People say that we do not need it anymore. Well they were already talking about this a long time ago when I was younger. They were saying,

"Pretty soon people are just not going to get married anymore. They're going to go and live together, because why bother getting married? Marriage is old fashioned; it's going to fall away."

Well they are still saying that and it still hasn't happened. There is a very good reason for it. That is why I have written this book.

Why marriage? Divorce rates have reached proportions unheard of in the past. They are getting worse all the time. I know they have been saying that for years as well.

But divorce is so easy now. It comes in do-it-yourself kits. Actually in some places getting a divorce is easier than getting married these days.

The Gay Movement has risen up and proclaimed a new morality. Why live with somebody of the opposite sex? You should be attracted to members of the same sex. Can you really have a man and woman living together for the rest of their lives?

Marriage is being attacked from all sides. Even believers are battling to cope with the stresses that are coming on the marriage.

Questions About Marriage

There is an attack against the marriage. Why is Satan attacking marriage so much? Why is it such a big problem to him?

We will be answering those questions as we continue in this book. But let's look at the big why.

Why all this upheaval? Why all the problems in marriage and all the conflict?

Well quite simply we have lost sight of the Scriptural pattern and the reason for marriage in the first place. Even in Christian circles people do not know anymore what the Bible really teaches about marriage.

This has caused people to ask questions like,

"Why did God create marriage in the first place? What did He have in mind when He made it? What was the purpose for it?"

How about this question?

"Why did God make the man first and the woman afterwards?"

Have you ever thought about that one? Why did God do it that way? Is it because He is a chauvinist?

Perhaps you have said,

"Why should we get married and live with just one partner for the rest of our lives? I mean that is dull. Why has God gone and imposed that on us? It's not fair."

We need some good answers; not the kind of answers that we sometimes give to our kids when they ask,

"Why must I do that?"

We say, "Don't ask me why; it's just because I say so."

A lot of people have been given that kind of answer for so long. They ask,

"Well why?"

"Because God said so."

"But why?"

"Because God says so."

Well I want to know why He said so, don't you?

I know that God is sovereign, we are His creation and we need to obey His commandments. But I am one of those people who like to have a bit of information below the surface there.

If God said so I would like to have just a little idea of what was in His mind when He said it. So I am going to try and pick God's brains a bit here and see if I can somehow tell you what was in His mind.

I want to share with you some of the things that God had in mind when He set the marriage in order.

Let me ask you this question. Is God a mean ogre who just imposes His will on us? When He put man in the Garden of Eden He said,

"You can enjoy the whole Garden, but that tree over there is my favorite one. Don't you touch it because that one is just for me."

Is that what He said? Well it is kind of what the devil wanted them to think wasn't it?

That tree was poisonous; it was deadly. And when God told them not to touch it He had a very good reason for it. It would have killed them. In the end it did actually kill them.

Satan's Lies

Satan came with his lies and said,

"God is trying to withhold something good from you. It's not fair that He doesn't let you partake of that tree.

You see God knows that if you were to partake of that tree you would know a lot more. You might be a threat to Him because you would become like a god as well. So God is holding out on you here. He doesn't want you to enjoy it."

That is the same lie that Satan still brings to people in the marriage situation. He says things like,

"Why did God tell you that you are supposed to stick to one partner? He just wanted to squash your fun.

He's mean; He gives these wonderful pleasures that a man and woman can have, then He says you are not allowed to have it except with one person. How boring is that?"

That is the same kind of lie. God had a reason for saying it, just like He had a reason in the Garden of Eden. It is because there is death out there. There are snares waiting for you. The results of disobedience are always the same. They are pain and loneliness.

Many people think they want to do the marriage merry-go-round.

They are sick and tired of being in the bondage of being married to one person. They are sick of being tied to this miserable individual for so many years, and they decide they want to break free.

They say, "I want to be free. I'm tired of being bound."

