Fifteen couples from our church along with a wonderful couple from Clayton, GA. will soon travel to Rome, GA. for a weekend marriage retreat.  The prayerful anticipation of this weekend, the work that God allows me to do with hurting couples, and the attempts in our culture to redefine marriage have all combined to cause me to think much about marriage in recent days.  What is the meaning of marriage?

It all begins with the awareness that marriage is what the theologians call rightly a “creation ordinance.”  All this means is that God established marriage from the beginning and its meaning has been defined by Him from that point.  It is to our temporal and eternal peril that we pervert the meaning of what God has so plainly put in place.  Marriage is the union of a man and a woman under the authority of God for the purpose of bringing praise to God by seeking together to fulfill His purpose for them.  The Bible does not recognize any other kind of union as a marriage.

It is interesting to me that another creation ordinance that God established from the beginning was the Sabbath ordinance:  one day in seven that is set aside for rest from normal labor and deliberate and devoted worship of God.  The Sabbath ordinance is tied to a given day in the context of the two covenants in which through which it is expressed so that under the Old Covenant in which the law is central, Saturday was the Sabbath; but under the New Covenant in which the resurrection of Jesus from the deac is central, Sunday is the Sabbath.  The principle is the same for either day:  it is a specifically designated time of twenty-four hours that is given over to remove ourselves from our normal routines so as to devote ourselves with the chruch and through our families to the worship of God.  Anything other than that is a serious and sober violation of the Sabbath principle.  The only way that humans who profess to belong to God could ever violate this principle is either out of works of necessity or a way of life that makes human understanding superior to the Holy Word of God, so that we decide what the Sabbath is regardless of what God says.  Or worse.  We just reinterpret what God says.

Now it should not surprise us that those who violate such a sacred principle as the Sabbath find little difficulty in redefining marriage.  It is not just that the redefinition includes homosexual understandings of marriage; it is that couples who cohabit prior to marriage find little problem with having a wedding in the presence of the people of God, even seeking the blessing of God.  And that without their public repentance before God and His people.  Marriage is a creation ordinance established by God for His people in which we live for the purpose of bringing Him praise by seeking to fulfill His purpose for our lives.  Marriage in God’s sight is so much more, but it is at least this.

Tags: Genesis, God's Plan, Marriage

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed