Deuteronomy 7:3-4

Marriage in the Lord.

This law, forbidding marriages with the ungodly, is one for all time. The apostle revives it in 1 Corinthians 7:39 . That marriage should be only in the Lord is evident—

I. FROM THE TRUE IDEA OF MARRIAGE . Two individuals unite their lives, and enter into a fellowship the most intimate possible—to what end? Surely that their natures may be raised to greater perfection, and that they may be better enabled to attain the ends of their existence. This implies a certain harmony of disposition, an essential accordance in the views taken of life and its duties. It is a union, as One has said, not merely between two creatures, but also between two spirits. But what communion, it may be asked, can exist in spiritual respects between two persons severed from each other in the deepest principles of their lives?

II. FROM A REGARD TO THE DIVINE BLESSING . Where one partner is irreligious, the blessing cannot rest upon the home in the same degree as where both are "heirs together of the grace of life" ( 1 Peter 3:7 ). Believers are to "agree" as touching what things they shall ask ( Matthew 18:19 ). Variances even in godly households result in prayers being "hindered" ( 1 Peter 3:7 ). How much sadder the case of a home, so-called, where husband and wife stand so far apart that they cannot unite in prayer at all! And who that values God's blessing would willingly enter into a relation which inevitably stints and limits it?

III. FROM THE DANGER ACCRUING TO SPIRITUAL LIFE . The danger is not imaginary ( 1 Kings 11:3 ). Where spiritual life is not destroyed, as we may hope that often it is not, yet nothing but harm can come from an association in every respect adverse to it. How intolerable to a spiritual mind to endure "the blight of all sympathy, to be dragged down to earth, and forced to become frivolous and commonplace; to lose all zest and earnestness in life; to have heart and life degraded by mean and perpetually recurring sources of disagreement" (F. W. Robertson)! This is the species of living death to which unequal yoking not infrequently leads. The effects on offspring are also to be considered. Yet such marriages are rushed into, and, in the prevalent anxiety to make marriage the stepping-stone to wealth and social position, seem likely to become increasingly numerous. Would that men were wise, that they understood these things l—J.O.