Marriage is sacred. Marriage is holy. And it’s fun, difficult, challenging, beautiful, messy, and entirely full of everything, good and bad, that makes this part of our eternity everything that it is.
But you know that. Still . . .
Marriage is too precious to be hurriedly arranged by someone else because one party is desperate to have courtship, engagement, and matrimony “happen to her” as it has to all of her other friends, and because the other party needs to be set on what looks the right track.
Christians, especially, see marriage in a sacred light, as the metaphor our God has given us to illustrate on this earth the union between Christ and His people. This isn’t because Christ values the institution above the two people in it, but because he so tremendously values the two people involved and has given marriage its proper place in their spiritual, psychological, emotional and personal development.
Christian elders, therefore, who encourage marriage recklessly, callously, and with a jaw-dropping degree of ignorance and indifference, deserve condemnation. And when that marriage is trumpeted publicly, that rebuke ought to be public.
And within the next couple of days, it will be.