Breaking Up is Hard to Do

In a previous post, I spoke at length about the significance of marriage and its implications for me as a man. Despite this, we live in a culture rampant divorce where one-third of people who get married eventually divorce, a rate that is shared between Christians and non-believers alike. This bothers me. And I don't think I'm the only one who shares that opinion.

A strong view of marriage and divorce was taught by Jesus, even when it wasn't popular. God hates divorce, plain and simple. If I want to be biblical in my views, then, I need to agree with him.

When I say that, however, I need to be very careful not to let any one misinterpret that sentence, and think I said that God hates divorced people. I didn't say that. And if you're one of those people who had to leave a marriage because of an abusive or adulterous spouse, I particularly feel for you, because you're the victim. For other cases, yes, the Bible calls it sin. But (big shock here, folks), I have sinned too -- my sins just aren't quite so visible.

Having said that, though, I want to get back to the original point of this post, which was to explore the reasons why God would be so strongly pro-marriage and anti-divorce. While I certainly don't claim exclusive access to the throne of God on this topic, here's a couple of thoughts that might explain what He's up to:

• Guys aren't terribly relational. Even the highly-interactive ones like me could just shut down and refuse to tell anyone anything deeply personal. Having my wife around forces me to relate, and that's good for me.


• Marriage is good for kids. Fathers hear this: regular child support payments aren't enough. Your sons need to see what it takes to be a man, and your daughters need to know how to relate to a man. Deal with it.


• Marriage is one of those images on earth that are supposed to show us how God relates to us. If we break up a marriage, we imply that God might cut us off -- and that's not how he works.

This last item is a delicate subject, and perhaps one of the more controversial points I have expressed here. It is a popular conviction that people can believe in Christ, become a Christian, and later fall away and stop believing. I just don't see it. From what I can see, salvation is a concept embedded in eternity; if God can see that we won't be saved on the Last Day, we never were, even if people thought we were.

From a perspective of marriage, however, God has a distinct advantage over us. That is, He knows our hearts, and He doesn't start a bad marriage. The rest of us make mistakes, and sometimes we have to live with the result of those mistakes. And despite what MasterCard says, "for the rest of us, there's grace."

Higher Mathematics

God's mathematics are nothing like ours. You only have to look at Gideon's army or the story of the loaves and fishes to realize that He doesn't think about numbers the way we do. Having said that, I don't think anything is as incomprehensible as the "1 + 1 = 1" mathematics behind a biblical marriage:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)

It's a fairly well known verse, and we quote it readily when talking about marriage; but have you ever considered the implications? When Job loses everything he has, all of his possessions are stolen or destroyed, and his children die. But only when Satan is allowed to attack his body do we hear Job's wife say "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die."

As a man, this is particularly poignant to me; whether I like it or not, discord between me and my wife tears at who I am. For years we've been reading about studies that show how married men live longer than those who are single. Some assert that this is because married men are more likely to take care of their own health. IMHO, that's one reason, but another might be simpler: "It is not good for the man to be alone." (Genesis 2:18).

I've been thinking hard about this for a bit, and I'm convinced that God wasn't correcting a mistake when He made the need for marriage. I think it was part of the original design specification.

This has significant implications for our view of marriage and divorce, but this post has gone on long enough, and I'll have to save those thoughts for another time.