Blog » But I am talking about Christ and the Church”

                                                  Friday, May 31, 2013 Jeff Lampl

“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery -- but I am talking about Christ and the church."                             Ephesians 5:31-32 (NIV) 



This passage is HUGE!!!!!

It reflects a consistent description of God from Genesis one through Revelation 21. Marriage is a picture of God.

Sounds dramatic but it’s true. After revealing that God is both plural and singular, Genesis one tells us that the image of God is male and female together. Genesis two tells us that men and women are reunited in marriage. They become one in marriage. God is three in one. Marriage is also a trinity, God, Husband, wife. This union procreates, just as God (pro)created the cosmos.  From Hosea to Isaiah to  Jesus’ marriage parables, to Jesus’ reaffirmation of Genesis 2, to the marriage of heaven and earth (pro)creating the New Creation in Revelation 19 and 21, we see marriage as the consistent image of God and picture of God’s relationship with humanity.

Once we understand this we then understand why Christians steadfastly maintain that marriage must remain between members of opposite sexes. It may be that in a secular society such as ours that gay and lesbian life-long commitments can be blessed by the state so that all civic rights are protected, but those unions are not the same thing as marriage. It’s not so much that gay persons should not marry, rather is it that they can’t, unless of course one changes the Judeo-Christian meaning of marriage that the West (and in it’s basic form every society on earth) had held to from the beginning.

My personal conclusion about this is that God withholds nothing good from anyone (unless it is for redemptive purposes in which case the withholding is good). I think if Jesus thought physical unions outside of marriage between and a man and a woman, a woman and woman, or between a man and a man, or some other arrangement were good things, then Jesus would have said “go for it”.   

God is for you, not against you. Do not fall into the sin of Eve and Adam, the sin of believing that God was withholding something good beyond what God provides.