Love STory

Valentine

I was looking back over the posts from previous years and it seems that I have not really written anything themed around the Valentine holiday. I must admit that I am not really all that well educated on the origins of the day that we set aside to celebrate romance and love. However, the true love story is a fundamental tale deep in the heart of all people and cultures. The reason it is so common and shared among all people is because the Lord has written it into His glorious redemption story.

Wedding Bells

Remember that the first human relationship fashioned and facilitated by God ever was a wedding between the man and the woman (Genesis 2:15-24). God brought the woman to the man as the father escorting his daughter to her groom. The Lord also presided over the establishment of the covenantal bonds. Here in the perfect environment of the Edenic garden, the Lord placed the perfect couple in perfect purity and innocence. In some sense, all our love stories are trying to recapture the reality of the gift of pure love that God had given to mankind when no hint or tint of sin had crept in to defile and deform His precious gift.

Think about the way that even our modern western marriage traditions reflect this modeling. The purity of the bride dressed in white gown. The fruitful fertile garden is represented in the floral bouquet. Even naming is represented when the woman takes on the name of her husband. All of these practices may seem to many like old fashioned and meaningless traditions. Certainly they are old but they are not meaningless as they harken back to the beauty of God’s original masterpiece.

Arranged Marriages

We live in a very emotional and maybe sentimental age. Our concepts of personal autonomy and entitlement cause us to be very arrogant and selfish. This being the case, we tend to think that truest and purest relationships must be the ones with the most freedom. We see this illustrated in many ways in our society. A couple of examples would include that in most of our stories we see so much premarital promiscuity. This is so common in modern stories that most people, even Christians, don’t even notice it. A second example would be the prevalence of pornography in our society. I don’t want to dwell on this point, but much of this is about a person's desire for sexual options that they do not have in real life or physical attention that they are not receiving in real life.

All of the above noted realities would make most recoil at the idea of arranged marriages. Now, I am not going to argue here for arranged marriages, but I do want to point out that the three most important marriages ever were arranged marriages.

The first one is the one noted above from Genesis 2. Adam and Eve had an arranged marriage. God purposely formed Eve for the forming of this marriage and ultimately through them all other marriages.

The second and most important arranged marriage ever is that of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:22-33). Remember that Jesus said that everyone who comes to Him was given to Him by the Father (John 6:37). The doctrine of election is the arrangement of the marriage between Jesus and His bride, the church.

The last marriage I would point to is yours. You see, if you are in a biblically legitimate marriage, then that is the marriage to which God’s providence has brought you. I am not minimizing nor excusing sin or suffering. But if God is in control, and He is, then He ordained your marriage. He arranged it. 

Why? He did it because He has a good intention for you in this marriage. I, of course, can’t tell you what that is. But it is. He also has brought you as a believer to this marriage for the display of love and sacrifice to His church, because all Christian marriages are meant to do that. Finally, your marriage exists for God’s ultimate glory!

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