The Fallacy of Compatibility

There is a song that you may remember. It goes like this:

Please release me let me go
'Cos I don't love you anymore

That is nonsense. You want to be free; but then you break free and suddenly you find out that freedom is not so good anymore. You are lonely and there is nobody who cares.

You now have to go and try to find somebody else. And every single person you find has only one thing in mind. They want to use you, take from you, suck the goodness out of you and spit you out again.

You say, "But I'm looking for Mr. Right."

Or, "I'm looking for Miss Right. She's out there somewhere."

"And how will you know when you find her?"

"Well we'll just click you know and be compatible."

Compatibility is a lovely word isn't it?

You say, "You know my husband and I are not compatible, so it's pointless us continuing with this marriage. I need to break this and find somebody that I'm compatible with."

What does compatible mean?

It means you want to find somebody who dances to your tune. It means you want to find somebody who doesn't upset you or cramp your style.

If you are a dominating person you want to find a partner that you can control and dominate. And if you are a grown up mommy's boy who is looking for a mommy, you want to try and find somebody that is going to dominate you.

We call it compatibility but there is no such thing. How can two sinful people be compatible? Yes it is true there are differences in temperaments, and we will be looking at that later.

We have dealt with it in my book called Psychology in Business and Ministry, on how temperamental make-ups affect each one of us.

We are going to be looking at it especially in the marriage situation, to see how temperaments flow together and how to get two people to complement each other.

The Marriage Merry-Go-Round

But most people do not think of that when they think of compatibility. They are just thinking of somebody they do not fight with; somebody that they feel comfortable with.

A lot of the time you do not even know what you are looking for, so you do not even know when you have found it.

And so you try this person to see if he is the one. You get married to that person, and it doesn't take long for you to come to the conclusion,

"We're just not compatible. He doesn't do things my way."

Or he says, "She just doesn't give me what I want all the time. How can we be compatible?"

So you hop on the marriage merry-go-round again; in divorce and remarriage, divorce and remarriage once more. The merry-go-round continues, until eventually you just get off the merry-go-round and stand and watch it going round and round.

You are too scared to get on anymore because you cannot find that person. So you come to the conclusion that no such person exists.

It is a lie from Satan because you believed his lie in the first place. We are going to be looking at it in much more detail in this teaching on marriage, and we will deal with all of these aspects.

In this book I am just going to cover a groundwork, or foundation if you like, of all the things that we are going to be covering.

You see the only way that you can be compatible is to do things God's way. You have to do it His way, and if you do it His way it is guaranteed to work.

There is something that most of us really hate. It is work. But unfortunately your marriage is going to take work. It is not just going to fall into your lap.

You will have to work at it and know what to do about it to make it work. That's what we are going to be teaching you in this series.

The End Goal

So where are we headed?

We are going to be looking in this series at the Scriptural standard for marriage. We are going to have a look at where we tend to violate that standard, why people do it, and what happens when they violate it.

Then we are going to show them how to correct their mistakes. In the end we are going to get a new view of marriage and give you some plans of action to fix things.

We will touch on some subjects like rearing of children as well. And we will also look at something for the unmarried people.

We are going to look at how to deal with an unsaved marriage partner, and we will look at how to deal with divorce and widowhood.

We will have a look at the gay lifestyle and how to deal with that as well. We are going to be covering it in a lot of detail. This is going to be a big series.

There is going to be a lot of intertwined areas that we will have a look at in this Counseling Series and in this Pastoral Counseling course that we are going to be doing.

We are just looking at the marriage aspect here. But there are so many other areas that all interlink and come together to affect us. This is because so many things that affect the marriage are caused by personal problems in each marriage partner.

If you are to solve the marriage, you have to solve the problem in the individual first, because marriage actually is very simple. We are going to have a look at it shortly and see how simple it really is.

Just the complications in our lives, and the other problems that we have in our lives, are what make our marriage complicated too.

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