Hebrews 13:4: Marriage

Hebrews 13:4 NIV

4 Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.

Context: This book is a masterpiece, showing how the Hebrew scriptures and religion are fulfilled and expanded in Jesus. The writer has shown how Jesus makes us right with God, and how He is constantly interceding for us in heaven, so we don’t need any mediator. The writer has shown how Jesus was greater than everyone that came before Him, and we see His ultimate greatness in His death and resurrection.

Writing to a church facing challenges, everything builds up to the glory of Jesus on the cross:

Hebrews 12:2–3 NIV

2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

And now, in this last chapter of the letter, we find the ‘so what’ - the practical ways to live, not to earn this great rescue, but because of it.

So far we have seen that brotherly love, and hospitality to strangers are essential. We’re to remember those in prison as if we are there with them. And next week Tony will talk to us about steering clear of the love of money, and how as people redeemed by Jesus we can live content with what we have.

And here, in the middle of this passage, we find this teaching on marriage.

This is probably the sermon where the most people have been like ‘oh, poor you’. I don’t know if that’s just because they think I'm a terrible wife.

But seriously, what are we afraid of? I’m asking that rhetorically because I think I know exactly what we’re afraid of!

The preaching task

My task as a preacher is to expound on what the Bible says. It’s not to add anything to, or take away anything from, what God has given us in Scripture.

But sometimes, before I can expound the text, I do need to take something away.

Not from the text, but from the lenses that we bring to the text.

I have to wear glasses for driving at night, and I bought a couple of pairs ten years ago which are now hideously unfashionable, but I don’t really care because I don’t drive much! For several years, if I was driving in the day, I would wear my glasses, and then I would wear my sunglasses over the top. This did not look great. Now I have prescription sunglasses.

Some of us, maybe even all of us approach a text like this wearing several different layers of glasses. So let’s take them off.

Lens 1 - The sexual prosperity gospel

You’ve heard of the prosperity gospel? It’s the teaching that if we give to God, or usually to His well-dressed representative, He will bless us with money, cows, rain, whatever is most important for making life add up in our society. Of course what we do with our money, and living generously and justly, is enormously important to God, and we’re going to look at that next week, but the idea that it’s a slot machine, and that we give to get - not in the Bible!

Sadly, some of us were raised with a kind of sexual prosperity gospel. Honour God with your sexuality, stay a virgin until you’re married, do everything right, and God will give you a really good-looking, kind, Godly spouse. When I was a teenager, this was what I grew up hearing, and even when I didn’t hear it directly, it was the vibe that my friends and I constructed for ourselves. I don’t think this is unique to Christianity either. We find a similar vibe in most major world religions, and there’s a secular version which kind of says you get what you deserve, though it has less of a problem with sleeping around as long as you’re not cheating.

Thing is, five minutes of thought shows us that it’s not true.

I know people who, to the best of my knowledge and I have no reason to doubt their integrity, have honoured God completely in that area of their lives, who have wanted to be married, and who haven’t ever married.

I know people who messed up and broke God’s rules in all kinds of ways (myself included), who have married and been really happy a lot of the time despite having all kinds of baggage to deal with.

I know people who have tried their absolute best to be pure, expecting that on their wedding night all their deepest desires will finally be fulfilled, and they will ever-after be able to have sex-on-demand, and then they’ve found that they’ve married a person, not a robot, and there are things like periods and babies and stressful seasons at work, and everything is not rosy in the garden.

The financial prosperity gospel is appealing because it offers a way to get what you need - all you have to do is give everything you have to this sharp guy with a nice car who will, really, he promises, give it to God. The sexual prosperity gospel offers something similar. Behave yourself. Watch your every move, and God will make you rich in marriage.

It sounds nice on the surface, but like every false gospel, it’s actually deadly.

If I could go back and talk to my teenage self, I’d want to say to her: the reason that you should live in this way is not so that God will reward you. It’s not even so you can avoid STDs or heartbreak. Sometimes we can really clearly trace the why in how God wants us to live. But sometimes it doesn’t seem so easy.

Why should we honour God with our sexuality? Because He’s our perfect Father, who loves us. Because He is the one who has rescued us from our sin.

So let’s take off the glasses of the sexual prosperity gospel, which is a false gospel.

Lens 2 - Shame

I think the second pair of glasses that many of us bring to this text is the shame glasses. These are some seriously powerful lenses. They completely distort everything we look at. It’s like when you have a friend who is nearly blind, and you put their glasses on and you almost fall over.

Many of us are scared, freaked out by a verse like this because we approach the area of our sexuality with a great deal of shame. Shame over what has been done to us. Shame for what we have done. Shame that we have desires at all, or shame that we don’t have enough.

Let’s look at how Jesus deals with shame.

John 4:4–14 NIV

4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. 7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” 11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Slightly religiously dubious, since good Jewish rabbis don’t associate with Samaritans, or women, but so far it’s a thirsty man asking for water, and then that same man, who we know to be deeply religious, talking about religion. Of course, the claim he makes is fairly staggering - that he is indeed greater than the patriarch, Jacob, because he offers something that no man could ever offer - water of eternal life.

