Enter The Partner

How did we ever get to a place where we are at in society discussing the virtues of whether or not Marriage is this or Marriage is that?  Are we so daft as to believe that we can upend thousands of years of human history to re-define what a marriage relationship is?  While I won't answer that question outright, I can see that we didn't get here overnight as there has been a very subversive attempt at re-defining marriage into a secular institution,  Enter the "partner." 

We have all seen what has taken place over the last several years as corporations, political entities, clubs, advertisers, writers, reporters, bloggers and even religious organizations have supplanted the word "spouse" or "husband" and "wife" for "partner."  The insidiousness of this replacement is such that it relegates the idea of marriage to a legal partnership.  The law has been doing this for many years due to our inadequacy to truly deal with marriage relationships that results in the over abundance of divorce.  In a divorced situation you have legal parameters that treat everything as if  you were in a partnership.  Thus reducing the institution of marriage to a business deal and here's where the decline begins.  The reality is we can all identify with a business deal, a contract of "you do this and i'll do that," but can we truly identify with the institution of marriage, hence "the two shall become one flesh." 

You see God's view was always that those entering into a marriage covenant (stronger than a contract) were now inseparable and to be viewed as a single entity.  The physical makeup of a man and woman notwithstanding, this has been pilfered by secular interests to simply be a partnership, 50/50, and yet God's idea was 100/100 to the point that together "we own everything and together we lose everything."  Marriage in God's mind is an all or nothing deal, "all of me and I don't require anything of you."  We failed to get that somehow and now we have secular society trying to dictate what should be included as a marriage relationship by this very basis, partnership, not covenant.  How did we get here?  We bought into this idea of partnership a long time ago.  The church itself sees divorce rates that mirror the secular environment which means we only saw it as a partnership.  We weren't on guard, we weren't honoring the sanctity of an institution that we now so desperately need to protect. 

Nonetheless, whatever might come of the decisions of the courts, the states and our nation over the next several years, Marriage will never be a secular thing, though a law might say it is, it will always and forever be a God given institution that can never be re-defined for those who worship and serve the one who created male and female. He created them to be a perfect union of His image and nothing and no one can take that away.