The Marriage Puzzle

One day the church will come out and
address the hypocrisy behind marriage.
I have worked with many pastors and I
have been in the church all my life.
By church, I don’t mean one denomination
but many.
One of the most puzzling dilemmas I
know every church is facing is on the issue
of marriage.

Everything God instituted is good.
Eternal life for example needed no augmentation
or amendment
It was God’s perfect plan of salvation that
was executed by Jesus Christ.
No man had a hand in it.
The same with creation, it was entirely done
by God.
Man only benefitted.

Marriage, however, the supposedly “Institution”
of God didn’t share the same characteristics.
It was flawed from the moment Adam ate the forbidden
fruit and nothing was ever able to put that
Humpty-Dumpty together since then.
Unlike Adam and Eve who were a perfect fit, there
were no other examples cited in scripture who were
a perfect fit in marriage.

Abraham had Sarah.
Sarah was taken from him twice.
The first time by Pharaoh, the second time
by Abimelech.
Hagar was given to him by Sarah and he later
married Keturah and had other concubines.
Both the man and the woman in a marriage are
susceptible to the attention of others and in
some instances can be swept right off their
feet by the tidal wave of power, money,
influence, desire, and will.
Perhaps Sarah would have protested but her
protest could cost Abraham his life.
Perhaps Abraham would have protested but his
protest would have displeased his wife.

Marriage is a complex “Human”, not a “Divine”
arrangement.
It cannot be divine because divinity leaves
no alternatives to perfection.
If you label anything as divine, it has
to be flawless.
Marriage is not flawless.
It shared conspicuously one of the
characteristics of everything made by man,
one of which is imperfection.

Isaac and Rebecca didn’t have a record of a
third man or woman in the union and yet their
home was the worst example of a home in the
old testament.
Their marriage was far from ideal.
Esau married three or more wives,
Jacob married two and had two concubines.
I can go on and on.

I know couples who had not been intimate for
ten years and neither of them was sick or old
and yet neither cheated.
I know couples who are intimate thrice a week
and both were still cheating.
I know faithful husbands whose wives are
praying that they should cheat because they
are too “uptight and needed a dose of humility”,
I know faithful wives who are crying and
longing every day for a husband who has gone
on parol with another woman

Behind every good marriage, there seems to be
a lot of endurance and tolerance from both
parties.
A happy couple I know were making a joke one
day and the wife said
“If there is marriage in heaven I will like
to marry you again!”
The husband said “What offense would God say
I have committed to make that happen”

We all laughed over it but the man meant it.
He told me later that if he had a choice, he
would walk out of the marriage without a
second thought.
One of the reasons a Christian “Marriage” will
not work as we all desire nowadays is that most
people getting into it are not Christians.
Imagine the irony.

Boy and girl live by their will all their lives,
then they get married in church and you expect
the marriage to last forever
It makes no sense.

The Christian life and reality is a deliberate
one.
It has its root and its fruits.
A million confessions do not make a marriage work,
speaking in tongues too will fail miserably.
More often than not we desire that God should help us
bend or shape our partners so that they can become
our dummies.

The word “conform” applies both to us as we change
into the image of Christ and walk together in
marriage.
Not all men are husbands,
not all husbands are good fathers.
Not all women are wives,
not all wives are good mothers.
We all expect our spouses to be both good husbands
or wives and good parents (If we choose to have
children).

Elephants can swim but they would rather walk,
that is how many spouses in marriages are coping
today.
The church must do better.
We cannot just leave it as it is and label it
the human condition.
We have to find a way to address the cracks in
this institution.
We made it and it is bursting at the seams!

The other alternative to marriage offered by the
world is “Partnership”.
I have studied it and it seems only the logical
can thrive in that system.
You cannot go into it with emotions only.
You must get a contract with a lawyer and state
categorically the expectations of the partnership.
It is not marriage because marriage is an
institution based on a lot of assumptions.
A partnership is pragmatic and both parties can
benefit from it if they broker it with diligence.

Someone wrote to me stating that God did not
institute partnership, I replied the person by
asking if God instituted marriage.
The person couldn’t respond.
Marriage and society at large as we have it today
is not following the original blueprint of God.

Our societies, like Israel of old, had chosen to
be like other nations and elected to have human
rulers and parliaments.
Most of us use God as a convenient excuse to do
our will (You can argue all you want but it
is a fact).
We have churches where God has no say in doctrine
and policies.
All over the world, it is in these last days that
some of us are coming out to say the leadership
of the church should be restored to the
Holy Spirit.

We are gaining ground but the dross is much globally.
From the moment man took over the reins of his
affairs, everything, especially marriage has
been altered.
Young people need to know this and not build castles
in the air by expecting faithfulness from people
whose nature was not faithful.

It is a fact that both men and women are polygamous
by nature. You can ask google, it will tell you
man is a part of the primate family and a polygamous
animal!
The hypocrisy is “Not leaving that nature by coming
to Christ genuinely and believing that by getting
married in a church, the man or woman would
suddenly become monogamous by nature”.
The term is “standing logic on its head”.

Now for pastors and gospel artists who acted
irresponsibly and are apologizing as a result,
Do you notice that their apology was always
addressed to their vows and responsibilities
to their spouses and the “church” but never
to their nature?
Nobody apologizes for his or her nature.
Excuses are given for everything else but
not for nature.

DNA test proposal made many women cringe when
it was announced recently.
If the primate nature is not addressed, the
rest is a joke…
You can train animals to control their instincts
all you want but when I watched Bolton’s dog eat
him in Game of Thrones, I realized that some
innate primordial desires can disarm the most
self-controlled and trained beings.

We will still witness many scandals within
the church.
Man must be true to his nature.
Those who have the nature of Christ will be
true to it.
Others who have the nature of man will be
true to it.
The apple doesn’t fall far from its tree.

-GSW-