What is a Christian Marriage?
What
is a Christian marriage? Is it
fundamentally different from marriage between non-Christians? We hear words
related to marriage, such as headship, submission, and love. What do these terms mean? Are these cultural relics of the 1st century,
or are they vital for our understanding and practice of marriage today?
As
noted about previous blog posts, these thoughts will be my opinion based on my
study of scripture, 15 years as a pastor doing marital counseling, and as a
husband successfully married for 25 years.
Every Monday, for several weeks, I will be writing on marriage, but with
the focus being on Christian marriages. Yet,
the principles can be applicable to non-believers as well.
Throughout
a study of God’s Word, you can see a strategy for relationships; Relationships
between men and women, parents and children, but most importantly, between God
and people.
Marriage
is seen as a good idea because it is God’s idea. He created it, He designed it, He established
it, and defined its parameters. Marriage
is not a human concept. Mankind did not
one day dream up marriage somewhere along the line as a convenient way of
handling relationships and responsibilities between men and women, or dealing
with childbearing and parenting issues. Marriage
is of divine origin. God Himself
instituted and ordained marriage at the very beginning of human history.
The
second chapter of Genesis describes how God, taking a rib from the side of the
man He had already created, fashioned from it a woman to be a “suitable helper”
for the man. Then God brought the man
and the woman together and confirmed their relationship as husband and wife,
thereby ordaining the institution of marriage. When God created man and woman, He created
them to complement each other. He
indicated this when He said, “…It is not good for the man to be alone. I
will make a helper suitable for him.” (Gen. 2:18-25)
God
formed woman to round out man’s incompleteness, so that physically, socially, emotionally,
intellectually, and even spiritually, male and female would not be rivals, but
mates.
Let me stop at this
point to clarify something. The Bible
describes an “ideal state” of marriage as God originally designed it. And as many of you are aware, the “ideal”
became “broken.” In the beginning, Adam
and Eve enjoyed a relationship characterized by peace and harmony, along with
continual, unbroken fellowship with their Creator.
And
then beginning in the third chapter of Genesis, we see a starkly different
picture. Because of their disobedience,
sin had shattered the harmony of the human couple’s relationship with each
other, and destroyed their fellowship with God. Inside the garden they share the same spirit,
the Spirit of God; outside the garden the presence of God has departed and they
are self-serving and strangers to each other. Inside the garden they are united in spirit
and in flesh; outside the garden all they have is a broken family.
Since
God is the one who instituted marriage, He alone has the authority to determine
its standards and set its rules. Another
important truth about marriage is that God established it as an essential
element of human society. While the
family is the basic foundation of any healthy society, marriage is the
foundation of the family. A healthy
“home” is the key to both a healthy community and a healthy society. It takes only a few minutes to get married,
but building a marriage requires a lifetime. Building a strong marriage takes time,
patience, and hard work. We will never
obtain God’s kind of marriage simply by going along with the crowd, doing what
everybody else does. We have to dig deep
into the heart of God to discover His principles.
The
Bible presents marriage as an institution that should be highly respected and
esteemed above all other institutions. Hebrews
13:4 says, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure,
for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.” “Honorable” in the Greek means, “valuable,
costly, honored, esteemed, beloved, and precious.”
Marriage,
then, should be valued and esteemed, and held in highest honor at all times, in
all things, by all people everywhere. That is God’s design.
To
be continued next Monday……
Any comments or
questions? I will get back to you as
soon as possible.
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