More than 60 years ago, a large television audience was entertained by the live showing of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, which hit Broadway in 1938.
The 1955 version of Wilder’s three-part play was a musical adaptation starring Frank Sinatra as the stage manager in a rare dramatic performance. Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint starred as the main characters. Jimmy van Heusen and Sammy Cahn wrote the music, which included the hit song, “Love and Marriage” sung by Sinatra.
The song starts out “Love and marriage, love and marriage/They go together like a horse and carriage.” That catchy tune has survived and thrived all this time and still tells it like it is.
The lyrics abruptly end “You can’t have one, you can’t have one/ You can’t have one without the other. No sir.”
You may well question that logic, but I find it truly plays out in life. You see, love and marriage has been designed and defined by the Divine Creator of this Universe, whether you like it or not! Let’s go to the biblical account of the first couple to learn how God laid out the marriage covenant.
In Genesis 2:18, God tells us “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Then after creating Eve for Adam, we’re instructed in Genesis 2:24-25, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.”
That’s the way God laid out the institution of marriage. And it all starts with the love of a man and a woman and continues in the covenant of marriage in the sight of God our Father.
In Proverbs 5:15-18, King Solomon speaks from experience and instructs all men to “Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public square? Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.”
Those are sobering words that I wish I had heard and applied earlier in my life. Fortunately, God gave this man one more chance to get it right. For that gift, I’ll be forever grateful. God saw a change in my heart and provided me with a loving wife later in life. Then He blessed both of us with a wonderful daughter through adoption.
Unfortunately, these days most people see love as impulsive permissive encounters that can take place with multiple partners over their lifetime. God created man and woman to procreate — to have little ones to carry on humanity from generation to generation.
He does not want us to take the sacrament of marriage lightly. The institution of marriage is defined by God as the coming together of a man and woman in a lifetime commitment to each other.
In Hebrews 13:4, the writer instructs “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”
The marriage relationship is succinctly explained by Paul in Ephesians 5, but many may not wish to hear Paul’s words dealing with wives submitting to their husbands. However, let’s focus on the first part of verse 25 in which Paul teaches “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her …,” which tells me that I must place my wife’s well-being above my own well-being. Such sacrificial love warrants respect and devotion in return.
God not only designed love and marriage from the beginning. He also defined it, and we’d be wise to follow his definition rather that the loose description this world chooses to apply. After all, we are reminded in 1 John 3:16, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”
And, let me add our sisters and certainly our wives!
Passages to Ponder
— Jim Langley has been writing for more than 30 years while working as a life and health insurance agent in Santa Barbara. In recent years, his passion has turned to writing about his personal relationship with God, and his goal is to encourage others to draw near to Him as well. As a longtime member of CBMC of Santa Barbara (Christian Business Men’s Connection), he started writing Fourth Quarter Strategies columns in 2014, and he now reaches an international audience through the CBMC International devotional Monday Manna. He can be contacted at jim@fourthquarterstrateies.com for more information. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.