“39 A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord. 40 In my judgment, she is happier if she stays as she is—and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.”
Tim McGraw’s first big hit came in 1994. ‘Johnny’s daddy was takin’ him fishing when he was eight years old. A little girl came through the front gate holding a fishing pole. His dad looked down and smiled and said, “we can’t leave her behind. Son, I know you don’t want her to go, but someday you’ll change your mind. And Johnny said, “Take Jimmy Johnson, take Timmy Thompson, take my best friend Bo. Take anybody that you want, as long as she don’t go. Take any boy in the world. Daddy please, don’t take the girl.”’
By the final verse Johnny is twenty-three, has married that girl, and, ‘there’s gonna be a little one, and she says “it’s time to go.” Doctor says, “the baby’s fine but you’ll have to leave ‘cause his momma’s fading fast,” and Johnny hit his knees, and there he prayed, “Take the very breath You gave me; take the heart from my chest. I’ll gladly take her place if You’ll let me; make this my last request: take me out of this world. God please, don’t take the girl.”’
The song doesn’t tell you whether or not Johnny widowed, but the song does remind us that spouses do die. There is a separation coming in each marriage, and to imagine otherwise is naïve; “teach us O Lord to number our days that we might gain a heart of wisdom.” These life-long marriages are only life-long. That’s the claim of this sermon: these life-long marriages are only life-long
We will study this in two points. First: being widowed. Second: free to remarry. We see being widowed in verse 39 and free to remarry in both verses 39 and 40.
First: being widowed. There is a reason the phrase, “‘til death do us part,” is included in the wedding vows and it’s not just because Paul wrote, “A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives.” It’s because when Paul wrote, “as long as he lives,” he knew that length would not be forever. Death will rip the one flesh union apart, and if you can imagine any living creature ripped in half, you can see just some of the pain of what we talked about with divorce and the pain of being widowed—being un-one-d is not painlessly done.
Death is an enemy. Scripture never treats death as if it were simply part of the lifecycle. Its treated as an enemy in Psalm 23’s valley of the shadow of death. It was treated as an enemy by Abraham who wept over his wife’s dead body. It was treated as an enemy by Jesus who was in agony at the thought of his own death. It was treated as an enemy by Johnny saying, “God, please don’t take the girl.” Death is not the way it was supposed to be from the beginning.
The death of a spouse introduces all sorts of dynamics that are contrary to the way it was supposed to be from the beginning. Waking up suddenly and realizing that she’s not there and then remembering yet again why she isn’t is not the way it was supposed to be from the beginning. Going to grandparents day alone is not the way it was supposed to be from the beginning. A bride walking down the aisle without her father is not the way it was supposed to be from the beginning. Feeling on the fringes of friend groups because they really don’t what it’s like to be widowed is not the way it was supposed to be from the beginning. Having your own grief compounded by your children’s grief is not the way it was supposed to be from the beginning. “Each heart knows its own bitterness,” as Proverbs 14:10 puts it.
We who haven’t been widowed need to remember that being widowed is not just the death of a spouse, it is the death of the one flesh union. In real ways the surviving partner isn’t whole anymore. One and one make one in marriage, but when that new one is cut in half, you have a half for quite a while. In some ways the newly widowed are like a stroke victim trying figure out how to manage with only one half of their body working.
Those who have been widowed get it, or at least they get their own experience of it. Since those who are widowed understand best, they are best equipped to minister to the widowed. Each of us are priests, in a sense, with our own ministry to which we must attend.
Death brings its own realities and part of death’s sting is the permanence of it all. You will never again hear that voice, which is why recordings of his voice are so precious. There is the resurrection but even then there is something permanent about being widowed because as Jesus explained, “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage.”
This isn’t to say that you won’t know your spouse in the new creation. We saw that when we studied the afterlife and the new creation. Your late wife will not be a stranger to you in the new creation, but neither will she be your wife. Death truly does end the marriage. It doesn’t end the relationship, but it does end the union. The reason is that there is a new union, and it is between each of us and God.
