Ephesians 5:18-22
No one needs to prove to us that we may be watching the death of the germ-cell of civilization, the family. All the signs are abundantly clear all around us. We could drag out all kinds of statistics to indicate the dire situation in the families in our culture. We are all constantly looking at the parade in the media of divorce, sexual rebellion, abortion, sterilization, delinquency, infidelity, homosexuality, women's liberation, children's rights and so on. That has been continually paraded before us for the last ten or twenty years. We are watching the formation of the rope that strangles the family to death.
And many, frankly, are gladly carving out the tombstone for the family, and really doing it happily. In a book entitled, The Death of the Family, a British physician suggests "doing away with the family completely...he says...because it is a primary conditioning device for a western imperialistic world view." Kate Millet(?) who is a very prominent feminist wrote a book called Sexual Politics and in it she writes that the family must go because it oppresses and enslaves women.
The people who hold these perspectives are aggressive, forceful, forthright, domineering and they find their most fertile ground for the propagation of their viewpoints in the universities and the colleges of our society, and consequently they are in the process of significantly reeducating the youth who eventually fall into the category of the leaders and movers and shakers of our society. Mrs. T. Grace Atkinson(?) of The National Organization of Women, seeks to eliminate all sex, all marriage, all motherhood and all love. I'd say that's fairly fatal. She says, "Marriage is legalized servitude and family relations are the basis for all human oppression." What a warped sad view. But in many cases it is the reigning view among the thinkers, the professors, the teachers in our society.
On the other hand, others who are watching the death of the family see it as a disaster, a virulent disease. If the family cannot function, who will raise, who will socialize, who will moralize the next generation?
Dr. Armand Nicolai II (?) of Harvard Medical School sees the trend to destroy the family as a devastating trend. He points to married women with children working outside the home, the tendency for families to move frequently, almost constantly, the dominance of television in the home, the lack of controls in society, the chaos of moral confusion, the lack of communication among families and divorce, and all of those things, he says, are threatening the very life which we live. Let me quote from him. He says, "These trends will incapacitate the family, destroy its integrity and cause its members to suffer such crippling emotional conflict that they will become an intolerable burden to society. What about the future? First, the quality of family life will continue to deteriorate producing a society with a higher incidence of mental illness than ever before. Ninety-five percent of our hospital beds may be taken up by mentally ill patients. This illness will be characterized by a lack of self- control. We can expect the assassination of people in authority to be frequent occurrences. Crimes of violence will increase, even those within the family. The suicide rate will rise. As sexuality becomes more and more unlimited and separated from family and emotional commitment, the deadening effect will cause more bizarre experimentation and wide-spread perversion," end quote. A frankly frightening picture and we are watching it being painted right before our very eyes.
There is no question about the fact that the family is under a major assault, that people want to redefine family in absolutely any terms they want. There's no question that we are watching a generation of young people rising up who have no socialization skills and no moral sense at all. There is chaos. There is murder. There is crime at a rampant level. There is even pleasure in shooting people incidental to you, just for the sheer thrill of killing.
Sociologists, psychologists, analysts and so-called marriage and family experts, psychiatrists and all the rest are scrambling all over the place to try to come up with some kind of solution, and they've been doing that now for a couple of decades with absolutely no impact on the slide. Nothing that they are doing seems to slow down the process of the disintegration of human relationships at the very core of life which is the family. You can tamper with society in a lot of places, but if you destroy the family you destroy society.
It's a fascinating, in a sense, to be alive right in the middle of this. The family is certainly at the head of the endangered species list, much more dangerous than the elimination of some species that occupy people's attention.
And at that point we interject...can the family be saved? And I suppose for the sake of some people we should ask...should the family be saved? Is it worth fighting for? And if so, how? I would add that the church has made some efforts, certainly in the last ten years, the last twenty years there has been a great preoccupation on this subject. Christian bookstores are literally filled with books on marriage and the family. There have been endless sermons and messages and tapes and seminars and conferences going on to deal with the issues of the family. But that, too, doesn't seem to make much difference.
