Marriage is a universal idea.  It is Chinese, Korean, Nigerian, Mexican, European, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and secular all at once.  It is as current as this minute and as ancient as Adam.  It has existed in every culture throughout history.  Although different cultures have emphasized different aspects of marriage, the essence has remained much the same.  The difference between ancient Vietnamese marriage and modern Christian marriage is more like the difference between a Model T and a Honda than between a car and a boat. 

In Scripture, marriage goes back to the original creation.  God created marriage from the beginning; we did not invent it later.   Marriage is part of the fabric of society . . . by design.  It is foundational to the flourishing of the human race . . . by design.  It is the central construct for male/female relations . . . by design.

We must get into our heads the idea that God designed marriage . . . and that we did not.  We must, thus, look to God for what marriage is and for how marriage is to function.  This requires humility, for sometimes God says things we do not like or understand.  When God tells us the purpose of marriage, He says that He created it to be a beautiful union — a living, breathing, portrait of Christ and the Church.  But we have lost that portrait, and in doing so, we don’t know what marriage is.  The previous blog discussed this purpose of marriage; today we will begin to discuss its definition.  But before we define what marriage is, we probably should say what marriage is not.

Marriage Is Not . . .

Marriage is not built on romantic feelings.  By all means, marriage should contain romantic feelings, but it is so much more.  Much of Western culture misconstrues marriage by making emotional feelings the foundation for marriage.  Think of Romeo and Juliet, Enchanted, The Princess Bride, or the latest romantic comedy.  Boy likes girl, girl likes boy.  They “fall in love.”  They experience setbacks or their love develops, and marriage is the final step.  Western culture builds marriage on love, and who wants to argue against love?  I certainly don’t. 

But love has a thousand meanings, and when Western culture builds marriage on love, that love, more often than not, is a glorification of romantic feelings.  It may be true that romantic feelings were the initial spark that got the girl interested in the guy, but in the long run, “Romeo, O Romeo” cannot sustain a marriage.  A strong marriage can and should sustain romantic feelings, but romantic feelings cannot be the fuel for the marriage.  Sooner or later such marriages run out of gas.  If marriage is a house, romance is the furnace, but it is not the foundation. 

The irony of romance is that the marriages with the best romance are not the ones built upon romance.  Romance cannot bear that weight.  It needs a strong foundation somewhere else in order to flourish.  When marriages focus on commitment, sacrifice, and honoring the other person, romance flourishes.  That’s a great environment for romance.  But when romance is made to be the end all, it withers because ultimately romance was never meant to be the end all. 

In the West, putting this weight on romance poses a great problem for marriage.  One of the most common reasons people give for divorce is “We just don’t love each other any more.”  What the couple means is that they “lost that lovin’ feeling.”  In other words, they ran out of gas.  They portray their situation with the word “love,” but I would question whether they ever loved one another in the first place.  One of the characteristics of Biblical love is that it lasts (I Cor 13:13).

Marriage is not built on sex.  This misunderstanding is a cousin to the first.  Especially in the hypersexualized world of the West (though much of the rest of the world is moving in this direction, too), sex is often the ultimate pleasure in life.  And this is precisely the problem.   We make sex ultimate and the marriage secondary.  We act as if marriage exists to serve sex and not the other way round.  This view of marriage has the master and the servant reversed. 

God intended sex to be a physical expression of two becoming one.  It expresses the deeper reality of marriage, which is why it is reserved for marriage.  Marriage can and should foster a vibrant sex life, but sex cannot foster a vibrant marriage.  Like romance, that is too great a load for it to bear. 

Marriage is not primarily a social institution.  It is not just a place to raise children, though good marriages do provide the healthiest place in society for raising children.  It is not primarily a stabilizing force for society, though good marriages bring society more depth of stability than perhaps any other institution on earth.  Marriage clearly has societal benefits, but when people enter marriage solely for social reasons, they miss the point. 

You say, “How do people enter marriage just for social reasons?” Lots of ways. Some may arrange marriages for the purpose of family connections.  Kings did this for millennia; Hindus often do it for caste reasons.  Sometimes people marry to move up in society or to get a better situation.  Sometimes people marry because they feel societal pressure to do so. “You’re not married yet?” Sometimes a social marriage involves a husband and wife who lost their romantic feelings and now need something else to hold the marriage together.  The kids are the best excuse they have, so they turn their marriage into a mere social institution.  Then the kids grow up and leave.  At that point, the marriage either crumbles or finds another social reason to exist — financial stability or looking respectable in society. 

Most people recognize the emptiness of building a marriage on social benefits.  And virtually everyone has seen marriages in which the husband and wife were merely two people living under the same roof instead of a husband and wife.   When marriage becomes a mere social convention, the two never live as one.  They may look on the outside as if they are living as one, but on the inside the marriage is hollow.  It has no intimacy.  It has no commitment to the other person.  It may have a commitment to raising the kids or to maintaining an appearance of respectability, but the husband and wife are not committed to each other. 

God designed marriage to be a great blessing for men, women and society, but the essence of marriage is not social. 

It is also not the place to find fulfillment.  This is crucial, for many people think that if they can’t marry they will never be fulfilled.  They tie happiness to marriage.  They then marry and find that marriage can’t fill the shoes they have created for it.  I understand the desire to marry.  It is natural and good.  I had the desire when I was single; but to think, “if only I marry, then I will be happy” is to put immense pressure on the marriage, pressure that marriage ultimately cannot handle. 

