Broken relationships are every where. Whether in the family, at work, at school, no matter where you look you find the evidence of a society which is suffering from the assault on good relationships.
The media has played a significant part in this breakdown. Many decades ago, people attended church and were exhorted to live their lives responsibly. But now people do not attend church. Instead they watch television and they go shopping in huge malls and such. Their daily news diet is about how terrible the state of the world is. In this climate it is hardly surprising that people’s sense of values and view of life are distorted.
Specifically I have witnessed the decades long assault on the basic module of a healthy society: the family. And the foundation of the family is the married couple – yes I did say married couple – those who have explicitly committed themselves before God and before those who know them to live together whatever life may throw at them.
That is not just a contractual arrangement; it is a covenantal arrangement.
So in the media we see the marriage of one woman with one man assaulted as a failed idea; as an impossible burden on a free individual; as a disaster causing problems to children and to the partners in the marriage themselves. Marriage has been made to look like the very opposite of what it exists to provide. Love and harmony; mutual support and protection; the environment for raising children successfully.
There is no model apart from marriage of course. But that fact of life is never explored. Marriage is criticised and pilloried.
Satan has a field day as he destroys God’s model and as he destroys every hope of happiness in human beings. Because once human beings accept the devil’s verdict on marriage, they lose all hope; they live like animals; they are prey to his every negative idea, without any positive, constructive alternative.
But God has ordained marriage as the fundamental relationship in society. And that relationship is so sacrosanct, it reflects the sacred relationship between Christ and his Church.
Now the Roman Catholics teach that marriage is a sacrament. I don’t go so far because Jesus Christ specifically ordains just two: water baptism and the communion of bread&wine.
But I can see their point. Because marriage is a holy estate reflecting the great spiritual relationship Christ has with his church. Read Paul’s explanation in chapter 5 of Ephesians.
We reach chapter 10 in our study of the Gospel of Mark which opens with Christ forbidding the Jewish practice of divorce. It was allowed, Jesus explains:
FOR THE HARDNESS OF YOUR HEART
A hard and self centred heart is what Jesus came to change. The new covenant he introduced is about people forgiving and forgetting each others offences, just as God forgives and forgets our offences.
And Jesus goes on to explain that when people marry:
THEY ARE NO MORE TWAIN BUT ONE FLESH
People who have been married for a while and are happy together will identify with that insight.
In marriage the two are no longer two separates but one new whole. Yes of course they have their own individual personalities and wills. But they are forging together a new entity. They discuss and decide together what is important and what they are going to do. When they have children, they need to be of one mind in how they are going to raise their children and how they are going to make a viable home possible for a family.
It won’t work if either one fails to see what they have now committed to. In this world, everything is supposed to be for our own individual convenience. If we no longer get what we want from a relationship, or it doesn’t go how we want it to go, then we have the right to opt out.
How can you build a society on such individuality ? How can people learn to become more concerned for others and less egocentric on that basis.
We are seeing the consequences in the state of society today. Everything is about Self and every thing is about the Material – production and consumption. This is the sum total of happiness.
There is no other reason to live. Man becomes his own god, and man loses the perspective and sense of being God derived and God sustained and God bound in eternity.
It’s all about the sensory, physical NOW.
But God knows the truth, the reality !
Christian Preacher
Christianity 