If you’ve lived in the Golden Isles very long, you’ve been to a wedding under the live oaks. Maybe it was out on St. Simons, maybe at a little country church up the road. The music changes, the back doors swing open, and every person in that room stands up at once. Nobody has to tell us to. Grandmothers stand and little boys in clip-on ties stand, while the groom down front is trying his best not to cry. Something in us knows we’re watching an honorable thing.

Then Monday comes. The same folks who stood for that bride go back out into a world that treats what happened that afternoon as cheap. Sex is sold on billboards along I-95 and streamed into the phone in your pocket. Our culture has pulled off a strange trick. It has made sex cheap, and it has made sex everything, both at the same time. Cheap, because it’s handed to anybody. Everything, because people now build their whole sense of who they are on it.

The church gets pushed one of two ways. Some churches blush and say nothing, and their young people learn about sex from the world. Other churches shrug and go along, and they call that grace. Neither one honors God.

So what does God say? He isn’t silent and He isn’t embarrassed. In one verse with three short clauses He tells us what marriage is worth, where the marriage bed belongs, and what He will do when it’s defiled. Set that verse in the whole Bible, and it points us to what He has already done for people who defiled it. Here it is in one sentence: God made marriage honorable and its bed undefiled, He will judge all who defile it, and through Christ, the faithful Bridegroom, He washes every defiled sinner who comes to Him.

Let love of the brothers continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you yourselves also are in the body. Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled, for the sexually immoral and adulterers God will judge. Make sure that your way of life is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,” Hebrews 13:1–5 (LSB)

So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the Living God.

This study is a little different from our usual walk through a book. We’re taking one subject and following it from the garden of Eden to the last chapters of Revelation, with Hebrews 13:4 as our anchor. Parents, I know some of you will read this with children nearby, and I thought about them the whole time I wrote it. I’m going to speak plainly, because God speaks plainly, but I’m not going to say anything your ten-year-old shouldn’t hear. If they ask you questions about it, praise the Lord. Answer them.

The writer of Hebrews has spent twelve chapters showing us that Jesus is better than angels, better than Moses, better than every priest and every sacrifice. In chapter 13 he comes down off the mountain and shows us what life looks like for people who have a Savior like that. He tells them to love the brothers, open their homes, remember the prisoners, honor marriage and keep their hands off the love of money. I want you to see where marriage shows up. It’s sitting right in the middle of an ordinary list, because holiness goes home with you on Monday.

So let’s start where the Bible starts, in a garden, at the very first wedding.

Marriage Held in Honor

Here’s something you’d never know from the English. The first half of Hebrews 13:4 has no verb in it. Word for word it reads, “Honorable the marriage among all, and the bed undefiled.” The translators have to supply the verb, and that’s why the LSB prints those words in italics. The old King James said, “Marriage is honourable.” Our Bible says, “Marriage is to be held in honor.” Which one is right?

Brethren, both are. Everything around this verse is a command: let love continue, don’t neglect hospitality, remember the prisoners, keep your life free from the love of money. So verse 4 is a command too. But the command stands on a fact. Marriage is to be honored because God already made it honorable, and our job is to keep the honor it already has.

The word for “honor” is timios. It means precious, valuable, held dear. Hold on to that word, because we’ll meet it again before we’re done, and when we do it will describe something that cost a great deal more than a wedding.

Why is marriage precious? Look at where it came from.

And Yahweh God fashioned the rib, which He had taken from the man, into a woman, and He brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This one finally is bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
This one shall be called Woman,
Because this one was taken out of Man.”
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Genesis 2:22–25 (LSB)

God performed the first wedding. “He brought her to the man.” The father of the bride was the Lord Himself. Back in chapter 1 we’re told, “male and female He created them,” so the two sexes came from God’s own hand. In verse 18 God looked at Adam alone and said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” That’s the first thing in the whole creation God called not good, and He fixed it with a wife.

Verse 24 gives us the pattern for every marriage since. A man leaves, so a new household is formed. He cleaves, and the Hebrew word means to cling, to stick fast. It’s the same word used when Ruth clung to Naomi and wouldn’t let go. Marriage is loyalty before it is anything else. Then the two “become one flesh.” The bodily union of husband and wife seals a covenant. God never meant it as a handshake between strangers.

Then verse 25: “not ashamed.” That’s the marriage bed as God first made it. There was no fear in it and no using each other, because sin hadn’t come in yet.

Jesus went back to this very chapter when the Pharisees tried to trap Him with a question about marriage.