God has an answer to...should the family be saved?...and God has an answer to...can the family be saved?...in fact, the Bible makes it very clear when it says marriage is the grace of life and children are a blessed heritage from the Lord that we must understand the blessedness, the bliss and the purpose of God that unfolds in the matter of marriage and raising children. Family is still the heart and soul of human society and family as it is defined by God. It is the place of intimacy. It is the place of joy. It is the place of memories that build the foundation of life. It is the place of love. It is the place of socialization. It is the place of morality. It is the place of security. It is where you build confidence.
I was talking to one of our professors out at the Master's College the other day who graduated with a Ph.D. from USC particularly emphasizing the field of working with children in education. And he said all of the literature, all of the existing literature today done on the study of children indicates that there is a period of time between the ages of six and twelve when everything foundational is either put down or not put down and those are the determinative years in what that child will become. You can look at the pattern of life in those years and predict almost perfectly whether they will be anti-social in their behavior or whether they will socialize in a normal way. We can see all of the roots of criminal behavior in that period of time in the life of a child.
That makes a lot of sense that the secular world would pick out that time because even in the case of Jesus there is an illustration of the fact that when a Jewish child reached the age of twelve, he was ready on his own to be a son of the Law. I talked about the fact that God has designed parents to strengthen and build up children between the ages of six and twelve so that they can cope with puberty that starts at about that time. And if they don't have the foundations of morality and they don't have the affirmation and self-discipline and self-control that is built in during those years of six to twelve, then they run amuck when their passions take over during that period of time. There is a divine pattern for how a family is to deal with that, for how a marriage is to set a model to be followed, for how a marriage is to be fulfilled and happy and rewarded.
And when we look for that model we need to go no further than the Word of God. It's all laid out there. It's not that complicated and it's not that difficult. When I was preaching this week after I left Illinois I went over to Ohio and I was preaching and after I had preached a lady came up, a sweet young lady, I suppose about 35 years old and she had a whole bunch of little kids, a couple in her arms and some hanging on to her. And she wanted to tell me that she was struggling ten years ago to find some direction in her marriage and she wanted to thank me for some messages she heard that I preached on this particular subject that led she and her husband, led her and her husband to determine the direction based upon the Word of God which in the ten years intervening God had so blessed that she came on a long trip in very difficult weather to express her gratitude to me for the joy that she's experienced both in her marriage and in her family. It's not me, it's the truth of the Word of God that makes the difference. And until people get in line with that truth, they will continue the devastating drift downward that's going to be far worse in the future than it is even now. One can only guess what the next generation is going to be like. Frightening thing to think about.
Now for us to get a grip on what God says about the family, we really find ourselves best served by looking in Ephesians chapter 5. Paul's letter to the Ephesians sort of gives us a place where all of the pertinent material is pulled together and it's a great launching point for us. Around 60 A.D. the apostle Paul wrote this letter and sent it off to the saints who are at Ephesus. It may well be too that the original manuscript didn't say Ephesus and it could have been a circular letter gone through all the churches in the area of Asia Minor of which Ephesus was the first of those churches. But Paul wrote this letter to the Christians in that part of the world and one of the things that was on his heart was the matter of marriage. And when you come down to chapter 5 and verse 18 you begin to get in the flow that leads you to verse 22 and following where the issues of family and marriage are addressed. We're going to talk about a lot of things in this series over the next number of weeks. We're going to touch on a number of subjects and interact with the divine revelation from God, but we'll constantly come back to Ephesians 5 as home base because it's a perfect launching pad for us. And keep in mind, this is not human opinion. I'm not here to give you my opinion. I really don't value my opinion at all. All I want to do is show you what the Word of God says and the applicable wisdom that comes from that. This is the last word on the issue. We don't need experts and psychiatrists and psychologists and analysts and marriage and family people, we can go right to the Word of God. We're not looking for tricks and gimmicks, we're looking for truth that can become part of our lives.
