Can someone give me some good passages on marriage?Thanks alot God Bless
At Matthew 19:3, upon being asked by the Pharisees: "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on every sort of ground ?”, Jesus replied: "Did you not read (at Genesis 2:24) that he who created them from [the] beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will stick to his wife, and the two will be one flesh’? So that they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has yoked together let no man put apart.”(Matt 19:4-6) Thus, marriage is a binding covenant or contract between a man and woman until death, with these now as "one flesh."
Only two things can break this marital covenant, death of a mate (1 Cor 7:39) and fornication (Greek
por·nei´a) on the part of a marriage mate.(Matt 5:32) The apostle Paul gave this loving counsel: "Let wives be in subjection to their husbands as to the Lord, because a husband is head of his wife as the Christ also is head of the congregation, he being a savior of [this] body."(Eph 5:22, 23) He then says: "Husbands, continue loving your wives, just as the Christ also loved the congregation and delivered up himself for it."(Eph 5:25)
Paul continues, quoting from Genesis 2:24: "In this way husbands ought to be loving their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no man ever hated his own flesh; but he feeds and cherishes it, as the Christ also does the congregation, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave [his] father and [his] mother and he will stick to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”(Eph 5:28-31)
Common-law marriage or living together is not acceptable in God's eyes, for the couple has not made valid commitment before the civil government of the land, established before witnesses. Just as a person has to have a license in order to legally drive, so likewise must a couple make their "marriage" legal in the eye's of both the civil government and God. Nor does the Bible approve of same-sex marriages, which are for many, now acceptable.(Rom 1:26, 27; 1 Cor 6:9-11)
Job, who lived some 1600 years before Jesus came to the earth, said of his marriage: "A (marriage) covenant I have concluded with my eyes. So how could I show myself attentive to a virgin ?"(Job 31:1) Jesus placed a firm emphasis on loyalty within marriage: "You heard that it was said, ‘You must not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone that keeps on looking at a woman so as to have a passion for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."(Matt 5:28, 29)
Thus, if a married man has sexual fantasies, that "keeps on looking at a woman so as to have a passion for her", Jesus said that man has "already committed adultery with her in his heart." The desire is there, just waiting now for the opportunity. More are now disloyal than are loyal, for the percentage of divorces is steadily increasing. Infidelity is now common.
