It’s wedding season. I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing until I had a job at a wedding hall. Living in the suburbs and now in Bowling Green I had heard of things like duck season, or dear season, but wedding season is a only a recent addition to my brain. My wife & I just kicked it off, attending the wedding of our good friends Nick & Lauren. It appears as though you hit a certain age when suddenly you and all your friends seem to be getting married. Before this past year, I had been to maybe 3 weddings in my whole life. I’ve since been to 4 in the last year alone and there’s another 4 on the docket for these coming months of summer. Being so connected to a college ministry as I am it shouldn’t really surprise me I suppose.
Christians get really excited about weddings, at least those in the circles in which I run. There is a lot of 
build up, and more times than not, it happens over a short period of engagement. Let’s acknowledge the heavy plant-eating mammal with a prehensile trunk, long curved ivory tusks, and large ears, native to Africa and southern Asia in the room. If you’re a Christian taking the bible seriously and believing it is the best way for living out this life, you are trying, maybe even struggling at times, to abstain from sexual encounters, heavy petting and otherwise. This posture of abstinence brings with it a certain hurriedness, a race if you will, to that first night together. But lets step back from that subject for a moment and concentrate on the Wedding, yes…the ceremony is hugely important, mostly because its the foundation of all we do as Christians, including what happens that first night together.
Some people think marriage is a crazy idea. Who wants to be tied to one person the rest of their life? That’s a lot of pressure, a lot of …. bondage some would say. I agree with the first half of that word, bond. If you really believe in marriage and the idea of binding yourself to this other person for the rest of your physical life, yes that is a big deal. That is a big bond. But I think a lot of people discount marriage or avoid it, saying it is archaic, because in some senses it’s scary. Some might wonder as I did: so wait, I’m going to commit to love this person no matter what…whether she loves me back, whether she is nice to me, whether she cares for me or not…no matter what…I’m with her? What if she doesn’t commit to me with the same promise, the same bond…what if she just jets?
If you’re real with yourself, that is scary. There is no guarantee that your spouse will wake up the next day and love you. And if all I had was my wife’s word that she will never leave me, I’m not sure that would be enough for me either. While my wife’s words, her promises, do count for something, I have seen enough of the human condition to know that everyone lets me down at some point. So who’s to say that she won’t wake up and leave me in the next few years. I just sat with a friend who is to be married next month. He described for me the deterioration and utter havoc that has played out in his fiance’s life as her parents just divorced one another after 27 years of marriage and 3 kids. You would think around year 25 you could begin to say…ok…I think we’re in the clear, we’ve made it this long.
Not so.
Unless…
The bible has a lot to say about marriage. In fact it uses it as a metaphor all the way from the the first book of the Old Testament to the last book of the New Testament. This book is absolutely saturated with wedding imagery. Even the ten commandments are crafted in wedding imagery. The ancient Jew more than likely would have immediately recognized the imagery as reminiscent of a sacred contract made between a bride and bridegroom. The first commandment being the most obvious, a statement of faithfulness, a statement of ‘I will never leave you’. But it’s not only a promise from God’s people not to stray to other gods. God goes on in the first few books of the bible to illustrate His faithfulness and to clearly articulate His promises to never divorce His people. There is discipline and hard times in the relationship when his people broke their vow. But God never abandons His favored creation, man.
As I said before, the human condition sucks! We are a weak people of little integrity. Few are the people whose yes means yes and no means no. A well know preacher John Piper has pointed out that in the Hebrew language there is no word for ‘promise’. He asks the question: in a culture of true integrity what would be the difference between ‘I will’ and ‘I promise I will’? So people are absolutely right that if all I had to go on was my wife’s promise her ‘I promise I will’, I don’t think that would be enough for me. That’s why the wedding ceremony is so important to Christians. Because we recognize that our ‘I do’ is no where near adequate enough to stand on for the rest of our physical lives, with so much of our hearts at stake. Both the bride and groom have to have their eyes glued to that which is faithful and their knees bowed in submission before the one who has never given up. The ceremony is so important because we stand before a God, who for all of eternity has been a faithful God, never leaving his people. We stand before a Father, who is fully committed to caring for us even when we flip him the bird. A perfect Father who saw how desperately short we had fallen from our intended nature that He sacrificed His Son so that he could continue to stand in the presence of our filth with us. We stand before a perfectly faithful God, asking Him to say ‘I do’ because we have seen how often our actions have communicated that ‘I don’t’.
So standing from the position of those who don’t believe in the God of bible, those who don’t put any faith in THE FAITHFUL, I agree and say that marriage is stupid…unless…