This life-long marriage is a sign pointing to that reality. When the reality comes, the sign falls away. There are street signs leading you to the Omaha Zoo, but once you arrive at the zoo there are no more signs pointing you toward it because you are there. The reality has come and so the signs fell away. When you and God become one, the sign of marriage falls away. ‘I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and He will dwell with them. They will be His people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”’ The best parts of marriage point to that union.
There are some who find this loss of the one flesh union with their spouse unthinkable. That’s understandable because the two really are one in this life. There are others, however, who find it to be a relief. Each of us are more sinful than we understand and when you put two sinners together it shouldn’t surprise us that every marriage has its messes and that some marriages are almost intractably miserable.
We Christians rarely live up to our calling. Husbands rarely love their wives as Christ loved the church. Wives rarely honor their husbands as they are called to do. The marriage in which both strive to do their part wholeheartedly is the exception rather than the rule. We just hold up the exceptions for emulation, sometimes unhelpfully so.
We are all capable of stunning hypocrisy. John and Molly Wesley demonstrate that. John was one of the founders of Methodism. He was possibly the most gifted organizer in church history. He grew up in a noteworthy home with an extraordinary mother and so idealized her that he despaired of ever finding her equal. That’s not a helpful posture for marriage. John could be stubborn and difficult. When he wanted to marry Molly, his brother Charles knew it would be a disaster, but he also knew that John didn’t want to hear what he had to say about it. Soon after they were married Molly began to resent John’s busy preaching schedule which took him away from home quite often. She came to suspect him of cheating on her during these trips. She opened his mail to look for signs of betrayal. She often passed on embarrassing facts about him to his numerous theological opponents.
She wasn’t kind to him. He wasn’t kind to her. He married her, in part, because of her spiritual interest, but eventually he cruelly asked her, “if you were buried just now, or if you had never lived, what loss would it be to the cause of God?” He once told her, “I hope I shall see your wicked face no more.” Both were professing Christians; neither seemed truly willing to live in harmony with the other or to resign themselves to the situation and do their best to obey their part of the equation; they separated and reconciled, separated and reconciled. Here’s a song that would resonate with them; “I swore that I would love you to the end of time; so now I’m praying for the end of time to hurry up and arrive ‘cause if I gotta spend another minute with you, I don’t think that I can really survive. I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow, but God only knows what I can do right now. I’m praying for the end of time; it’s all that I can do; praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you!” Both John and Molly knew that marriage was life-long; they both knew it was only life-long. There are such marriages in Scripture too. It probably describes more unenviable marriages than enviable ones. Life is not what it is supposed to be. Death will end the marriage bond. This means the surviving spouse is free to remarry or remain single. That’s our second point: free to remarry. The widowed spouse is free to remarry and free not to remarry. Both need to be stressed. Some would rather not remarry. Of this group some think it would be somehow disloyal to their late spouse. Jesus made clear that this was not the case when he told the Sadducees that a woman who married and then widowed seven times would not be married to her first husband in the new creation nor to any of her husbands. For some, however, the thought of getting married seems disloyal so they don’t; that’s fine.
Some widows might have felt compelled to remarry because of tradition. In the Old Covenant, if a woman was widowed without children, she was to marry her late husband’s brother to be cared for and properly pass down the allotment of the Promised Land. The New Covenant doesn’t have the same focus on the land, in part because of the inclusion of the Gentiles. These words from Paul may have relieved the consciences of some women who thought they might be wrong to remain unmarried.
There are reasons that a widowed person might be happier single. Many widowed women have said, “it took me decades to break in one man. I don’t have it in me to break in another.” Paul knew there were trials that came with marriage and those same trials would be present in another marriage as well as new trials. Paul thought that for some people freedom from these trials would be a gift in these sense that it would free them up to be solely devoted to Christ in terms of particular ministries; that’s part of verse 40, “In my judgment, she is happier if she stays as she is—and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.”
