What is a Marriage?
Christoph C. L. von Pheil, wrote a hymn back in 1782 defining a home as a place where Jesus Christ is all in all! For many of us faith in Jesus Christ is like a construction project in which we do all the work. Bradley Gray wrote an interesting article on The Fullness of Life in Christ, pointing out the fact that a home like faith is not a construction project. Inclined as we are to do it ourselves, young couples set out on building a marriage according to their specifications.
Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat— for he grants sleep to those he loves. Psalm 127:1-2
The Good News about a Christian marriage is that it has already been built and the Word of God is the key that enables us to enter into a relationship between male and a female compassionately and fruitfully. There are thousands of articles, blogs, and websites that offer scientific advice on marriage. There is a book written by Jonathan and Christa Petzold entitled Male and Female, Concordia Publishing House 2021 that displays what I would call Biblical compassion. It deals with the various roles of a husband and a wife, as well as remaining Biblically true to sexual orientations and rightfully critical of sexual behaviors that refuse to submit to the will of God–the sin of disobedience.
If you are considering a marriage between and male and a female two factors must be taken into consideration, first that God created us male and female and secondly, The Fall corrupted our relationships as male and female. God created us male and female as spiritual beings. As a result of The Fall, our spiritual relationship with God became completely severed. This means we are born from a woman, bearing the image of God, the Spirit of God that is completely severed from God. We are souls that will live on without God. Biblically speaking, we are souls destined to live forever apart from God.
If you are considering marriage in this 21st century this chasm that separates you from God must be taken seriously. Left without the guidance of God the things that torture our souls leave invisible scars. Sexual disorientations, bestialities, tortures, rapes, violent rebellions that have no sanctuaries. And the sanctuaries that exist only create deeper scars.
As a psychotherapist and a pastor I have always taken this relationship with God or the lack thereof seriously. On my return from study in Zurich, Switzerland I followed a Journal in which Dr. Jeffery Satinover wrote a number of articles. One caught my attention. It was entitled, No One at the Helm which lamented the tremendous amount of literature that implied that mankind had reached the point where it had become intelligent enough to exist without God. In 1996 Satinover wrote the book Homosexuality and the politics of truth. In 2001 he wrote The Quantum Brain: The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man 1st Edition 2001 In this book Satinover tells us that we have elevated ourselves above what modern science assumes us to be. In 2001 he predicted that we would soon construct Artificial Intelligence and begin to re-evaluate who we are, what we are and our place in the universe and even of who God is.
Perhaps more than any other book he wrote I am indebted to The Empty Self: C. G. Jung & the Gnostic Transformation of Modern Identity. 1996 The demonical influence C.G, Jung had on the Christian world Leanne Pyane writes about “In my book on CS Lewis, The Real Presence, I wrote that one of the great bulwarks against the ideological thrust to combine good and evil that now affects us at every level is the intellect of CS Lewis, and that his books are unique in this century” for that reason. But she adds “I believe we now have another such in Dr. Satinover. His works will be extraordinary effective in unmasking this dread synthesis as it has flowed into church, synagogue, culture and the body politic through psychological reductionism-–reducing complex phenomena to their most basic parts.”
These may be books you as Christian counselors and males and females aspiring to marriage might want to read that will expand your insights into what the Bible means when it says “the two shall become one,” mirroring the unity between Christ and the Church,
