Respect for Real Marriage

With the Senate from the 117th Congress soon to vote on: ‘H.R.8404 – Respect for Marriage Act,’ it seems appropriate to say a word or two.

For one thing, there really is not any sense in which the founders of the congress, or this country, would have been thinking about people of the same sex getting married when defining happiness and flourishing of life in America. But if you believe the Constitution is a ‘living document,’ then you set yourself free NOT to restrict interpretations to or respect the writers’ original intent. That is one of the more simple repercussions of such a stance.

But that is not even the most important thing.

If people who go into gender studies degrees to ‘study’ Gender, also believe that Gender is a cultural or personal construction, then you are not really studying anything to know the truth about it. You are simply looking to make things up to conform to what you want, not studying to understand what is accurate.

In that same vein, if you believe that marriage is simply a cultural expression, and are thus defining your own terms of what a marriage is, then you are not actually respecting anything real. You are engaged in circular argumentation for what is true and then defining that statement as what should be respected. It is both super selfish and perfectly arbitrary regarding what is ‘true’ and what is to be respected.

Bible believing people don’t have the same problem because the Bible clearly says that marriage is between one man and one woman. (see references: Genesis 2:23-24; Matthew 19:5). Anything else is immorality, which is really idolatry (see references: Leviticus 18:22; 1 Kings 14:24; 1 Kings 15: 12; Romans 1:21-27; Colossians 3:5, and many others). We know that life is created by God (see references: Genesis 1; John 1), that He is the one who judges (see references: Deuteronomy 32:4, Isaiah 33:22, James 4:12) and that he determines how it should be lived. If we don’t live as God requires, and none of us really do, we will be judged by the perfect judge who does so impartially and without error

Marriage is very important to God. Marriage is a picture of Christ and the church. It is a type and figure that shows us something about the Christian faith and faithfulness to Christ. All of chapter 5 in the book of Ephesians in the New Testament, describes a godly life, lived in and under Christ. Marriage and family are a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ and his church, referred to as the Bride of Christ.

• Be imitators of God
• Don’t be sexually immoral
• Husbands and wives, submit to each other in the sense that we should consider the other as better than ourselves
• Wives, respect your husbands and submit to them as to the Lord, which fits inside the line above for the sake of Love and order
• Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her

What Paul refers to as a great and glorious mystery would be completely lost if marriage is defined any other way than how it is defined in the Bible.

Christians, those who believe in the True and Living God, who reject falsehood of any kind, who are being renewed after the image of Christ, rather than to the world, must rest in the truth of God’s word on this subject and wait on Him.

If you need prayer in this area, please feel free to send me an email.

Also, if you have read this far, and are willing to go a little further, let me say this:

• God is a holy God and is a perfect judge
• We have each sinned against him in many areas such as idolatry, following false religions, sexual immortality, covetousness, blasphemy, or even supporting false and immoral relationships (there are so many areas of life in which we sin)
• The good news is that Jesus came, born under the law, satisfied God’s holy requirements perfectly, and thus, after having gone to the cross, becomes our blessed advocate before God, but also the atonement for our sin as blood IS required for the remission of sins.
• Those who receive this free gift of God’s grace in Christ will be transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of light, to spend eternity with Jesus, to see him as he really is.
• There is only hope for eternal life in Christ. There is no other name under heaven by which men can be saved and brought into a right relationship with God almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth.