The message, “The Three Gifts of God,” is adapted and expanded from the text of some remarks I prepared for our local church’s couples’ retreat last weekend.

Marriage is among the three most beautiful gifts which the Lord gives to his children. Each gift is given only by God, and is accompanied by a mystery, a commission, and blessing. Each gift proceeds from the former gift. One cannot understand the gift of marriage without understanding its context in relationship to the other gifts.

New Life in Christ

The first gift is new life in Christ. This gift of regeneration and admission into the family of God is a mystery, in that it is an irresistible gift; it is given solely by God and without human merit; it involves the actual transformation of the recipient of the gift; and it is a gift that cannot and will never be rescinded. The mystery of this gift finds its ultimate expression in the fact that it is a gift of espousement to God Himself, meaning that the gift recipient is now joined with the blood-bought Church as the one, true, and spotless bride of Jesus Christ Himself, the second person of the Trinity. This gift is accompanied by a commission and the means to execute the commission, to love, glorify, worship, serve, and proclaim the glories of the Gift-Giver. It is a blessing because the gift is the source of all true joy, prosperity, peace, hope, protection, perseverance, and eternal happiness.

One-Flesh Covenant Unions

The second gift is the mysterious union which results from becoming one-flesh with the bride of your covenant. This gift is a great mystery, first, because two separate individuals become one-flesh and must henceforth view themselves not as individuals but as two who have been joined together, and second because this union is an explicit picture of the first gift — the union of the redeemed with their Spouse. This gift is given with an explicit purpose in the form of a commission to be fruitful, to multiply, and to have dominion over the earth. It is a gift bathed in the happy waters of blessing as the two discover that they are “better than one,” as the man learns that a “good wife is the gift of the Lord,” and as the wife is revealed to him who found her as a “good thing.”

The Reward of Children

The third is the gift is of new life which springs from the one-flesh union of marriage. Because so little is understood of this gift today, please allow me to take a little more time to expand the principles.

The gift of children is a great mystery for four reasons: First, it is a great mystery that the one-flesh union of a man and a woman results in the supernatural creation of a unique soul and a body. The soul produced is immortal and faces one of two eternal destinies. The body is mortal and will ultimately return to the dust from which it was formed. The wedding of this soul and body are present at the moment of conception and are of infinite value even in their original microscopic form. That man and woman, joined as one flesh, can be the instruments of creation is a mystery that should never cease to cause us to rejoice, to wonder, and to glory in the wisdom and mercy of God. Also mysterious is the fact that one-flesh couples are the God-appointed means for producing humans, the only creation in the universe which are made in the image of God Himself. But the most mysterious is the fact that this act of human childbirth was closely linked to the coming of God in the flesh, as the seed of hope was carried four thousand years in the chosen line of God, and that henceforth every covenant-keeping, one-flesh couple has the hope of seeing the miracle of spiritual new birth through their physical offspring, and this contributing to the very perpetuation of the Church and the glory of Christ by the fruit of their wombs. In this sense, the gift of physical new birth is a picture and daily reminder of the blessing of spiritual new birth. So wonderful is this mystery, that Scripture says of the woman, “she shall be saved in childbirth if she continue in faith, love and sanctification with all sobriety.”

Second, this gift is a great mystery because (notwithstanding the scientific manipulations of man) only God can create new life. The mystery of life-creation is and will remain just that — a mystery to man. Man cannot and will never be able to create life from non-life. The gift of children is a reminder of the mysterious, but wonderful, sovereignty, lordship, and creatorship of God over the universe. Third, this gift is a great mystery because, in the creation of a new child, mother and father impart elements of their own identity into the very make-up of this new creation. The child resembles them, carries their genetic make-up, and is uniquely connected to them through birth and blood in a way which is truly singular among all human relationships.

Finally, like other gifts of God, there is a mysterious relationship between human responsibility and the absolute sovereignty of God. Those one-flesh couples who receive this gift of new life in the form of children realize that God alone is sovereign over the womb. The Lord causes both the fruitful and the barren womb. However, God has appointed the means as well as the ends. Even as God appoints the foolishness of preaching to win lost souls, so too He appoints obedience to His marital commission as the means for bringing new life into the world. Those who shut up or pervert the normal function of the womb to separate love from life, will not (absent unusual intervention from the Lord) receive this third gift. The gift is given to those who act upon the explicit and binding commission of God that one-flesh couples use their marriage to actively and willfully seek to be very fruitful through procreation. This commission means that a man will “rejoice in the wife of his youth and let his fountains be blessed.” He will not “deal treacherously with the wife of [his] youth,” understanding that “for this cause did he make the two one, but to bring forth a godly seed.”

Finally, the third gift is a blessing of such value that it is part of God’s program to influence the life and very happiness of the one-flesh couple. God describes the gift of children as His true “reward” for the righteous man, and the absence of such rewards as a curse. This gift is a blessing that makes the righteous man mighty in the land, is the joy of his youth, and as well as the comfort of his old age.

Conclusion

Spiritual new life in Christ, the one-flesh covenant union between a man and a woman, and the creation of physical new life are the blessed trinity of gifts given by God to his children. Each gift has elements which remain mysterious to us. Each gift is accompanied by a commission. Each gift is surrounded by blessing. The first gift gives meaning to the second, which in turn gives meaning to the third, which in turn points back to the first.

All three gifts can be misinterpreted, perverted, or subverted by sinful man, but man’s sin does not diminish the glories of the true nature of each gift. Moreover, those who will, with their whole heart, receive these as personal gifts from the Lord, and who will understand that the value of these gifts lies not in and of themselves, but in the person of Jesus Christ (who alone is worthy of all glory, dominion, and honor), are capable, by God’s grace, of modeling before a cynical world the glories of our gift-giving Savior.