p. 14 | Marriage Alarm Bells by Jacob H. Miller

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 18, 1910

"Marriage Alarm Bells"

By Jacob H. Miller

MANY Christians have been wrecked upon the rocks of mismated marriages. This should not be.

"It is not good that the man should be alone."

Marriage is honorable to all who honorably enter upon it. God designs that the home shall be a beautiful and peaceful heaven, a foretaste of the home eternal.

Mismated marriages thwart God's purpose, and make it too often a place of bickering and strife, with alarming frequency ending in divorce.

How can these evils be avoided?

I. By hearing and heeding the following Marriage Alarm Bells:

a. Believer, don't marry an unbeliever in the truth. God forbids it. "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers." 2 Cor. 6:14.

b. There can be no spiritual fellowship between a child of God and a child of sin, such as all unbelieving persons are.

c. Mental and physical affinity will not suffice for spiritual communion.

d. God's blessing never rests upon a marriage which he forbids; hence if you marry an unbeliever you thus forbid God's blessing.

e. You would each have different aims in life, one living for Christ and the other not.

f. The unbelieving companion often becomes jealous because God is loved more than himself.

g. A goat and a sheep never make a good team.

h. Their sources of enjoyment are opposite.

i. The person who will not promise to be true to God you can not trust to be true as a companion.

j. Such marriages are usually unhappy.

k. The Christian who is thus ensnared usually repents when it is too late.

l. The unbelieving are frequently regardless of observance of the laws of marital self-control and purity, without which marriage is degraded, and both suffer in mind, soul, and body.

m. The children of such marriages are robbed of the sacred prenatal influences to which they have a right, and which largely affect their destiny.

n. The unbelieving often insist upon ruinous sexual indulgence and prenatal murder, debasing the sacred bond of marriage into a license for lust.

o. You have no right to choose for the father or mother of your children a godless person.

p. Both husband and wife need all of God's grace that is for them in order to exercise the forbearance and self-denial which marriage demands.

q. There are always matters arising upon which there will be a division. One wants to go to church, the other on a stroll or visit; one wants to give for the Gospel, the other is opposed to it; one welcomes God's ministers, the other dreads them or forbids them; one wishes to rear the children for God, the other for the world. How many mothers have aching hearts because the father leads the children to the dance, the theater, the horse-race, and the circus.

II. The Exceptions

a. The fact that God has overruled so that sometimes the marriage of Christians with ungodly leads to their conversion, is no argument in favor of such marriages. See Neh. 13:23-31.

b. A kind disposition, personal beauty, a mere profession of religion, or church membership and promises of reformation, should never be accepted as substitutes for vital piety. All who have not that, are practical "unbelievers."

c. If, through infatuation or personal magnetism or natural affection, you have become engaged to an unbeliever, the first duty you owe to God, the person, and yourself, is to wisely, firmly, tenderly, and quickly as possible break off the engagement the same as you would any other sin.

d. If you do not, you will sooner or later bitterly regret it.

e. Tho unbelievers sometimes live happily together on a worldly plane, yet such instances are rare, and in no wise affect the law which is to govern the actions of Christians. The aims of worldlings are one, those of Christians are opposite.

III. Never marry a person to reform him. Why not?

a. Because you can not reform him that way. Salvation, not matrimony, is God's prescription for such persons.

b. Many have been deceived by this device, and discovered the mistake only when too late.

c. If your love and influence are powerless to win your friend before marriage, much less will it be after, when you have lost the power of religion by marrying against the will of God.

IV. Never marry a divorced person.

Many lives have been wrecked on this rock. Marrying a divorced person before her husband or his wife from whom he or she is divorced is dead, is adultery (Rom. 7:1-3); and as no adulterer can enter heaven, all such, unless they break off the unholy alliance, are lost. Neither time, nor affection, nor children, nor public approval, can atone for this express violation of God's law.

V. Never marry to please others, nor for money, nor for a home, nor social position, nor for any other reason less than pleasing God and doing Him better service.

Thousands marry from social motives, and reap a harvest of disappointment.

If God's blessing is received, His will must be learned and done. A single state with His favor is Paradise compared with a married life without it.

Marriage without true love is like a furnace without a fire.

VI. It is no reason you should marry a person because infatuated.

Two persons may be of such temperaments and so keyed mentally and physically as to become infatuated almost on first sight. Many mistake this feeling for true love and the basis of matrimony, and by its balmy breezes are wafted into the harbor of a wedded life, only to discover, when the glamour is gone, that they are mismated and mistaken. The bright morning dewdrops of intense infatuation are soon dissipated by the hot sun of the long day of marriage endurance. For a fuller treatment of this point lift your eyes up to your Maker.

VII. Be sure and learn God's will as to whom and when to marry.

You can afford to make no mistake at this point, and victory here means victory at all other points. He knows just whom you need, and who needs you, and with whom you can be the most useful and happy; and if you will claim His counsel, He will make you sure.

Never marry while there is doubt at this point; and be sure never to mistake your own will, or the will of others, for God's will in this matter. Then all will be well.

If you have married against these rules, and find yourself the wedded companion of an unbeliever, then seek by penitence and prayer the fulness of God's favor, and strive to win the unbelieving one to God.

VIII. Be right with God yourself.

Be sure that you are converted, and also that your heart is fully cleansed from all sin and selfishness, and filled with the Holy Spirit. Until then you are unfitted for the holy offices which marriage brings.

"And it shall come to pass, if ye shall harken diligently unto My commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full. Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them. . . . Therefore shall ye lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth." Deut. 11:13-21.

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