28 We celebrate the unity-plurality relationship in the church through the Lord’s Table or Communion. God intends that the plurality of the church participate in a unifying ceremony in which there would be common bread and a common cup. In the contemporary world, we eat individual pieces of bread and drink from separate cups for hygienic reasons, but it tends to undermine the symbolic sense of corporate attachment. It must be acknowledged, however, that salvation is a personal, individual event described in Scripture as being born again. Just as children are born individually into a family, so children of God are born individually into the family of God. Salvation is individual, not communal in nature. At the point of salvation, the Holy Spirit grants spiritual gifts to each child of God. Those gifts are for the social purpose of giving or ministering to others. But in our individualistically self-absorbed culture, we have developed a private prayer language from the gift of tongues and turned a gift of the Spirit inward upon ourselves. Likewise with marriage, we see plurality in unity when two become “one flesh.” God created humans to live in a plurality-unity relationship because God exists in a plurality-unity relationship. In marriage a husband and wife demonstrate the kind of relationship in which the Godhead exists. Is it possible for the Son to detach Himself from the Father and the Spirit and attach Himself to another? Is it possible for a redeemed one to separate himself from the body of Christ? Marriage is established when a man leaves his father and mother to become joined with his wife in a “one flesh” union. The order of God’s creative activity is that marriage occurs first, followed by family (childbearing). In the chronology of the naturalistic evolutionist, family occurs first followed by marriage. Marriage arrives late on the evolutionary time clock after eons of reproduction. Which comes first, marriage or the family? The biblical and evolutionary views are in complete contrast to one another, and the ramifications are profound. If marriage began in a cave with the female agreeing to settle and nourish the young while the male hunts down dinosaur meat and brings “home” the food, then what is so sacred about it? What is there to preserve? Why not experiment with multiple partners, same-sex relationships, and cohabitation? The current state of marriage as a mating relationship is the logical conclusion to the evolutionary starting point.
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