Sword & Trowel 2015: Issue 1


parents intrude into and dominate the marital union of their children, against the law of God.


New relationship before God


Marriage creates a new union, and a new unit, and parents should stand back. Parents may give advice and help discreetly, but there is now a new relationship before God. Once again, in some cultures a family council may be summoned and im- pose upon a married couple the will of the wider family, but that is not in accordance with Scripture. In all cultures there is good and bad, and wherever social culture confl icts with God’s Word we decline to follow it. Adam and Eve, we are told, were naked and unashamed, because shame did not come until the Fall, and sin. Shame is the humiliation


New Hungarian translations by Pastor Miki Chiciudean, who is pioneering a reformed Baptist church in Budapest. These latest booklets are Your Reasonable Service for the Lord, The Goal of Brotherly Love and Christian Stewardship by Dr Masters. Copies of these and other Hungarian booklets are available from Tabernacle Bookshop.


produced by guilt or inadequacy or foolishness, or loss of dignity. Shame for sin is generated from the conscience. Shamelessness, which is due to a hardened, calloused con- science, gives license to coarseness and lewdness. It emboldens people to believe that lust and abandonment of refi nement are our right and we are entitled to express them. Shame- lessness, as promoted by the media today, is rebellion against standards of decency and refi nement, and the rejection of inhibitions. Believ- ers should never yield to the moral abandon of today’s society, in under- dressing, for example, for it is part of the world’s campaign to get rid of the conscience – the God-given monitor of the heart, the warning system of shame and embarrassment. Genesis 2 describes the comple- tion of creation, the sabbath principle, man’s appointment to work, the Garden of Paradise, the test of obedience (or covenant of works), the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowl- edge of good and evil, and the gift of the woman alongside man in the institu- tion of marriage. All these foundational concepts are set in the most marvellous ‘mansion’ ever built, the Garden of Eden, the divinely provided home of Adam and Eve.


The Garden of Eden page 41


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