Without understanding Jesus’ quote of Moses from Genesis two, most are content to strive for the lesser goal of happiness in marriage. By nature, happiness is actually transitory and seasonal. It fluctuates.
You can’t always be happy and continue to grow as a soul.
A life time of growing into One with God and our spouse is the stated goal. As it turns out though, growing into and sustaining Oneness is actually hard and at times expensive, demanding work. Thank God, it is more than worth the effort as it substitutes deep fulfillment, along with it’s joy, for ‘happy’s’ temporary kiss.
Oneness is the fruit of shared minds flowing from shared, corrected- qualified, restated - thought through- again, apologized for and explained one more time, words. Hungering and living life with God through His Word is the primary example of this truth found in Genesis chapter two. Life, had and has, a purpose and it’s inseparable from His commission to go into all the earth and take dominion, subdue, replenish and multiply.
It’s actually a superhuman task that no soul can accomplish on their own. This is why God Himself joins the marriage with a portion of His Spirit.
A marriage, therefore a family, isn’t just two people making it through life as happily as possible- there just isn’t enough money printed for that. Instead it’s the joy of finding love even in your most unlovely faults, sins and mistakes and knowing the freedom to rise up with God’s help and the help of your other identity and try again. That takes a lot of good will. That takes a lot of love.
THIS… is why it’s absolutely essential that marriage be recognised as God’s property. It’s His first form of government, biblically expressed. We get to use it, live it, receive it’s benefits - but it does not exist from our own idea or concept.
This is why we can’t change it’s definition, any more so than we can change a Van Gogh painting or re-write the United States Constitution - we didn’t create it. Marriage is not and never shall be our intellectual property. All that can be received from efforts to reinvent it after our fashions is toil, without benefit, and grief.
I wrote above that Oneness was humanly impossible to achieve and sustain. It is, and that’s why we must be ever more resolved to let the ever present One who created it, lead it through life, heal it’s wounds, expand it’s strength and use it to make known His goodness into all of our worlds. Thank God, He does this even when we sleep:)
I know you will all feel this way about your own mates, as you should- but I would be remiss if I did not take this moment to thank my Jeanne ( the best thing that God ever did for me ) for her strength, courage of conviction, her resilient heart and her full and gracious love towards me; a sinner, for being the agent God used in my life to move me farther down the path, bringing me from faith to faith and glory to glory.