Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Christian sociologist Mark Regneres wrote that the institution of marriage is under severe strain.

No kidding. A significant reason, according to his research, is that young adults have simply misunderstood what

marriage is, seeing it more as a capstone to success rather than what it really is, a foundation

of a good life and a flourishing society. Well, the implication for young adults is an idea that

for one to be marriageable, he or she must have it all together. Well, that change in understanding is

significant, Regnerus noted. There's a world of difference if marriage is about sacrificing together

in order to build something, or if it is another means of achieving individual fulfillment.

Biblically speaking, marriage has a design. Man and woman sacrificed together in order to achieve

a larger purpose. In this sense,

marriage is a calling, not a right, as it has been misconstrued to be, both in the law and in the

cultural imagination. This is clearly the vision of marriage that Jesus gives in Matthew 19,

when the Pharisees tested Jesus by asking him whether or not divorce should ever be

law.

There's is a legal question from the Jewish law.

But Jesus doesn't answer it from the mosaic law.

Instead, he begins with this.

Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning?

In other words, Jesus points back to what God intended marriage to be in creation.

Specifically, he pointed to two aspects of how God created humans and marriage. First, that

humans were created male and female. Second, that marriage is about a man and a woman becoming one

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