A Defense of Young Marriage
Response to Jimmy's presentation
Recently I received from an older friend a copy of some talks that he has given several times on the subject of relationships between men and women particularly focused on advising the young and single in more helpful directions. As I read it, it struck me how two people reasoning from the same principles and for the most part seeing the same situation can give very different advice on going forward. I recognize that this is a bit of a deviation from our standard fare but I think that the conversation is interesting and would appreciate any takes that you all might have. The images of Can You Be an Influence? are Mr. Jimmy’s talk followed by my response.
Mr. Jimmy,
I’ve been thinking about your presentation on relations between the sexes for several weeks now. I hadn’t thought about Joshua Harris in probably twenty years and had been only very vaguely aware of his disavowal of his former positions. So, when you mentioned that I became curious and looked into his present situation. As you may know he was raised in a very strictly traditional way, wrote his famous I Kissed Dating Goodbye very young, became a pastor at a church famous for the soundness of its teaching, and went on to divorce his wife and appears to have entirely abandoned the faith. When I read this, I thought about my cousin who was raised in a similar way and now after two unhappy marriages before the age of 30 thinks that he is a woman. I haven’t spoken to him lately but I presume that he has also abandoned the faith. Why does this same story keep playing out? Why do those who seem most to be ‘trained up in the way that they should go’ depart from it so spectacularly? And what part has the church played in their failure, or rather what part ought the church to have played in helping them to stand which we failed to do?
In the following Scripture passages I have bolded the verses that you referenced. I think that it is important to see things in context and not take words that are spoken as a part of a larger message as a sort of isolated proverb.
4 Remind them of these things, charging them before the Lord not to strive about words to no profit, to the ruin of the hearers. 15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 16 But shun profane and idle babblings, for they will increase to more ungodliness. 17 And their message will spread like cancer. Hymenaeus and Philetus are of this sort, 18 who have strayed concerning the truth, saying that the resurrection is already past; and they overthrow the faith of some. 19 Nevertheless the solid foundation of God stands, having this seal: “The Lord knows those who are His,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of Christ depart from iniquity.”
20 But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay, some for honor and some for dishonor. 21 Therefore if anyone cleanses himself from the latter, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified and useful for the Master, prepared for every good work. 22 Flee also youthful lusts; but pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. 23 But avoid foolish and ignorant disputes, knowing that they generate strife. 24 And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, 25 in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, 26 and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will. 2 Timothy 2
I agree very much with the spirit in your presentation that seeks to benefit young believers and protect them from a corrosive, destructive world, and I think that we are agreed on all of the relevant principles of the Christian religion; that is we see the same problems and see them in much the same ways. However, I am very skeptical of the proposed solutions. It seems to me that they do not place a high enough value on the divine institution of marriage or consider that it is intended to be begun in youth, they also suggest placing our hopes for chastity in procedures and policies devised by our own brains of which I am skeptical in the highest degree. I would first point out that there is nothing in 2 Timothy 2 that points to the reference in verse 22 to be specifically sexual in nature. He is discussing false teaching concerning the resurrection and the Lord’s Return and the importance of purity of doctrine and the right way to teach the faith. While it is not impossible that his mind was on young men’s libido it would be unusual and should not be our default interpretation. Whether the neoterikos, here translated ‘youthful’ would not be more appropriately referred to a novice in the faith than the physically young is certainly up for debate. The word translated lusts here is used of many different desires, both good and bad, throughout the NT. As this is the only verse that specifically mentions ‘youth’ in the context of lust that you referenced or that I found, and I doubt that it is intended to refer to young marriage I intend to move on to a defense of marrying young which is my primary purpose in writing this.
What I remember about being a young bachelor, some twenty years ago, is the combination of very easy access to perversion and very difficult access to a normal relationship with a woman. I lived in a men’s dorm with pornography everywhere you turn. Videos of the most perverted sex acts were openly viewed as a group and someone who didn’t want to participate was expected to defend their behavior rather than the other way around. I have often said that any young person who escapes without an addiction to pornography should share their secret. I have no such secret to share. I fell in the same snares that most of my contemporaries did and we have struggled ever since to escape. I would save other young men from my own mistakes. It might be answered that I should have avoided public school, should have closeted myself in some way, I think the examples of Mr. Harris as well as numerous other pastors and teachers who have followed the strictest rules regarding male/female relations, not to mention my cousin, who’s homeschooling certainly entailed enough biology to determine his own sex, demonstrate the unreliability of such efforts.
