Who Needs Marriage? On Saving it and Why Bother?
Men don’t need it to have sex, and women don’t need it to have money (Belinda Luscombe, Time). Crass but correct. Another significant magazine raises this question: Vanishing Vows; Can the Church Save What’s Left of Marriage? (CT - Christianity Today). Likewise, the following words were famously spoken by comedian Groucho Marx: Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
The title above is significant. The two title sentences are ten years apart. Who Needs Marriage? screams in big bright red letters from the cover of the November issue of Time magazine, 2010. On Saving it and Why Bother? comes from words on the cover of CT, July/August, 2020. The two magazine quotations in the paragraph above come from those two lead articles respectively. The deduction is clear. The tidal waters that were threatening the front gates of matrimony ten years ago are now lapping at the foundation. Put another way, the secular disparaging of marriage has now reached the church — the bastion of marriage. Where will marriage be ten years from now or (perish the thought) in a hundred years? Mimi and I believe — and we are far from alone — that marriage is at the core of our existence. It is human life’s least common denominator: i.e. so goes marriage, so goes a society, a culture, a civilization. Why we feel this way is the subject of this page. You may not agree, but few subjects are more important to examine than this one.
It is said: If you can get the milk without buying the cow then go at it! Another crass way of stating a truth — truer all with time. From articles in the magazines noted above, and from other sources, I’ve learned that the expense of the cow is at the heart of the demise of marriage. And it’s costlier than just money. A collective statement from young adults of both genders and of other countries as well as the U.S. would go something like this: I can’t think about marriage now. My resources in time, energy, and money which marriage will require are now being used to hone my gifts, establish my career, affirm my identity, and build a blueprint for my life. I’ll just wait. Veiled in this statement is another revealing truth. “Besides, Marriage is difficult!”
Holy Cow!
Sadly overlooked is that the cow — marriage — is holy. Yes, with the exclamation mark included. By “holy” I don’t mean a religiosity like in sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, or goody-goody. The original Greek word for holy, hagios, means in essence, a God-thing. After God invented human life he crowned it with marriage. God appears to have more pleasure in his creation of marriage than anything else he created. Marriage is in God’s DNA. He loves marriage. Even married people who don’t believe in God are participating in God’s crowning achievement. The word often translated “rib” does not appear in the ancient Hebrew text in the creation story. The word is tsela and it’s translated “half” or “side.” So, the Genesis story says God took half of adam (humankind) and created a female whom he called Eve. The remaining half he reshaped and named Adam. Marriage is reuniting male and female as halves to make a whole, now reflecting the full image of God. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh (Genesis 1:27 & 2:21-23). God is neither male nor female… The full spectrum of God [is] only depicted when man and woman come together — male and female — in that mysterious union called marriage (Dr. James Garlow). I’m almost forced to say, a person needs a sense of call to be single.
Marriage — God’s Master Template
God began the book of Genesis with marriage, and marriage is the subject of the last page of the Bible.
His believers are known as the Bride (the Church) and Jesus Christ is the Groom. A wedding reception of cosmic proportions is scheduled at the world’s end as Bride and Groom are joined in marriage. There is therefore no need for marriages in Heaven because of this big one. The ecstasy of that union will be enjoyed forever by the collective Bride. God chose to establish marriage on this earth so we would get a little bit of a grasp of what the real Marriage — capital “M” — would be like (Dr. James Garlow).
So, for Better or Worse — Celebrate Marriage!!!
As I write, our oldest daughter, Betsy, and her husband, Kevin, are at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island celebrating 30 years of marriage. Kevin has just kindly written to us words that you can easily see cause us, Betsy’s parents, to thank God that he loves to bless marriages and has been pleased to so bless theirs. Kevin texted: The best decision I ever made 30 years ago!
