A Biblical, Gospel-Shaped View Of Marriage

In the Winter 2015 issue of The City (a publication of Houston Baptist University) the president of HBU talked about the current state of marriage. In response to the question, “How do we display to [those who are younger and skeptical about marriage] that marriage is worth fighting for…?” He answers: “Primarily, of course, how we help them believe in marriage is through the model of marriage.”  He then adds the following.

“We won’t finally be restored until the resurrection from the dead, but in the process here and now, we have communities of faith. We have Scripture-shaped communities and we are supposed to live as the people of God n the world who are actually modeling…we’ll never do it perfectly…but the new creation. I think education matters. Ideas matter. 

“It really has to matter for [those young people who are skeptical]. If we don’t model marriage and talk about marriage and talk about the role of the family, for example, as God intended, it’s a challenge to Scripture. We believe in Scripture-based communities. It used to be that people simply said, well, we disagree about this interpretation of Scripture and there were efforts, for example, to re-read Romans 1…and so on.

“The fact is that, I think pretty well everyone agrees, we know what the Scriptures say about same-sex behavior, about divorce. We don’t want to talk too much about divorce because that would offend some of us, but we have harmed the family long before the same-sex revolution. At any rate, we ought to think about the importance of marriage in terms of just maintaining what the Scriptures teach. Are we Scripture-based communities or not? We ought to maintain marriage, frankly, for the sake of the Gospel.

“The family is inextricably linked with the nature of the church.”

These are great initial thoughts on marriage and why it is important for us to view it from a biblical, gospel-shaped view point. It helps us see why in June we will start a short sermon series on marriage in which we will address what the Bible teaches about marriage and why it is important.