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A Few Thoughts on the Means of Grace

^{Acts 2:37}Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” ³⁸And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.³⁹For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” ⁴⁰And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” ⁴¹So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. ⁴²And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Means of Grace — Those instruments of God’s favor that God uses as the means by which God accomplishes His people’s conformity to Christ and growth in the Christian faith.

Means of Grace — Word & Sacrament

Two Sacraments — Baptism & Eucharist

We see all these present in Acts 2:38f

A Sacrament is not merely a symbol as if baptism and the Lord’s Table merely represented something else as a flag might stand as a symbol for a nation. The Sacraments are not mere visible jogs to the memory to remember something larger. In a Biblical understanding of the Sacrament the reality of what is being pointed to is contained in the symbol and for those who participate by faith the sacrament is what it symbolizes and so does what it promises.

Illustration — Sign saying Lansing is 25 miles away.

But what if the Sign was made of that which is Lansing? Maybe of a peculiar type of tree that grew in Lansing. And maybe the dye that formed the letters on the Sign was of a dye that was peculiar to Lansing. There would be a sense then that the sign to Lansing, as a symbol for Lansing, had Lansing in it.

Just so with the Sacraments. God, in His sovereignty, has put the reality of forgiveness, cleansing, and eternal life into the Word and Sacraments themselves and for those who come to the Sacraments full of Faith in Christ alone the Sacraments give what they symbolize. For those who do not come in faith then the Sacraments remain only empty symbols that at best jog the memory.

This explains why throughout much of our Church History God’s people have so desired the means of Grace and why Church attendance was such a given. God’s people understood that in the assembled community of God’s saints there they would be fed with Eternal life and drink the promises of God’s favor. In the assembling of the saints, Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day, the weary and battered people of God would come and be built up and strengthened by God’s favor preached.

Illustration — The means of Grace, Word and Sacrament, then is like Josh’s Pickle juice after fighting in his 90 pounds of armor in the hot sun when he does his Medieval Knight re-enactments. Worn out and weary with the exertion of fighting I am told that Pickle juice revives and vivifies almost instantly.

Just so with the means of Grace. We gather Lord’s day by Lord’s Day, weary and exhausted with contending for the crown rights of the Lord Christ in battle — whether that battle is with foes external or internal or both. Where will we find the refreshment for our souls and the invigoration to continue? The Church has always taught the place that is found is gathered worship … in the means of Grace … in Word and Sacrament…. in God’s pickle juice for spent warriors.

Illustration — Popeye and Spiritual Spinach

II.) Means of Grace (Baptism) Teaches a particular Anthropology

Because of their belief in Covenant Theology Reformed people have always inclined towards being Conservative with its impulse of seeing that human nature is corporate before it is individual. Liberal thought, as expressed most clearly in Anabaptist circles, has always seen the individual as having pride of place over the community. The individual precedes and the community depends upon the collection of individuals. This has meant that the sovereign self is the prime integer in Anabaptist Christianity. This is not so for those who are Biblical Christians…. for the Reformed.

The Reformed never gave up on the individual but in its Covenant theology it could never tolerate the radical Anabaptists with their hyper and atomistic individualism. Covenant theology teaches us that all of God’s people through time are one organic people. We belong to our forbears before we belong to ourselves and we belong to God along with our forbears. This is a different view than that which is espoused at the heart of the organizing motif of Western culture with its social contract theory. The Christian faith at this point lies in contradiction to the official anthropology of the West which at its heart is indeed liberal.

We see biblical anthropology in our Baptism services when the Generations assemble at the Baptismal font in order that a member of their family may be ratified in their place in the covenant of grace. This covenant into which they are being announced is a covenant in which their forebears were placed through the centuries and it is a place where the Baptized infant’s generations to follow will also be announced. Also, the very nature of Federal Theology with its idea of Federal Headship pushes Reformed people in a conservative direction. The teaching of Scripture where we find man created as incomplete apart from woman suggests that the individual is not the primary building block of society but rather the community is apriori to the individual. Likewise the idea of the fifth commandment pushes Christians towards being conservative in their disposition. Family is to be honored. Even the very idea of the God as Triune having Eternal community pushes the Biblical Christian towards conservative commitments.

Infant Baptism then is radical break with our non-Christian, hyper-individual Anabaptist culture. In our Church culture we have individuals walking the sawdust trail. We have individuals “askingJesusintotheirhearts.” In our Western Church culture we talk about having a “personal relationship with Jesus.” We talk about datable conversions … our “born on date,” as if this was a matter of our choosing and and not God’s. All those, when spoken about apart from a covenantal context mitigate against a Biblical anthropology which normatively finds man coming to Christ as a member of a community that has come to Christ by God’s sovereign election.