Now in this wonderful epistle that we are familiar with, the epistle of Ephesians, as Paul begins to launch into this subject he starts, at least for us, in verse 18 with a very key premise. And let's begin there. He says, "And do not get drunk with wine for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit." That really is the key that unlocks all the rest. From that great principle flows the instruction to the wife in verse 22, the instruction to the husband in verse 25, the instruction to the children in 6:1 and the instruction to the parents in 6:2. All of that marriage and family teaching flows out of this principle in chapter 5 and verse 18. In fact, it is the first of several necessary prerequisites for any successful marriage or any successful relationship.
And the contrast in that verse, as you see it there, "Do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit," it's quite dramatic and remarkable contrast. If you just pick up the book of Ephesians and read that, you might stop and say, "Well why in the world would he contrast drunkenness with being filled with the Spirit? What is the point here? When a person is drunk, they've lost control of themselves and they wander around in an out of control kind of behavior. Is he saying I want you to be out of control but not by wine but by the Holy Spirit? What is he saying here? I want you to yield up the control of your faculties to the Holy Spirit rather than to wine? Why make such a comparison?
Well the answer is found in a bit of the historical context. Let me give you a little bit of background. Ephesus, of course, was in Asia Minor and was dominated by Hellenistic or Greek culture called Hellenistic from the Greek word hellene which means Gentiles. But the Greeks believed that the great god Zeus, they, of course, had a pantheon of gods and Zeus was one of the formidable ones, they believed that the great god Zeus had given birth to a son. And that it had occurred in a very unusual way. And I'll give you a little of the background. They believed that the child was snatched from the womb of its mother, and its mother's name in Greek mythology is Semele. And the child was snatched from the womb of Semele while Semele was being incinerated because she got too close to the burning glory of Zeus. I don't know how Zeus produced this child in her in the mythology but in some way he did it without destroying her but when she sought to get too close to him, she became incinerated and in order to preserve the child of Zeus, the child was snatched out of her womb during her incineration. The child-god who had not yet come to full term was then sown into the thigh of Zeus and kept there until time to be born. That stretches your imagination.
So here is Zeus with this fetus in some point of formation sewn into his thigh. The infant god destined by Zeus to be the world ruler was born eventually out of the thigh of Zeus and then kidnapped by the envious Titans. Titans were called in Greek mythology sons of earth. They took the child, the Titans did, this child of Zeus, tore the child limb from limb, cooked it and ate it. But Zeus found the heart, according to the mythology, revived it and it was reborn as Dionysius. Now if you ever study Greek mythology you come across the name Dionysius quite frequently. Zeus found the heart, swallowed it and eventually the heart formed into the personality of Dionysius and was reborn.
Zeus then blasted the Titans with lightning, incinerating all of them from whom...whose ashes all of humanity came. So that's their creation story. Dionysius was then really someone beyond humanity because all of humanity just rose out of the ashes of the Titans and Dionysius along with Zeus was a god.
Dionysius then, according to Greek mythology, spawned a religion, a religion of ecstasy, ectasia(?) and emotionalism. And the Dionysian cult, this religion of ecstasy and emotionalism, this frenzied kind of religion, saturated the Greek and Roman world. The Dionysian cult was a debauched form of worship and a popular, a dominant form.
The worshipers committed atrocities with human organs. They engaged in orgies of sexual perversion, along with music and dancing and feasting. But there was one common element to all of the Dionysian debacle and that was drunkenness...drunkenness. In fact, if you ever circulate in the Middle East or in the ancient Roman world, you will see Dionysius associated with grapes. When there is a statue or a tribute to Dionysius, some monument to Dionysius, it is always marked out by clusters of grapes because he became known as the god of wine.
