*BOOK STATS: 220 Pages / 11 Chapters / Weekend Readable
Let’s be honest here. There are a lot of books on marriage.
But, think about it for a second. Is there one that grabs the men?
Seriously, is there a book out there that really ignites a man’s passion to pursue his wife and work to build a lasting legacy?
I can think of twenty-five books that a woman will try and drag her man through, but I can’t think of a single one that will awaken the man’s quest for destiny in his marriage.
But this one will. That’s because it’s not even a book on marriage. It’s a call to arms.
It’s a reminder.
The marriage relationship is the relationship that God has chosen to reveal one of the greatest mysteries on the planet, the relationship that Christ has with His church. This is why it’s under constant and strategic attack. Man was created during a war. It’s not even our war, but we have been wed into it.
The Bible teaches that there was a whole story that happened before our story. There were created beings before us, angels. I’ll spare you the details, but there was a coup. There was an angel named Lucifer that tried to take the throne from God. He mostly failed, but he was able to convince one third of the angels to go with him.
When we think angel in the west, we think peaceful white man with a harp and amazing hair. But the bible teaches that these beings were valiant warriors; there are even a few instances where one of them was able to defeat whole armies of men by themselves! Every time they would try and talk to a man the first thing they would say is something like, “You’re ok, I’m not going to kill you, please chill out, I swear I just want to tell you something!” because these creatures were utterly terrifying.
If you think your family drama was bad before your wedding, well this was the temperature before the first wedding! It was an absolute war. God violently cast Lucifer and his followers from heaven somewhere between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 (it would seem since Jesus references the moment he saw Lucifer cast to the created earth). And then He took a breath, and He made man.
The creation of Adam and his marriage to Eve was a declaration of God’s victory to His enemy before the dust of this war had even settled. I can imagine that it was a huge slap in the face. Lucifer takes a third of God’s created beings, so God goes on and makes new ones! Wow. Audacious to say the least. And then He marries them to each other, He establishes a new idea; an unending covenant, a promise, there will be no more coups, no more betrayals, this one is built to last. And with it, gender, babies, family. All these new and unbreakable mysterious relationships and ideas, it all pissed Lucifer off real good. You ever wonder what was up with that whole snake thing in the garden? Wonder no more, Satan (Lucifer has many names) has been hell bent against all this working out from even before the very beginning.
Satan took a strategic victory in the fall of man. When Adam and Eve chose not-god in the garden it broke the blessing promised to the married couple and has us spiraling down into what the Bible calls the curse.
Within the curse is the fundamental problem with the marriage relationship; woman is tied to her kids while desiring to “fix” her man, and man is so focused on work that he has no time or passion for anything else.
The bible literally says that. Go read it. Genesis 3. This curse fools us into working so hard to get somewhere in this world that all the while we are losing everything that matters.
We divorce the spouse instead of divorcing the job.
We will spend years building equity into a job and then leave our spouse and get stuck with alimony and child support, ensuring that the job stays the master of our lives.
The curse has us right where it wants us.
But there’s good news.
My goal was to write the book I wanted to read. As a young husband, a busy husband and a man achieving every possible goal in front of me, I needed someone to call me out, call me up, and remind me I was in a war I was designed to fight. And so are you.
- Ty