Thumbnail Sketch on Devlin’s “Sexual Utopia in Power”

I Finished, F. Roger Devlin’s “Sexual Utopia in Power; The Feminist Revolt Against Civilization,” late last night.

Devlin, not a Christian, gives a book that amounts to an apologetic for men in the ongoing war between the sexes. Devlin takes note of the decline in marriage as well as the decline in the success of marriage in the West and lays the responsibility for that clearly at the foot of Feminism and its destructive ideology.

Devlin insists that the old bromides of generations past of women’s role in marriage, of stereotypes of women as naturally inclined to monogamy, of the sanctity of marriage held by women, of women needing protection, have all been exploded with Feminism and the old answers to cure these problems from conservatives no longer are valid and likewise are part of the problem.

Devlin offers a rousing approach to these problems inasmuch as he insists that women have to have a mirror held before them for their contribution to the current conflict of interests that exists between men and women. Devlin holds feminist women responsible for the shambles in which our marriage culture currently finds itself.

Along the way Devlin takes on the Divorce culture in the West and demonstrates that it exists as a money making enterprise for those cottage industries of the State that have sprang up around divorce and so now support divorce. Devlin rightly notes the absolute carnage that “Family courts” create. He notes the impossible demands that Judges and social workers make upon men who are ground up by these courts.

Along the way Devlin notes the tools used by Feminism to support the Monstrous regime of women in which we currently live. Devlin insists that matters like “date rape,” and “sexual harassment” are largely contrived crimes created in order to support doctrinaire feminism.

Devlin insists that women must be forced to live with the consequences of their choices, explaining that as matters stand now the irresponsibility of women is subsidized and winked at by our current feminist system. Devlin says that men who refuse to marry are merely playing the cards dealt them in terms of the feminist zeitgeist. Why should men marry when the norm in our culture is for men to be abused by women shaped by feminism? Devlin also intimates that no man who is a man will put up with this feminist behavior as coming from a wife or girlfriend.

Devlin freely admits at the beginning of this book that he is not interested in considering men’s problems in the current situation. He contends that there are plenty of others sources out there if people are interested in looking into that. Devlin insists that he is doing something that men refuse to do out of their inbred sense to “protect the woman” and that he is turning a light on how the women we are protecting are feminist hags that wish to destroy men.

One of Devlin’s better insights in my estimation is his noting how the failures of Feminism guarantee the success of feminism as each failure is explained by feminists as resulting because we are not feminist enough. Consequently, oddly enough, the more that Feminism fails, the more it succeeds.

Devlin sees this crisis as the death of the West unless something is done quickly to correct this state of affairs.

The Enlightenment Use of Passions as Vehicle for Control

Classical ethics proposes restraint as the means of freedom; Sade proposes vice as the way to freedom; indeed Sade’s political theory proposes freedom as a way of annihilating moral restraint, but ends by imposing another more severe restraint in its place, thus introducing the central paradox of the Enlightenment: freedom equals control. ‘As we gradually proceed to our enlightenment,’ Sade writes giving the standard physics of the enlightenment as his starting point.

‘we cam more and more to feel that, motion being inherent in matter, the prime mover existed only as an illusion, and that all that exists essentially having to be in motion, the motor was useless; we sensed that this chimerical divinity, prudently invented by the earlier legislators, was in their hand, simply one more means to enthrall us.’

In classical physics, all objects were at rest unless moved by some agent; in Newtonian physics, all objects were in motion unless halted by some greater opposing force. The same could be said of Sade’s politics, which he derived from Newton’s physics. In an inversion of both Plato and Aristotle, Sade saw ‘insurrection’ as the natural state of men, who are nothing more than machines made out of matter in which motion was inherent. Since the passions are the moral equivalent of gravity, the successful government is not on which stifles passion, but rather one that foster it, and then directs the subsequent motions to its own ends. The state, in other words, should foster vice as an instrument of control:

‘The Greek lawgivers,’ Sade writes,

‘perfectly appreciated the capital necessary of corrupting the member citizens in order that their moral dissolution coming into conflict with the establishment and its values, there would result the insurrection that is always indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness which, like republican government, must necessarily excite the hatred and envy of all its foreign neighbors. Insurrection, thought these sage legislators, is not at all a moral condition; however, it has got to be a republic’s permanent condition. Hence it would be no less absurd than dangerous to require that those who are to insure the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order be moral beings: for the state of a moral man is one of tranquility and peace, the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes him to, and identifies him with the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government of which he is a member.’

