Yes, the title of this post was intended to grab your attention. I woke up this morning to do some reading out of a book that my mother was reading. Before anything else is said, I must proclaim the amount of respect I have for my parents, and particularly their reading habits. Often when I am home I will pick up a book of my mom’s desk or dad’s “one square foot” and flip through it, and it consistently a blessing when I do so. The reason why I even mention this is because the book I continued reading this morning, and will be writing about, was taken off of my mother’s desk (yes, I am going to return it).
This post will be interesting on a number of levels due to how our culture perceives this particular topic (to be revisited soon). I find myself in or hearing of conversations about marriage that continually blow my mind. Yes, this post is about marriage. Yes, I am unqualified to talk about this topic, seeing as I am not married. BUT, I take serious issue with the way marriage is talked about among today’s young people (specifically, college students; I include myself in this category), especially the Christian communities within our society. There is a cynicism, doubt, and inaccuracy clothing our conversation about what marriage is or what we think about it.
Think with me for a moment in terms of the possible. Upon graduating college, it is possible that a young man and young woman be married. While this is not necessarily probable, it is a real and precedent-set possibility. Therefore, by nature of this possibility, our dating in college should be geared in such a way that this possibility is still that, a possibility. By no means am I suggesting that everyone should be married upon graduation, nor am I suggesting that every dating relationship be this heavy, burdensome task that binds one to a commitment that is not practical or healthy during one’s “college years”, for lack of a better term. I am simply suggesting that it would be in our best interest to rethink what it is that marriage is and in turn alter the way we talk and think about it. Bear with me.
This Momentary Marriage by John Piper was published in 2009, and I picked it up a few days ago as boredom was setting in and I kept on hearing snippets of conversations about engagements and weddings. I guess this is universal, the older you get the more people you know who are getting married and the more it affects your friend group, role models, and family. I am the type who gets hung up on “Oh my gosh, everyone is getting married,” for better or for worse. It really is unreal how many people “take the plunge” the older we get, and how people begin, right around their Junior year of college, to say something along the lines of “I think I want a girlfriend.” I cannot tell you how many times that conversation has come up in my conversations this semester. Guys who I love dearly are finally cutting their hair, putting down the video game controller, tucking in a shirt, and presenting themselves in a chivalrous fashion. I wish there was sociological research that I was familiar with to supplement my claim of this reality I experienced on the Ole Miss campus this fall. It is awesome.
I would argue that this happens with such regularity at this point in people’s lives because we are all struck with this feeling and conviction that this is what we are made for. Everyone, every single human, is created with an inherent need to intimately share their life with someone of the opposite sex. This basic human need and desire was made manifest this fall, but was not coupled with the appropriate view as to why this need arose from mere dust. John Piper’s book has some great answers to this sense and desire of a serious relationship with a girl or boy that will one day lead to marriage. One last thing, I hate how the word “marriage” has the same awkward connotation as does “sex” or something like that. We should be able to talk about these things with regularity, as that would also further aid our view of marriage and sex. As Christians especially, this should be an everyday conversation, and This Momentary Marriage elaborates as to why this should be the case.
I am only going to speak about the first chapter for two reasons: (1) to peak your interest enough so that you go buy the book (2) because I have only read the introduction, the preface, and chapter 1.
The introduction of the book is titled “Marriage and Martyrdom”. Piper agrees that this is a really strange and off-putting title of an introduction of a book about marriage, as there is a correlation between being married and being a martyr. These pages speak of two stories: one of a freshly married missionary couple and one of an engaged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The stories end with the married couple and Bonhoeffer being put to death because of their sharing of the Gospel in China and Germany, respectively. Two years before his death Bonhoeffer wrote a series of letters from prison titled “A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell”. Excerpts are used throughout the book, and this one excerpt defines the introduction, and also defines what I believe should be a part of the thesis for renovating our idea of and thought process surrounding marriage:
“Marriage is more than your love for each other…In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. You love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, and office. Just as it is the crown and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.”