Paul thought that for other widows a new marriage would be the proper context for obedience. In 1 Timothy 5, he told younger widows to get married and raise families to keep themselves from sexual immortality and worldliness. Now with the advent of Viagra, that’s an important word to older widows as well. There is a good deal of sexual immorality in the retirement communities in Florida just as there is when young people go down to Panama City for spring break. The sexual revolution has been remarkably successful; “if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion,” is a word for them too.
What mattered to Paul was that the widowed devoted themselves to God. That’s because he thought marriage was about God and singleness was about God, but, of course, that’s not just Paul—that’s the Holy Spirit speaking through Paul. The Spirit of God thinks that this topic, as well as every other topic we’ve covered in this series, has far more to do with you and God than with you and another person.
So if you are widowed, consider your situation. Consider how you are wired. Consider what it means for you to obey God in your situation. Would getting married help you in these or hinder you in obedience?
We see the widowed making both choices throughout Scripture. Abraham gets married after Sarah dies. Moses gets married after Zipporah died. It seems that Jesus’ mother didn’t married again after Joseph died. Anna was married for seven years, was widowed, and remained so for the rest of her life.
Each of those situations reveals factors to consider in a new marriage. Abraham had vast wealth and we already studied how he divided among the children of his first marriage and second marriage. Moses’ sister Miriam didn’t like his second wife, which led to all sorts of trouble. John Calvin married a widowed woman who had a stepdaughter. Stepchildren can be a great joy, but it can also be a difficult relationship to navigate. Calvin it quite difficult to do so after his wife died and his stepdaughter got into some rather deep difficulties.
Jesus’ mother didn’t get married again after Joseph died and so the question of how to best care for her needs came to the forefront. There was no social security or pensions in those days. The oldest son would inherit a double portion of his father’s estate to care for his widowed mother. That oldest son was Jesus who, as he died on the cross, told John to care for his mother. Anna was most likely a widow for over fifty years. She lived in the temple because that’s where the people gave alms to the poor. Being widowed brings new realities. Getting married again can bring new realities. Remaining unmarried has its own realities. These are to be considered.
If a widow is considering a new marriage, the will of God must be part of those considerations; verse 39, “if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.” Christians are called to marry Christians. Disciples are called to marry other disciples. People who take the commandments of God seriously are to marry people who take the commandments of God seriously. People with new hearts are to marry people with new hearts.
Remember, marriage is never just about two people. It is about people and the Lord. This is why Article 69 of our church order states, “consistories shall instruct and admonish those under their spiritual care to marry only in the Lord”, and “ministers shall not solemnize marriages which would be in conflict with the Word of God.”
We’ve been studying so many of these topics to see what the Word of God says on these matters. God has something to say to single people. He has something to say to married people. He has something to say to divorced people. He has something to say to widowed people. Whatever marital status box you check on governmental forms, God has something to say to you about that status. He makes His will clear in other areas of life as well, but we’ve studied this area because, by and large, we haven’t. We’ve been taught in ten thousand ways that all of this is really about us. We’ve wrung our hands at the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage without returning to God’s definition of marriage and applying it to ourselves.
So when we come to the death of a spouse we, as a culture, have little to say because we tend to believe it really is about us and the other person and now the other person is gone. We need to be able to say more, or rather we need to be able to hear more. When speaking to Israel at perhaps their lowest moment when all seemed lost, God said, “don’t be afraid. You will not be ashamed; do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated; you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more for your Maker is your husband.”
That is the only hope any of us have, whatever our marital status. Our only hope is that God willing to become one with us. That’s what we see in Jesus. That’s the meaning of the blood shed on the cross—God reconciling Himself to sinners. God is willing to be one with us. He wants to. The question for us is, “is that we are living for?” Amen.