“To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward till death do us part.”
These familiar words form part of the traditional wedding vows. Marriages were intended by God to last for life. Jesus points out in His teachings on marriage that although Moses permitted divorce due to the hardness of people’s hearts, marriage was intended to be permanent. To give yourself sexually to someone to whom you are not married is to commit adultery. Whether that is before marriage, or during a marriage, or after a marriage breaks down, if you’re not married to the person, the blessed relationship of a man and a woman who love each other and give themselves to each other becomes a sinful relationship. That’s what the Bible teaches. Whether or not our society or culture agrees is a different matter, but it is what God’s Word says. And it’s God’s Word that determines what is or is not sin, not cultural matters.
The apostle Paul builds on this accepted teaching on what marriage is about to help us learn about how sin and death work in our reading from Romans 7 for this morning. I would like to re-read the first part of this reading at this time.
Or do you not know, brothers–for I am speaking to those who know the law–that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:1-6 ESV)
On first glance, it seems that what Paul is doing is simply reminding the Roman Christians of what a godly marriage is about, and the importance of building a marriage according to God’s law on marriage. But what Paul is really doing, as weird as it is, is building an analogy comparing a marriage to our relationship with sin. He’s saying that Jesus’ death sets us free from sin so that we, as His people, aren’t acting the part of an adulteress, as the Old Testament people of God were so often called for their half-hearted love toward Him. In that way, we can totally and completely be His own people.
The analogy here, while a strange one on first glance, really does help us understand the nature of how sin has an effect on us. Like a relationship you just can’t get free from, so sin has us ensnared by its caresses and constantly under the spell of its affections. This might sound weird, or warped, or depraved, for Paul to compare sin’s connection to you to marriage. It is supposed to sound that way. For that is what sin does. It makes what God desires into something undesirable to the very people God created to serve and love Him. It makes what is evil and twisted and wrong to be at the heart and core of your very being. It turns you from holy to depraved, from loving God to loving anything but God.
And the saddest thing of it is that the marriage to sin that we all so enjoy—and there is not a sinner on earth who does not have some sin that they actually enjoy—is even a pre-arranged marriage. Consider your heart. Do you love God above all things and love your neighbour in every way just as you love yourself? The answer for every person, save Christ, is ultimately no. We had no hand in it, but our father, Adam, signed and sealed the deal through his willing disobedience, as accompanied by his wife, our mother, Eve. It’s a pre-arranged marriage, all right, but from the moment we are born we each seem to be a perfect match. We fit so well with each other. It just feels right in so many ways.
But God isn’t happy with this marriage. He had a different spouse in mind for His people. A much better spouse. One who was pre-arranged from before the creation of the world, one who was lined up long before sin stuck its ugly face in where it didn’t belong. You see, God is watching this marriage between sin and the human race and He sees how incredibly dysfunctional and abusive this relationship is. Sin always takes, takes, and takes, and gradually kills all those in its clutches. For this reason alone, God wants His Son to be the groom, not Sin. Yet the Law binds us so strongly to sin. For the Law continually points out what sin is, and we, amorous as we are, keep running back to the arms of our natural-born lover. It’s such a strong and powerful bond. Time and time again sin calls, and time and time again you answer. Time and time again I answer. And the answer, as much as you or I might like to pretend is always no, is more often than not a yes. In spite of the fact that sin is a lousy mate and will only drag you or me to hell, it’s still so attractive, so desirable. Consider the description of the fruit in the Garden that brought sin into play in the first place: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” (Genesis 3:6 ESV)
Good for food, delightful to the eyes, desirable to make a person wise. That’s what sin always pretends to be. Sins of delight, sins of pleasure, sins of false-focussed wisdom, sins of worldly pride. These are the sins that will catch you over and over again. The devil isn’t going to try to get you to leave God by obvious means. He is always desiring to lure God’s chosen ones to fall away— and please be aware that the Scriptures do teach that it is possible to fall away from your salvation. What better lures could the devil use than those sins which are most enticing because they are so pleasing to you? What better method could the devil use to keep you away from your true love than to keep pointing you back to your prearranged lover, your default husband, sin?
Here’s the thing though: In Jesus’ death on the Cross, everybody involved in this arrangement dies. The husband, sin, dies. The wife, you and me, dies. The would-be husband, Jesus, dies. And the devil, the old evil matchmaker, is dealt a mortal wound and is also now in his own death throes. And the amazing part is that out of all this, only two are brought back to life: the wife, and the would-be husband.
By now, this might be sounding a little familiar. It’s the dynamic of being dead to sin and alive to Christ that Paul talked about last week in Romans 6. But it needs to be pointed out again and again because the reality of sin and death is that even though Christ has put their power at an end, even though you and I are dead to sin and alive to Christ through His life worked in and through us in Baptism, where we were directly connected to His death on the cross and His resurrection, even though all things necessary for our salvation and for us to live as God’s people is already a done deal, yet you and I keep going back to the graveyard to admire sin’s grave and spend quality time with it, doing things in honour of that former relationship. Sin’s grip on you and me is very strong, even though it’s no longer in control. It is fundamental to who we are by nature. There’s a reason why the Catechism reminds us to die daily to the old Adam through contrition and repentance. Every day we need to once again be loosed from the ways and means of sin and brought back into the life Christ desires for you and me.
And the point of Paul’s analogy, more than anything else, is to say, stop going back to sin. Inasmuch as in you lies, be faithful to Christ, who has called you to be His own, claimed you in the waters of Baptism, who feeds you with His Word and His body and blood, who heals you from all your diseases and takes away all your sin. You don’t belong to sin anymore. You have a new vow. Christ has claimed you “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward unto all eternity.” There’s no death-do-us-part bit in Christ’s vow to you. For it was death—His death, that set you free from the shackles and bonds of sin and death, it was His death that caused you to die to the power of sin. It was His death that freed you from death and set you into eternal life. Right here, right now, in Christ, you have eternal life. He is raised from the dead and will never die again. When He vows to you, it’s an eternal vow. Jesus’ love for us, shown in His sacrificial death for us, His undying love for us—that’s the model for our earthly marriages to follow.
As Paul says, “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.”
We have been released from the power of the Law, from the power of sin, to live and to serve God in the Spirit, to bear fruit from the faith God has given us. That’s our new calling, our new role. It isn’t a law thing at all, but rather the new relationship. When you love your spouse, you want to do things that make them happy, not out of a sense of obligation, but out of that sense of love and thankfulness that you belong to them and they to you. So it is with following Christ. We live as His people not out of fear that God is going to blast us for every misstep but because our hearts have been freed from the power of sin and out of thankfulness that Jesus has taken away our sins and bought us to be His own holy bride. Holy bride. Not a sinful, messy bride, but holy and pure, blessed and clean. That’s you in Christ. That’s me in Christ. Christ calls you to be His own and live under Him in His kingdom, now and forever. God grant it by His grace! In Jesus. Amen.
Last updated July 2008 by the webmaster.