The New World Disorder & Your Marriage
- Bob & Evy Smith
- 49 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Your marriage is under attack. Your marriage must fight back. Your marriage will have no lack.
Reality or concepts? Are we aware of the sneaky shift away from reality — the slow boil of false ideas otherwise known as lies? Our world today is characterized by disorder, and that disorder isn't coming from just one place. Over the past few decades we've watched a deep moral and societal breakdown unfold at the government level, alongside a steady push to strip away the Constitution in favor of a one-world governance. The language used to describe this shift — "New World Order" — is deceptive, because the only way to achieve such an order is to first manufacture disorder. Disorder isn't a side effect. It's the goal.
So the question worth sitting with is this: are we listening to ideas that run alongside the track, quietly nudging us off it, without our even noticing we've left the rails?
I. Your Marriage Is Under Attack
Confusion, and every sort of evil that rides in with it, serves the goals of this new world disorder. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick of the exploitive mind, and splintering families, relationships, and the natural bonds between human beings is a core part of that strategy.
A dominant ideology has forced its way into our culture, proclaiming the removal of every God-created distinction — God and creation, male and female, parent and child, husband and wife, student and teacher, reality and fantasy, rational and irrational, moral and immoral, truth and lies. All of them are being systematically dismantled. Most people today see anything that pushes back against this ideology as an assault on personal rights, an intrusion on cherished freedoms, and grounds enough to justify intolerance toward it. But these distinctions aren't arbitrary — they're the underpinnings of a functioning society, and institutions like marriage and family depend entirely on them holding firm.
What we've watched unfold over recent decades is the systematic removal of God and His laws from the public square. That quiet campaign against religious liberty has landed a stinging blow on marriage and family life. It makes a grim sort of sense that a culture indulging in godless pleasure and infatuation would develop a growing distaste for moral limitations of any kind. A lack of commitment and personal accountability — seen clearly in how casually premarital cohabitation is treated — follows naturally, and the consequences are tragic. Moral mutiny leads to sociological devolution, and that devolution gives rise to the breakdown of society's most fundamental unit: the family.
Marriage Is Meant to Be Preserved at All Costs
Marriage was the first institution God established for the order of society, and it needs to be protected accordingly. As the family goes, so goes the nation — and since the church is made up of families, the health of the family is critical to the health of the church.
Consider the public school system: God has been pushed out of classrooms, and everything He created is now up for redefinition. Supposedly a man is no longer simply a man, a woman is no longer simply a woman — you can identify as virtually anything, even an animal. The result is a generation with a lost sense of identity. That attack on marriage is already underway when young people aren't being taught the truth about who they are or their relationship to God, let alone taught math and music.
What's especially unsettling about these trends is that they're widely treated as normal, or at worst uncontroversial. Even trusted institutions like the church often bear up too quietly under the breakdown of the family, without treating it with the seriousness it deserves. To be clear, the church's role in accepting and helping broken families isn't the issue — the issue is how rarely the pulpit offers real clarity, hope, and healing on the subject of marriage. People are left largely on their own to figure out how marriage even works, let alone how to resolve their problems within it, when the hope and love that first bound two people together before God and witnesses is still available to be drawn on.
As Os Guinness has observed, modernity has shifted the church from an integrated faith to a fragmented one — from a stance under authority to a stance of preferences, from a spiritual sense of reality to a purely secular perspective. We have become conformed rather than transformed. Romans 12:2 puts it plainly: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect."
Attempts to Replace Marriage Are Attempts to Replace God
Every attempt to replace marriage is, at root, an attempt to replace God — to remove the Creator so we can enthrone ourselves, or our government, in His place. This disorder comes at us from many directions and in many disguises. Do you recognize it when it arrives? Are we willing prey, letting our marriages fall victim to this power play — quietly allowing the slow degradation of our marriages, our relationships, our culture — failing to notice the sin crouching at the door?
The passage of no-fault divorce law in 1970 set off a breakdown of the family that has compounded ever since. We now have a majority of adults who grew up without a stable example of marriage to follow, and the moral guideposts that once preserved the integrity of family life — along with any shared sense of what God intended family to be — have been stripped away. God's law stands above the laws of government, and the moment that hierarchy gets reversed, we need to be on guard, holding fast to God's law rather than the law of no-fault divorce.
II. Your Marriage Must Fight Back
Fighting back means leaning into the power of truth and righteousness — recognizing that marriage has the power both to restrain evil and restore good, in your own home and in society at large. So what can you actually do, right now? Start by recognizing your need for God's help and presence, and that He is always in the business of redemption. Wherever you find yourself, His redeeming power is available — not only over your circumstances, but over the way you think about and approach them.
From there, become discerning. Think hard about the forces, within you and outside of you, that are shaping your relationship's dynamics. This takes the same kind of focused attention you'd bring to fixing a stubborn lawnmower: if you don't know how the mechanical nuts and bolts in front of you come apart, you go to the owner's manual. Fixing relational problems works the same way — you go to the Owner's Manual.
