No doubt marriage is a wonderful thing. It has been recoursed that the greatest source of human joy and pain is found in the drama of love, relationships and marriage. Many successful people have traced their unusual levels of acceleration to their spouses while many failed marriages also vestiged their failures to their estranged ‘witch’ partners. The epidemic and explosive rise of the divorce rate adds further fuel to the fear, hopelessness, disillusionment, and despair people feel with regard to marriage. But marriage is beautiful and what makes marriage such is the fact that it’s your decision. Marriage is meant to be in specifics. In other words, YOU choose to marry your partner.

Let me correct a notion before I proceed. Nobody has the right to choose who you’ll be married to; be it your parents, friends, pastor or anybody. Let me shock you. Not even God can choose who you’ll marry. Is that a blasphemy? Absolutely Not! In Hermeneutics, one of the ways to provide answers to questions is to identify where such questions first happened. It’s called the principle of First Mention. To clarify issues, let’s go back to the first incidence of marriage. The Adam and Eve story. After God had created every creature, scriptures retort that God brought all of them to Adam (Gen.2:19). Now there arises a question, why would God bring all these creatures to Adam when He could have done it alone? It’s because apart from the spiritual dimension of Adam, there’s also the intellectual phenomenon attached to his nature.

Man is supernaturally intelligent and that’s why you can look at the world we live in and marvel at the great discoveries of man. Following through, that same verse continues ‘….and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name.’ This simply means that it was at the discretion of Adam to name every creature as he wished. Another reason why God brought the creatures to Adam was to also ‘test’ his feeling as to who to be with. Man is also soulish. That’s his second dimension. He has feelings which would be expressed in his daily life. It was man’s decision to choose who to marry. If he had found a partner among those creatures, that would have been the order of marriage.

You may ask why that? It’s very simple. Man was entrusted with responsibilities. He’s to account for every of his decisions that affected him. And for him to be accountable, he ought to be independent. If your Dad gave you some dollars and asked you to invest the money in a certain company, and based on your knowledge, the company is not viable. And you explained it to him but he refused. If he lost all the money, he cannot blame you. You know why? Because he forced you to make that decision. Contrarily, if he gave you the freewill to choose any company to invest in, then he could blame you if you invest the money in the wrong company. The same way, If God had chosen anybody for Adam and he married such creature by force, it would have violated the principle of accountability. In other words, Adam would have blamed God for his misfortunes! And God would have no option but to accept the blame, and Adam would deserve no punishment because God is a just God. He operates on the principle of righteousness.

Understanding this synopsis will help you have a basic understanding of what marriage entails. That’s why it’s always said that love is a decision not a feeling. In other words, love does not happen naturally. It is cultivated. This is particularly important to youths who get engrossed in youthful exuberances especially in the area of relationships. When you ask a guy why he loves you and he says ‘baby I don’t just know why!’ You’d better run away from such a person because it’s a dangerous statement. It implies such a person is irresponsible. ‘Love and Responsibilities are co-travellers’, says Leke Alder. He must have a reason why he chose you. If not, he might wake up on a bad day and equally say ‘baby, I don’t feel we can continue again!’ and you ask him the reason and he replies ‘I don’t really know why. I just feel I’m no longer interested.’ And that way, you feel jilted and cheated. You see why you must be careful on who to date?

Before I drop the pen for this part, don’t date a guy who has used God as an avenue to propose to you. This is usually the case of people who are so spiritually-minded! They fall into the trap when the guy says that God told him you would be his wife. Listen, you are FREE to reject any guy you think you’re not comfortable with no matter his level of anointing. Why? The principle of responsibility and accountability I just explained above. Rejecting his proposal can never land you in hell. It’s unscriptural! The principle of responsibility is applicable to both sexes. The Big Book says ‘So God created man …..male and female created He them.’ (Gen.1:27) In other words, when God was giving instruction to ‘man’ in the Bible, He was referring to both the male and the female. It’s the reason why dating and marriage is a joint decision.

Another major excuse most guys use on the ladies is if it’s God will, they would marry them. I’m currently undergoing a diploma degree in Hermeneutical Theology (That involves studying the methodological interpretation of scriptures and their Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic etymologies). So I have at least, a basic understanding on the issue of Semantics. What the sentence ‘If it’s God’s will, I will marry you’ means is that; ‘My decision to marry you is not based on me but on God’. Most, not all guys do that though. It means the guy is shifting his own responsibility to God which has violated the principle we’ve learnt earlier on. So Akin, does that mean God’s will is not needed in marriage? My answer is a capital NO but there’s a better way to present it. For example, you can put it in a more appropriate way by saying, ‘I trust God I WOULD MARRY YOU!’ You see that? Despite the presence of God in the equation, the man still cannot dodge his responsibility of making the decision of marriage. The reason being that the human life is sacred and sacredness ought not to be violated or it’s a criminal offence. In the kingdom, we don’t joke with the human heart because it’s sacred (prov.4:23).

I’ll be talking on the three things to consider before you say ‘I do’ in the final part of this topic.

Written by Akin Omotesho

Source: http://www.hub201.com/just-before-you-say-i-do/

what happens when you propose to a lady in the public and she says NO

Just asking sha...

Will be back to d topic later.