Introduction
Yesterday I read where some were incensed by an alumni speech given at a High School graduation. The speaker, according to USA Today, encouraged the listeners to “learn the Word of God”, and to get married after this manner: “a male with a female and female with a male.” In other words, choose a person of the opposite sex.1 That last idea, that one should get married to a person of the opposite sex, was met with disbelief by at least one attendee that someone would actually say such a thing. When the attendee realized that it was indeed what was said, and that some in the crowd agreed with the speaker, they “felt like crying.” It was clear to the hearers and to the reporter that the speaker “condemned homosexual relationships in his commencement speech.” That’s how a graduation speech causes crying.
I cried too
I have also cried over this issue, but for a completely different reason. My crying was because humans, created by God, have chosen to disregard God’s direction about marriage. I have come to tears because we have turned our back on our Creator. Some in our nation have spurned the design of a just and holy God and gone their own way. I have cried over this rejection of God, which He calls sin, just as I have cried over my own sin. However, God gives us a different view of marriage.
Building Society
Some in the world believe that marriage is a government creation, and therefore it can be whatever they deem it to be, or do away with marriage altogether. However, marriage is one of the institutions created and established by God, and is the building block for families and society.
In Genesis, God declares His design when He tells us that He has made us male and female, and that when we join together, we become as if we were not two people, but one. He says that “the two shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24-25)2
When Jesus came many years later, He confirmed what was written in Genesis and said:
Mat 19:4-6 [Jesus speaking to some religious teachers] answered and said, “Have you not read, that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, 5 and said, ‘FOR THIS CAUSE A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER, AND SHALL CLEAVE TO HIS WIFE; AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’? 6 Consequently they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
Jesus makes the additional point that man should not separate what God has joined together. This clarifies that marriage is God’s idea, not the government’s.
Furthermore, God’s plan is that men love and nourish their wives as He says in Eph 5:28-30:
“So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; 29 for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, 30 because we are members of His body.”
However, I didn’t always believe God was right.
It’s Those Christians
When I was a young man, about 17 or 18, I remember thinking that it was ‘those Christians’ who were trying to control me by telling me what I could or could not do. How I should act. That I was responsible to a Creator. After I became a Christian several years later, I realized that it was not ‘those Christians’, but rather God who was telling me through His followers. What I had once rejected as being too controlling, became a freedom to live as I had been created. God puts parameters on our lives because He knows what is best for us -He created us after all!
Jesus is the Lord of Marriage
My last point, is that in God’s design for marriage, the Lordship of Christ is demonstrated by:
- A man and a woman in a life long commitment;
- who honor each other in their marriage; and,
- Living lives dedicated to God.
They have submitted themselves to each other, and to their Creator, and seek to fulfill His direction for their lives.
I have written on the impact of Lordship of Christ on our lives in a brief article titled: Jesus is Kyrios (Lord).
Conclusion
I don’t think that crying at a graduation ceremony should be because we disagree with a speaker who encourages graduates to follow the Creator’s design for their lives. But that is what happens when we reject His plan, and decide that we know better than Him.
Instead of tears of anger, we can have tears of joy. We can have joy in knowing that God loves us, that we can be reconciled to Him, and that He has given us a design for living. So, instead of a graduation speech causing us to cry because of anger, we can be reconciled to our Creator and cry tears of joy!
Appendix
I have written about how to be a Christian in the post, The Gospel. If you are married and interested in staying that way, see my article, How to Stay Married.
1 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/06/02/anti-gay-speech-ohio-high-school-outrage/7480962001/ 6/3/22
2 Gen 2:24 For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.