Let us imagine a young man. He loves the Lord. He believes the Bible. He wants to marry a godly, virgin woman and raise children in the nurture and admonition of Christ. He is not picky. He is not superficial. He is simply obeying the biblical expectation that marriage is honorable and that sexual purity is good. But he looks around and sees a landscape filled with women who carry the wounds of their past, who once walked in the ways of Babylon, who have only recently begun walking toward Jerusalem. What is he to do?
I am not saying he should lower his standards. I am not saying he must accept any woman simply because she claims to be saved. I am not saying that the wounds of the past carry no consequences. What I am saying is that the math is not in his favor. The cultural rot is too deep. The statistics are too overwhelming. Unless he is prepared to remain single forever or seek a wife in a foreign land, he may need to face a reality that his theology has not yet prepared him for. He may meet a woman who loves Jesus, walks in repentance, weeps over her sin, and carries a past that would make the Pharisees hiss.
And when that happens, he will need more than personal preferences. He will need a theology of redemption. He will need to understand the doctrine of expiation. He will need to know that Christ did not die merely to forgive sins, but to remove them. He will need to believe that the Gospel does not leave stains in place but washes them clean. He will need to embrace the radical, offensive, scandalous truth that the blood of Christ is not just strong enough to get someone into heaven—it is strong enough to make them marriageable.