Any fulfillment of sexual desire outside of the covenant of marriage is a descending spiral. You always need more and more because what you had before never satisfied. You gave your brain a little hit of dopamine and the need went away for a bit but you were still empty inside so you need something more intense, generally more degrading next time to get the same fix. Because whether they know it or not, young men don’t want porn or hookups they want a wife1. Trying to satisfy spiritual needs with biochemical solutions is, to my mind, the source of most addiction. A young man’s need for his wife is not merely biology. It is a spiritual need. The command, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’ is carved into us at some bone deep level, and cannot be denied except by special dispensation from the One who gave it.
We make a great mistake when we try and reduce or remove the young man’s desire, and an even worse when we teach him that it is wrong and unnatural. We should rather teach him that his desire will remain unmet by the merely physical and that for satisfaction he should turn to that divine combination of the physical and spiritual which is marriage.2 We turn to perversion only after we become frustrated in attempts to fulfill our needs legitimately. I don’t excuse the turn to perversion. It comes not just from impatience but from unbelief. It comes from misunderstanding the character of God so that we believe that He has created us with needs that He is unable or unwilling or uninvolved to satisfy. Every need that we have He has created a legitimate fulfillment for. We should teach him that the same God who provides for all of his other needs made this need and intends to fulfill it in the most complete way imaginable. But as men we must also see that it is our task to avoid putting obstacles in the way of those who seek to fulfill their God-given needs legitimately. When you hinder a young man from marrying you are tempting him to perversion. It is better to marry than to burn.
14 I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him who considers anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. 15 Yet if your brother is grieved because of your food, you are no longer walking in love. Do not destroy with your food the one for whom Christ died. 16 Therefore do not let your good be spoken of as evil; 17 for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 For he who serves Christ in these things is acceptable to God and approved by men.
19 Therefore let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another. 20 Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All things indeed are pure, but it is evil for the man who eats with offense. 21 It is good neither to eat meat nor drink wine nor do anything by which your brother stumbles or is offended or is made weak. 22 Do you have faith? Have it to yourself before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. 23 But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because he does not eat from faith; for whatever is not from faith is sin. Romans 14
I don’t know if you have already come across this or not, but the younger generation contains a very large number of men who are involuntarily celibate, known as Incels. We have thrown up roadblocks on every side to prevent these unhappy creatures from being a husband and father. We have conditioned women to be unattainable to most men. Our society treats masculinity with contempt and the masculine pursuit of the woman is regarded by the American civic religion as a sin. Women are encouraged to prefer anything sacred or secular to the glories of being a wife and to view the mutual dependence of man and wife as an insult to their dignity. Now, many of these obstacles are put up by the secular world but for the church to participate in this cruel game is equivalent to denying food to a starving man because it is not kosher. Actually, it is rather worse. Because any man can survive on a diet of only kosher food, but for a man to be content without a wife is a special grace that is not given simply for the asking but only to those for whom the Lord has foreordained it. The Lord knows there are plenty of young men who have tried to renounce the way that He made them as a way out of their sin, tried in bitter tears and prayers, and found that to be true. Wouldn’t it be Good News to these miserable, bitter, starving young3 men that God is on their side? Wouldn’t it be Good News to know that He did not create their body and its desires to torment them or to be an enemy to them but made plans to fulfill their desires, as a good father does his children, not as a cruel taskmaster demanding bricks but refusing to provide straw?