Sade’s politics is the classical tradition turned upside down. The key insight of both the Marquis de Sade and the Christian West is that the moral man is in a state of peace; he is, in other words, not in motion and so therefore impossible to direct and control from the outside. The revolutionary’s very restlessness, his very rebellion against the moral order, which is the source of his restlessness, holds within it the seeds of control because once in motion the state need only manipulate the revolutionary’s desire by controlling his passions, and it succeeds in manipulating and thereby controlling him. Sade is not slow in drawing this very conclusion. ‘ Lycugus and Solon,’ Sade tells us,

‘fully convinced that immodesty’s results are to keep the citizen in the immoral state indispensable to the mechanics of republican government, obliged to exhibit themselves naked at the theater.”

Lust in other words, is the force which keeps the citizenry of the republic from succumbing to the inertia of tranquility which is the fruit of adherence to the moral order. At this point we enter into something like a circular argument. Lust is good because it fosters the restlessness of republicanism, but republicanism is also good because it fosters lust. Either way what we have here is the rationalization of desire as an instrument of simultaneous ‘liberation’ and control; what was hither to deemed pathological is not to be seen as social norm:

We are persuaded that lust, being a product of those penchants, is not to be stifled or legislated against, but that it is, rather, a matter of arranging for the means whereby passion may be satisfied in peace. We must hence undertake to introduce order into this sphere of affairs, and to establish all the security necessary so that, when need sends the citizen near the objects of lust, he can give himself over to doing with them all this his passions demand, without ever being hampered by anything, for there is no moment in the life of man when liberty in its whole amplitude is so important to him.”

Liberty, according to this line of thought is the ability not to act according to reason, but rather th ability to gratify illicit passion, which means that in the very act of attaining his ‘liberty’ man becomes the thrall of the passion he gratifies. Before long, it becomes clear that Sade’s politics is in many ways just the physics he says it is. Man at the beck of passion is in many ways like a particle with no will of its own, since reason, especially morals, is the soul source of man’s ability to govern himself. And once gratification of passion becomes the definition of ‘liberty,’ then ‘liberty’ becomes synonymous with control because he who controls the passion controls the man. Liberty, as defined by Sade, becomes a prelude to the most insidious form of totalitarian control known to man. This was the genius of Enlightenment politics, which is in reality nothing more than a physics of vice. Incite the passion; control the man; this is the esoteric doctrine of the Enlightenment, one that has been refined for over 200 years through a trajectory that involves everything from psychoanalysis to advertising to pornography and the role it plays in the Kulturkampf. Sade clearly understands that sexual liberation leads to social control and sees this liberation and subsequent control of passion as the basis of permanent revolution that life in France would become ‘If You Would Become Republicans.’

‘No passion has a greater need of the widest horizon of liberty than sexual license,’ he writes,

‘here it is that man likes to command, to be obeyed, to surround himself with slaves to satisfy him; well, whenever you withhold from man the secret means whereby he exhales the dose of despotism Nature instilled in the depths of his heart, h will seek other outlets for it, it will be vented upon nearby objects; it will trouble the government. If you would avid that danger, permit a free flight and rein to those tyrannical desires which, despite himself, torment man ceaselessly: content with having been able to exercise his small dominion in ht middle of the harem of sultanas and yours whose submission your good offices and his money procure for him, he will go away appeased and with nothing but fond feelings for a government which so obligingly affords him every means of satisfying his concupiscence.’

There are a number of ironies here, some obvious some not. One irony is obvious: Once man is freed from the moral order, he is immediately subjected to the despotism of those who know how to manipulate his desires. This is the essence of the enlightenment regime; not to prohibit, but to enable, to encourage motion or restlessness, and direct the flow of that activity by manipulating desire. This is the political genius behind a regime that is based on advertising and pornography and opinion polls and the other instruments which control liberated man.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters From the Id — pg. 85 – 88

Quotes from E. Michael Jones’ “Monster from the Id” (I)

“From the point of view of the Marquis de Sade there is nothing but nature, and whatever nature commands is right. The very fact that I have a desire is a sign that it exists in nature, and the fact that it exists means that nature wills it, and if nature wills it, it would be wrong — i.e., a sin — not to act on a desire which nature has implanted in us.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 27

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“Women… are nothing but machines designed for voluptuousness.”

