The Bible Study Podcast, episode 312. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues a study on marriage.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. As I mentioned, there are some things about this study of marriage that

scared me a little bit, and we'll look at some of the reasons for that today. Now, what have we

established so far? We've looked at marriage, and we've said that it's something established

by God and that it's very important. So you'd think at that point that if I open up the Bible

and I start looking at people's

marriages, I'm going to find some good examples of marriages that we should strive to emulate.

But I don't find a lot. And that's one of the things that concerned me about doing a Bible study on that.

So let's look at some of the track records here. We start with Adam and Eve, and we don't really know a lot about their marriage. We do know that when push came to shove, Adam was certainly willing to blame Eve for the problems that he got himself into. But it's our understanding that they stayed together. Of course, there weren't a whole lot of alternatives at the time. We skip ahead, and the next marriage we probably run into is the marriage of Noah, and we get some things about Noah's relationship with his sons, but not quite as much about his relationship with his wife. And what did she feel about this big arc that's being created out on their front lawn? Abraham and Sarah had an interesting marriage, a childless marriage, of course, for many, many, many years. And he did have an unfortunate habit, at least twice, of introducing his wife as his sisters, because he thought that she was so beautiful that people might kill him and take her.

His son, Isaac, chooses a wife who helps one of their sons conspire against the other one and tries to fool her husband.

His son gets into a marriage where he marries the wrong woman and then manages to marry the right woman.

And, of course, he ends up therefore with two wives and, of course, later on, two handmaidens who are competing with each other and probably a fairly dysfunctional family when one of the children is sold into slavery, we would have to say. Moses' marriage seems to be pretty good. We don't really know a whole lot about it. We know he got some good advice from his father-in-law when he went into the whole ministry business, so this get people out of Israel business. Skip ahead to King David, his first wife,

mocks at him when he's praising God when they're bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem,

is made barren by God. He ends up eyeing the neighbor's wife and plots to have her killed and marries

her instead. His son Solomon has so many wives, so many foreign wives, that they pull his heart away from God. And we'll look at that in a later episode. So in the Old Testament, I just really don't find a whole lot of examples of marriages that I think I want to be just like them. And in the New Testament, we really actually don't get a whole lot of marriages that we learn much about at all.

We see the start of Joseph and Mary's marriage, and it looks like it's going to be a good one.

But really, most of their marriage happens in that quiet period that the Bible doesn't talk about between Jesus being 12 and Jesus going into public ministry.

And then we know that Peter was married because he had a

mother-in-law, and Paul says that Peter and all the other disciples, except he and Barnabas are married,

but we don't really learn about those relationships that much. So what can we say so far?

We can say so far that if you look at the total sums of all the marriages named in the Bible,

that marriage can't be that easy. Well, and that shouldn't be too much of a surprise, because it's right there

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