Every society we've ever explored recognizes some form of marriage. Even the most primitive societies have some sort of legislation, some sort of rules regulating family life. I want to make it clear, however, that this is not what I'm talking about. We do not base our understanding of marriage on contemporary human legislation. We go back to what God has said from the very beginning of creation.

Our modern tendency is to look at what our state or federal law allows us to do. We tend to base our behavior on "commonly accepted" norms. All these may or may not be valid, but they are of secondary significance at best. Of primary significance is what God has said from the beginning of creation. Let's consider some of His basic laws.

God has built physical laws into His creation. And if we ignore them, we suffer the consequences. For example, if I decide that the natural heat don't operate and I put my hand in the fire, I will nonetheless be burned. Or, if I disregard the laws of gravity and decide to jump off a seventh-floor balcony, I will make quite a splash when I land. We cannot disregard God's physical laws with impunity.

By the same token, God has built sociological, theological, and psychological laws into us from creation, and we can no more disregard these with impunity than we can physical laws. Disobeying God's fundamental Laws--psychological, theological, and Sociological--will only do us harm.

Marriage is not a human Institution--something dreamed up by humanity. Therefore, man's alternate lifestyles, as he calls them, cannot be valid if they contravene God's Word. That is why I begin by treating marriage as an institution of God, not man. Marriage is ordained by God for the welfare of human society. There are three reasons for this.

First, God ordained marriage for profound psychological reasons. According to psychologists and psychiatrists, we human beings need to learn to receive and to express love. We suffer severe psychological trauma if these needs are not fulfilled, as they are fundamental to our human psyche. But where are we to learn to love, and be loved? Where are we to see love modeled and take those first steps of risking love?

The answer, of course, is in the family. And if we do not have a solid family situation, there is a very high probability that we will be deficient in our own experience of love and the ability to express it. What makes the family a secure place, where we can learn to love and be loved? A secure marriage builds the foundation for the family. That's why God ordained it. If we disregard the importance of marriage and family, we will be doing extreme psychological damage to everybody concerned. It is not an accident that many of the disturbed people in our society are the products of broken homes and broken marriages.

Secondly, God ordained marriage for profound sociological reasons. John Donne told us that no man is an island. We know that! No man lives unto himself. No woman lives unto herself. We do not live in a vacuum. Whatever we do affects somebody else. We are sociological as well as psychological creatures. The question is, how do we learn to function properly in society? Sociopaths are people who cannot relate properly to others -- and our world is full of such deviants.