And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” Matthew 19:4–6 (LSB)

Notice where Jesus starts. He skips past every rabbi and goes back to “the beginning.” He takes Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24 and lays them side by side: “male and female,” and then “the two shall become one flesh.” So let me say it as plainly as I know how. Marriage is one man and one woman, joined by God, and no court, no culture and no legislature can redefine what God defined in Eden. The church isn’t free to change it either. We didn’t write it, so we don’t get to edit it. I say that without one ounce of meanness toward anybody, because the Lord who drew that line came into the world to save sinners, and every one of us is one.

So God made marriage for companionship, and He made it for children, because “Be fruitful and multiply” came wrapped inside a blessing. He made it for delight too. Proverbs tells a husband, “Let your fountain be blessed, / And be glad in the wife of your youth” (Proverbs 5:18). And He made it as a guard against temptation. Paul says that “because of sexual immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7:2).

The Lord Jesus honored it with His own presence.

And on the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; and both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding. John 2:1–2 (LSB)

His first miracle was at a wedding reception. Nobody who reads that can say God is grim about marriage.

Notice the little phrase “among all.” Marriage is to be honored by everybody, married or not. Paul warned that some would come “who forbid marriage,” and he called that one of the “doctrines of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1, 3). Rome later did exactly that to her priests. Our Lord was single and so was Paul, and Paul called singleness a gift. The single person honors marriage too, by refusing to take early what belongs to marriage.

The old Puritan Thomas Watson said it about as well as it can be said: “It is not having a wife, but loving a wife, that makes a man live chastely.”

Husbands, how do you talk about your wife when she isn’t around? At the shop, on the boat, in the deer stand? If you call her “the old ball and chain” and get a laugh, you’ve just dishonored what God calls precious. Talk about her the way you’d talk about something you’d die for. Young people, it’s right to want to be married someday, so get ready now. Learn to keep your word and your temper, and learn to pray. Church, let’s celebrate the fiftieth anniversaries and pray for the newlyweds.

God built marriage as a precious thing, and precious things get guarded, which is where the second clause takes us.

The Bed Undefiled

“The marriage bed is to be undefiled.” The Bible speaks modestly here, and so will I. By “the marriage bed” God means the union of husband and wife. Undefiled means unstained. The word is amiantos, and Hebrews uses it one other time. In chapter 7 it describes our Lord Jesus as a high priest who is “holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26). The marriage bed is meant to be as clean as that.

Picture a fire in the fireplace on one of those few cold January nights we get down here. The family pulls up close and the house is warm. Take that same fire and set it on the living room rug, and you’ll burn the house down. It’s the same fire. The only difference is where it is. Proverbs asks, “Can a man take fire in his bosom / And his clothes not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:27). God built the fireplace, and He loves a warm house. The boundary around the marriage bed protects what’s good.

That boundary goes all the way back to Sinai: “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). Then the Lord Jesus moved the line from the bedroom to the heart.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Matthew 5:27–28 (LSB)

Jesus means the look that lingers on purpose, the look that wants. Job saw this a long time before Jesus preached it.

I have cut a covenant with my eyes;
How then could I gaze at a virgin? Job 31:1 (LSB)

Job never owned a phone. You do. In 2026 a covenant with your eyes includes your thumbs. Pornography is adultery of the heart on a screen, and it’s in the pocket of men and women, and boys and girls, in every church in Glynn County.

Let me name plainly what Scripture names, without describing any of it. Sex before marriage defiles the bed, and so does adultery. Lust and pornography defile it. So does homosexual practice, and so does every other union outside of one husband and one wife. God drew one circle in Eden around one man and one woman, and that circle hasn’t moved. Paul says, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

I need to say one more thing in this list, and I want to say it gently. Some of you were sinned against. Someone forced themselves on you, maybe when you were young. Hear me. The Law of God put the guilt on the man who used force, and of the young woman it said, “there is no sin in the girl worthy of death” (Deuteronomy 22:26). What was done to you was not your sin. Going to a pastor or to the authorities is the right thing to do.

The boundary runs inside marriage too.

The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 1 Corinthians 7:3–5 (LSB)

Did you catch the word “likewise,” twice? It runs both ways. Neither spouse withholds, and neither spouse demands. Peter tells husbands to live with their wives “in an understanding way” and to “show her honor” (1 Peter 3:7). A man who uses verse 4 as a club has missed verse 4.

Why does God care so much about what we do with our bodies? Paul answers in 1 Corinthians 6.

Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. 1 Corinthians 6:18–20 (LSB)

Your body belongs to the Lord. The word “sanctuary” means the inner room of the temple, the holy place. If you belong to Christ, the Holy Spirit lives in your body the way God’s glory filled that room. Notice the strategy God gives. He gives one word: “Flee.” When Potiphar’s wife grabbed Joseph, “he left his garment in her hand and fled and went outside” (Genesis 39:12). Joseph ran, and it cost him a coat. I’d rather lose a coat than a soul.

