Marriage – as God intended is blessed!
It is a beautiful truth found in the first chapter of the Bible and onward that heterosexuality is God’s purpose in creation and that men and women are created equal in dignity and worth before Almighty God their Creator.
That man and woman were both created in His image – Gen 1:27
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. – And both were blessed and told to be fruitful, to subdue the earth, and to care for its creatures.
What creation has established no culture is able to destroy!
Although the sexes are equal, they are beautifully different; equality is fully compatible with complementarity.
Sadly it has been our human disobedience and fall in sin that has upset our human sexual relationships, God’s intention through the coming of His Son Jesus Christ is to restore and even deepen them through the gospel.
Men and women in the Church should honour and value one another more than they do in a non –Christian society.
Why – because we should recognize our status – we are equal by creation, even more equal by Christ’s redemption.
Genesis 2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. 22 Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.
23 And Adam said: “This is now bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
God designed marriage to be a blessing to both the husband and the wife.
It was Peter Lombard, who became bishop of Paris in 1159, that wrote in his famous summary of Christian doctrine entitled “The Book of Sentences”, ‘Eve was not taken from the feet of Adam to be his slave, nor from his head to be his lord, but from his side to be his partner’.
Marriage is NOT a human invention. The Bible’s teaching on marriage begins with the joyful affirmation that it is God’s idea, NOT ours.
Therefore as such it is something that we should never change or tamper with.