Marquis de Sade
Justine

One desperately would have liked to ask de Sade, “Designed by whom (?).”

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“Mme. Roland, the Girondist leader who eventually lost her head to the revolution described scenes in which ‘women were brutally violated before being torn to pieces by those tigers; intestines cut out and worn as turbans; bleeding human flesh devoured.'”

Jacques Barruel
History of Jacobinism — pg. xii

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“If the object of classical politics was the tranquility of order, a kind of stasis, then revolutionary politics chose motion as its goal. Passion, which according to classical tradition, disrupted order was now seen as the engine of progress. Movement, for a revolutionary, was its own justification. What the revolutionaries failed to see was the direction movement was taking. Passion seemed to be a function of the will, but as the initial euphoria of the revolution was replaced by the Terror, it became obvious that passion followed no law but its own and that the trajectory that began with passion and ended in horror was pre-programmed from the beginning, no matter how the intentions of the revolutionaries protested to the contrary…. The French intelligentsia had embarked on the trajectory of emancipating the sexual impulse from the moral order some time before and were now entering the end phase of that trajectory as the revolution, itself a manifestation of the trajectory , engendered the Terror and an orgy of sadistic violence and murder.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 37

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“… the early phase of the Enlightenment (held) that releasing sexual passions from the confines of the moral order can be managed and its bad effects rendered harmless by technology (penicillin, the condom, etc.) or legislation (no fault divorce, sexual harassment statutes, etc.) What begins as sex emancipated from the moral order ends in murder and death.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 38

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“Msgr. Knox has written that when men get the upper hand in Utopian communities polygamy is the rule; but when women get the upper hand, the rule is celibacy. Once convention is eschewed in favor of revolutionary authenticity in sexual matters this sexual antagonism begins to assert itself.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 41

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“Horror and Enlightenment are two sides of the same coin. Like Mary Shelley we too are the captive to two contradictory imperatives: We as a culture can’t disavow the Enlightenment, especially its commitment to sexual liberation, and at the same time, we can’t deny that people get hurt when they act on these imperatives….

The two monsters of the Enlightenment, now immortalized on cereal boxes, also portray two phases of the Enlightenment as it actually got implemented, as opposed to what it proposed. Frankenstein epitomizes Phase I of the Enlightenment project — the early, ostensibly altruistic, optimistic phase, when the revolution, no matter how horrific its execution, still seemed plausible as a way of bettering mankind. This is the electricity phase, the phase of youthful energy, captured in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘Bliss was it that dawn to be alive. / But to be young was very heaven!’ Dracula symbolizes phase II of the Enlightenment — the syphilitic phase, the disillusionment phase, when blood has been not only shed but polluted, generally by venereal disease as the logical consequence of sexual liberation. By the time the Enlightenment arrives in Germany during the Weimar Republic, revolution is seen as a draining of the blood of the innocent, and the revolutionary leader is seen as the scientific Vampire, as Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu and the doctor in Dreyer’s Vampyr were viewed at the time….

Vampirism and disease are ultimately metaphors for lust, which is a perversion of sexuality into something not life giving but life draining. The trajectory of the Enlightenment then has Frankenstein as its terminus a quo and Dracula as its terminus ad quem.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 62, 63

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“The crucial step taken by La Mettrie and the Marquis de Sade was the transformation of man into a machine as prelude to manipulating him as the scientist would manipulate inanimate nature. Because Christianity posited a certain sacredness to life, it was also seen as the major obstacle to the fulfillment of forbidden desire. Christianity, as a result, was construed as the enemy by Shelley and his circle. Science was an essential weapon in the arsenal he used to attack Christianity, the family, marriage, property, and government…. ‘Oh!’ wrote the aspiring young chemist,

‘I burn with impatience for the moment of Xtianity’s dissolution, it has injured me; I swear on the altar of perjured love to revenge myself on the hated cause of the effect which even now I can scarcely help deploring.! — Indeed I think it is to the benefit of society to destroy an opinion which can annihilate the dearest of its ties … — Let us hope that the wound which we inflict tho’ the dagger be concealed, will rankle in the heart of our adversary….