So make a covenant with your eyes, and put teeth in it. Put a filter on your phone, your tablet, and your computer. Young couples, don’t be alone at the house late at night. Set the boundary before the evening starts, because nobody makes a good decision at midnight. If a friendship at work is getting warm in a way it shouldn’t, change desks, and change jobs if you have to. Husbands and wives, don’t defraud each other. Treat your marriage bed as something holy, because God does.

Young people, and all of you who aren’t married yet, let me talk straight to you for a minute. The world has a slogan it repeats in health class and on television: “safe sex.” What it means is a precaution. Brethren, nobody has ever made a device or a pill that can protect your soul. A precaution won’t guard your conscience, and it won’t guard the marriage you may have someday. It can’t get you out from under the last clause of our verse either, because “the sexually immoral and adulterers God will judge,” and nobody ever took a precaution against God. Here’s the only safe sex there is. You wait until your wedding day, and then you stay faithful to one husband or one wife until death parts you. Paul calls that the will of God: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor” (1 Thessalonians 4:3–4). When the pressure comes, God’s instruction is one word, “Flee” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Every year you wait is a gift you’re keeping for someone, and God sees every bit of it.

The fence around the marriage bed is good and kind, but what happens when someone climbs over it? The last clause answers that, and it’s sobering.

God Will Judge

Look at the order of the words. In the Greek the sinners come first and God is the very last word, and our translation keeps the sinners up front: “the sexually immoral and adulterers God will judge.” It lands like a gavel. The little word “for” tells us why the bed must be kept clean. God is going to judge.

Then notice the two names. “Sexually immoral” is the word pornos, a person who has sex outside of marriage. “Adulterers” is the word for a married person who breaks covenant. Between them they cover everybody, single or married. The world has softer names. It says “an affair,” or “hooking up,” or “living together.” Matthew Henry observed that God won’t call these sins by the pretty names we give them. He calls them what they are.

God sees what’s done in secret. When David took another man’s wife and arranged her husband’s death, he thought he’d covered his tracks. Then the prophet Nathan walked in.

Nathan then said to David, “You are the man! Thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel, ‘It is I who anointed you king over Israel and it is I who delivered you from the hand of Saul. . . .

‘Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.’” 2 Samuel 12:7, 12 (LSB)

“You did it secretly.” There’s no such thing as a private sin before a God who sees everything. Proverbs says, “For the ways of a man are before the eyes of Yahweh, / And He watches all his tracks” (Proverbs 5:21).

Sometimes God’s judgment comes in this life. David was forgiven, but the sword never left his house. Homes break apart, and children carry the scars for years. Paul tells the Thessalonians that “the Lord is the avenger in all these things” (1 Thessalonians 4:6). The final judgment is worse.

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 (LSB)

“Do not be deceived.” Paul wrote that to church members. He knew there would be people in the pews who thought they could keep their sin and keep their heaven too. Jude warned about men who “turn the grace of our God into sensuality” (Jude 4). We live in a day full of them. You’ll hear preachers say that God is love so He doesn’t mind, or that grace covers whatever you choose. Grace says the opposite.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us that, denying ungodliness and worldly desires, we should live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age, Titus 2:11–12 (LSB)

Grace is a teacher, and the first lesson it teaches is no. Anybody who tells you grace gives you permission has never met it.

When the cone of a hurricane points at the Golden Isles, the warnings go out and the roads fill up with people heading inland. There are always a few who stay put. “It turned last time. It’ll turn again.” Brethren, God’s Word doesn’t turn.

The Puritan Thomas Brooks put it this way: “Though they may escape the eyes of men, yet they shall never escape the judgment of God.”

Call sin by God’s names, not the world’s. Stop laughing at what God judges, whether it’s on the television or in the break room. If a professing believer in our church walks into open, unrepentant immorality, love requires us to go after him, and the Bible lays out how (1 Corinthians 5). If you’re in it right now, today is the day to stop. Don’t wait until the storm hits.

If the study ended there, every one of us would be in trouble, because who hasn’t looked where he shouldn’t? But Hebrews 13:4 sits in a Bible that also has Hosea and Ephesians 5 in it.

Christ Washes His Bride

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Ephesians 5:31–32 (LSB)

Paul quotes Genesis 2:24, the verse from the garden, and then he tells us what it was about all along. Christ and the church. From the very first wedding God was drawing a picture. Every faithful marriage is a little sermon about a Bridegroom and His bride. That’s the deepest reason the bed must stay undefiled. Adultery tells a lie about Jesus.

The trouble is, the bride in this picture hasn’t been faithful. God showed Israel that in one of the hardest assignments He ever gave a prophet.

