Category: Soul

Our current concept of marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s driven by romantic feeling, that wonderful experience of being in love. If you somehow lose it, basically if you’re not Romeo and Juliet 24×7 for the rest of your life, well you have a right — nay, an obligation — to move on. It didn’t work out, he or she was not the right one, I will now go find my true soul mate. Because I deserve that kind of love. Repeat until spouse number eight.

Another choice is just to pretend that all is well in Verona, try to fool yourself and others that there’s not a deep, life-sucking disappointment at the center of your life, settle, give up your dreams, rationalize. (I’m not even going to address here those who have allowed “marriage” to devolve into a mere consumer transaction).

Look, since we’re all big boys and girls, I’m going to let you in on a fact of life: No matter how hard you try, no matter how much one is determined to be Romeo to her Juliet, or Juliet to his Romeo, the feeling of being in love will fade. It may be six months, it may be three years. But it will go. There’s no getting around it.

There is another way.

True Christian marriage starts with the understanding that we are each deeply broken individuals in need of salvation. And while it’s true that marriage is in great part about raising the next generation, it has a more fundamental purpose: sanctification, of being made day on day more like Christ. We now find ourselves far, far from the land of daisies and chardonnay. In God’s plan, your spouse is your spiritual partner, picked by Him just for you expressly for this process of making the other holy. It’s a great returning. Needless to say, the business at hand is vitally, desperately important.

Sanctification means pain and conflict, of eventually turning over to God all in you that needs to be burned away — and there’s a lot there that needs to change — of responding with love and resolve to the challenges to your very being forced upon you by your spouse’s God-given differences. It can only happen if both partners are committed to following God’s will and to sticking it out in sickness and in health, in times of plenty and times of want. In other words, of sticking by the promises you made on your wedding day.

All of this makes what Navy Seals do look like a day at the waterpark. But what results is two beautiful human beings – “little Christs” who serve the Father – who in the process find (to their great amazement) that they love each other more deeply, and in a real, completely naked, and deeply joyous way than either could ever have thought possible.

Take that, Romeo and Juliet.

Photo credit: Ben Swayze, Zion National Park

Understanding the Gospel starts by understanding that God is, by his very nature, both perfectly loving and perfectly just.  Both.  

If you want the real God, you can’t have just one or the other.  It’s a package deal.

Here are the opening lines of perhaps the greatest poem ever written, Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost”:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit 

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, 

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 

Restore us, and regain the blissful 

Seat

In these thirty-eight words, Milton has summarized all of history: We were originally given everything we needed in order to live joyfully, in wholeness and love.  We traded our happy condition for a lie, with tragic, cosmic implications.  We have since lived a broken existence in a broken land east of Eden.

Justice could not let our act of disobedience stand.  Someone had to pay.  And someone did.

Enter love, which led God to take on human flesh in the form of “one greater Man,” who lived the perfect life we should have lived, and then died the death we deserve.  

Justice served.  Love wins.  In Christ, we are restored, regaining “the blissful Seat.”

That’s good news.

Photo credit: Ben Swayze, 2013