Written by: Daughter of The King
Marriage is a wonderful thing but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. I’ve been married almost ten years to the funniest, nicest, gentle Christian man I have ever met but it’s still challenging at times because no matter how great he is he’s not perfect and I’m not perfect. Occasionally we make mistakes; we may hurt each others feeling or maybe one of us feels taken for granted but no matter what may temporally divide us there is something much more powerful that brings us back together and that’s our faith.
In John 10:10 the Bible tells us that satan has come to destroy mankind; what better way to do that than to destroy families. Satan knows that when he destroys one marriage he’s destroyed a few people in one shot and what’s the easiest way to destroy a marriage? Cause a division. Satan knows how to find your marriage’s weak spot and when he does he goes to work on it and if you both aren’t rooted and firm in the same faith it’s only a matter of time before he’s got you beat and you find yourself in divorce court.
Marriage is hard and believe me even in the best marriages there is plenty to fight about; couples fight about finances, schedules, chores, how to raise the kids and the list goes on and on. Now imagine marrying someone outside your faith or of no faith at all and adding to that already long list fights more arguments about things like:
Expectations - You may discover yourselves expecting too much of your interfaith relationship because you have the expectation that your love for one another can overcome all obstacles but over time your start to see the cracks forming in your marriage.
Children/Baptism – You and your husband may have definite opinions about baptizing your children, for Catholics it’s something you must do, protestants/evangelicals are completely opposed to that. The Islamic religion requires that children of mixed marriages be raised as Muslims.
Religious Identity – What happens when your children are old enough to ask questions about God and mom and dad give them different answers? What kind of religious identity can they form?
The Bible warns us about this in 2 Corinthians 6:14, I like the way The Message version of the Bible states it:
“Don't become partners with those who reject God. How can you make a partnership out of right and wrong? That's not partnership; that's war.”
Those are pretty strong words but I know that they are true for two reasons; the first is that the Bible is the absolute true word of God and the second reason is that I personally experienced it. I’m currently in my second marriage; I was first married to a man of the Greek Orthodox faith. Even though I was raised as an evangelical Christian I thought that we could work it out, I tried to justify it by saying things like “we are both Christians just two different types of Christians”. But the truth is that the problems began as soon as we got engaged, when we were selecting the church to get married in my fiancé and his family put so much pressure on me to get married in the Greek Orthodox Church that I caved in. Then our first child was born and as an evangelical Christian I had no intention on baptizing my baby but instead I wanted to have a service to dedicate him to the Lord. Well, here came the pressure again from my in-laws to have him baptized because they believe that if you don’t baptize the baby and God forbid something happens to him that he would go to purgatory or maybe even hell. I don’t believe that at all so I asked them to show me were in the Bible does it say to baptize babies and were in the bible does it talk about purgatory, they couldn’t find it in the Bible so they told me that it was church tradition. I don’t follow church tradition I follow the Word of God but because of all the arguing and fighting I caved in again and let them baptize him. Are you starting to see a pattern? I continuously had to give in and turn my back on what I knew to be true just to keep the peace in my family, the Bible calls that being double minded and look at what it says about double minded people:
James 1:8 (NIV) “…a double-minded man is unstable in all he does.”
I was unstable, my marriage was unstable, my children were unstable; Satan saw this and he moved right in and toppled the whole thing over. There were other things that contributed to the divorce but I know that if I had married someone of my faith the marriage would have been more stable and we would’ve had a much better chance at making it work.
If you are contemplating marrying someone of a different faith and he believes in things like infant baptism, purgatory or anything else that you don’t agree with you have to wonder who’s right and who’s wrong. The only way to answer that is for the two of you to pray together and ask God to reveal the truth to you in his word; open the Bible and compare what you believe to the scriptures, I know that God will lead you to the truth.
Once you have found the truth the two of you can go into a marriage that is united and strong in one true faith that can resist satan’s plan to divide and conquer.
