The culture may have forgotten the meaning of marriage, but Christian families don’t have to follow suit.
So says author and theologian Sam Allberry, whose new children’s book, God’s Signpost, helps parents teach their youngsters the biblical definition of marriage. With colorful illustrations, the 32-page book follows two siblings, Ethan and Lila, as they attend their grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. The two kids learn that marriage is a “signpost” pointing to God’s love.
“I've been speaking and writing about issues of human sexuality for some years now, and it was becoming more and more apparent to me – talking with lots of parents – that it's good to start to build early on a positive foundation of what marriage means and points to,” Allberry told Christian Headlines. “And so that's the aim of the book is to give kids a positive understanding of what marriage is meant to be a picture of – hopefully so that as they then grow up and encounter various biblical prohibitions against different forms of intimacy and other things, they would have a positive framework to put those prohibitions into.”
Although the book does not mention hot-button issues – same-sex marriage, among them – it is nevertheless intended to help parents frame the issue from a biblical perspective, Allberry said.
“There are a lot of secular books targeting that age group, pushing very much a pro-LGBTQ agenda,” Allberry said. “And so it struck me – we need more Christian resources aimed at young children, giving them a healthy biblical understanding of some of these things.”
The societal debate over marriage’s meaning, Allberry added, preceded the legalization of same-sex marriage.
"We have same-sex marriages now – that's commonplace,” he said. “But actually, even before that change in the definition of marriage was a prior change where marriage stopped being about promises and was simply a kind of romantic contract that is flexible. … The whole premise of this book is that marriage is based on promises.”
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Fly View Productions
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
