THE ESSENSE OF MARRIAGE
Page 78
But when the Bible speaks of love, it measures it primarily not by how
much you want to receive but by how much you are willing to give of yourself to
someone. How much are you willing to lose for the sake of this person? How much
of your freedom are you willing to forsake? How much of your precious time,
emotion, and resources are you willing to invest in this person? And for that,
the marriage vow is not just helpful but it is even a test. In so many cases, when one person says to another, “I
love you but let’s not ruin it by getting married,” that person really means,
“I don’t love you enough to close off my opinions. I don’t love you enough to
give myself for you that thoroughly.” To say, “I don’t need a piece of
paper to love you” is basically to say, “My love for you has not reached the
marriage level.”
Page 81
The Bible sees God as the supreme good – not the individual or the
family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feeling and duty, passion
and promise. That is because the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage
is the covenant.
Page 81-82
Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our
particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit –
that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation
from us than we are getting back – then we “cut our losses” and drop the
relationship. This also has been called “commodification”, a process by which
social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the
very idea of “covenant” is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept
that is increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of
marriage, so we must take some time to understand it.
Page 82-83
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and cleave (紧贴) to his wife, and the two shall
become one flesh.
There in Genesis 2:22-25 we see the first marriage ceremony. The
Genesis text calls what happens “cleaving”. This archaic English term (which
you can find in the King James Version) conveys the strength of the Hebrew
verb, which modern translations render “united to”. It is a Hebrew word that
literally means to be glued to something. Elsewhere in the Bible, the word “cleave”
means to unite to someone through a covenant, a binding promise, or oath.
Why do we say that marriage is the most deeply covenantal relationship?
It is because marriage has both strong horizontal and vertical aspects to it.
Page 83-84
This is the reason that so many traditional Christian wedding services
have both a set of questions as well as a set of vows. In the questions, each
spouse is asked something like this:
Will you have this woman to be your wife? And will you make your
promise to her in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and
tenderness – to live with her, and cherish her, according to the ordinance of
God, in the holy bond of marriage?
Each spouse answers “I will” or “I do”- but
notice they are not speaking to each other. They are looking forward and
technically answering the minister, who asks them the questions. What they are
really doing is making a vow to God before they turn and make vows to one
another. They are “speaking vertically” before they speak “horizontally”.
They get to hear the other person stand up before God, their families, and all
the authority structures of church and state and swear loyalty and faithfulness
to the other. Now, building on this foundation, they take one another by the
hand and say something like this:
I take you to be my lawful and wedded husband, and I do promise and
covenant, before God and these witnesses, to be your loving and faithful wife.
In plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long
as we both shall live.
Imagine a house with an A-frame structure. The two sides of the home
meet at the top and hold one another up. But underneath, the foundation holds
up both of the sides. So the covenant with and before God strengthens the
partners to make a covenant with each other. Marriage is therefore the deepest
of human covenant.
Page 85
Love needs a framework of binding obligation to make it fully what it
should be. A covenant relationship is not just intimate despite being legal. It
is a relationship that is more intimate because it
is legal.
Page 91
Promising is the key to identify, it is the
very essence of marital love. Why? Because it is our promises that give
us a stable identity, and without a stable identify, it is impossible to have
stable relationships.
Page 94
When you first fall in love, you think you
love the person, but you don’t really. You can’t know who the person is right
away. That takes years. You actually love your idea of that person – and that
is always, at first, one-dimensional and somewhat mistaken.
Page 91
Passion may lead you to make a wedding
promise, but then that promise over the years makes the passion richer and
deeper.
Page 100-101
Actions of love lead to feelings of love
Though natural
likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that
the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate
feelings…The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time
bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do
this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved
someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you
dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn,
you will find yourself disliking him less…Whenever we do good to another self,
just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own
happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned it to love it a little more
or, at least, to dislike it less…The worldly man treats
certain people kindly because he “likes” them: The Christian, trying to treat
everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on –
including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the
beginning.
Lewis then used and illustration that had great potency, particularly
at that time:
This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The
Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them:
afterwards they hated them more because they had ill-treated them. The more
cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you have, the more cruel
you will become – and so on in a vicious circle forever.
Page 103
I had been loving them even when I didn’t
like them, and the result was that, slowly but surely, my emotions were
catching up with my behaviour. If you do not give up, but proceed to
love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to
you.
Our culture says that feelings of love are
the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer
to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love. Love
between two people must not, in the end, be identified simply with emotion or
merely with dutiful action. Married love is a symbiotic, complex mixture of
both. Having said this, it is important to observe that of the two –
emotion and action – it is the latter that we have the most control over. It is
the action of love that we can promise to maintain every day.
Page 103
It Ephesians 5:28, Paul says, “Husbands ought to love their wives.” He
had already urged them to love their wives in verse 25, but here, just to be
clear, Paul uses a verb that stresses obligation. There is no doubt about what
Paul is saying. He commands husbands – they ought to love their wives. Emotions can’t be commanded, only actions, and so
it is actions that Paul is demanding.
Page 104
In any relationship, there will be
frightening spells in which your feelings of love seem to dry up. And when that
happens you must remember that the essence of a marriage is that it is a
covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what you do? You do the
acts of love, despite your lack of feeling.
Page 108-109
Many people hear this and say, “I’m sorry,
I can’t give love if I don’t feel it! I can’t fake it. That’s too technical for
me.” I can understand that reaction, but Paul doesn’t dimply call us to a naked
action; he also commands us to think as we act. “Husbands, love your wives just
as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
This means we must say to ourselves something like this” Well, when
Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn’t think, ‘I am giving myself to you
because you are so attractive to me.’ No, he was in agony, and he looked down
at us – denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him – and in the greatest
act of love in history, he stayed. He said, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t
know what they are doing.’ He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but
to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse.” Speak to your
heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day.
Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God, by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)
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