Category Archives: Christianity

Relationships and Filling Voids

I’ve heard it said that one shouldn’t get married to fill a void. This is supposed to be “unhealthy”. While there is a sense in which this is true, the statement is completely false in its literal meaning. We absolutely do and should get married to fill a void. Let me explain what I mean. Many of us have two voids in life: a God-shaped void and a spouse-shaped one. Everyone has the God void. We were created for God’s glory. Many of us have the spouse void. God designed men and women to be different and to complete one another emotionally, behaviorally, and even physically—we literally fit together like puzzle pieces! Many but not all yearn for such a companion. Men and women, contrary to what culture might say, like each other quite a lot.

The problem is not void filling but filling the wrong void, namely trying to fill the God void with a spouse instead of God. When someone does this, his spouse becomes God for him, his ultimate source of meaning and value. No mere human can fill this role. Men and women should get married for a number of reasons including emotional and sexual fulfillment and help in submitting to God’s guidance and plan in this life. Many of us experience a spouse void because of God’s design plan, and those who do should seek to fill it.

If one accepts all this, it becomes clear that the statement, “One shouldn’t get married to fill a void” is literally false. It’s okay if what one really means by it is, “One shouldn’t try to fill the God-shaped void in his life with a spouse”. But if that’s what we really mean, we should just say that.

The Trinity

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity says that God is three persons Father, Son, and Spirit in one being. Because there is only one being, there is only one God, and yet there are three divine persons. A person is something having a first-person perspective, free will, and intellect. When understood this way, the Trinity is hardly a contradictory concept. Mysterious, yes. My favorite analogy for the Trinity is that it’s like the Three-Headed Giant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except immaterial. The mystery comes in the case of God by how the three persons are united without sharing a physical body.

“Christ-Centered”

I’m wary of phrases like “Christ-centered”. Perhaps they are sometimes used in a clear and unobjectionable sense. My concern is that the Christian faith should not be Christ-centered but God-centered—Father, Son, and Spirit. Obviously, God in his entirety is the proper object of our worship and ultimate concern, and two verses come to mind that I think drive this point home:

“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16.7, ESV).

“So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ ” (John 5.19, ESV).

Hell

Each of us is or was in a vortex of sin leading to a final rejection of God, the natural consequence and just punishment of which is everlasting personal separation from him, which is hell. It is not the sins we commit in the vortex—like adultery, theft, and murder—which merit hell; rather, it is the final rejection to which they lead. This rejection is a free and culpable choice on the part of all who make it, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible!) for God to force them into a proper relationship with him.