The Greek name of Dionysius became in the Roman language, Latin, Bacchus. And Bacchus is the Roman god of wine. When people engaged in these unbelievable drunken brawls, they were called Bacchanalian feasts. And if you've studied any of that, that's a familiar term even today. Take your dictionary out and look up Bacchanalia and it will say a drunken orgy.
The key element then, the key element in pagan worship was drunkenness. That's how...that's how they got their inhibitions out. That's how they dealt with their normal restraint. That's how they dealt with normal feelings of guilt. That's how they dulled their senses sufficiently to quiet their conscience. That's how they dispelled their anxiety and fear and guilt over such vile behavior as they engaged in. That's how they induced a kind of giddiness that substituted for real joy and just catapulted them in to this kind of horrible behavior. They did it by getting drunk and losing all their inhibitions.
So they believed that drunkenness was simply the door into ecstasy, the door into religious expression. And at such drunkenness elevated the believer, the worshiper, to total communion with the deities. So drunkenness was the key to worship, to communion to the deities. The more inebriated they were the more likely they were to get in to the ectasia(?) and enthusiasmos(?), two Greek words, ecstasy and enthusiasm, that spoke about these horrifying often demonic kind of activities.
A number of years ago when I made a trip to Israel, I had the privilege of taking a special trek up through Lebanon, up through Beirut, back east of there in a fascinating journey to the city of Damascus. Damascus is pretty deep into the Middle East at this particular point. And when we went into Damascus, a fascinating opportunity on the way to Damascus, we went to the city of Baalbek which was the easternmost point of the Roman Empire, the great Roman Empire extended way to the Middle East, east of Israel. And we went to the city of Baalbek because there are some of the most marvelous ruins that have been preserved there and restored. And they have some obelisks that are almost impossible to understand, to understand how they made them and how they moved them is an ongoing dilemma...massive, massive pieces of stones.
There also has been reconstructed there an incredible temple. And all across this temple, it was devoted to Jupiter, but all across this temple there are grape vines hanging on the columns and across the colonnades at the top. And you are told by the guides who take you through there that this is representative of Bacchus, that the Romans erected at the most eastern point of their empire a temple to Bacchus and there they carried on their orgies. What is fascinating about it, for example, is that in the very center of this large place where they did this, there's a decorated area and then a hole, a deep hole and that was in order that the people might vomit in the process and go back and indulge themselves even more. An unbelievable kind of conduct in which they believed and they did it in temples that they were ascending to communion with the gods. That's what Paul has in mind.
Now go back to verse 18, it takes on different meaning in the light of that context. He is saying to them do not get drunk with wine, all that does is produce dissipation. All that does is take you down. If you want to commune with God, be filled with the Spirit. Our religion is not brought about in its fullness and its richness and its reality by drunkenness but rather by the filling of the Spirit. Don't be filled with alcohol, be filled with the Holy Spirit. Literally, be being kept continuously filled by the Spirit.
If you want true religion, if you want true communion with God, if you want true worship to take place, if you want godly living, if you want to please God, then you must be filled with the Spirit...not controlled by alcohol but controlled by the Holy Spirit. The parallel to this is in Colossians 3:16 where instead of saying be filled with the Spirit, Paul says let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly because that's really the same thing. When the Word of Christ dominates your life and you respond in obedience to it, it's the same as being controlled by the Holy Spirit, of course, who is the author of Scripture. Obedience to the Word is being filled with the Spirit. It's not some kind of mystical experience. It's not some kind of ecstatic thing. It's not something that comes over you and catapults you into some unconscious behavior. It's not being knocked over into a dead faint, as you see so often on television. It's not launching off into some ecstatic speech. It's not going out of yourself or being beyond control. It simply is to be continuously controlled by the Spirit who does it through the Word and that means we are obeying the truth.