For the case of the enthusiasm for voluntary celibacy, some might think that the brother who feels he cannot be celibate is the weaker brother, I think that in context it is the one who imagines spiritual merit in celibacy, who imagines some uncleanness in lawful marriage. It is the one who throws up roadblocks before his suffering brother who has failed to understand Paul’s teaching on essential Evangelical liberty, which Our Lord suffered so much to obtain for us and should not be treated as a common or indifferent thing. We see that the same Paul who says here that it is good to follow dietary restrictions for the sake of charity towards the weaker brother accused those who tried to enforce kosher laws in the church of being bewitched and of hypocrisy and of preaching another Gospel.(Galatians 2 and 3) I learned a new word not long ago crybully. It is a combination of ‘crybaby’ and ‘bully’ that refers to someone who uses their weakness and vulnerability to force others to conform to their wishes. The weaker brother must not become a crybully.
The modern world is a big damn mess. There really isn’t any other way to say it. And I think that a lot of it comes from the modern invention of the teenager. Throughout human history it has been understood that when people reach sexual maturity it is time for them to begin looking for a spouse and starting a family. It is time for a man to have a trade and seek to provide for that family. By putting obstacles in the way of this, our society has sealed its descent into perversion. A young man is expected to focus on a career or a reputation or almost anything other than the ‘fruitful vine at the center of his house’(Psalm 128). To ape the world’s behavior but dress it in spiritual clothes is not the right way for the church to proceed. Even if a man does get married at 25 or 30 by then he has spent so much time warring against his own nature that he has halfway neutered himself.4 When we put up unnecessary obstacles between another and the God-given solution to their problems we tempt them to invent their own solutions and we inflame the war between flesh and spirit in ways and times that are unnecessary. We must always remember that though ‘we war against the flesh’ it is not the flesh as flesh that we war against but only the corruption of the flesh, and to stir up a battle between a young believer and his own body is to involve him in a fight that will be truly bitter for him and may be entirely needless.
Young marriage is rather praised in Scripture than condemned, the wife of your youth was to the Jews a term suggesting faithfulness and a fullness of love as in Proverbs 5 in particular.5 Perhaps the easiest way to see that the tradition of God’s people has always been to marry young is found in the Exodus. The growth of a population from a few hundred to several millions in 430 years was taken as a sign of blessing, which it certainly was, but we do no injustice to the divine gift by recognizing that this virtually guarantees that they were marrying with a long period of fertility in front of them, that they might have many children (described often by Scripture as a blessing and inaccessible to those who marry in their thirties or forties generally). This is the default position of God’s people and we should give no aide to the depopulation agenda whether it is expressed as abortion, contraception, delay/dishonour of marriage, contempt for the physical or sexual, or any other form. If Paul advises married couples not to withhold themselves from one another physically, then how much more should we not restrain those who wish to be married from doing so, whose lust burns with no legitimate outlet? To tell a man who is starving to increase his faith until hunger does not bother him is not the act of a brother. Rather we ought to help him to sate his hunger in a legitimate and God-honoring way, but quickly lest we tempt him to worse sins than impatience.
We ought to be for the family and against every attack on it. If we actually wish to make America great again and not simply talk about it we must recognize that all of the shifts in America have happened as a generation that grew up as only children and in single parent homes have taken the reigns of society. When we see the incivility and the inability to engage with differing viewpoints we must recognize that these people grew up without brothers and sisters with whom they must learn to cooperate and be civil, grew up with bitterness because their fathers were stolen from them. And these issues, this pain and suffering, goes to deep places that certainly can’t be fixed by a better president, better government, or the stroke of a court’s pen. America will never be great again until American families are great again.
9 Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, 10 nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.
12 All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. 13 Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power.
15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For “the two,” He says, “shall become one flesh.” 17 But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.
18 Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? 20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s. 1 Corinthians 6
In Paul’s long list of sexual immorality please note that conjugal faithfulness is nowhere mentioned. When we fail to distinguish between the sacred and the common, when we fail to encourage the excellent, we are left with the disgusting by default. If we truly wish to flee sexual immorality then we ought to begin first and foremost by seeking the divinely ordained cure for sexual temptation, the embrace of a beloved wife.
Which brings us back to Joshua Harris, why do so many pastors who follow such rigid guidelines about contact with women find themselves in adultery or similar sins? Does a year, or even a month, go by without some such person falling spectacularly and making fools of us all? It seems that no matter how many rules we make or how fastidiously we keep them we have no protection. We seem to be making so many efforts at faithfulness but wind up making a trainwreck of the whole thing. Allow me to suggest that by enshrining the Law in fences of our own devising we are setting ourselves up to fail, just like the Pharisees and Puritans of old. C.S. Lewis makes a distinction that I find helpful between chastity-the divinely commanded faithfulness to a wife or celibacy outside of marriage, and modesty-a set of social rules which have been erected as a fence around the Law of chastity. Rules of modesty should be followed when they are helpful and disregarded when they are not as a matter of the liberty of the Gospel, liberty that was bought with blood. And I would add at this point that liberty always seems like a small thing to sacrifice, only held on to by the stubborn and short sighted, but it is only by recognizing that though these little liberties are small in appearance they are huge in cost and remaining stubborn and uncompromising is the only way that we will pass on freedom of any sort to our sons. The freedom from the Law, from sin and death, is of course the chief and by far most costly, so we must not give up an inch of Evangelical liberty.
20 Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations— 21 “Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle,” 22 which all concern things which perish with the using—according to the commandments and doctrines of men?23 These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh. Colossians 2
When we build a fence around the law it becomes unhelpful at precisely the point that we begin to put any trust in it, that we begin to think, to any degree, that our procedures and policies give us any protection against the depravity in our hearts or the schemes of our enemy. The purpose of God’s law was never to make men righteous or preserve them in righteousness but only to drive them to Christ, and this is the thing that we should expect our rules and laws to do: to reveal us as failing sinners that we may ask as a gift the righteousness which we will never have in any other way. As Romans 7 teaches so clearly, laws inflame lusts, that what is in our heart can be expressed. What is in our hearts is sin, as that chapter also makes inescapably clear, we are not ex-sinners or former sinners or recovering sinners but sinners plain and simple, kept from the legitimate results of our actions only by supernatural mercy. These men who failed so spectacularly were not remarkable in their sin, but remarkable in their laws which made the sin so blindingly obvious. The church should not berate or look down on such men, once they have learned the depths of their depravity, but should learn the lesson with them that we are subject to the same deadly gravity. Our sin and our hearts are only different in not being put on display.
But just as I think that the policy of single Christians delaying marriage is generally not a good idea, so I think that the policy of men like Harris of having no contact with women is a bad idea. First, it is not possible for a man to avoid all contact with other women. However you arrange your life it just isn’t going to happen. And if a man never speaks or interacts with any woman but his wife then when he does interact with a woman he will interact with her as he does with his wife. He is training himself to failure. If however, he has casual friendships with women then he will be practiced at self-control, he will have habits that help him rather than hinder him. But, if that is doubtful, then what I insist on above all is that when we put hope or trust in any policy or procedure of our own, and the word of God gives very few specifics on modesty such that we must make our own judgments, then we have already made the climb which proceeds a fall. The fall is then inevitable.
Maybe the greatest mistake we have made is the universally accepted belief that young men just want to get in a girl’s pants. Certainly if we teach them to believe that about themselves then it becomes true, but I am not convinced that it is normally so.
It is pretty much acknowledged fact now even by society at large that married couples are more satisfied with their partners and enjoy more passion and intimacy than those in any of the ‘alternatives’. This is the message that we should be getting out.
and some not so young anymore
I speak of both Christians and unbelievers who have God-given human nature in common. For both are driven to unnatural uses, pornography, ‘hook-up culture’, and all other perversion, are driven to the storm tossed seas because they are denied the happy port of ‘the wife of their youth’.(or husband but I write and speak from the point of view of a man)
So much so that in the Hebrew language the word for ‘young woman’ and ‘virgin’ is identical leading some to foolishly suggest that Isaiah’s prophecy of a virgin birth only referred to a young woman giving birth. The point being that a young wife and a faithful, happy marriage were seen as entirely synonymous.
Appreciate your thoughts. Thanks for sharing the link. I also think the two options you mention aren’t great. I think the solution is the cultivation of virtue, not rules. But cultivation, like farming, takes time.
There is currently a large, and much needed, emphasis away from college and toward trades. Complimentary ideas, perhaps.
Economics matters; maybe instead of college, parents could help establish a home.