What are you Doing? Chapter 21

      I:            After-warning

Reading this book, and reading the Scriptures, the book it is based on, could change your life.

Fathers: it could force you to take up a responsibility that you have, hitherto ignored: that of choosing, or causing to be chosen, a wife for your son, or accepting, yourself, a husband for your daughter. To place your wisdom, your experience, on the block: accepting, forever, the responsibility of giving this good gift to your child.

Sons: Accepting the ideas that Scripture presents for your marriage could cast down the idol that you have constructed for yourself of the girl you will marry. And it will definitely challenge you to take much, much more seriously your own responsibilities toward becoming a Godly husband and father if you become liable to having your father, without warning, suddenly present you with a betrothed wife. Those video games, that ‘free time’, that you are so addicted to; these will have to go by the wayside; replaced by the responsibilities and joys of spiritual leadership and diapers.

Daughters: You too may have to give up an idol: the idol of choice. Girls never had as much choice as boys, but, perhaps, you have always held on to that last kernel of ‘veto’… of being able to send a young boy, not up to your standards, packing. Your idealized marriage (which never was a reality anyway) will have to give way to the reality of a real, live, fallible young man, suddenly bound in covenant to you. And you will find that this fallible young man is exactly who God has prepared for you.

Or perhaps you will need to give up the idea of ‘romance’… that a young man will come and ‘sweep you off your feet’; the idea of a marriage based on emotion. Instead you need to replace that false and worldly idea with the permanence of covenant: the old idea, the Biblical idea of ‘for better or for worse’.

Elders, Pastors: Are you ready to die for the testimony and teachings of the Word of God? Are you ready to face the humiliation that will arise if you stand before your flock and admit that you have gotten it wrong? That the courtship or ‘Christian’ dating message you have been preaching was, actually, a false front; a compromise of worldly wisdom hiding behind a façade of Christianity?

Titus 2, Proverbs 31, Titus 1… these are wonderful passages. But they, along with Ephesians 5, describe the results of marriage, not it’s preconditions. Titus 2 is specifically written for what the older women are to teach the younger (married) women to become. The young, naïve, foolish and disobedient younger woman is taught; taught by God, her husband, and the older women, to: ‘love her husband, and to  love her children’. It is the married man who is to become the man listed in Titus 1; for how can he already be: the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.’

We need to stop putting these obstacles in the way of clear obedience, and be ready to ‘let them marry’; to tear down the walls of an unBiblical culture that has prevented hundreds and even thousands of marriages that will result, and result quickly, from an honest application of these principles; that has prevented the hundreds and thousands of children that would have been added to our ranks.  We need to be ready to face the mockery of the surrounding communities over what they will no doubt call ‘arranged marriages’.

We need to obey God; to demonstrate our love for Him and for our children in our obedience:

1Jn 5:2-5 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God.