This fact means that many people need to rethink their view of marriage.  If you are single, you have criteria about who you will date.  You know, nice looking, nonsmoker, interested in outdoors — these are the kinds of things people put on those dating websites.  Well, when I was single, I had criteria as well, and at the top of my list was “content in Christ.”  That’s not exactly the kind of thing you can put on a dating website, but that was nonnegotiable for me.  I was looking for contentment in a girl.  I knew that I could never make a woman content.  I’m a sinner.  And so I wanted a girl who didn’t need me to be content.  If I married someone who needed me to be content, then I would just be playing with a beehive. 

Let’s face it.  If you are not happy single, no spouse will make you happy later.  And if the guy or girl you like is not happy single, you will not make him or her happy later.  I wish I could shout that across the globe because too many people try to make marriage their fulfillment, and I’ve never seen it work.

God made us ultimately for Himself, not for a spouse.  The best marriages are the ones in which the husband and wife find their fulfillment in Christ and not in each other. 

Marriage is not about you.  This is related to the previous misunderstanding.  Too many people marry with a focus on themselves.  It is not wrong to consider what benefits a guy or girl may bring you, but it is toxic to make you the focus.  God may bring you great blessing through marriage, but the blessing is never the main point.  When the whole point of marriage becomes “what can I get out of it,” you become a beast.  You demand that your spouse meet your needs instead of trying to meet his or her needs.  In marriage, God calls a man and woman to die to self.  He tells the man to sacrifice for his wife as Christ died for the church, and He tells the wife to submit to her husband.  This is absolutely not a self-focused endeavor. 

Many marriages decay or explode because one spouse or both enter it with a focus on meeting their own needs.  They then find that their spouse does not meet their needs and that, uh oh, I have to give in to him?  Or I have to sacrifice my time for her?  Yes you do.  And if you do, you will find that you will improve your marriage if only because you begin to take the focus off yourself. 

So marriage should not be built on romance or sex.  It is not merely a social institution, nor is it the place to find ultimate fulfillment nor is it about meeting your needs.

What then is it?  That’s for the next blog. 

Praise you, Father, for the marriage you have given me. It is a wondrous gift from your hand, a portrait of an even more wondrous gift from your hand.

Everybody knows what marriage is, right? After all, most people marry at some point; and even if they don’t, they see marriages everywhere they look. In fact, the odds are that they have seen at least one marriage up close, for most people still have lived in a home with married parents.  We know marriage.

Or do we? 

For all of our familiarity with marriage, most people do not seem to have any inkling of what it really is.  Just look at the marriages.  Marital dysfunction and divorce are rampant, and I would argue that part of the reason so many marriages are so bad is that people don’t understand what marriage is.

And this ignorance is not limited to the rank and file.  Most researchers, psychologists, marriage counselors, sociologists, and therapists likewise don’t know what marriage is, for most of these “experts” completely ignore what Scripture says about marriage.  To them, marriage is an entirely earthly affair.  It is not rooted in God; it does not reveal anything about God; it participants do not answer to God; indeed, it has nothing to do with God.  They rip God out of marriage and then talk as if they understand it.  In other words, when it comes to marriage, the blind are leading the blind.

If we want to recover marriage, I’m afraid we need to put God back into it.  We need to know why He made it, how He structured it, and what He has to say about it.

So let’s begin. 

Marriage is God’s idea.  He invented it and He likes it.  A lot.  Marriage is a holy union that unholy people get to participate in.  Sometimes we like to think that marriage is an arrangement designed to meet human needs, but I’m not convinced that is true.  I wonder rather if human needs were designed to fit marriage.  After all, marriage is a picture of Christ and the church, and we in Christ are His Bride.  Through faith all Christians enter into a marriage — the marriage they were made for.

This reality is why marriage is so holy.  It reflects the very purpose for which you were made.  It is not itself that purpose.  It merely reflects it.  Thus, a single woman can be completely fulfilled without a husband because she enjoys a greater Husband.  And a married woman can experience in marriage an earthly taste of heaven because that is what marriage was designed to be.  Our little marriages were meant to point us to a much greater one. 

When you begin to see this truth about marriage, you begin to see a template for marriage, and you also see how far we have fallen.  Anything that clouds the picture of Christ and the church defiles marriage.  An abusive husband defiles the picture of Christ; a self-asserting wife ruins the picture of the church; divorce destroys the picture outright.  God meant marriage to be a wondrous blessing, but we have too often turned it into a hell. 

We need to restore marriage to its original purpose, but we can’t if we deny that purpose outright.  This world wants to improve marriages by improving communication skills or implementing conflict resolution strategies or discouraging behaviors that bring financial strain.  All of these things are good, but they go only so deep.  Marriage is Christ and the church, not just two people communicating well. 

When a husband grabs hold of a good conflict resolution strategy, he may implement it, and it may help; but it is merely a tool he uses, and it touches his heart as a hammer does.  But when that same husband begins to see that he represents Christ within a holy union, that vision touches his heart.  He wants to love his wife as Christ would.  He wants the commitment to his bride that Christ has toward His.  That husband will fail to show the perfect love of Christ, but he will also have that perfect love pulling him ever onward.  He changes from the inside. 

And when a wife sees that she represents the church within a holy union, she forms a desire to honor her husband, to remain with him no matter the cost, and to respect his leadership.  She will fail to do these things perfectly, but she will have Christ pulling her ever onward.  She changes from the inside.

When marriages fail, they fail from the inside. They do not fail mainly from inadequate relational skills or strategies but from a lack of love and commitment.  Good skills and strategies cannot survive a lack of love and commitment, but Christlike love and commitment toward the other will endure poor skills and strategies.  Bringing marriage back to Christ brings it to its origin and allows us to build it on a foundation that will last. 

Marriage is much more than we think.