Imaging God in my marriage on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions to the problems that people face.

Today on the podcast I have with me, Dr. Cheryl Bell, she's an adjunct instructor at Southwestern

Baptist Theological Seminary in their biblical counseling department. She's a member at

Birchman Baptist Church there in Fort Worth, and she's an ACBC certified member. She's also

written several of our

booklets. If you recall, we released a set of booklets to service our counselors and churches,

and she contributed a couple of those booklets, and I'm so grateful for her. Fun fact about

Cheryl, Cheryl and I went through the PhD program together at Southwestern Seminary. We became very good friends through that process. And I love Cheryl and I appreciate so much of what she does in teaching. And we're now the beneficiary of her being one of our certified members. This past year, she taught a breakout at our annual conference. And I just wanted to grab her and talk to her about

that particular topic. And so obviously we're talking today about image of God and marriage.

Cheryl, listen, I'm so grateful you're here. So grateful for the work that you've done. Let me just

mention some of that work. She wrote on Freud and the idea of the sexualized child. And that's

going to be a really healthy contribution in the future to help us to think biblically about sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, and that sort of thing. So, Cheryl, thank you for your work. I'm glad you're here. Let's talk about marriage. Okay. It's a pleasure to be here. Now, how does marriage look backwards and forwards at the same time? Sometimes we use that imagery. Maybe we don't know

exactly what we mean. Marriage does look backward and it does look forward. Describe what you mean by that.

Okay. These are the truths that I wish I'd known before I got married. So I would have thought

about marriage very differently if I had because I didn't understand the theological foundation on which every marriage,

particularly believing marriages are built. And so if we look back to Genesis 2 and we see

where God established marriage, we understand that there are some ways in which our marriages

uniquely reveal him as a Trinitarian God. You know, a lot of times when we look at Romans

120 and we see that his attributes are clearly seen and understood by the things that are made,

we think purely about material creation, but the reality is it includes immaterial parts of

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