So we have to start at that point. Whatever we're going to do in terms of our Christian life, whether it's our marriage or our family, it has to flow out of a life controlled by the Holy Spirit. And that's why the society really has no chance, no hope. They're not regenerate. They don't know God. They have no more hope of getting it right than the people at the Bacchanalian feasts did. It's not going to happen. A right kind of marriage relationship and a right kind of family relationship is built on a redeemed life, empowered and energized by the Holy Spirit in obedience to the Word of God.
Now look at verses 19 and 20. "Speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord." Let me tell you something. Where the Spirit of God controls a life, where there's a life devoted to the Word of God and obedience to the Word of God, there is praise...that's the first thing. There is praise. And I suppose obviously we could conclude that a worshiping life, a praising life comes from a heart that is filled with joy. It's this simple. You give me an obedient person, obedient to the Word of God, I'll show you a positive, happy, praising, worshiping person whose heart is filled with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, who is singing and making melody in his heart to the Lord, and I'll show you a person who can get along with anybody because they're lost in wonder, love and praise because they're worshiping the Lord.
Verse 20 adds, "Always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God even the Father." I'll tell you what, it's very hard to argue with somebody who is thankful for everything...everything. You find a person who is filled with the Spirit, I'll show you a happy person, I'll show you a thankful person. A person obeying the Word of God, a person filled with joy and praise and worship, a person who has nothing but thanks for everything God has done is going to be wonderful to live with. That's the bottom line. We're really talking here not about some kind of gimmicks to make your marriage work. We're not talking about, you know, the kind of things that I read about all the time. And you remember some years ago I told you about a book I read about marriage and said if you really want to have a great relationship with your wife, here's a good suggestion. Go buy her a Teddy bear...a nice little Teddy bear, one of those real soft ones. And bring it home. Wrap it in tin foil and stick it in the back of the freezer. This is in a book. Stick it in the back of the freezer. On the Teddy bear before you wrap it in the tin foil and stick it in the back of the freezer write words of romance and love and then just stick it back there...you know, behind the old lasagna. And some day, and you don't know when, when she is looking for the old lasagna, and she pulls that thing out and unwraps it and finds a frozen Teddy bear with a romance note, the book says when you get home from work it's going to be bliss. Are you kidding me? If you have a bad marriage, it's better to get hit with one that's not frozen. My suggestion would be, leave it thawed, just in case. Stick it in the closet.
Look, we're not talking about that. You're not going to be able to prepare a marriage like that. You're not going to be able to make a meaningful relationship like that. I hear suggestions all the time, take your wife on a date, take her out to dinner. That's all fine. That's not going to repair a marriage that isn't right. There's only one way to cultivate a right relationship with anybody and that's to be filled with the Spirit of God, filled with praise and gratitude to God so that your heart is overflowing with joy. And that's what makes a person someone that you can live with, someone who is a blessing to you. It should be, frankly, almost impossible to start a fight with you because you're just too blessed, too full of praise, too full of thanks, too full of the overflowing grace of God, too controlled by the Holy Spirit. You're so filled with love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and self- control that your spouse may just get upset at their inability to cause conflict. It has to start there.
Now out of those things flows yet another element, verse 21. "And be subject to one another in the fear of Christ." It doesn't mean you're afraid of Christ. It just says be subject to one another. Now look here, we're not talking about who this...this isn't talking about wives to their husbands, this isn't talking about children to their parents, it's talking about everybody. But this is the ground work, folks, this is what makes meaningful marriages. It's a spiritual issue here. It's not a matter of cleverness, it's not a matter of ideas, it's not a matter of scheduling events, it's not a matter of buying her gifts or whatever, or reverse, buying him gifts or cooking his favorite meal. Those are nice little things to do. But with two people who live according to the standards that we've just read, it wouldn't matter whether you did those or didn't do them. That's not the stuff that makes for lifelong joy in a relationship.
Submission does though, and we're talking here about a generic kind of submission, without regard for any specific relationship within the context of