Marriage Pictures Christ and the Church
God joins a husband and wife in covenant and gives their marriage a place in his mission, so that their life together shows the world how Christ loves his church.
God Does the Joining
Marriage begins with God, who joins a husband and wife and remains present to the covenant they make. Preaching on Malachi 2, Chris put it this way: “it's God himself who brings the man and a woman into this marriage covenant. It's the very Spirit of God himself who's present and who does the joining. It's not a pastor, it's not a priest, it's not a judge, it's not a marriage license, it's not a husband or a wife, it's not a mom or a dad.”[6] Every couple who has stood at an altar made their promises in the presence of the One who sealed them, which is why those promises carry the weight they do.
When the Pharisees came to test Jesus on divorce, he reached behind Moses to the garden: “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mark 10:6–9). John Piper draws out what follows from those words, writing that “it is God who in each marriage ordains and performs a uniting called one flesh. Man does not create this. God does, and it is not in man's power to destroy.”[6]
A Covenant Kept in God's Sight
Most people meet marriage through a frame the culture supplies, in which a man and a woman search for the right match and then build on whatever chemistry they find. The frame has an appeal, since nobody wants to spend fifty years beside someone who grates on him, and it borrows something good from Genesis, where Adam delights in Eve the moment he sees her. Genesis 2 places that delight inside God's design, though, because the woman Adam recognized was the one God had built from his side and brought to him. Chris drew from the passage a fuller account of what compatibility means: “It's intimacy that can only be fostered in the confines of marriage. Authentic compatibility happens when a husband and wife unconditionally love each other.”[3]
A covenant made before God also makes God its witness. “God's presence at all marriages means that he will hold each party accountable to him for the keeping of these vows. He places the whole weight of divine presence in support of the vows and in judgment on any who threaten or break them.”[3] Malachi says the LORD stood as witness between a man and the wife of his youth (Malachi 2:14), so that faithlessness toward her is faithlessness committed in God's sight against a union his Spirit sealed.[6] Chris has said that marriage was “neither designed nor created to end in a breaking of that covenant.”[6]
Why Paul Calls Marriage a Mystery
Paul spends ten verses of Ephesians 5 on how husbands and wives should love one another and then names what the whole arrangement has been pointing toward: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). He reaches the household only after chapters on election and redemption, and on a church through which God displays his wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:10), so that marriage arrives in the letter as part of that same work. Chris said it to the church in March of this year: “The purpose of your marriage is not domestic harmony. It is not relational satisfaction. It is the mission of God in the world.”[1] In the same sermon he placed marriage beside the church itself, calling it “just one more tool like the local church that God has created to advance his mission into the world.”[1]
When two believers who share that mission turn on each other, the blows land on one body, and preaching on Ephesians 2 Chris compared it to “a hand beating a foot or something. It's just nuts.”[2] A husband and wife who remember whose body they belong to will still quarrel, though they quarrel as fellow members of Christ's household, with more at stake between them than who wins the argument.
Headship and Submission in a Fallen Household
Marriage has an authority structure, and Chris roots it in God himself: “Marriage is an institution created by God. Just like any institution that God has created, it has an authority structure… because He's patterning them off of His order within the Godhead.”[5][7] The claim meets resistance in almost any room, some of it bred by a culture suspicious of every hierarchy and some of it earned by husbands who have used the word headship as a club.
Chris names the wife's calling at its full size: “It's really hard, wives, to submit to your husbands because the word submit means submit in a very extensive way. It doesn't mean pretend submission. It doesn't mean I'll let you pick the restaurant. It means to walk with your husband in the calling he's received from God. It means to do that first. It means to pursue that first.”[5][7] The same preaching holds the husband to a leadership that draws his wife in, and in a sermon on the local church Chris described a healthy marriage in which “a husband's leadership and authority shouldn't create begrudging submission from a wife. Her counsel is sought. She should be quick and free to give her input.”[8]
Chris also warns that every institution with authority “will sooner or later be hijacked by sinful people who want to abuse that authority structure.”[5][7] A husband who uses his headship to dominate has turned against the pattern Paul sets before him, which is Christ giving himself up for the church (Ephesians 5:25), and he will answer for it to the God who witnessed his vows.
God's Design for the Marriage Bed
God made sex for marriage from the beginning and formed the bodies of male and female to fit each other. Preaching on Genesis 2, Chris traced the design from character to body: “From the man's physical strength and protective impulses to the woman's gentleness and nurturing instincts… male and female complement one another. The man initiates, the woman receives. Their bodies model this. They literally fit together in physical intimacy in a way that's meant to bring them face to face, a picture of their emotional and spiritual intimacy.”[3]
Desire for that intimacy belongs to the gift. Chris has told the church that “longing for a healthy and exciting sex life in marriage is not wrong. It's a good thing. God wants you to experience that. He created the gift for you.”[3] Preaching from the Song of Songs, he went further, saying that God “literally anatomically designed those parts of our body to be highly sensitive and capable of immense gratification… It brings God pleasure and glory to see us embracing his gift with grateful, joyful hearts.”[4]
The gift depends on the life that surrounds it. “Sexual health in marriage comes from relational and spiritual health, not vice versa… Sexual health is the wellspring that comes from them, not the other way around.”[3] A couple who try to build closeness on the strength of their sex life have laid the foundation upside down, and the trouble they find in the bedroom usually has its source in the hours they spend outside it. Chris adds that “there is something mysterious about the way a husband and wife's sexual intimacy mirror the relational intimacy of the Godhead. Not in a physical way, but in a spiritual and emotional way.”[4]
The boundary around the gift belongs to its design. “Sexuality only flourishes, it only brings blessing when it's practiced between one man and one woman who've covenanted together, who've pledged one another their undying love and faithfulness.”[3] Exposure of body and heart at that depth is “a recipe for relational disaster and for heartbreak, unless it occurs in a context of absolute trust,”[3] and Chris has said as much without softening it: “Sex is broken. Sex is dangerous. Sex is painful when it happens outside the context of covenant marriage between one man and one woman.”[3]
How a Marriage Keeps Its Covenant
A marriage holds to its covenant as husband and wife keep looking at the love it was made to picture. Preaching on Malachi 2, Chris pointed the church past technique to the gospel: “You want to know how to guard your marriage, how to keep covenant? Look at how Christ loves the church. We look at how Christ loves the church. We look at the gospel and we see Christ pursuing the church.”[6]
Christ went after a bride with nothing to commend her and took her faithlessness onto himself at the cross, so that he could present her to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle (Ephesians 5:25–27). A Christian husband and wife stand inside that finished work together, forgiven by one Lord and joined by his Spirit, and their marriage keeps pointing past itself to the Bridegroom who has already loved his church to the end.[1][6]