Geoff Thomas
There is absolutely no reason why in Old Testament times a Jew and a
Gentile could not have fallen in love. There is no reason today why a
believer and an unbeliever should not feel enormous attraction to one
another and fall in love. There is no physical mechanism preventing us
from falling in love with atheists, or with members of the cults, or
with Muslims. There is no reason why a person belonging to any of those
groupings should not be beautiful and why a Christian should not be
drawn by that beauty. There is every physical and emotional and
intellectual and hormonal reason to say, ‘Wow!’ and fall in love
with them, but there is every reason why we should not marry them, even
if they are beautiful and the wow factor is very high and we know we're
in love.
This is something young people must all work out in a most careful
way as they prepare themselves for marriage. There is no back door out
of which you can escape if a marriage is not working out, not in the
Christian attitude to marriage. There are the contemporary media with
their enormous powers of seduction glorying in instant attraction. There
is no more common constituents of tragedy than a couple involved in
hopeless love. It seems so utterly cruel that their hopes and longings
should be frustrated, and that a pastor would reserve the right to
refuse to marry them, but it is the whole teaching of the Bible that no
matter how much you love an atheist, or how much you love an unbeliever
or a humanist or someone from another religion that you have no right to
marry them simply because of that love.
However there is not nearly enough insight into the various states of
weak professors coming to marry professing believers. I mean God-fearers
who have not yet come into assurance of salvation, and church-goers who
have had very little Bible teaching. It is certainly another issue
whether in every such case the church should tersely say ‘only in the
Lord’ and forbid the pastor from marrying such a pair who are
certainly going to get wed. A public rebuke may be sufficient in some
cases and then the pastoring and a church marriage can take place. There
is such a range of moral and theological understanding or ignorance
amongst the individuals involved in this. There can be a serious church
attender who has hesitated for years before getting baptised. You think
it will be years more before he knows he is saved. Do you forbid such a
person from marrying one who is a church member? I think not. There are
weak church members whom you wished showed much more interest in the
things of God, but they have some kind of profession. It is a very
serious matter to tell a Christian who has attended a church all her
life with her family, and been baptised in that church that she may not
marry in the church. Yet if the one she is to marry scorns the things of
God can such a wedding occur there? It is certainly a serious matter for
Christian parents to refuse to attend the wedding of a daughter who is
being married to an unbeliever. For a father to refuse to give his
daughter away might make a bad situation worse, and yet the daughter may
know her father's principles and love him still.
Every situation needs to be weighed carefully. We certainly must take
account of all this in pastoring those intending to marry. Let the
pastor who meets and talks with them come to his own decision. The
church will never be all agreed. My inclination during the last few
years is to marry them and deal with these issues in personal
counselling before and after marriage. Other courses of action lock the
door in the faces of families and tear a congregation apart. What a
problem!
My concern is that there are some Christians who never think about
marriage, they simply fall in love, and that is an absolutely classical
contemporary outlook, so much so that many don’t question it. Yet if
there is one thing God’s word says to us about marriage it is ‘Think!’
It doesn’t only say, ‘Be sure you are in love.’ It says something
more difficult. It says to us, ‘You may be in love, and yet the
marriage may be wrong’ You can be in love and not walk with God, and
it may seem to you so utterly tragic, and Christians who question you
unkind and legalistic men and women, and yet in the view of the
Scriptures there should never be union between people who are not agreed
as to whose Son Jesus Christ is, and what is man’s chief end, and what
must we do to be saved, and how then should we live, and what is our
only hope in life and death. Where there is no unity in understanding
those great themes there is the deepest disunity in a home, and that is
bound to show itself in the lives of the children and the whole ethos of
the home. We may make all the compromises in the world, and patch up all
the cracks to the best of our ability, but God says, ‘Stop and think.
Do not marry simply because you find him beautiful.’ King Solomon was
far wiser than any of us and yet his whole testimony was ruined and the
damage he did to the faith in Israel was great because of his
multi-marriages to unbelievers.
It becomes terribly obvious as the years go by and as one looks at
the condition of our own society, that many marriages are very fragile.
Alas, many Christian marriages are fragile and the reason for that is
that they never had any foundation other than this that there was a time
in their lives when they found a member of the opposite sex very
attractive; in fact they found that person utterly irresistible, so good
to be around. He or she really turned them on, but that is not enough.
Attention must be addressed to questions of compatibility, and of
affinity, and of fellowship, and of theology, and of a commitment to a
great common end in life. And if there is not, then our marriage may be
the most romantic thing in the world, as it is when two beautiful
Hollywood people get hitched, and everyone is excited, but it is not
going to last. It is going to be for ever fragile, and some visits to a
chat line on the Internet can start a crack that just spreads until it
breaks the marriage in half.
