All of us long for what is imperishable.

All of us long for what is imperishable.
What would we be if God had not breathed his breath into us?
Darwin’s whole theory of evolution, by itself, is dangerous
and futile because it is not God-centered. Something inside
each of us cries out against the idea that we have been hatched
by a purposeless universe. Deep within the human spirit is a
thirst for what is lasting and imperishable.
Since we are made in God’s image, and God is eternal, we
cannot, at the end of life, merely vanish again like smoke.
Our life is rooted in eternity. Christoph Blumhardt writes,
“Our lives bear the mark of eternity, of the eternal God
who created us to be his image. He does not want us to be
swallowed up in the transitory, but calls us to himself, to
what is eternal.”2
God has set eternity in our hearts, and deep within each
of us is a longing for eternity. When we deny this and live
only for the present, everything that happens to us in life will
remain cloaked in tormenting riddles, and we will remain
deeply dissatisfied. This is especially true in the sexual area.
Casual sex desecrates the soul’s yearning and capacity for
that which is eternal. No person, no human arrangement, can
ever fill the longing of our souls.
The voice of eternity speaks most directly to our
conscience. Therefore the conscience is perhaps the deepest
element within us. It warns, rouses, and commands us in our
God-given task (Rom. 2:14–16). And every time the soul is
wounded, our conscience makes us painfully aware of it. If
we listen to our conscience, it can guide us. When we are
separated from God, however, our conscience will waver
and go astray. This is true not only for an individual, but also
for a marriage.
Already in Genesis, chapter 2, we read about the
importance of marriage. When God created Adam, he said that
everything he had made was good. Then he created woman
to be a helpmate and partner to man, because he saw that it
was not good for man to be alone. This is a deep mystery:
man and woman – the masculine and the feminine – belong
together as a picture of who God is, and both can be found
in him. Together they become what neither would be apart
and alone.
Everything created by God gives us an insight into his
nature – mighty mountains, immense oceans, rivers, and
great expanses of water; storms, thunder and lightning,
huge icebergs; meadows, flowers, trees, and ferns. There is
power, harshness, and manliness, but there is also gentleness,
motherliness, and sensitivity. And just as the various forms of
life in nature do not exist without each other, God’s children,
too, male and female, do not exist alone. They are different,
but they are both made in God’s image, and they need each
other to fulfill their true destinies.