The more Shelley became convinced that he was in possession of the secrets of nature, the more violent became his hatred of ‘unnatural’ conventions like the family, the state, and religion, in particular Christianity: ‘Yet here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that I will never forgive Christianity! … Oh I wish I were the anti-Christ, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell to never rise again.'”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 69, 71

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“Physical passions, are the only real pleasures … In regard to happiness, good and evil are indifferent, and he who gets greater satisfaction out of doing wrong will be happier than whoever gets less out of doing right…. We should not, on the pretext of avoiding remorse, refuse to nature what she demands, nor above all, repent for pleasure…. We may, then, rightfully conclude, that if the joys derived from nature and reason are crimes, men’s happiness lies in being criminals … he who has no remorse, because of so great a familiarity with crime that for him vices become virtues, will be happier than such another who, after a fine deed, is sorry he has done it, and so loses all its reward.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

French Philosophe

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Marriage Homily

I.) Opening Prayer — Mr. Mark Chambers

Father we thank you that we’ve been invited to participate in this joyous occasion, the uniting of Andy and Bernice in Holy Matrimony. We’ve come to witness the ceremony, to celebrate with them, and to ask for your blessings on them. We pray that you would strengthen them for all that lies ahead, especially in this day and age when the forces of darkness are being brought to bear on your church. We ask that their love for and commitment to each other would grow as it remains grounded in their mutual love and commitment to you. That you would own their hearts and minds all their days and ensure their fidelity to you and your holy purpose. That within the confines of the roles of marriage that You have laid out in your holy word they would place the needs of the other above their own. And finally that you would bless them with an abundance of Godly seed, that the church might be filled with Christian warriors who from their youth are dedicated to godly dominion and conquering this apostate nation for our Lord and King Jesus Christ.

II.) Marriage Homily

When God said that Husbands were to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it, and when our Sovereign God went on to command that wives are to submit to their husbands at that point God confirmed a law order for Marriage that had already been in place for a millennium among God’s people. What this means is that Marriage is not based on schmaltzy notions of sentimentalism and Harlequin Romance. Nor is marriage anchored in effervescent and mercurial feelings. Marriage is structured and ordered by a law structure ordained by God wherein husband’s are to serve their wives by leading them as that service is consistent with God’s law and wherein wives are to submit to their husbands wherein that submission required is consistent with God’s law.

Note that neither the Husbands service, nor the wife’s submission are absolutized. Both must exist and move in terms of God’s overall law order. Husbands have no authority to be either Tyrants or Wimps and wives have no authority to be either Shrews or Doormats. If Husbands operate outside of God’s law order in relation to his wife, his wife is duty bound to oppose him. The same goes in the other direction.

For centuries the short hand label for this biblical marriage social order has been “patriarchy,” which means literally “rule of the Father.” That Scripture everywhere supports patriarchy is seen from Genesis to Revelation. God who rules over all is described as Father and entrusts covenantal representations with fathers and husbands.

Now Patriarchy has fallen on some hard times, what with the advent of feminism and egalitarianism. Indeed the Church in the West, in many quarters, is all in a tizzy to find some other paradigm that is more “fair” and is more “wise” than what God has provided. The consequence of this search to replace the God of the Bible’s authority for structuring marriage with a different god’s authority for structuring marriage has resulted in the wreckage of the family in the West with the residual flotsam and jetsam of broken marriages, single parent families, and confused children.

The cure for all this breakage is found in a return to biblical patriarchy. In Patriarchy we find that the Christian faith gives us structure that is characterized by Love, Hierarchy, and Suitability

I.) Patriarchy is defined by love (Ephesians 5)

Interestingly it is Christ’s sacrificial love for His Church that is used as the model here for husbands. Here the Lord Christ is said to have gave Himself up for the Church.

Of course this is a shorthand reference to Christ’s death on the Cross for the sins of His people. Just as the Lord Christ served the Church in solving the Church’s sin problem by His death, so Husbands are to so love their wives that they sacrificially surrender themselves for their wives.

We should find it fascinating that the inspired Apostle would invoke the death of Christ for the Church as a model for a husband’s love and service for and unto His wife. The crucifixion is the integrative point for all of Scripture. This love of God in Christ, taking upon Himself, on the Cross, the wrath of the Father, as deserved by the Church, becomes the model for patriarchy. In His Cross work for the Church Christ did not consider His own needs but the needs of his Bride. In the Cross Christ provided for His bride the approval with God that she did not have. In the Cross Christ received the hostility of God that would have otherwise have fallen upon His bride. In the Cross Christ answered all the demands of God’s law that His bride could not meet. In the Cross Christ brought His bride underneath the safety of His wings and provided shelter from the storm of a loving God who provided Christ to be the Church’s husband. Christ did for His bride everything that His bride could not do. The Lord Christ loved His Church and gave Himself for it.

This selflessness, this obedience unto death, this compassion to do for others what they cannot to for themselves is the model set forth for Biblical patriarchy. And yet, we are still told that patriarchy is arcane, oppressive, and so must be shelved in favor of other marriage models that are reflections of the bizarre and unseemly.

II.) Patriarchy is defined by Hierarchy (Ephesians 5)

The hierarchy is found in the explicitly stated requirement that, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.”

If modern man was not offended by what was already said he certainly has his knickers in a twist over this statement. Quit contrary to modernity’s lust for a Jacobin egalitarianism where everyone is equally the same thus assuring that each and all of us descend to a lowest common denominator sameness what patriarchy teaches is that all of life, marriage included, has hierarchy. This hierarchy is not absolute but is governed by God’s law word. Husbands are to be the authority covering over the wife even as Christ is the authority covering over the Church.

That men have hierarchy authority over their wives and families is not based on the fact that men are innately superior to their wives. Such a view would be a sign of some kind of mental distemper. That men have authority over their wives is only based on the fact that men are better at being men then women are at being men and part of what it means to be a man is to serve one’s wife and family by exercising authority. This God ordained authority is wielded by the husband with a selflessness that is looking out for the best for wife and family. It is to that authority that wives are to submit just as the Lord Christ submitted to the authority of the Father during the incarnation.

Notice the implied “harmony of interests” motif here. In patriarchy there is the presupposition of a harmony of interest. The husband and wife think not only of their own needs but of the needs of one another. As a minister for over 25 years now I can tell you that when marriages break down they most often break down when the “harmony of interests” is exchanged for a “conflict of interest” model where husband and / or wife begin to think the marriage is about themselves as opposed to being about the glory of God and the extension of the Kingdom of Christ.

III.) Patriarchy is defined by Suitability (Genesis 2)

This is what God said in Genesis
The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now, it stands to reason that this woman who was to be suitable for Adam found an Adam that in turn was suitable for her. This is just to say that Adam and Eve were a fit. They were quite literally made for each other. First of course they were a fit in the sense that they understood that they were God’s creatures and were beholden to Him. In our language today we might say that they shared a common faith. No marriage should be entered into where man and wife do not share a common understanding of their shared Christian faith. Indeed Scripture forbids it for Christians when it forbids unequal yoking.
But the correspondence, — or suitability if you prefer — between our first parents of course only began with Adam and Eve’s common faith — a common faith that found each of them trusting in God at each turn.

But beyond this common faith were other commonalities. They were related and yoked in other ways. After all this was a woman who was, in Adam’s own words, “Bone of my Bone, and Flesh of my Flesh.” Adam and Eve mirrored one another. I suspect that Adam and Eve corresponded to each other in the way that they looked and in their mannerisms, in their likes and dislikes. They not only shared a faith and a bed but they shared common delights, common palates, common speech patterns, and common characteristics.
Rudyard Kipling caught something of what I am getting at in terms of the need for commonalities in uniquely Christian marriage that is never less than a common faith but is always more than a common faith when he wrote,

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk–
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face, the eyes, the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

If this is true of a stranger within the gate how much more true of a stranger within a marriage?

Dr. Clarence Macartney, a well known conservative Reformed Minister from my Grandparent’s generation put this time-tested concept, if also time-worn idea, in a sermon he preached on Marriage and family life. Macartney preached,

“Love imagines that it can overleap the barriers of race and blood and religion, and in the enthusiasm and ecstasy of choice these obstacles appear insignificant. But the facts of experience are against such an idea. Mixed marriages are rarely happy. Observation and experiences demonstrate that the marriage of a Gentile and Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic, an American and a Foreigner has less chance of a happy result than a marriage where the man and woman are of the same race and religion….”

I know that Andy and Bernice share the kind of commonalities that the Lordship of Christ anticipates for a uniquely Christian marriage. They are not strangers to one another in terms of suitability. They share a common understanding of their common faith. They share a worldview.

They each are

Christian
Reformed
Covenantal
Confessional
Theonomic
Reconstructionist
Presuppositionalists
Familial-centric

They come from similar family cultures and backgrounds and they share a common people group. They are suitable for each other.

May God and His Christ favor us with a return again of Biblical patriarchy in order to heal the brokenness in our families and our people. The West will only be rebuilt, one marriage at a time, as those marriages turn to Christ and embrace God’s family order of patriarchy.