We had the incredible privilege last weekend of enduring the traumatic experience of hosting our daughter’s wedding. Until one actually does such a thing, you have no idea the insanity of such an undertaking, but the blessings and memories among the all the craziness are priceless. You get to spend time with family and friends you rarely see, or haven’t seen for a very long time, and giving your only daughter away to an incredible young man before them is worthy of all the tears. Not to mention that everyone together gets to witness one of the most profound mysteries of human existence: the marriage of one man and one women “till death us do part.”
I can’t help but connecting everything in life with the great grand narrative of God’s redemptive history of his people in Christ, and marriage is central to that narrative throughout Scripture. Why would that be? In our day, marriage has come to be accepted as merely a romantic attachment of two individuals, and many even think that the sex of those individuals is irrelevant to the attachment. But the sex of the individuals is paramount because only two individuals of the opposite sex can create new life, and that is the only reason marriage ever came into existence. While children are just one part of the biblical rationale for marriage, it is profoundly significant. Marriage ties it’s adherents to the future, and makes civilization possible. George Gilder argues this powerfully in his seminal work, Men and Marriage. But there is something much more spiritually, and eternally, profound in marriage. The institution was initiated by God in Genesis 2:
21 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
There are so many profound insights to be gleaned from this passage. As in all of Scripture it doesn’t stand alone, but is part of the flow of redemptive history which all hangs together in Christ. Jesus told us at the end of Luke’s gospel that the entire Old Testament is about him, and thus about God’s redemption of his people in him. Marriage is the great spiritual metaphor for Christ and his bride, his people, the Church.
Marriage has always been honored as an exclusive commitment among God’s people because Yahweh ordained it at the dawn of creation, and because sexual fidelity was a significant contrast between the Hebrews and the surrounding heathen cultures. It was one of the many aspects of them being set apart as holy by their God, the Creator of all things. And because he was the Creator, he made all things with a certain end in mind, the true flourishing of his creation. That’s why sex is meant for one man and one woman for life in the context of holy matrimony that the two may become one flesh. But more important than the practical flourishing, is the ultimate eschatological flourishing of God’s people. When we attend a wedding, the joy of the bride and groom, their families and friends, is meant to point us to the ultimate feast, the “wedding supper of the Lamb,” where “Christ’s bride has made herself ready.”
The context for human marriage and the ultimate eternal marriage of God and his people, is covenant, the most profound and ignored concept in all of Scripture. Covenant was a legal concept of commitment in the ancient world, where the more powerful of the parties would agree with the weaker one on certain terms that would be met, or there would be consequences. The most shocking example of this in the Bible is Yahweh’s covenant commitment to Abram in Genesis 15, where God begins the covenant relationship with his people to fulfill the promise he made to Adam and Eve, that the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head. The covenant marriage relationship is a picture of this covenant commitment of God to save his people ultimately and forever. And this is why the man carries more of the burden of the marriage covenant promise as the head of his household and family. We find the most direct description of this dynamic in Ephesian 5 where Paul says of the whole marriage dynamic:
32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
We were privileged last weekend to see the beginning of this mystery unfold in the lives of the new Mr. And Mrs. Paul Micah Lewis.
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