Love and Marriage

"Love and marriage. Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage." Just ask the expert, Frank Sinatra. We know this, though, don't we? "First comes love; then comes marriage; then comes baby in a baby carriage!" I mean, it's as simple as that. The standard for all time, we believe, is that people marry for love. "Why are you two getting married?" must be followed with "Because we love each other" and, of course, "Duh!" What's the question?

Can I let you in on a little secret? If you are looking for a biblical worldview -- a view of the world and how it operates from a biblical perspective -- it ain't in there. Oh, we are to love our spouses. That is unavoidable ... and often one of our serious shortcomings. But that command is not offered as a motivation to marry, but a demand once married. Nowhere in the Bible does the idea that "we love each other" come into the biblical definition of marriage. That is, the world says to marry because you're in love, but the Bible says to love because you're married. Nowhere does the Bible connect "love" with "the reason we marry".

What is the biblical perspective? Well, let's start at the design phase. Did Adam love Eve? Nothing there about it. What do we know? We know that "It is not good for man to be alone" (Gen 2:18). Thus, biblical marriage includes the need for companionship. We know that God declared, "I will make him a helper fit for him" (Gen 2:18). So we know that biblical marriage includes mutual assistance -- two people cooperating to manage the affairs of life. (We might take notice that God designed Eve to help Adam, but that would look too ... patriarchal for most.) So, marriage by God's design is for companionship and mutual assistance. So far I don't see anything that requires romance. What else? "God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'" (Gen 1:28). That would be procreation. Obviously procreation is designed to require two -- male and female. Anything else? Yes, there is the definition of marriage offered by Adam in Genesis and reaffirmed by Christ in Matthew 19: "A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Gen 2:24). The union of two lives is the union of one flesh and the creation of a single entity, a family unit. This family unit is connected to parents (they don't cease to be the parents), but is distinct from them as its own entity.

Let's see now what we have. Biblically, marriage is the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of companionship, mutual assistance, and procreation, packaged as its own family unit. Looking ... looking ... nope! I don't see it. I don't see anywhere that Scripture says anything remotely like Sinatra's wisdom about love and marriage or the age old kids' poem about love preceding marriage. It's not there. Just ask any 4-year-old why people get married, and you'll know it's because they love each other. Unfortunately, most 4-year-olds don't have a biblical worldview.

So what? Am I opposed to loving someone that you marry? First of all, that would be silly since we are commanded to love the person we marry. The problem comes when we mix up cause and effect. If the love causes the marriage, then what do we conclude when we stop loving? Well, the national divorce rate is your answer. Do you know where the lowest divorce rates in the world occur? It's in the countries where marriages are arranged rather than felt. As these countries "come into the 21st century" and abandon this practice, their divorce rates rise. Doesn't that suggest a problem?

Consider it from this angle. Husbands are commanded to love their wives. Now, we all know that love is an emotion, right? So ... how is it possible to command an emotion? Is it remotely possible that we have this whole thing mixed up somehow? Is it possible that the "love" that we are commanded (over and over) to have is a choice that we make while the emotions that we associate with "love" are the result of those choices rather than the definition of the term? And if love is a choice we make and we are commanded to "love one another", is that really a good choice for the singular reason for getting married?

So, what's the bottom line here? I'm not opposed to marrying for love. We are certainly required to love the one we marry. However, if we mix up cause and effect and blind ourselves to God's plan for marriage, what we end up with is confusion and failure. You know ... you can't hit a target if you don't know what it is. If your target is simply to commit to someone towards whom you have a strong emotional bond and God's target is companionship and mutual assistance and procreation covered in a love that is commanded, it won't be long before there is a divergence. Marriage will be an emotional effect without definition and commitment will be based on emotional responses that are guaranteed to ebb and flow and we'll end up with something that looks a lot like what we have today rather than what God intended. Divorce, "same sex marriage", cohabitation, adultery, a completely skewed sense of marriage, rather than a lifelong commitment between a husband and wife who are devoted to each other and their children as they deal with life's situations. Now, that's all well and good if you're planning on sharing the world's view on the topic. But for those who want a biblical worldview, that will be a problem. Just something to think about.