If we go all the way back to the very first married couple, all the way back, just after the creation of marriage, immediately following the fall of mankind, the birth of sin and the ensuing pronouncements of judgement, we find the tap-root of marriage’s tree of challenge. Right there in the Garden of Eden, home of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, sprouted the Tree of Marital Challenge.
The serpent would crawl on its belly amid the dust of the earth. He would bruise mankind’s heel, and mankind would bruise his head. The man would find the earth cursed and his work extremely difficult. The woman would have, in addition to intensified pain in childbirth, the desire to control her husband, but would instead be controlled by him.
Consequently, marriage has three serious challenges.
- They have an enemy for the ages working to undermine them.
- The husband finds his work daunting.
- The wife finds in her heart the desire to supplant her husband’s role as head of the marriage relationship.
With such a towering tree of challenge, what’s a poor married couple to do? Well, that tree has to come down. But how?
When God made these pronouncements of judgments, he knew exactly what their solutions were. In fact, He used the whole unfortunate fall of mankind as a stage on which to bring His Son. And therein lies the solution. Once again we find a problem whose answer is Jesus.
Christ established the New Covenant, expressed in the New Testament, which provides the solution for the husband’s insurmountable work challenge. Love your wife, husband, as Christ loved the church and gave His life for her.
The husband’s challenge has to do with how difficult his work is. There appear to be two tendencies for husbands, and most incline to one or the other. He either works too hard, overcompensating in an effort to succeed, or he’s intimidated by the difficulty and shies away from working to provide. Thus, many are workaholics, while many others are seen as lazy.
But how does loving his wife address his work challenge? Follow this logic: If he loves his wife, he’ll resist the urge to fall into either extreme; he’ll find the work-life-balance that allows him to succeed in providing while reserving a healthy amount of time for his family.
The wife’s challenge, the desire to take the reins from her husband, is overcome by accepting her New Testament solution of submitting to her husband.
Ladies, please put down your stones. I know you want to hurl them at me but think about this. You aren’t the only spouse in your marriage that God is asking to submit. Try loving as Christ loved without submitting. It can’t be done, and that’s the calling your husband has.
What does submission have to do with solving the wife’s problem? Here’s the logic for her: the decision to submit completely replaces the desire to rule over her husband. The dreaded idea of submitting to the husband is the very thing that relieves the pain of the ancient curse.
What about the enemy? The biggest thing is to not repeat the mistake the inaugural couple made. Do what God said and don’t listen to the deceiver.
If we do these three things – love, submit and don’t listen to the enemy – we’ll find that we’ve felled the Tree of Marital Challenge.
