That mad rush you hear as you read this column is many husbands running to the local drug store to quickly pick out a card and some flowers and chocolate for their wives. You may think that Valentine’s Day is a mere sentimental Hallmark holiday, a conspiracy for the greeting card companies and the chocolate manufacturers to make money. You’d be right. And yet, take some advice from a happily married man of 23 years that you likely don’t want to take this approach with your wife.
Historians are not sure where the holiday originated. Many believe it was in honor of two Christian saints, both put to death on Feb. 14 by Roman Emperor Claudius II in the 3rd century. It was first tied to romantic love by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the Middle Ages. In America, it was an enterprising artist named Esther Howland in the mid-19th century who began selling romantic cards. By the early 1900s, a chocolate magnate, Richard Cadbury, saw a potential market and the modern Valentine’s Day was off and running.
Whether you love Valentine’s Day or think it’s a useless made-up holiday, it is a good time to emphasize the Bible’s beautiful vision of romantic love, even if as an antidote to the world’s distorted view. While pop culture pumps out a message that love is mere attraction or desire, the result of two people “following their hearts” to a predetermined destiny, Scripture portrays romantic love as a beautiful gift from God, uniting husband and wife in a covenant commitment for life.
Marriage is grounded in the creation order. “For this cause,” Genesis tells us, “A man will leave his father and mother and will cleave to his wife and they shall be one flesh (Genesis 2:24).” Marriage is a signpost of God’s relationship with the church, a mystery embedded in creation (Ephesians 5:30-32). Tertullian, writing in the 3rd century, said it this way:
How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice. They are as brother and sister, both servants of the same Master.
This doesn’t imply that romance and attraction have no part of what brings a man and a woman together. Isaac, for instance, saw that Rebecca was “fair to look upon” (Genesis 24:6). Attraction is part of the chemical makeup in which God designed men and women. Yet a relationship bound only by sexual attraction will not sustain itself over the long haul.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine )
