Marriage

Marriage begins in a garden, not a law code. When God made the first man, he said it was not good for him to be alone, and he built a wife for him from his own side (Genesis 2:18-22). Adam's response was joy — this one, at last, was like him, part of him. The passage that follows became the pattern for every marriage after: a man leaves his father and mother, joins himself to his wife, and the two become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).

One flesh is not a metaphor for feelings. It described a real, God-made union — two people bound together as if they were one body, undoing the aloneness the very first chapter of the Bible calls not good. Marriage was there before sin entered the world. It is part of the original design, not a fallback plan.

Scripture never hides how hard marriage can be. Jacob loved one wife and was tricked into another (Genesis 29:21-30). Hosea married a woman who broke her vows, and God used that marriage to picture how Israel had broken its vows to him (Hosea 1:2-3). Proverbs weighs both sides plainly, warning of a quarrelsome wife in one place and praising a good one as a gift from the Lord in another (Proverbs 21:9; 18:22). The Bible is honest about marriage rather than sentimental about it.

Even so, one whole book of the Bible is a love song. The Song of Solomon lingers over the delight two people can take in each other, without embarrassment, as something God made and blessed. Later readers have also heard in it an echo of a larger love — the love between God and his people.

That echo becomes explicit in the prophets. God speaks of himself as a husband to Israel, wounded by her unfaithfulness but still pursuing her (Isaiah 54:5; Jeremiah 3:14). Marriage, in other words, was never only about two people. From early on it was also a picture — the closest human relationship standing in for the closest thing to it, the bond between God and his own.

Jesus deepens rather than loosens that picture. Asked about marriage, he goes back past the law of Moses to the beginning, grounding it in Genesis and forbidding anyone from tearing apart what God has joined (Matthew 19:4-6). His first recorded miracle takes place at a wedding, where he keeps the celebration going rather than let it run dry (John 2:1-11) — a small but telling sign of how he regards the occasion.

Paul takes the picture furthest of all. Writing to husbands and wives, he tells husbands to love their wives the way Christ loved the church and gave himself for her (Ephesians 5:25). Then he goes further still, applying the one-flesh language of Genesis directly to Christ and his people, calling it a great mystery (Ephesians 5:31-32).

By the end of the Bible the picture has become the main event. The last book does not close with an ordinary ending but with a wedding, the marriage of the Lamb to his bride at last made ready (Revelation 19:6-9). Every earthly marriage, at its best and even in its struggles, has been pointing toward this the whole time: the day Christ is joined to his people forever, and the two, at last, become one.