Pyromaniacs: Of Course, she says
A last note and a link about the Newsweek article by Lisa Miller. Frank Turk at Pyromaniacs has put together a fine piece of polemics, and he targets not just the folks at Newsweek but also the church. It really is way past time we start getting our story straight when it comes to marriage.
I am hardly someone that anyone would turn to for advice about marriage. In fact I would assume that not many people are interested at all in what I think about marriage, unless they are interested in order to do the exact opposite of what I am doing. But fortunately, what I think about marriage is not relevant because God has made Himself abundantly clear about what marriage is, how it should look, why it is mandated, etc.
To paraphrase Voddie Baucham, God defined marriage and because God defined marriage we do not get to redefine marriage. Marriage is what God ordains it to be, and what He has ordained it to be is revealed in the pages of Scripture.
Marriage is not about us, it is not about making us happy. In fact I have spent much of my married life doing things that make my spouse unhappy, although I am working on rectifying that. It is not a social construct. It is not designed to make benefits more freely available. From the very beginning God made man in His own image, and as part of that He demonstrated through Adam that it was not good for man to be alone, that His creation glory is expressed in both men and women and that their proper relation to one another in this world is in marriage, one man and one woman for life (Genesis 2: 18-25). That life together ought to be a life that is focused on glorifying God by serving Him in our ministry to others, but also in our ministry to our spouses and our children. It is hard to overemphasize the centrality of the human family as ordained by God. In Genesis 3:15 we see the first promise that through the seed of the woman would come a Redeemer who would crush the head of the serpent and restore the fellowship between God and man. We read in the Proverbs about how precious a good wife is (Proverbs 18:22, Proverbs 19:14, Proverbs 31: 10 just to name a few). The family and children are a blessing, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward (Psalm 127). Geneaolgy tracing the people of Israel run throughout the Bible culminating in the genealogy of Christ. Abraham to Isaac to Jacob the familial patriarchs of the faith. The adoption of believers as sons and daughter, grafted by sovereign grace into the tree. The marriage supper of the Lamb. There is a clear theme throughout the Bible of the church being family. Those who share a common salvation in Christ share a familial relationship that goes beyond blood and DNA making us brothers and sisters in Christ.
It is high time to restore the family to its central place in the church so that when issues like gay marriage and Proposition 8 and Newsweek magazine come up, we can make a cogent, Biblical defense of what God has ordained. Rather than stumbling around talking about traditional marriage, we can instead confidently speak about Biblical marriage. Having the most conservative position on an issue is worthless unless it is grounded in Scripture and that is nowhere more true that in the defense of God ordained marriage.
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