I was talking with my mom about how she and my dad got married. My dad was 16 years older than my mother, and he had returned from the pacific realm and WWII in the year before. Because he was older than my mom, her relatives had misgivings about him. Some of them really didn't warm up to him. Actually I don't honestly know if those particular relatives ever did.

Dad was a wonderfully loving guy, and a great provider who loved his wife, and when they decided to get married, the minister at the church at first declined to marry them. His reasoning was that because of the sixteen year gap, my dad must have been married before. Actually, my dad had spent the previous 9 1/2 years in the army. The minister was finally convinced and agreed to perform the ceremony as my mother's sister and her husband witnessed it.

Age differences in a couple might be more of a thing now than they were then, I don't know. Whether or not my dad had been married before he married my mother, and what the circumstances of that marriage might have been were a Scriptural concern that gave the minister pause, and I think he made a godly choice to pause and make sure before the Lord that he was in the middle of a godly situation or not.

Pastors often have to make a call like that based on what the Scriptures tell us, and though they often know they are right, that doesn't always make what they have to do easy. Unbelieving couples walk into churches all the time, seeking a "pastor," because they want some sort of "blessing" on their marriage. While the Bible tells believers not to marry unbelievers, I don't think that it's necessarily wrong for a pastor to marry two unbelievers.

Marriage was created in the mind of God and He meant for a man and a woman to be married to one another, and it's better for them to do that instead of just "living together," and there are a lot of reasons for that. A man once got angry with me about something I'd said and told me that his girlfriend and he were just as married as my wife and I, and that the only difference between their situation and ours was a piece of paper. I told him that that "piece of paper" meant a lot to me. He and his girlfriend broke up. He is now married to someone else.

One thing pastors can do when an unbelieving couple asks to be married is explain to them that they would be interested in performing the wedding if the couple would be willing beforehand to meet for some counseling sessions. The pastor could try to make the couple understand that as a pastor, part of his job in the ministry is to help those who come to him create solid, healthy relationships. I corresponded with a young husband and father, ( and I emphasize young) the other day who had a lot of things going on in his very brief marriage, and he conveyed that family influence weighed heavily on he and his even younger wife's decision to marry.

Getting married just because your parents want you to, can be a bad idea. Getting married for some sentimentality about a "church wedding" will not add God's blessing to the marriage either. If such a couple comes to a pastor and agrees to counseling, it can build into a great opportunity to share the gospel through a process of trust building, to talk about the origin and the purpose of marriage, who designed it and why He has to be in it.

They might not come to believe in Jesus, but at least the gospel has been shared with them in a good way. But things could get interesting though. One of them could come to believe in the Savior, and one might not. Then the marriage would not be Scripturally sanctioned. Trouble in River City. They would have to be told the ceremony could not go forward, because it isn't a matter of judgment on them, but a matter of obedience to the Lord.