Have you ever heard people looking at a cute couple and said, “God sure is a matchmaker?”
I mean, there are many good and amazing marriages, but, do those marriages happen to be good because God is a matchmaker?
If God is a matchmaker, does He make some and leave the rest for us to make them in whatever way we like? What are the criteria we need to fulfill for God to find our matches so that our marriages become good ones? Or, is He just randomly matching people and distributing good marriages to people He likes?
Or, if we believe that God is a matchmaker of every marriage, we can easily and safely conclude that all marriages are from God. And, if all marriages are from God, from above, from heaven, they must be good and perfect as the Bible says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:17)
While I leave those questions to you to wrestle with, let me share with you what I believe.
I believe that marriages are made here on earth, both good and bad ones. If two people, a husband and a wife, decide to submit to God, their marriage will be a good one; otherwise they will have a bad marriage.
It sounds so simple and easy, doesn’t it?
Well, for Christians, for the followers of Jesus Christ, submitting to God itself is a lifetime endeavor, not an easy, one-day thing, but an everyday decision we need to make. So, the day we refuse to submit to God (James 4:7), we refuse to submit to one another (Ephesian 5:21), and when we refuse to submit to one another, our marriages tend to “metamorphose” from good to bad ones. (A very simplified explanation, leaving out all the details)
Then the blaming game starts: “He is the one who did this! If he had acted this way, I would have been a loving wife. No, she is the one who is responsible for this, not me.” – the game Adam and Eve played in the Eden Garden.
We all adore to play this game, don’t we?
So, here is what I’m trying to say: Marriages are made here on earth by two people and these same people, one man and one woman, are the only responsible parties who need to pull their sleeves and get to work so their “Garden of Eden” looks good. For this to happen, they both need to be responsible and accountable for everything that is happening in their marriage.
Accountability and responsibility are not famous terms we like to hear today where blaming our pastors or the devil for our laziness is something easy for all of us to do. But the Bible teaches us that until we learn to be responsible and accountable for all our actions, forget a good marriage, we can’t even have a good life all by ourselves.
So, let’s strive to make our marriages “blame-free zones” so we can proactively get involved to make them good ones. Blaming and mud-slinging games don’t seem to take anyone to the Promised Land (to a good marriage).
And yes, we, human beings, make our marriages here on earth. It is neither God’s nor the devil’s responsibility. ///