Marriage Not Fornication
Marriage is Approved by God. Fornication is Not.
The marriage relationship is a sacred bond; husband and wife are “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Jesus says so in Matthew 19:4-6:
And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
“One flesh” is the physical union of man and woman. First Corinthians 6:16 says “Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For ‘the two,’ He says, ‘shall become one flesh.’” His point is not that these two are married, but they are pretending to be, so their relationship is a lie. That is why he says, “Flee sexual immorality (fornication). Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:19). He sins against his own body by using his body to commit fornication. Pretending is not the same as being married.
Marriage is approved by God. Fornication is not. Do you want to be approved by God? Cease fornication and get married. That is Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 7:2-4: “Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.”