During my regularly scheduled blog hop, I stumbled across some articles on marriage that forced me to evaluate how my church upbringing and my wounds have sent me way off track in my “pursuit.” In fact, my church upbringing and my wounds have perfectly ruined any attempt at a “pursuit,” so that “pursuit” is no longer an appropriate word for what I have been doing.
These truths also gave me a biblical understanding of why I hate being pursued by women so much, and why it is unnatural according to God’s natural order, beyond the typical gender role agenda of the traditional church.
First, let’s explore a couple simple proverbs of which you may already be acquainted:
He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord. (18:22)Throw in a dash of Paul:
A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. (31:10-12)
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleaning 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. (Eph. 5:25-28)John will close out our study:
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son in to the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:7-11)Break it down…
Truth #1: We cannot know love without knowing God. I’m sure many of us claim this truth as believers, but consider how many people we would acknowledge to “be in love” that do not know God. For example, if someone would ask about them, I would say that my parents love one another. But my dad doesn’t know God, so how can he love? And then I look at the fruit: I see selfishness, rudeness, jealousy, and all sorts of things that Paul tells us are contrary to love. Not to sell my dad short -- he holds an affinity for my mom that has contributed to nearly 38 years of marriage. One might even say, there are lingering remnants of the Lord’s glory within my dad’s attempt at love.
I could ease the argument, and say that my dad simply loves in a different way than God, but this would contradict Paul…
Truth #2: Man’s love for his bride is to mirror God’s love for the Church. Here’s where things get dicey; I may lose you ladies. Having grown up in the church, one of the truths that I did not grasp until late in my 20s is that Christ apprehends man. For years, I was under the impression that if I wanted more of God, I had to seek Him on my own terms, hoping to chase some elusive deity until He saw my desperation and gave up hiding. And while there is some apprehending to be done on our behalf, we do not have a relationship with God because anything that we have done. Our Father chose us, he predestined us, and he made himself known to us (Eph. 1:3-14).
Do you realize that you would have no right to apprehend God if He had not first chosen to make himself known to you? You may understand this theoretically, but consider this: without God making radically aggressive moves towards us, our lives would be lived in complete separation from our Creator. You understand love because this is what was required: that His Son would serve as the sacrifice for our sins, so that Christ could present His perfect Bride, the Church.
Reconcile what Paul is truly expressing. In the same way that God radically and aggressively pursued mankind to demonstrate the existence of love -- an existence that would not be known apart from Him -- husbands are expected to love their wives. This correlation brings about two uncomfortable conclusions for the 21st century:
- Men are not expected to idly sit back and wait for their beloved to present herself.
- While a woman can know love through the Father, she cannot know love in a marriage relationship apart from their husband first demonstrating his love for her.
As man and woman desperately seek God in a passionate response to His love, man comes to find that while God has given him vision and purpose for serving his Father, it is not good to be alone. What better expression in service to God than to model His love for mankind? So God establishes the standard of the righteous and upright woman for the man -- bone of his bones, and flesh of his flesh -- and the man decides it is time to honor God through marriage. He sets out to see if his journey can be successful. He demonstrates his love to the women in his life: serving, protecting, and leading them selflessly -- loving according to the 1 Cor. 13 foundation established by God and not the world. He contains his heart for passion and romance until its due time.
Woman sees the heart of the upright men in her life, and she responds to their love in kind. She serves, comforts, and guards their hearts selflessly, not presuming to present herself as a bride, but as a sister. As the groom comes calling, he will search the hearts of those that have responded to his love, and will ask the chosen one’s hand in marriage. She has the decision to accept his offer according to the love demonstrated to her; she may reject it based on the same standard, which she should know fully well according to the love that her Heavenly Father has lavished on her. Any “love” that does not mirror the Father’s love will not stir her heart, for this “love” is foreign to her, and not really love at all. The groom that presents his heart as one after the Father’s will be loved if the woman has understood love according to the Father.
Quaint, huh? Final truth…
Truth #3 The man who loves his wife -- and the wife who loves her husband -- are in fact loving the image of God that they recognize in one another. This is why all other love is not really love at all. The marriage that God intended, reflecting the glory of His own love for His children, must be represented by two people that seek Him first. The reason that a man receives favor from the Lord when he finds a wife is that she demonstrates everything feminine that he adores in his Creator. The reason that a woman receives comfort from the Lord when she is found by a husband is that he demonstrates everything masculine that she admires in her Father.
Does that sound attractive to anyone in this world?
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