Then Yahweh said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by her companion and is an adulteress, even as Yahweh loves the sons of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes.” So I bargained for her for myself for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a half of barley. Hosea 3:1–2 (LSB)

Hosea’s wife had been unfaithful to him. God told him to go get her, and Hosea had to pay to bring her home. “Even as Yahweh loves the sons of Israel.” That’s what God is like with an unfaithful people. He goes after her and pays the price, and He brings her home and makes her His again.

Then Paul shows us the One that picture was pointing to.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless. Ephesians 5:25–27 (LSB)

Christ didn’t find a clean bride. He made one. He “gave Himself up for her” to wash her. Remember the undefiled High Priest from Hebrews 7? He went to the cross for people who were anything but undefiled. Later in this same chapter, Hebrews says, “Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate” (Hebrews 13:12).

knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver or gold from your futile conduct inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. 1 Peter 1:18–19 (LSB)

“Precious blood.” I told you we’d meet that word timios again. It’s the same word Hebrews used for marriage. God calls marriage precious, and He paid for His bride with the most precious thing heaven had. Hosea paid in silver and barley. Jesus paid with His own blood.

All of this is heading toward a wedding. Jesus said that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30). Our marriages are signposts, and signposts come down when you reach the place they point to. John saw it in Revelation.

“Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.” And it was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean; for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. Revelation 19:7–8 (LSB)

Look at that phrase: “it was given to her.” The bride’s clean dress is a gift.

Husbands, you’re preaching a sermon to your children every day about how Christ loves His church, so make it a true one. Love your wife the way He loved His bride, sacrificially and patiently, even when she’s at her worst. Single brothers and sisters, you aren’t missing the main wedding. If you belong to Christ, you’re in it, and nobody at that supper will feel left out. Every one of us needs to quit hiding and come to the One who washes.

Such Were Some of You

We started at a wedding under the live oaks, with everybody standing for the bride. God stood up for marriage first. He made it in the garden and brought the bride Himself. Then He put a fence around the marriage bed, the way you’d put a screen in front of a fireplace, because what’s inside is good.

He has also said plainly what He’ll do when that fence is trampled. He’ll judge, and He won’t use the world’s soft names when He does. But the verse that warns us also hands us a picture of something better, a marriage that was always about Christ and His church, and a Bridegroom who stays faithful when His bride isn’t.

Maybe you’ve never bowed the knee to Jesus Christ, and you’re living right now in what this verse forbids. I won’t soften it. “The sexually immoral and adulterers God will judge.” Paul said such people “will not inherit the kingdom of God.” It doesn’t matter whether anyone else knows or whether you’ve told yourself it’s love. God sees, and God will judge. Please don’t file that away as an old-fashioned idea. This is the Word of the Living God.

Hear the rest of what Paul wrote, because he didn’t stop at verse 10.

And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:11 (LSB)

“Such were some of you.” Paul could look out over the church at Corinth and see former fornicators, former adulterers, men who’d lived in homosexual sin, and he said “were.” They had been washed, sanctified and justified. The same Christ who will judge is offering, right now, to wash.

The Bridegroom whose honor you trampled is the Bridegroom who bled to make you clean. He did for His bride what Hosea did for Gomer and more. He paid with His own precious blood, and He’ll clothe you in linen you could never sew for yourself. Turn from your sin and trust Him. Pray what David prayed after Bathsheba: “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:7).

Christian, maybe you carry a past you think about every time this subject comes up. If you’ve confessed it and come to Christ, hear me plainly. You were washed. God has thrown that file away, and when your Bridegroom looks at you, He sees what He made you.

Before Sunday comes again, do one concrete thing about what you’ve read. If you’re married, take your wife or your husband out this week, just the two of you, and tell them out loud you’re glad God gave them to you. Does your house have a device without a filter? Fix that tomorrow. If there’s a secret you’ve been carrying, call your pastor this week, or reach out to us. We won’t be shocked, and we won’t gossip. We’ll pray with you and walk with you.

Parents, don’t wait for your children to ask. Sometime this week, sit down with them and have the talk, in words that fit their age. Tell them God made marriage for one man and one woman, and that the only safe way is to wait for marriage and then stay faithful in it. Tell them Jesus washes sinners too. Single brothers and sisters, you belong to the Bride of Christ right now, so live like it with your whole heart.

“Flee sexual immorality,” and “glorify God in your body.” You were bought with a price, and it was precious blood.

If you do not have a church home, we would love to have you visit us at Sovereign Grace Baptist Church in Brunswick, Georgia. You can find our service times and location at sgbcbrunswick.com/services, or contact us with any questions.