Get ready to start a journey…a journey through the pages of the Bible and the pages of your life.
Christian love is both vertical and horizontal. It starts with our love for God. This love is established by our “obedience to the truth” of the gospel. The resulting new birth purifies us from the inside out. This love begins and ends in God. We love him only because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). Here’s how Peter explains it.
The apostle Peter walked with Jesus, and he had stories to tell. Stories about Jesus healing the sick (his mother-in-law, for one), calming the sea, walking on water, feeding the five thousand, and raising the dead. He could tell you how he stood at a distance and watched Jesus die, then saw them take his body down and place it in a tomb. He could also tell you that three days later, he found the tomb empty and Jesus alive! His readers had not seen Jesus, but he had. One of the reasons he wrote this book was to hand off the faith to the next generation.
Marriages don’t explode. There is seldom one event that causes a husband and wife to call it quits. Rather the demise of a marriage is more like a slow leak. If the leak is not tended to, over time, the air escapes, and the relationship goes flat.
In today’s passage, Jesus puts marriage on the divine level. He looks each husband and wife in the eyes and says, “God has joined you together. Don’t mess it up” (My paraphrase). Marriage is not about a man and woman going through a ceremony, moving into a home with a white picket fence, and having a family.
How can we make our families strong—bulletproof—against the constant attacks from our culture? Well, for starters, strong families always start with strong marriages. So, let’s begin at the beginning. This passage in Genesis is repeated by Jesus in the Gospels and Paul in his letter to the Ephesians.