Show me a reality that I’ve never experienced, a sight I’ve never seen, a sound I’ve never heard, a surface I’ve never felt. Introduce me to a place you are going or a place you have been, without first taking me there.
The story that comes before, informs our understanding of what comes later. Experience teaches. To fully understand what it is to be an adult, you have to be a child first. And yet, to fully understand what it is to be a child, you have to be an adult for a time. It is through the familiar and the known that we learn to understand the unknown, and through experiencing the unfamiliar that we gain perspective and understanding on the familiar. Take any number of familial and cultural traditions, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions, relational patterns, the way different groups use various words, religious practices, etc... and you will see this reality. The deeply meaningful dynamics and traditions of one group of people can seem absurd to another if they are unacquainted with the people and backstories involved.
My point in making these statements is to show this: in order to understand how the story of the Bible applies to us, we need to understand the Bible's story. We need to understand that the present is intimately interwoven with its past and its future, and that we as humans are fibers that exist within this narrative weave. If we hope to understand something, we must understand what it’s made of.
I am convinced that if we would like to properly grasp the New Testament’s teaching on marriage, we should take time to understand the material it’s made of. What is the origin of “biblical” marriage? Who were the people involved? Where did they come from? What was their substance and vocation? We need to take time to consider the history of biblical marriage, where it started and where it went, its battles and triumphs. We also need to jump to the end of the story to glimpse the future destination of this marriage narrative.
In the last installment of “Thoughts on Biblical Marriage,” I spent a touch of time working through the substance of this marriage. In the next couple of blog posts, I’d like to share more of what I’ve discovered in the exploration of its origin and backstory. I’ll be dwelling for a time in the first few chapters of Genesis, and would love for you to do the same with me!
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