LOVE & MARRIAGE

Love and Marriage

Runaway wagon. Image from Web.

There’s an old Sinatra song that alleges that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, that you can’t have one without the other. Is this true? What is love? What is marriage? As does marriage, love has it source in our Creator. ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16). The LORD God, as it were, walked Adam’s bride down the aisle, ‘Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man’ Gen. 2:22). Was it love at first sight for Adam? ‘And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (Gen. 2:23-24). This is what came to be known as ‘leave and cleave’, i.e., leave parents and cling to spouse. We speak of marriage as getting hitched, hitching up.

Sin is when our love for God runs cold. When Adam sinned, God unhitched His carriage, i.e., Adam and the rest of humanity. He divorced humanity because of our unfaithfulness. He hates divorce (Mal. 2:16) but permits it because of our sin (Matt. 19:8-9). Nowadays love is symbolised by the shape of a heart. But Calvin says, ‘The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.’ We commit adultery with our legion of manufactured idols, false gods (Exod. 20:3-5; Jer. 3:6-9; Ezek. 16:32; Hos. 2:2). We’ve seen it many times in the old westerns, an unhitched wagon hurtling towards a cliff’s edge. God, do something or we’re all going to die!

‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). God shows His love to us and for us by sending us His Son as a husband who loves us that much that He is willing to lay down His life for us. In marriage, we are to reflect this sacrificial love, ‘Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her … For we are members of His body, of His flesh and bones.’ (Eph. 5:25, 30). Those who believe are the new carriage that has been renewed by His love. Unbelievers are the wreckage at the bottom of the canyon. Food for the vultures and the cayotes. ‘Your carcasses shall be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and no one shall frighten them away’ (Deut. 28:26). God offers mankind life, yet the love of many has run so cold that they would rather choose death. For those who worship the LORD, ‘And they shall go forth and look upon the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me. For their worm does not die, and their fire is not quenched. They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh’ (Isa. 66:24; cf. Mark 9:44-38).

Image from Web.

It’s at the mere suggestion of Hell that the idol factories start working overtime, ‘My god would never send anyone to Hell!’ ‘Your God is so cruel!’ ‘My god loves everyone regardless!’ And so, factory furnaces that produce their idols grow hotter and louder, thus drowning out God’s genuine offer of salvation in Christ. And so, the carriage continues over the cliff to its everlasting doom. Hell has no escape hatch. You’re in the fiery furnace without the Angel of the LORD to rescue you (Dan. 3:25, 28; cf. Psa. 34:7). 

Yes, it is Christ, the Messenger of the covenant (Mal, 3:1) who rescues His bride, the church. ‘“Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua … was standing before the Angel’ (Zech. 3:2b-3).

Love and marriage do go together like a horse and carriage. Show your love for God by making sure you’re in His Son’s carriage (2 Cor. 13:5).