Maybe it’s time to go back to the manufacturer’s handbook, God’s perfect design, when it comes to marriage. Did you know that the United States Census Bureau recently reported that 47% of households have a married couple and fifty years ago, that number was 71%. 100 years ago 92% of American households had married couples. What has happened, indeed is happening, to marriage in America?
Don’t Ignore The Instructions
Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Most things we buy are designed and made by somebody who, along with the product, provides a manufacturer’s handbook that gives you instructions for assembly, use and maintenance. If we ignore those instructions we can expect dysfunction, breakdowns, and something that doesn’t last as long as it was designed to.
Maybe it’s time to go back to the manufacturer’s handbook when it comes to marriage. Fortunately we have one. It’s called the Bible, God’s handbook for life — temporal, abundant and eternal. In it we find that marriage is part of God’s original creation — He designed and created the component parts that fit together. Fortunately also for us, His instructions on marriage are not nearly as long and detailed as, say, the driver’s manual for your car. His manual doesn’t tell us everything we get to decide and work out together, like who washes the dishes, takes out the garbage, handles the finances — there’s a lot of freedom that each couple can work out according to their unique interests, necessities, skills, time. But the Bible does give us basic principles that provide a framework within which each marriage can optimally operate.
God’s Design
Originally, and in the New Testament, marriage was designed to be composed of one man and one woman. Whenever there was polygamy in the Old Testament there was jealousy and conflict (e.g., Sarah and Hagar, Leah and Rachel, Solomon’s wives and concubines). And never was marriage for two of the same sex (or gender, biologically speaking, as assigned by God at conception, not by us as an afterthought).
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
In the Bible we can find homosexual behavior, but it was labeled an abomination, contrary to God’s law and inviting God’s wrath (e.g., Sodom, Leviticus 18:22, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11). God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, or Madam and Eve. Basic to marriage was the potential to reproduce, which requires a male and a female. God’s first blessing was “be fruitful and multiply,” a homosexual impossibility. The capacity for reproduction was given by God to all His living creatures (plants and animals), but only for humans was it meant to be in an exclusive sexual relationship with one other. When we choose to live like animals (sexually), we destroy God’s design and blessing. And children often suffer the most, even if they make it out of the womb alive.
