What is marriage?

Ive been to 3 very different weddings this summer, and at all of them they have asked the question - what is marriage?

Im not sure anybody on the street really knows now... and when you see someone getting hitched for the umpteenth time you have to wonder!

I am convinced that marriage is given to us as an illustration of the relationship Christ has with his church. It is God given and therefore a potentially perfect illustration. I am excited by weddings in a way that is hard to describe... i sit there and see a glimpse of the glory of Christ, and the beauty of his bride - the Church. There is something about that which stirs me up inside and causes me to belt out 'In Christ Alone' louder than i ever have before.

It is only in this context that fornication becomes as dark as the Bible makes out, and it is only in this context that sexual union becomes the gift that is was intended to be. Sex - the most intimate communication between two people, in some way mirroring the love shown on the Cross, and our (revelation 5 style) worshipful response to it!!

The idea of husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the Church, and wives submitting to their husbands as the Church submits to Christ is a touchy subject... yet imagine all husbands loving their wives in a Phillipians 2 kind of a way, and all wives submitting to their husbands in a romans 12 1-2 kind of a way, and i think you have what Paul is getting at in Ephesians 5.

I'm not planning on getting married any time soon, but i am excited about marriage... what better witness could there be than 2 people living out the relationship that Jesus wants with every non-Christian!!

Cosmology vs God?

A serious cosmologist cannot, in the same mind, claim to also be a Christian.

Dont quote me on this because it is not true! I have been very excited as I have gotten into studying the big picture of our universe by the massive God-shaped holes that appear everywhere!

Modern scientists claim that time, space and energy all came into existance simultaneously... at the big bang. Essentially they're claiming they have a scientific need for 'creatio ex nihilo' (creation from nothing). A postion that Christians were ridiculed for holding for centuries.

There is no scientific explaination possible for the big bang, partly because all the 4 fundemental forces break down there, and our equations become useless; but far more simply... things dont just appear out of nothing. Order does not appear out of chaos, nor intellegence out of mindlessness: the second law of thermodynamics tells us this.

There is a God shaped hole in the story of beginnings... and nothing seems to fill it. I believe that we can learn a lot about the Creator of the universe by studying the shape of the hole he would leave if we could remove him, but that's for another post methinks!