How ‘soul mate’ and gay dribble nonsense is destroying Christian marriages
Let me be perfectly clear: No matter how many ads for Christian
dating services you hear or trendy books you read, we simply don’t have “soul
mates,” at least as our confused culture understands that term. Does this
surprise you? It shouldn’t. Look for that concept, by the way, in the Bible,
and the only thing you can find remotely close to it is the fierce friendship of David and
Jonathan. “Jonathan made a covenant with David,” Scripture says, “because he
loved him as his own soul.”
Now those are
soul mates, friends. But the Bible knows nothing of romantic “soul mates.” This concept is more
New Age than Christian. The Huffington Post gives nine signs that you’ve found
your soul mate, the first one being: “You communicate without speaking.” Okay.
One New Age website, however, gives three signs
you’ve “definitely” found your soul mate: “You just connect without trying,”
“Your level of communication is unmatched,” and “You create your own world
together.”
That’s cute, it’s nice, maybe it’s even romantic . . . but it’s
certainly not biblical.
Now all of this confusion might be kind of funny if it weren’t
so harmful to naïve Christians and others who’ve fallen for this idea. Because
this idea implies that somewhere out there is that “perfect person” for you,
and if your marriage is not exploding with intense communication, romance, and
a great sex life, well then maybe it’s because your spouse is not your “soul
mate.”
Men who are a little bored with their wives, or vice versa,
might be tempted by a co-worker who “understands me so well and is my soul mate, or
could be my soul mate.” But frankly, this is a recipe for adultery and divorce,
and families end up getting dropped for “soul mates.”
Once I wrote a tribute to C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters”
called “Screwtape Proposes a Divorce,” in which Wasphead, my invented senior
devil, says the following to Gallstone, the junior devil: “That [soul mates] do
not exist is to be kept TOP SECRET. … Let’s be blunt: these humans are scouring
the globe for someone with whom a relationship will require absolutely no work
or compromise. … Many adult humans who have long ago dismissed Santa Claus and
the Easter Bunny as myths somehow persist in believing this person to exist.”
The “soul mate” concept is unworkable and completely unfair to
the real other
person in your life. It puts enormous pressure on him or her to perform, to meet our
impossible expectations. As Jerry Root and Stan Guthrie point out in “The
Sacrament of Evangelism,” putting others in God’s place—expecting them to give
us what only He can—is a naked form of idolatry and will only lead to deep
disappointment.
Here’s another thing. The “soul mate” idea suggests that
marriage is all about me,
that I need to find someone who understands me perfectly, who makes me happy. Marriage
should be about finding someone you can
make happy. In the great teaching on marriage in Ephesians, for example,
husbands are told to lay
down their lives for their wives, as Christ did for the
church.
As J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote to his son, “No man, however
truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man has lived faithful to her
as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will,
without self-denial.”
So folks, let’s drop the whole “soul mate” talk, shall we?
Marriage can be wonderfully satisfying,
but that’s the result of God’s grace, hard work, and self-sacrificial love. And
that is the truth.
Reprinted with permission from Break
Point.
