THE MEANING OF MARRIAGE

I live in Australia and I have received a letter from the Australian Federal Government asking me to answer Yes or No: “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?”

Like all Western democracies, Australia is a nation of laws. Without the rule of law there is only anarchy and its partner chaos.

We are being asked if we should have the law-makers change the meaning of marriage. Notice the marriage act as it presently stands: “marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.” (Underlining mine.) Therefore, I am being asked to vote to either retain the meaning of marriage or to change the meaning of marriage.

If we were to do a random survey on a busy street corner asking passers-by the question: “What does the word marriage mean to you?” What sorts of answers would you hear? What sort of answer would you give? Would you hear people say that “marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life”? Would you agree with this or would you change the meaning of marriage to mean something else? That is the question we are being sked by our lawfully elected government. We are being asked if we want the meaning of marriage to be changed.

If you want the meaning of marriage changed then you are saying that you are not happy with what marriage means. You are saying that you do not believe that “marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.” You are saying that marriage no longer is “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others.” You are saying that you no longer want to exclude others but rather include others in the marriage relationship. You are saying that you want to recognize as a marriage: (a) a man and another man, and (b) a woman and another woman.

Thus, we are being asked if we want to change the meaning of marriage to allow same-sex couples to marry. Do you see my dilemma? If I vote to change the law to allow same-sex couples to marry, then marriage (in Australia) no longer means marriage.

So what? Well then, how did your (pretend) street survey go? How were the people you were asking defining marriage? Did you find yourself agreeing with some of them, most of them or none of them? Where did they get their ideas of the meaning of marriage from? From the movies? From romance novels? TV sit-coms? What? More to the point, where did you get your idea of the meaning of marriage from? From all of these? Some of these? None of these? Perhaps you got your idea of the meaning of marriage from Australian Law? What was it again? “Marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.”

The question remains, where did the meaning of marriage as defined in Australian Law come from? 

When Jesus was asked: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Matthew 19:3b-6.

Marriage from the very beginning has always been “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.”

What is your basis for retaining or for changing the meaning marriage? Ever-changing Pop-culture or the never-changing Word of God?

(See also my article on marriage at: 
http://snowofftheben.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/marriage-see-westminster-confession-of.html