More of The God Show. This is The Marriage Channel. The previous post is HERE.
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I get a lot of personal benefit from my marriage with Brenda. I live on that level of benefit to me. I pay, too, but I get way more than I give. I live mainly on the level of thinking of marriage as being between her and me, with a background realization that our relationship is a picture of God’s relationship with his people. That’s as high up as I want to handle. I can hardly handle that.
Do you ever think about what marriage is? You do believe something about what it is, because if someone asked you you’d have an answer. But, the answer is not something most people have thought about. It’s like why the grass is green or the sky is blue – it just is.
You know there are explanations of why the grass and sky are what they are. But it doesn’t matter why. It’s enough that they’re there.
If you do think about marriage, there are several layers of how you can think about it, from low to high:
One: There’s nothing to think about. It’s something people have always done – it’s useless to think about what it is or why it’s there. Like grass and sky, it’s green and blue because it is.
Higher: It’s for companionship and making kids and meeting basic needs. You can think of a lot of other things like this.
Higher: It’s a picture of the relationship between God and his people – husbands love wives like Christ loves the Church, and wives submit to husbands like Christians do to Christ.
(That last one is is probably one of the most generally misunderstood and abused things in the Bible. It’s so misunderstood and abused that the popular perception is that it’s saying it’s better to be the husband. No way – when you understand it, if you had a choice, you’d never pick being the husband. However, there are many who do understand it, and who honor it, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. But, all that’s for another time.)
The higher up you go in thinking about marriage, the more intimidating it gets. The higher up you go the less selfish you can be about your marriage. What if there’s one more layer?
What if marriage is also supposed to be a picture of God? Personally, him? Like the nature and authority channels we just looked at, what if marriage, too, is rigged?
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The God Show is five channels (in addition to the Bible) that don't change over time or according to culture, where God's ways, invisible attributes, eternal power and divine nature are clearly perceived but often missed: 1. Nature, 2. Authority, 3. Marriage, 4. Family, 5. You. Really, he's all over the place.
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