And then comes the deeper question: who owns you? That's the one you ultimately answer to. Once that's clear, you understand why the opponents of God are so eager to take over His rightful place in your life. They want to own you — to strip away your identity, the truth that you are a cherished creation of God, and that your marriage and family are the fruit of His continuing love. The easiest way to take over someone's mind is to create confusion, and the Bible tells us plainly that God is not the author of confusion. So it's worth asking: who is?
Marriage Is the Mainstay of Civilization
Marriage deserves to be valued as the golden standard it is. Happiness and personal fulfillment are wonderful things, but they're fruits of a higher pursuit, not ends in themselves. We see the narcissistic version of this in how many couples live together before marriage, prioritizing career, social networking, homeownership, and financial security over commitment itself — chasing the benefits of marriage without the commitment that anchors it. But it's a lie that men don't need women, or women don't need men, simply because a person can pay someone to cook their meals or clean their house. Convenience isn't companionship, and it was never meant to substitute for it.
Your Marriage Is Bigger Than You
Your marriage isn't just yours. It's a cornerstone of civilization, resting on a foundation that stretches back to time immemorial. Don't accept the untruths being thrown at it. If you've convinced yourself that you don't need a spouse — that all you really need is money — you've quietly stopped looking at God as your provider and the authoritative source of your decisions. Recognize instead that right living brings easy living, and refuse to compromise with the lies that say otherwise.
Without real transformation, it's hard to think in alignment with truth or push back against erroneous beliefs. We might make some tactical progress on our own, but that effort won't fundamentally change us. It's bringing our beliefs and presuppositions into alignment with God's Word that lets us see reality as He made it, rather than as we've made it or presumed it to be. Left to ourselves, we get comfortable with conformity to the world — we all want to fit in — and because of that pull, we tend to excuse our own choices, especially when the people around us are making the same ones.
III. Your Marriage Will Have No Lack
There is no lack when you return to the true source of your marriage's well-being. That starts with continually raising your standards to meet God's, since no standard set outside of His is ever equal to it. Anything less shouldn't be treated as a standard at all.
This drift toward conformity hasn't stayed confined to the secular world — it's reached into the church itself. A church that's become more deeply embedded in the surrounding culture risks being unwittingly transformed by that culture, rather than transformed by the gospel it's meant to proclaim. As R. C. Sproul put it, the church today often tries to speak the language of God from within the framework of secular culture, and because of the sheer volume of secular beliefs and practices we're bombarded with, both languages end up tangled together in our heads — confused, like the Tower of Babel. Getting sanctified means shedding that godless language and culture, and relearning the language of God.
God's Word vs. Our Experience
Most people are driven by their own experience or by situational ethics rather than fixed truth. Since Satan can't out-argue the language of God, his strategy is to marginalize God's Word through two especially susceptible areas: our emotions and our personal experience. In our day, those two gauges have been elevated above everything else as the final measure of right and wrong. Satan's play is to convince us that God's revealed will and its remedies simply aren't equal to the weight of our circumstances — so we set the Word of God aside and take refuge instead in the collective reasoning of fallen people.
The data tells a different story than our fears do. According to the American Values Institute, the happiness quotient within marriage tends to improve over time — their research found that roughly two-thirds of people in unhappy marriages report being happy again within five years, simply by staying married rather than divorcing. Children raised in married, two-parent households show two to three times more positive life outcomes than those who aren't.
Glenn Stanton, writing as a fact-checker for the Gospel Coalition, put it this way: what seems intuitive turns out to be true. Couples who consistently practice serious religious behaviors and attitudes — attending church nearly every week, reading Scripture and spiritual materials regularly, praying privately and together, and generally taking their faith seriously (not perfectly, but seriously) — experience significantly lower divorce rates than casual church members, the general public, or unbelievers. Other sociologists studying family and religion have found a similar divide in marital stability between those who take their faith seriously and those who don't.
Of course, there will always be couples with happy marriages who give no credit to scriptural principles at all. But to whatever extent their marriages succeed, those same principles are quietly at work, whether they're aware of it or not — which is why it's simply better to pursue a biblical marriage with knowledge and purpose rather than by accident.
God doesn't want a moral people who take all the credit for their own goodness. He draws us away from religion — a checklist of things to do to earn salvation or favor — and toward relationship: what He has already done to resolve our need for salvation in the first place. Out of that relationship comes an interactive walk with God, and from that foundation, relying on the instruction manual He's given us in His Word, we can give God His rightful place in our lives. Seen through that lens, His blessings and promises for our marriages and families come into full view. "His banner over me is love," says the Song of Songs (2:4).
Those who model a harmonious, committed marriage inspire others to pursue the same. Even those coming out of broken marriages and families still have the opportunity to shine. With the resources God has made available to us, we can play a meaningful role in changing our own marriages, and the world around us along with them. God holds the whole world in His hands, intimately aware of and lovingly concerned with all our joys, struggles, and aspirations — imperfections included. So remember this: you don't have to be perfect to have a perfect marriage. You don't have to be conflict-free to have a marriage that sings.
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