look at yourself, and you say, ‘Am I able to take my children, my wife, or my husband together with myself into the salvation of the Lord? Is it just about me or about my household?
When God wanted to destroy the land of Sodom and Gomorrah, we were told that God came, and Lot was sitting at the gate, and he was just looking. It was his practice to sit down at the gate daily. But when he was interceded for, he didn't intercede for himself. When Abraham his uncle interceded for him, and God decided to save him; God didn't want to save him alone. That was not the strategic intent of God for his life. The strategic intent of God was to save him, save his wife, save his daughters, and the husbands of his daughters. Did you see God trying to save his friends? You can see that the salvation was tailor-made for his marriage — his family.
The angel said to him, “The people that will be saved from this calamity are you, your wife, your daughters, and the husbands of your daughters.” So, what did Lot do? Lot went to tell the husbands of his daughters: “God wants to destroy this land, and want us to get out now.” The Bible says, “The men said he was joking.” They did not follow Him. And while he was dragging, the angels practically held his hand, the hand of his wife, and the hands of his children; and went out of the city. But what happened to the wife of Lot? She looked back behind her husband. She looked back, and as soon as she did, she could no longer follow. The ark that the Lord has made available to save his family could not save his wife, couldn’t save the husbands of his daughters.
Unlike Noah who was able to bring his wife into the ark with his sons and the wives of his sons. That is what God is looking for: A man who can lead his family into salvation, into victory, you're able to lead them into the experiences that God has made available. You wouldn't say, ‘as long as people are fine, I don't care if I lose my family.’ When we begin to realize that our success begins from home, not from outside — the crusade
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