Divorce culture did not start in America. It did not start in the 20th century. It started a long time ago in a garden far, far away. It started with an apple, and it ended ages later with a tree. One thing has always been clear — God is not about abandoning us, His beloved, His people, His children, His bride, no matter what we do or how much we deserve it. But people have a hard time with faithfulness.
In the garden we were unfaithful. In ancient Israel, God’s chosen people were compared to an adulterous wife, even to the point of prostitution. Over and over again, we see the tension between God’s burning and committed love for us and human unfaithfulness, which I believe is summed up in 2 Timothy 2:13, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.” God is faithful, but sometimes people are not. Is it any wonder that we have a hard time being faithful to one another, in an age where people have rejected God Himself on a massive scale? Is it any wonder that those two moral scourges have ravished our culture hand in hand? But all is not lost; Christ made a way for us. Together we must sink our roots deep into timeless understandings of faithfulness and where it truly starts.
First of all, faithfulness does not start with marriage, or even before. It starts with God. As we have already mentioned, God IS faithful, all true faithfulness comes from Him, and we will have a very hard time being faithful to one another if we are unfaithful to Him. In the end, is not faithfulness a manifestation of love? Moreover, it is a proof of substantial and mature love. Love for God, and love for one another — this is where faithfulness starts. It ends when we put ourselves first, which ironically is a virtue in our culture. Even more ironically, we lose ourselves in the process.
In Pilgrim’s Progress, I always loved the character named Faithful. What I remember most about him is that in the city called Vanity Fair, he was the one they could not stand so much that they opted to kill him. He was faithful even when it cost him his life, and as he was dying a brutal death, Christian could see a chariot standing by to take Faithful to the Celestial City. Today, one of our top magazines is called Vanity Fair, and few of us realize that it bears the same name as that city. We live in a culture of Vanity Fair, where faithfulness is specifically intolerable. Yet we worship a God whose very nature is that of faithfulness, and he demands for us to imitate Him in it.
The entire problem of divorce culture is just a symptom. The root problem is that we have forgotten faithfulness — first and foremost to God. We also tend to have this funny notion that faithfulness somehow starts once we get in a relationship or even get married. It is a proof of the way we view the world with the self first--we think that we have no obligation to anyone until we choose to commit, if we choose to commit, until we decide we would no longer like to keep that commitment. It is becoming more and more expected even in Christian circles that people will date around, be physical, and even sleep with people before marriage. Part of the problem is that we have sometimes made abstinence about sex, instead of about a journey of faithfulness. “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies,” 1 Cor. 6:19-20.
The idea that we are not our own is an offensive one, but it is crucial to our understanding of the Christian life. Our lives are not our own, our hearts are not our own, our minds are not our own and our bodies are not our own. It is all part of the call to come and die in order to live, taking up our crosses and following Christ. We can only embrace faithfulness when we believe that we actually belong to someone — first to God, and on this earth to our spouse. Faithfulness is not a set of parameters (however defined), it is an outflowing of a surrendered life and mature love; it is how redeemed image bearers seek to relate increasingly to God and to one another.
We need our minds to be renewed, and to see others with eyes of faith. We need to honor one another, and understand sex in the context of covenant relationship rather than a biological urge akin to eating. We need to be willing to die to ourselves, and keep our covenants even when it seems it really is for worse and not for better. God kept his covenant with us unto death, and it is primarily to Him that we are to be faithful in earthly marriages.
Faithfulness is only by grace, for by the law we have all failed. The law can only condemn, and can never make us faithful or holy. But there is amazing grace, and we worship a God who is rich in mercy as well as being Holy. With God we can be transformed, all the way down to our subconscious thoughts. It is time we start taking this pilgrimage seriously, and expect that “Vanity Fair” will put up one heck of a fight. But we are the people of God, and He is able to keep us. By His power, people of faith can and must remember, even reclaim, our identity as a people who are faithful unto death.
