The Music And The Dance

Okay, I’m still thinking about marriage because after all my eldest son Alex just got married. It was a beautiful wedding for Alex and Meghan and our shared community of friends, family and followers of Jesus. Here are a couple of quotes I especially liked and incorporated into the service.

In Dr. Waltke’s Old Testament Theology he has a chapter titled The Gift of the Bride. In that chapter he writes:

The gift of the bride story emphasizes the goodness of marriage. I AM’s statement that Adam’s singleness is “not good” (Genesis 2:18) is more emphatic than “lacking in goodness”… by his choice of words he is calling Adam’s situation “bad”. God completes the man by the gift of a bride.

He goes on to say that the rest of the Old Testament also defines marriage as a holy and ideal state. And he points out that the holiest people in the Old Testament are married. In ancient Israel the high priest is married. Regarding the Nazarites who set themselves apart to be holy to God, Dr. Waltke points out that they separate themselves from many things, they do not cut their hair or drink wine “… but they do not demonstrate their separation to God by celibacy. Marriage is part of their consecration, worship and holiness.”

I love that last phrase.  I also think the following quote, which showed up at a shower, the rehearsal and the wedding, beautifully expresses a big part of what it means for marriage to be a part of our consecration, worship and holiness. There is that section in his book Remembering where Wendell Berry describes a married couple with these words:

“It was as though grace and peace was bestowed on them out of the sanctity of marriage itself, which simply furnished them to one another, free and sufficient as rain to leaf. It was as if they were not making marriage but being made by it, and, while it held them, time and their lives flowed over them, like swift water over stones, rubbing them together, grinding off their edges, making them fit together, fit to be together, in the only way that fragments can be rejoined.”

In another place he says,

“What you alone think it [your marriage] ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you––and marriage, time, life, history, and the world––will take it. You do not know the road: you have committed your life to a way.”

All of these quotes work together to remind me of the importance of marriage and the mystery of how God uses it in our consecration, worship and holiness.

~ by Larry Kirk on August 4, 2009.

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Tags: Marriage