Grace Ring Weblog

Our society has a problem. The divorce rate in our modern world is very high, even among Christians. We can cite many reasons for this, but one of the concessions divorced people have to make is that they didn’t marry the right person. So we ask, did the problems that led to divorce occur during the marriage or were there warning signs present even before marriage? Though we could put some in the former, we could make the case that a lot of our issues start from a non-biblical perspective on dating. So what is wrong with our modern dating practices?

First and foremost, we must remember that when Christ had bought us with His immense sacrifice, we are to no longer act as the world acts. “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Rom 12:2). Now as Christians, most of us know that sex is reserved for marriage. But the issues run deeper than that. It’s not as if a Christian man and woman who date can date as the world dates, but just without intercourse. How we look upon each other must also be different from how the world views relationships.

In our modern  society, we use dating as the process that leads to marriage. In other societies, including those in the Bible, marriages were pre-arranged between the families of the bride and groom. Some of today’s Christians don’t even believe in dating at all but only in courtship, where a marriage leading relationship should only occur when the parents (if they are believers) of the potential husband and wife have blessed the relationship and romance is only to occur after a commitment to marriage has been made (i.e., after a formal courtship has been arranged). While a case can be made for courtship, it isn’t the only proper path to marriage, but there are some elements of the courtship process that are very valid and biblical.

The most important principle that single people need to keep in mind is that they should treat each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. The person you date may not end up being the one who you will eventually spend the rest of your life with but since they are a believer (and we assume they are a believer because that is really an obvious step 0 in dating), they are fellow heirs to the throne of grace. So what are the consequences of this? The most important is that we must be careful in how we conduct ourselves with those of the opposite sex. In God’s marriage economy, deep emotional and physical intimacy is one of the benefits reserved for the relationship between a husband and wife. The reason this is so is that God views marriage as a lifetime commitment and the only break in this kind of emotional and physical intimacy is to occur only in death. But if we substitute some of this intimacy to the dating world, to people we may not marry, we may end up blinding ourselves to potential warning signs about the other person which can lead us to marry a person we should not biblically marry.

So how does this apply in the real world? 2 Corinthians 7:1-2 says “It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and every woman have her own husband.” Does that mean that we as men and women can’t shake hands? Not really. The touch refers to intimacy reserved for a husband and wife. That’s the key. If we allow this intimacy to occur outside of marriage, we have broken this commandment and we have sinned.

What about kissing? Without getting into specifics about what type of physical contact is within the bounds of obedience, these issues are best discussed using godly principles. Men and woman have different physiologies, and a man kisses a woman because he is physically attracted to her. Let’s say it bluntly. He is desiring her. For an unmarried man, this type of desire is called lust. “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28) One of the reasons lust is such an abominable sin is its ability to obscure rational thought. When we lust after someone, we downplay or even ignore warning signs such as, oh let’s say, she might not even be a believer or that his Christianity might be weak or incompatible with our strongly held beliefs. God is much wiser than us and He knows the blinding disastrous effects of lust. Like other sins and temptations, it fights against our good judgement. What this translates to in terms of what types of physical contact is appropriate is between God and the individual. But the principle is clear and it is a test to determine whether we really desire to follow the Lord or our own lusts.

The same can apply to emotional romantic intimacy. Two items to consider here. First, when we are dating someone and we declare that we romantically love the person and start speaking in those terms, but have not committed to marriage, we have emotionally attached ourselves to the other person without any commitment. In the Bible, fornication is often described by an emotional attachment. God refers to Israel as fornicators due to their emotional attachment to the gods of the world and to their pagan neighbors. They were blinded by their desires to be loved by this world and fell into fornication. God takes this seriously because He knows that emotional myopia can be quite strong even without physical intimacy. It clouds us from really knowing a person. To know a person takes time, a lot of time. Placing emotional bonding too early in a relationship causes us to think about how we feel at the moment, which is temporally deceptive.

Secondly, God reserves emotional intimacy for marriage because in God’s marriage design, the husband and wife have been equally yolked and are to be married for life. Therefore this emotional attachment doesn’t carry a foreboding potential for abandonment as it would with an uncommitted relationship. What about potential divorce? Isn’t that abandonment? Keep in mind that divorce is our own sin and not part of God’s marriage economy. “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Mark 10:9) So in the proper Biblical order, this kind of emotional transparency is safe between a man and a woman in marriage because God expects a commitment without abandonment.

So one might think, that leaves dating pretty dry and boring doesn’t it? First, when we look at life through our sin-filled perspective, a lot of what is “exciting” is sinful and a lot of what is “dry” turns out to be obedience to God. We should make sure our perspective and attitude are fully aligned with the Bible before considering anything else. Second, many of us have male friends and female friends who are not marriage candidates who we have a brotherly and sisterly intimate relationship with in Christ and who we look forward to knowing as fellow believers. If we treat the ones we date as brothers and sisters in Christ in this manner, we have an opportunity to really know our compatibility with the person as a true best friend without the potential blinding effect of our emotional and physical urges. If we as a society were more Biblical in our perspective on dating, the divorce rate could conceiveably be far lower than it is today. God knows us. He knows our desire for intimacy, and we will greatly benefit in our quest for it by doing it His way. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt 6:33)