I was perusing the CrossWalk website to search the Bible when I ran across this article about “Becoming a person worth marrying” in reference to the book by James R. Lucas. I hate articles like this with a passion because they are never founded on Biblical truth and frankly they make Christians look exactly like the self-rightous idiots that non-Christians think we are. First of all, God has NEVER established maturity guidelines for marriage. According to the Bible, humans can’t marry animals, people of the same gender, or siblings. Paul’s letters imply that Christians can’t marry non-Christians, but he wasn’t talking about marriage in that scripture and some may believe that to be up to interpretation (oddly enough, Paul was talking about business and working and many of us do that with non-Christians without batting an eyelash – but that’s for another day). Nowhere in the Bible does it say that one shouldn’t get married at all if one isn’t a Christian, that “baby Christians” aren’t ready for marriage, or that one must be “passionate about life” or devoted to God in any way in order to get married. Christians don’t have a monopoly on marriage, and, while it would be nice for people to reach a certain level of maturity before they marry, it’s not a sin to be married while immature. In fact, since God’s way of marriage is that we only do it once, regardless of how mature we are in other matters, marriage is supposed to be something we are novices at and have to learn how to do while we’re in it. How prepared do you have to be if you have to go though “on-the-job” training anyway?
My personal view is that Christians are making an idol out of marriage. According to Christians, salvation is easy, but marriage? Not in the least. You have to be uber-prepared, and perfect, and mature, and know your Bible, and be second in blamelessness only to Christ himself – and then you can get married. Look, people, God made childbearing years. In women, they start in the teens (it’s called puberty, and it – not sin – is why people want to have sex – for those of you who haven’t figured that out – but again, that’s a rant for another day). Anyway, what I was saying was that God made childbearing years start relatively young in women, and if God made childbearing years and puberty happen at such young ages, I think it’s clear that he intended marriage to start near those ages as well. I’m not saying we should marry off a bunch of 13 year olds, but I’m also pointing out that God didn’t mean for everyone to wait until we were in our mid-30’s either. And, since there isn’t much maturity at those ages, obviously God doesn’ have the same maturity standards for marriage that we humans have made up.
Speaking of the relative maturity of teenagers, if older teens (and even twenty-somethings) are “too immature” for marriage – who’s fault is that? We humans have created an economic structure that makes it difficult to have a marriage and raise children before age 30 – not God. We humans have introduced layers of leisure and standards of entertainment that make families seem to be a burden during young adulthood – not God. We humans are making marriage seem like an achievment that only the best and brightest of us deserve – not God. We humans have created a society that prizes youth, freedom and non-attachment to the point that young people are made to feel abnormal if they want to romantically connect with each other in a permanent, serious, committed state – not God. We humans have decided to not love each other correctly and then pass this dreary vision of marriage on to the next generation as a discouragement to committment – not God!
If God loves each of us as we are then what makes us think we have the right to create such arbitrary standards in order to love one another? After all, the Bible does say we’re supposed to do that.
