The most important meeting in life: meeting with a spouse.
Life is made up of many encounters. Humans meet their parents as soon as they are born. A child meets a friend as he grows up. And when a child becomes an adult, he meets his spouse and gets married.
Marriage is the most important meeting of all time. Because it’s about meeting someone who will live with you for more than half of your life.
The Bible shows how bad a marriage can make life miserable. Rather than living with a quarreling woman, Bible tells him to set up a tent in the desert alone. On the contrary, meeting a good wife is compared to wearing a crown.
Women change men good or bad
This story is told in the Talmud, which contains the wisdom of Jews. There were a good man and a bad man. A good man married a bad woman. In contrast, a bad man married a good woman.
Over time, the lives of the two men changed. The bad man who married a good woman was assimilated by his wife and turned into a good person. But a good man who married a bad woman was also assimilated into his wife and turned into a bad person.
So the most important thing in your youth is to meet a good spouse. What should a young man do to meet a good spouse? In order for a young man to meet a spouse who will be with him for life, he must take a close look at the teachings of the Bible and apply them to life.
Otherwise, regardless of the teachings of the Bible, choosing a spouse according to your taste makes your entire life unhappy. Think of Samson and Delilah.
So what’s important in your youth is to control your passion. Otherwise, if you abandon the teachings of the Bible and live according to your own desires, you have no choice but to marry a failed marriage. They blame God even though it’s their fault.
We must live with the character and mission of Christ
So before you think about marriage and your spouse, remember one important fact. Let’s think about the purpose of God’s creation and rebirth of us to enter the church, the body of Christ. We must live with the character and mission of Christ.
Christian parents should think about marriage before their children. Parents should first guide their children with the standard of biblical marriage.
Best revealing God’s existence: Church and couple
Jesus Christ and the Church are two persons each, but they mysteriously unite to form one person, one large body. When we say the body of Jesus Christ, do we give up all our consciousness and personality?
That’s not true. It rather lives more clearly and serves as the holy retardation of Jesus Christ. It is the mysterious body of Jesus Christ that moves like a finger or toe, including all of human individuality.
Therefore, there are many churches at the same time. And this church stands in the middle of the world as a prototype that reveals something about God.
The best model for this church and Jesus Christ is the couple. The couple’s prototype is a church. The Bible called the church the prototype of the couple, not the prototype of the church.
The church does not follow the couple, but the couple follows the church. The church with Jesus Christ as its head is the most important prototype for couples to learn and represent. Let’s read the words from Chapters 22 to 24 of Ephesians 5.
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
NIV
Just as the church does to Christ, the standard of the family is that the wife should treat her husband. Let’s read again from Chapters 25 to 30 of Ephesians 5.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body.
NIV
What Christ does to the church is the standard attitude that a husband should do toward his wife. To love your wife is to love yourself. If you love a friend or child, you don’t love yourself. But if you love your wife, you love yourself.
Let’s read again from Chapters 31 to 33 of Ephesians 5.
For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
The Bible does not use abstract and philosophical expressions. Instead, they use specific expressions to form a body. Couples do not coexist with each other but exist as one body.
Christ loves the church, and the church obeys Greece is an example of the attitude that a husband should show to his wife and a wife to his husband.
Create a wife to help
I’m going to read Genesis 1:26.
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
God, who said “we” here, created men and women. Just as God is “we” and also one, he created it so that people can call each other “we” and also “me.” He created a man and a woman in the presence of God.
Here comes the mystery of God’s marital creation.
In particular, it is important when God created Adam’s help. It is when God created Adam and Adam was doing his mission from God. When Adam’s reason moved actively, God created Eve for Adam. The fact that God created Eve with Adam’s ribs means that women are human beings created in the center of men.
When the man first met his wife, there are two different personalities, but in principle, they exist as one body, as one flesh, as God managed. So it exists as one body. The analogy taken by Adam can help a man as a person.
She can shake the center of men as much as it is created by men’s ribs. In the end, under the influence of a woman, Adam makes a bad choice. Women had a bad influence on men.
Then is Adam’s crime the responsibility of the woman? That’s not true. It was Adam who had to deliver and follow God’s revelation to the woman. But Adam doesn’t correct his wife and commits a crime with a woman.
The influence of a wife on her husband
Young Christian women need to know the impact of their words on men. Words that a wife does not take into account during the marriage have a great influence on her husband. The deeper the interest and love for the wife, the greater the influence.
This is another aspect of the wife that helps. What is the biblical meaning of helper? Above all, wife’s role is to sympathize, be sure, and hold on to the mission given by God to his husband to drive and lead the man’s mission more strongly. This is the purpose why God made Eve.
When you look at marriage from a biblical point of view, you don’t get married because you love it. Rather, love and happiness are secondary factors. There must be a clear perception and awakening of a mission that you believe in and are sure of as you discover it. Love is an important factor, but if you think of love as the biggest factor in marriage, it turns into a marriage obstacle.
Young people, when you prioritize the most important thing in life and put love as the next value, love is constant. But if you consider love as your top priority, you will be disappointed.
An incorrect marriage whose goal is love and happiness
It is a serious mistake to marry for one’s own happiness. Marriage for one’s own happiness, not God, is a shortcut to unfortunate results.
People feel happy only when objective conditions are satisfied with subjective conditions. It should be
noted that there is a weak point in a person’s failure to make the right judgment on objective conditions and that subjectivity changes over time.
As humans mature, so does their desire for happiness. Marriage, which is decided for one’s happiness at a young age, turns into unhappiness and causes disappointment and regret over time.
Christians can have a happy marriage when they live with a goal for God, not an individual. When the wife sympathizes with the Christian mission that her husband received from God and achieves it together, the two become a couple. The biblical couple is getting the same mission as this.
On the contrary, if a Christian couple lives for their own happiness, it has the unfortunate result of not achieving one’s will and not obtaining each other’s happiness.
There is a paradox in Christ’s life. There is greater satisfaction, happiness, and gratitude when God takes precedence over me.
So if you think about marriage, if you find a spouse, find a greater mission and Bible policy to take precedence over it. Here’s the secret of a biblical and happy marriage.
