Friday, June 26, 2015

Now That "Marriage" Has Been Stolen

Sadly, the US Supreme Court has passed down a ruling that redefines what the government calls marriage to include same sex unions. Because of their ruling, the state governments are now required to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples, no matter how opposed to this the residents of those states may be. This is disturbing, but it isn’t unexpected. The homosexual movement has eroded values in America, even among the people of God. How can we expect the US Supreme Court to have better values than we do?

But what are we to make of this? As Christians we must remember that though it is now legal for same sex couples to commit to each other in so called “marriage,” this is not a marriage that is recognized by God. Nowhere in the Bible will you find any reference to people obtaining a license from the Government to marry. I don’t know when that started, but it doesn’t appear that a license is required for a marriage to be valid. Since a license isn’t required for a marriage to be valid, neither can a license validate a marriage that God doesn’t recognize as valid. In other words, homosexual unions are no more valid marriages now than they were before the Supreme Court redefined marriage.

So, what is required for marriage? Is it that two people stand before a preacher and he marries them? It would seem that this isn’t the case. We don’t see that happening in the Bible either. At its heart, marriage is a contract. The two people involved are committing to each other and to God that they are going to fulfill their responsibilities to each other and to their children, for life. But before you ask why that can’t be true of a homosexual union, consider that there are significant differences between men and women. God designed the family in such a way that these difference come together in such a way that a family can accomplish greater things than the individuals alone can accomplish. This doesn’t happen within homosexual unions, because half the puzzle is missing. The union ends up with too much of some things and not enough of others.

Given that the Supreme Court has stolen the word for marriage, it would be nice if we had another word that specifically referred to the union of a man and a woman, committed for life. We need people to realize that when we are talking about marriage, we aren’t talking about just any union between two people, but we are referring to this special, godly union between a man and a woman.