I heard a man on Christian radio promoting a matchmaking service that he founded. Without noticing, the man taught the most pragmatic perspective on marriage. “You can increase your chances for a successful marriage
. . . you’ll have a better chance of selecting that one person you can love and live happily with for a lifetime.” Chances? I wasn’t aware that we live in a world of chance. From this perspective, some personalities are compatible with others, and a good system increases a person’s luck. This identifies the “right one” as someone that is easy to be happy with.
I have no problem with this somewhat scientific system of matching people on compatibility, because God does use similarities to bring people together. It makes perfect sense that people would be drawn together by common interests and temperament.
The problem is that this man makes compatibility the basis for the relationship. He went so far as to say that of Christian marriages that end in divorce, 75% happen because people were mismatched. It wasn’t a moral concern. People made honest mistakes. It surprised me to hear someone deny the gospel on Christian radio.
In this view, marriage is a pragmatic system for making people happy. It’s a system in which you find someone so similar to yourself that you won’t need to struggle to understand each other, and you won’t be pushed to change and sacrifice and to know someone who differs much from yourself. It’s like marrying yourself, and if you aren’t happy with your marriage, you might have been mismatched.
I have a better explanation for why people divorce. God puts them together, and they disobey His commandment to love each other. He gives them a gift, and they treat it as an inconvenience.
Rather than helping to curb the divorce rate, this man actually casts doubt on the legitimacy of difficult marriages. He offers no hope for those couples and, in fact, adds to the frustration.
Eventually a man in a difficult marriage will feel justified in seeking divorce. Rather than seeing himself in rebellion against God, he sees himself humbly admitting to making a mistake and responsibly working to correct it. God has nothing to hold against him, because the marriage is illegitimate anyway. Divorce simply corrects an error.
The fact that people struggle does not prove that they were mismatched. My parents are polar opposites in significant ways, and they struggled with deep disagreements. They would not pass this man’s inspection. They stayed together, not because of compatibility but because God taught them to let Him be God.
In a sense, no two people are compatible. People are sinners, and sinners are naturally incompatible.
I might not be able to prove that God ordains every marriage for His purposes, and neither can anyone prove that some people accidentally end up mismatched. However, one view acknowledges a sovereign Lord, and the other does not.
A matchmaking service can be a blessing, but the point at which people trust it to ensure their marriages, it becomes an idol. Trying to take Jehovah’s place as matchmaker is like standing on the train tracks. Sure, you can stand there for a while, but for your own good, you should humbly step aside. You really need to step aside.
I will make this as clear as I know how. The founder of a matchmaking service does not have the authority to determine the legitimacy of someone’s marriage on the
basis of “compatibility.” A matchmaking service, Christian or pagan, is an instrument that God uses to bring people together. It is not, absolutely not, the ensurer of people’s marriages. God is the primary agent. He ensures that
people are right for each other. We are on His program,
not our own.
At the same time that we correct this error within, I must point out that the church is full of people who do have a biblical concept of marriage. I am happy with the wealth of truth coming through ministries in churches, books, radio, and other media.
