The Bible speaks piercing clarity about our human capacity to generate idols to worship other than the true and living God.
Paul talks about this process in Romans 1 where human beings exchange “the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.” (Romans 1:23).
The reformer John Calvin put it well when he warned that ““The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.”
It’s no wonder that one of the Ten Commandments that God revealed on Mount Sinai was a warning against creating and bowing down to idols.
Ultimately, almost anything can become an idol. Some common idols of our day include work, fame, money, success, fitness, and authenticity.
But there’s another idol that rarely makes our list. That is the idol of marriage and family.
This is a particular problem for Latter-day Saints who elevate the importance of “eternal marriage” to the level of a “pillar of eternity” on par with the creation, the fall and that atonement. Marriage becomes the key to exaltation and the only way to “ultimate happiness” as Elder Bednar put it.
Speaking candidly, this was a sin that I was guilty of as a Latter-day Saint. This form of idolatry is also what Elder Holland is guilty of in his famous temple open house video remarks: “I wouldn’t know how to speak of heaven without my wife and my children. It would not heaven for me.”
When marriage is placed as an idol it can have terrible consequences. It makes those who are not married feel worthless or inadequate. It creates a church which squeezes out anyone who does not fit a particular mold. It puts pressure on women (and men as well, but especially women) to put aside their dreams to pursue family whether or not that is what God has called to do. And it causes guilt and pain and shame for those whose marriages have failed or whose children have strayed from God.
This is not meant to be.
- Jesus taught of the potential for our families to become idols:
Jesus’s teachings about family make clear the danger of elevating family to the level of an idol and our need to be willing to follow him above all of these kinds of relationships. Many of these teachings are meant to be jarring, but to convey a much needed voice of warning.
To one man who wanted to go and bury his father before following Jesus, Jesus declared: “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” And to another man who wanted to go and say goodbye to his family he warned “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:59-62).
Later on, Luke records Jesus teaching the need to put Jesus first above even our family members.
““If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry his cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple.” (Luke 14:26-27).
Jesus also warned that his teachings would divide families: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.” (Matthew 10:34-36).
This is a small sample of the teachings of Jesus that show clearly that our devotion and loyalty must be first and foremost to Christ and that families can become idols if we are not careful
- The New Testament apostles avoided idolizing marriage.
The New Testament apostles and other inspired authors avoided the idolatry of marriage. They found a healthy and proper balance that allowed for God above all to be gloried.
Paul plainly called out those who would come and “forbid[] to marry” as a form of asceticism and self-denial. (1 Timothy 4:3-5). These heretics had elevated abstaining from marriage to the level of a divine mandate. They had forgotten that God had given marriage “to be received with thanksgiving.”
But on the other hand, Paul also recognize that marriage could be entangling and detract from God’s calling for us. Paul spoke to the Saints in Corinth and recognized that for many of them, “It is good to remain single as I am, that you might serve the kingdom.” He recognized that marriage could be an incredible blessing to individuals and the Church, but he did not place marriage on a pedestal as the only God approved option for mankind. He would have rejected President Nelson’s words that “marriage is both a commandment and an exalting principle of the gospel.” Paul avoided either idolizing or demonizing marriage.
3) Marriage is a symbol of Christ.
One clear biblical teaching that I had never encountered as a Latter-day Saint is the idea that marriage first and foremost is a symbol and a type of Christ’s love for his bridge, the Church.
Paul talks about this in Ephesians 5. He speaks of the ideal relationship between husband and wife and how that covenantal love symbolized and points to Christ:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this 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 their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” (Ephesians 5:22-33).
Marriage is a profound and meaningful symbol of God’s unfailing love for us. It is a beautiful institution that is meant to be honored and protected. But we should not loose sight of the deeper reality of how it ultimately points us to Christ.
4) Jesus and Eternal Marriage
For a Latter-day Saint who believed in the concept of eternal marriage, Jesus’s teachings on this topic were always particularly disconcerting and jarring.
Here is the full story that is found in all three synoptic gospels:
Marriage at the Resurrection
“That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”
Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ ? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”
When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.”
The Sadducees attempted to challenge the idea of a resurrection by posing a hypothetical to Jesus about a woman who had been married to seven brothers. They asked him whose husband she would be.
The fact that the Sadducees asked this question shows that many of Jesus’s contemporaries the Pharisees did believe in some kind of eternal marriage. Otherwise the question would not have had its sting or been a useful one for them to ask.
This would have been the perfect opportunity for Jesus to affirm the eternal importance of marriage. Jesus could have pointed out that under the law of Moses any children born would have belonged to the first husband implying that the wife continued to be married to the first husband. Or he could have said that she would get to choose the spouse that would make her happiest.
Instead, Jesus responded by refuting these assumptions completely. He explains that in the resurrection we will neither “marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”
I’ve read a lot of LDS apologetics on this verse. The most common argument is that Jesus was only saying that these men who denied the resurrection would not be married eternally, but that the righteous faithful would be. But this is not what Jesus says. For one thing, there is no indication that this woman or her brothers were anything but faithful. These brothers married her in accordance with the law of Moses just as they were commanded. This woman faithfully tried to bring children into the world to honor her dead husband. There is no reason to believe that they were denied eternal blessings because of their lack of faithfulness.
Jesus’s teachings are instead universal and stark: Jesus emphasizes the power of the resurrection, and the fact that we will eternally worship the living God just as the angels do. For Jesus, that is the center point of eternity, not the eternal family.
It is worth noting also that this is exactly what John the Revelator sees in his heavenly vision. He sees angels and humans alike around the throne of God bowing down in worship. See e,g., Revelation 7. For John as with Jesus, that is the focal point of eternity.
This doesn’t mean that we will not be with our loved ones eternally. We will enjoy eternity with those that we love. But it is worship of God that will bring us the greatest joy and satisfaction.
God must be at the center of our theology and our worship. We cannot let the family and marriage however wonderful and precious supplant the worship of God in our hearts.