Does it take marriage to create a family?

I ran across an article this week that was conducted by Pew Research and Time Magazine. They conducted a survey that asked the following question, “Is marriage becoming obsolete?”

According to their study one in three children is living with a parent who is divorced, separated, or never married.

The article also states: About 29 percent of children under 18 now live with a parent or parents who are unwed or no longer married, a fivefold increase from 1960, according to the Pew report being released Thursday. Broken down further, about 15 percent have parents who are divorced or separated and 14 percent who were never married. Within those two groups, a sizable chunk — 6 percent — have parents who are live-in couples who opted to raise kids together without getting married.

39 percent of Americans said marriage was becoming obsolete (in 1978 just 28 percent believed that marriage was obsolete). According to the U.S. census (date was released in September) marriages hit an all-time low of 52 percent.

If marriage is obsolete then what do the people interviewed believe constitutes a family?

Listed were several variations including the following: three of 5 people said a same-sex couple with children was a family.

Other findings:

_About 34 percent of Americans called the growing variety of family living arrangements good for society, while 32 percent said it didn’t make a difference and 29 percent said it was troubling.

_About 44 percent of people say they have lived with a partner without being married; for 30-to-49-year-olds, that share rose to 57 percent. In most cases, those couples said they considered cohabitation as a step toward marriage.

The older I get the more I realize that my way of thinking about issues and problems in our country is not the way a large segment of our population thinks. I know my way of thinking is not always the right way, but I know whose way IS always right.

God says in Genesis 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Marriage is an important part of God’s plan for creating a family and no matter what society says, that hasn’t changed.

Marriage is important because throughout the Bible the marriage relationship between a husband and a wife is a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church throughout the Bible. In Jeremiah 31:32, God says “The time is coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand and to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant though I was a husband to them.” Notice that God made a covenant with his people and then states that He was their husband linking the covenant between God and His people to the marriage covenant between a man and a woman. In Revelation 19, the wedding of the Lamb, which is Jesus, has come and his bride, the church, has made herself ready.

In Ephesians 5:28-32, marriage is discussed this way: “In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church –for we are members of the body. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.”