The reason for the association with martyrdom is that marriage, just like life itself, is a temporary gift that has a certain mystery about it that ultimately points to Jesus and life eternal with Him. Upon de-mystifying marriage, we learn that even if married for 50 years, we will only scratch the surface of its wonders and wounds, and that not until glorification will we understand its fully beauty and power.
Chapter 1 is titled “Staying Married is Not Mainly About Staying in Love”. The chapter dissects this incomprehensible vision of marriage, marriage is God’s doing, marriage is for God’s glory, and that the mystery of marriage revealed is that Christ will never leave His wife. The best part of the chapter, and why I spent so much time discussing culture initially, is Piper’s analysis on our society and why we have this distorted view of marriage.
In Matthew 19, Jesus is gives a glimpse of the magnificent view of marriage that God willed for His people. Christ’s vision of the meaning of marriage was so wildly different from theirs that they could not imagine it to be a good thing and they told Jesus, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry,” (v.10). If this was their response in a culture and society that was as sober as the Jewish world, how much more radical, magnificent, and “crazy” will God’s vision of marriage be in our modern, Western culture today? Our culture, as Piper so perfectly describes it, is one where:
“where the main idol is self; and its main doctrine is autonomy; and its central act of worship is being entertained; and its three main shrines are the television, the Internet, and the cinema: and its most sacred genuflection is the uninhibited act of sexual intercourse.”
Our culture finds the glory of marriage in the mind of Jesus incomprehensible and inapplicable. Jesus replied to his disciples in Matthew 19 in the way that he would probably speak to our society today about this view of marriage: “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given….Let the one who is able to receive this receive it” (v.11-12).
Marriage is God’s doing. In Genesis 2:18-25, there are four ways to see this both explicitly and implicitly: Marriage was God’s design (v. 24-25), God gave away the First Bride (v. 22), God Spoke the Design of Marriage into Existence (v. 24; 18-25), and God Establishes the One-Flesh Union Himself in Each Marriage (v. 21, 24). The words in verse 24 point to is “marriage as a sacred covenant rooted in covenant commitments that stand against every storm ‘as long as we both shall live’.” In Ephesians 5:31-32, the mystery of marriage is more fully revealed. Paul quotes Genesis 2:24 in verse 31 and then lays the hammer, the point our society must grasp and hold tightly to, in verse 32, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.” Marriage is patterned and modeled after Christ’s covenantal commitment to His church.
The ultimate thing we can say about marriage is that it exists for God’s glory. That is, marriage exists to display God. Marriage is patterened after Christ’s covenant relationship to his redeemed people, the Church. The highest meaning and the highest, all-important purpose of marriage is to put the covenantal relationship of Christ and His Church on display for all the world to see. I once heard a pastor say, and think the saying goes here, “The best way for Christians to minister to non-Christians is to get married.” The aforementioned is why marriage exists. This is why we bother to pay thousands of dollars and invite all our friends and family to a ceremony. Piper sums this up beautifully:
“Jesus died for sinners. He forged his covenant in the white-hot heat of his suffering in our place. He made an imperfect bride his own with the price of his blood and coveted her with the garments of his own righteousness. He said, ‘I am with you…to the end of the age…I will never leave you nor forsake you’ (Matt. 28:20; Heb. 13:5). Marriage is meant by God to put that Gospel reality on display in the world. That is why we are married. That is why all people are married, even when they don’t know and embrace the Gospel.”
My prayer for you all, and for myself, is that this view takes over our thoughts and conversations and worldview on marriage. This is a big deal, a much bigger deal than we think and portray it to be in our conversation. If our thoughts are changed, our conversations will change. If our conversations change, our actions will change. God designed marriage to be a picture. No single photograph can show someone how beautiful something is. Though a single picture may not capture all the majesty of a scene and setting, the pictures incapability does not touch or blemish the magnificence and natural wonder of it. Some pictures do give better and clearer representations than others. I pray for all of us around this holiday season that we all focus the lenses of conversations about, thoughts of, and plans regarding marriage so that “the portrait of Christ and his bride is sharp and clear.” I believe that this would be a worthy endeavor this holiday season, and until the end of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment