The final and conclusive proof of all that I have been saying is in the truth that when God created us male and female and established the state of marriage, he did so for a definite purpose. What was it? It was to provide the best illustration in life of how God joins a man or woman to Jesus Christ and how He joins them to Him forever.
I have said that a true marriage must be a marriage of body with body and of soul with soul. But it must also be a marriage of spirit with spirit. It is for this reason that the only marriages that can approximate the kind of marriage that God intended to exist in this world are Christian marriages.
Hence, a marriage that involves a union of souls is a marriage in which a couple shares an interest in the same things—the same books, the same shows, the same friends—and seeks to establish a meeting of the minds (as it were) both intellectually and emotionally. Such marriages will always last longer.
Moreover, the fact that God has established marriage means that you and I are to get our ideas about it, not from the books we may read or from the movies, but from God Himself and from the Bible. I suppose that over the years I have read perhaps ten or twenty books about marriage and sexual problems, and the general impression I have had from the non-Christian books (and sometimes from the Christian ones) is that marriage is primarily a matter of sexual compatibility and adjustment. This is part of the truth, of course. But at best it is one-sided, and by itself it is only slightly less misleading than the marriages in movies, where marriage is either a farce or else the institutionalization of romantic love. Neither of these is right. And what the Bible teaches about marriage is quite different.
Last week, as I was discussing the subject of "Sex and the Christian Marriage," I said that a firm grasp of what marriage should and can be under God is the only reliable antidote to the hedonistic philosophy of our age. That is most important. For that reason, I want to return to the subject of Christian marriage today.
