So just a very quick thing to share today that struck me the other day as I was working on my last post. There are a number of things God has been teaching me over the past couple of days, but this is just a particularly amazing thing revealing how amazing our God is, and how great is his plan of redemption for his children. I wrote in my last post how the problem that entered into the world with Adam and Eve was misplaced desire and that statement got me thinking about desire and as I started thinking about desire I remembered in Genesis 3:16 where God curses the woman by saying, “your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.” What I realized in this moment of remembrance was that God, our wonderful, sovereign creator, has been working to redeem our misplaced desire from that very first moment of fallenness. Let me explain briefly:
Ephesians 5:22-33 contains what I believe to be the most important lessons (even if incredibly unpopular) for every married couple. These verses describe what God expects and has planned for marriage. Wives are to submit to their husbands and husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Paul explains these duties in some detail and then wraps up his comments by saying, “this is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church.” This may be the most important verse in the entire section. What Paul is saying is that while he is describing God’s plan for marriage he is also describing the relationship between Christ and the church. In other words, God has designed marriage to be a living metaphor for Christ’s relationship with the church. Every Christian marriage is intended to be an image-bearer to the world of how Christ wants to relate to his people. In the same way as Hebrews describes the tabernacle and the law as a “copy and shadow” of those things in heaven, so marriage was created by God to be a “copy and shadow” of Christ’s relationship with his bride. I had concluded all of this prior to my writing earlier this week, but what I had not realized was how this all related to the story of the fall in Genesis.
Now the reason that the tabernacle, the law and marriage are all copies and shadows of God’s original plan for humanity is that since the fall God has been inserting patterns of the original plan into the world so as to awaken the human heart to its original desire. Now I talked in my last blog about the desire of all human heart’s being intimacy with God, and how since Adam and Eve we have been killing ourselves with misplaced desire. So let’s take a look at the punishment that God places on Eve. It is important to remember that Eve’s guilt came in desiring something that was other than what God intended her to have. She had misplaced her desire. Her desire was fallen. God knows that her desire is stained, and it cannot be easily restored now that she has eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, he immediately gets to work redirecting and redeeming her fallen desire, and thus he punishes her by giving her a desire for her husband, the husband who will be her Lord. Now remember the role marriage plays, as described by Paul, in reflecting a right relationship with God. What this means is that from the very first moment of his dealing with a fallen humanity, God was already setting into motion his plan for marriage and for redemption. By making her desire for her husband, the man who is to be as Christ to her, even as she acts like the church before Christ, God is already beginning to paint a picture that imitates the woman’s original desire for her maker. Her desire for her husband was not God’s original plan, but it is now being used by God as a persistent reminder to the woman of the desire she once had for her true groom and true Lord. I understand that this might not be clear what I am saying upon the first reading, but the reality is that we have a God who has never been taken by surprise or caught off guard. From the very first moment of dealing with a corrupted humanity God was setting his redemptive plan into action with the very punishments he was giving. Oh what love the father has lavished on us. Praise God that he knows nothing of nearsightedness. For me to think that all the way from the fall and his decree for Eve that she would desire her husband God has planned to use that desire of Brie’s to help redirect not only her, but me, and hopefully others through us, back to him as our true groom just forces me to stand speechless in awe before him.
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