Some of you know what happens next:

John 4:15–18 NIV

15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” 17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

Now 5 is a lot of husbands! And this woman is now living with a man who is not her husband. Very normal in our society, very not normal for observant Jews. So now we understand why this woman has come to draw water in the middle of the day. If you go out in the middle of the day on one of four hot days we have here in England, you will get burnt. A hot day in Samaria is a very hot day. All the other woman would have gone early, but this woman doesn’t go with the others, and now we get why. The lifestyle she is living makes her an outcast in her society.

We don’t have time to read the whole passage now, but before we leave this unnamed woman I want to draw our attention to one more thing. And those of you who were here last week will know that my delightful husband kind of stole my punchline on this, but it’s too important to leave it out. It’s so necessary in understanding why we don’t have to wear the shame glasses:

John 4:25–26 NIV

25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” 26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

So Jesus and this woman have more theological dialogue and then there’s this moment. It’s the first time that Jesus says this to anyone. In fact, it’s arguable the most clear, explicit declaration of who He is. And it’s to this woman that he says it. She drops the water jar, and runs and tells everyone.

Let’s remind ourselves who Jesus is, in this same gospel, the gospel of John:

John 1:1–5 NIV

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

So the One who was with God, the Word who in fact was God, the One by whom all things were created, including God’s rules for human sexuality, that One stands before this woman who is so covered in shame that she goes to the well in the crazy heat of the day to avoid others. He stands before her, He knows how she is living, and He chooses to tell her who He is before He tells anyone else.

That’s why we have to get today’s passage in the right order. This is telling us how to live in response to the grace of God, poured out on us through Jesus. He came for the spiritually poor. None of us is too far gone, in our sexuality or any other area of life, to come to Him.

But we have to come to Him.

Jesus doesn’t say to this woman - ‘you’re fine darlin’. Go live your life, do what you want.’ Time after time we see Jesus go to the outcasts, the ones that others rejected. The pharisees tried to insult him and call him friend of sinners, but He wasn’t insulted, because it was true.

But He also would say ‘go, and sin no more’.

If we take off the glasses that we bring to a passage like this in Hebrews, if we take off the sexual prosperity gospel glasses, and the shame glasses, what are we left with?

Hebrews 13:4 NIV

4 Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.

As people who worship Jesus, as people who have been bought at a price, set free by grace, this is how we ought to live.

Marriage should be honoured by all. Honoured by the married, and the unmarried. How do we honour marriage? If you are married, firstly by honouring your own marriage. Tony once memorably said, if the grass looks greener on the other side, water your own garden.

If you’re unmarried, honouring marriage might take an extra step. I remember once hearing a sermon on radical hospitality, and the example was given of how you can show hospitality even if you don’t have a home to invite others to. Maybe you live in an HMO with strangers. You can show hospitality by buying someone a coffee. By making a picnic and inviting someone to a park. By cooking a meal for our homeless night shelter guests in winter. In the same way, if you’re single, you can honour marriage as a God-given gift to all of us, which points us to His love. How might you do that? How might you bless someone else’s marriage?

And finally, note that it is God who will judge. What do we know about Him? We know that He longs for all to repent. He loves the world. In what way does He love the world?

John 3:16 NIV

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

And then verse 17 says:

John 3:17 NIV

17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

So God will judge all sin in the end.

BUT His longing, as taught throughout Scripture, is for everyone to come to Him through His Son. Whatever our labels. Whatever way in which we are called a ‘sinner’. Whatever way in which we actually are a sinner. We are called to come to the friend of sinners, and then, out of the grace He gives, to live a new life. Married, unmarried, widowed, single, engaged, dating - all of us are given this same teaching for how to live out the freedom that Jesus has won for us.

He will judge all. His longing is that on that day, when we stand before the judge, we are able to say ‘already paid’, and Jesus will gather us to Him. Let’s not live as though we are able to stand on that day in our own strength.

I could say so much more. I don’t have time now to look at why faithfulness is so important to God, at how it is one of His own core attributes, how He is faithful to us even when we are faithless. I don’t have time to talk about how hard marriage can be sometimes - how we need God’s help when illness or unemployment or infertility come along and make marriage difficult. I also didn’t have time to tell you any funny stories about the guy I’m married to, but this is church, not standup!

But I want to leave you with this. If you are someone who is wearing glasses that God didn’t give you in this area, then let this message be an invitation to take them off. Take off the idea that we live right to gain blessing from God. Take off shame, and leave it at the cross of Christ. That is an invitation to all of us, and many of us find we need to repeatedly go back to that cross, not because it wasn’t finished there, but because we didn’t leave it all there.

If you are a follower of Jesus, let this message be an exhortation to let what Christ has done for you permeate every area of your life. Hospitality, social justice, sexuality, money - let’s give all of it to Him and live in His truth. If you’re struggling with some particular aspect of that, then the absolute worst thing you can do is carry on struggling in secrecy and shame.

Our worship team will come back up now and lead us through a couple more songs. Let this first one be an invitation to all of us.