And what stood out to me amid the rules for brides taken in war, and who can marry in large extended families, was the practical and legitimate role of the physical relationship in defining marriage. Bluntly if you had sex you were married. If one or the other was already married to another it is adultery if neither was married the man was then forced to pay a very high bride price and was married to that woman without ever being allowed to divorce her.
The second thing that stood out to me was that marriage always involved the family. It was a socially recognized situation. A failure to work through the family could also result in huge problems for a man under the law.
Thus marriage can be defined as a man and a woman in a socially recognized relationship, which is binding on both parties, intended to be lasting, and officially sealed upon intercourse.
We live in a day and age when the idea of marriage is under assault. We are arguing about whether of not marriage is designed or just socially convinient arangement, to share property rights with close sexual partners.
Here is the thing I have had a number of Christians in my acquaintance challenging the idea of marriage. They ask why the government has a role in it in the first place. They want to know why we let the civil authorities define a religious ritual. I have secular acquaintances asking much the same question for very non-religious reasons, but more than that I have the opportunity to counsel with a number of younger couples who are in commited monogamous relationships with the intent to stay together for a lifetime, but no marriage. They are not believes and they actually want to make their already consummated relationship lasting, binding and socially recognized.
The order is backwards but the elements are all there.
Even though our culture and laws have moved away from the idea of a common law spouse that is functionally what I am encountering. And ironically they want the relationship to be defined as a marriage.
The challenge of course is to stay true to Scripture, without going beyond it. And as I counsel with these couples it has become more and more obvious that these young adults who grew up in church and made professions if faith, have no clue about marriage, let alone a Christian one where, submission and sacrificial love become the embodyment of a Gospel which they do not understand.
One trend that parallels this is the tendency is to have outdoor weddings, not even remotely connected to a church. The ceremony is a joyous formality. They are functionally married already, and they don't see the wedding as a religious but sociall event. So having it in a building they don't go to otherwise makes no sense. (Not that a church make a wedding more or less valid, there were no weddings in church buildings untill well after the book of Acts, for the simple reason that there were no church buildings but there were still lots of marriages.)
Now the reason for this rambling post:
Twice in as many months I have found myself looking across the counseling room at a young woman in tears because she has heared a Biblical definition of marriage not as the mechanics of what order sex and social recognition come in, but how the Gospel fits in. And seen the serious look in the eyes of a yong man who has been asked to embody sacrificial love with a biblical standard that is foreign to him.
I'm not sure where we should stand in regard to state licencing if marriage. So long as I am not forced to affirm or perform a marriage that defies Biblical norms, I am not sure my protest will be very useful, But I do know that I must be concerned for the Gospel. And that is why marriage maters, because the young people who are comming to me, don't know the gospel, and thus they cannot know a Christian marriage. They are left, as Jesus put it, in the hardness of their hearts, leading all too often to divorce, abuse and bitterness, because no matter when a relationship becomes a marriage, lost people cannot have a Christian marriage.
Which is why we need to speak and clearly live out the gospel in our conversations about marriage- nothing else will truely change the culture or morals of the nation, and nothing else will save these souls from hell.
