We are about to enter a new era of world history. How will it come?
The last time it came, it came by means of God conquering the impossible and overcoming barriers that were superhuman. That is how God does it every time He does a new thing. The last time, He overcame the remnants of the old paganism that were still resident in the Western mind and soul. If you go to India, and you study the still regnant idols that many of the people are still in thralldom to, you see that these idols are really horrible, bloodthirsty, murderous, devouring, demons. They hate humanity, and long to destroy humanity. In the West, God had through a thousand years taught the human race that it was sinful, and that at the same time, He was just. When the explosion of the Reformation came, it came to the human race by enabling them to take hold on something that was impossible: that God was not a blood thirsty demon who wanted to trap the race and destroy it, using its own sinfulness against it, but was a God who was so great that He could forgive human beings and overcome His own unquenchable anger by means of mercy. God could overcome God, and mercy could triumph over wrath and justice. It was impossible, utterly impossible. In Europe, men still were close enough to the old empire and tribal paganisms to feel what humanity in India still feel. But by faith, one could find mercy in a just God. It is hard for us to relate to the quandry that men felt in those days.
The new era is going to come through something that is now felt and experienced that is just as impossible. The Reformation came through Justification by Faith. The new era will come through a new emblem: marriage. It is the image of marriage as combined with the image of the city in the picture of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22.
Marriage is the new emblem and type of the new configuration of the human race: the city. The two are combined in Revelation 21-22. But marriage is impossible. Just ask almost anyone under thirty, and if they won’t say it, they feel it. It is impossible. That is why such a high percentage of them are shacking up. They have watched their parents and seen too much for too long. The experience is too deep and they are too knowledgable. The thing is impossible. Just as well not even try. Just hook up and have a room mate for a while. And even more fearful is the thought of having a family. Lots of girls want a baby, but the only thing that is more fearful to young men than marriage is the thought of being a father. That is the horror of horrors. And on top of that, we are now facing the fears of world wide depression. Who in their right mind would take on a the most extended financial obligation of all in a world like ours? Marriage is impossible.
There is only one way to be married. One must be married by faith. It is as impossible in our time as believing in forgiveness was in Luther’s time. And the only alternative to the image of marriage as we find it in Revelation 21 and 22, as we metropolize all over the world, is the image of a whoredom in Revelation 18. This tells the whole story of the hell that humanity is doomed to in the city if we do not marry successfully. The Whore of Babylon who drinks blood and is herself destroyed by her pimps, is the other possible picture as the alternative to the picture of the New Jerusalem. This is also a picture of economic devastation. The whore and her pimps not only devour blood, but every form of wealth. It is all just squandered in the most horrible of orgies. Sex and death are very expensive, and generations of capital can be devoured in one night of revelry. Whoever is right about the technical source of our vast malinvestment, at heart it is whoredom that undoes everything.
Marriage is impossible. The city is also impossible. The university is impossible. But, these are NOT impossible, either on the micro or the macro level. But it happens in only one way: by faith. And marriage is the type that is at the heart of each of these realities. And the first and primary reality of all of these types is the church, the Bride of Christ.
Marriage by faith is where the new world is going to come from. It is impossible in every other way.