Healthy Marriage

As has long been known, being married is a healthy estate.

Can doctors in today's regime encourage this? Not without strident criticism. Can the Church? Yes. On the grounds of evidence such as these researchers accumulated? No, rather because the Bible commends it as the norm for most people. Yet the general consistency with what biblical counseling might at times recommend is illustrative. In his “catalog of risks,” Bernard Cohen, mentioned earlier, found that poor social connections -- living a relatively isolated life -- ranked fourth among the causes of loss of life expectancy, after smoking, alcoholism, and poverty. He estimated a loss of about 3 years of life expectancy for such persons, exceeding suicide, murder, AIDS, drowning, electrocution, natural hazards such as floods and earthquakes, and many other things that we get all worked up about.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers