Issue 7 - What is Marriage For?
Biblical Understanding
What is the design and purpose of marriage?
In a future issue, I’m planning to address a recent controversy regarding Christians and gay weddings. But in drafting that newsletter, it occurred to me that before we can discuss how Christians should think about issues like attending gay weddings, it is important to understand what the design and purpose of marriage even are (something I admit I knew little about until recently). Entire books have been written about the design and purpose of marriage, but here are some basic elements I came across reading about this topic last summer.
In an essay for The Gospel Coalition (TGC), scholar Christopher Ash notes that marriage was given by God (that is, it is not a human construct) and that it predates the fall. (For those interested, his longer, academic essay makes some really interesting expansions on the points he summarizes for TGC - particularly about the Bible’s view on relational loneliness).
He describes the Biblical design of marriage as a “God-given, voluntary, publicly declared union of a sexual nature, between one man and one woman from different families.” (While polygamy existed in the Bible, it is never affirmed. Genesis 2:24 describes marriage as between one man and one woman and Jesus affirms that definition in Matthew 19:4-6).
He describes the purpose of marriage as enabling “service of God in his world.” This is based directly on the narrative in Genesis 2. In verse 15, God gives the man a job to do. In verse 18, God says “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make a helper fit for him.” (The word translated “helper” is also applied to God elsewhere in the Old Testament, and does not signify that the woman is simply the sidekick). The author notes that as stated in the text, “the problem with the man’s aloneness is not a relational loneliness but rather there is too great a task to be achieved” alone. The purpose of the first marriage, before the fall, was to facilitate the fulfillment of a task that God had granted, that was too great to be accomplished alone.
From this flow three purposes of marriage that are nested within the overarching theme of service to God in his world.
Procreation - In Genesis 1:26-28 the creation of mankind to hold dominion over the world is directly linked to the creation of both male and female, and the blessing to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over” it. By creating and raising children in “the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4) those children “become - in the language of Genesis 2 - fellow gardeners under God to care for his world.” One of the ways marriage fulfills the cultural mandate is by creating new image-bearers to carry out the mandate. (The author acknowledges that marriage can exist without children, but that doesn’t negate procreation as a primary function of marriage).
Intimacy - The Bible uses the metaphor of marriage in the Old Testament to describe God’s covenant relationship with Israel (God as groom, Israel as bride) and in the New Testament to describe Christ’s relationship to the church (Christ as groom, Church as bride). The covenant commitment and level of intimacy unique to marriage are meant to serve as a reflection of the “intimacy that the whole church of Christ will enjoy with Christ her bridegroom” when we are united with him.
Social order - Fire is something powerful that serves a great purpose in its right place, but becomes destructive when released outside of its bounds. Similarly, sexual desire outside of its bounds leads to chaos. Marriage channels sexual intimacy in a way that addresses the first two purposes, while maintaining a social order that breaks down if desire is left unchecked.
I would add to this a fourth purpose, which is sanctification. John Piper provides a great summary of Biblical directives towards husbands and wives. What is clear is that sacrificial submission to a husband, and sacrificial love towards a wife, serve to make us more like Jesus (reflecting on the fruits of the Spirit, I like to think I’ve developed love and joy in my wife - but I’m certain that I’ve strengthened her patience and self control!) And ideally, the encouragement and wisdom of our spouse also helps to propel us in our Christian walk. What distinguishes this purpose from the first three is that it is not intrinsic to marriage before the fall (while the directives would presumably still exist without the fall, they wouldn’t serve the purpose of developing our character away from our sinful nature). But I think this is still a timeless, Biblical purpose of marriage, which is not the case for other purposes of marriage in the Bible (for example, Christians don’t practice Old Testament laws about marrying our dead brother’s wife).
What is notably absent from this list is our modern society’s notion that the purpose of marriage is to make the husband and wife happy and fulfilled. With that said, while that is not the primary purpose of marriage, the Bible paints an ideal of marriage delivering those things (at least in seasons). Proverbs 5 blesses men to “rejoice” in their wife, and be “intoxicated” by her love. The Song of Solomon paints a picture of marital delight that is anything but a white-knuckled “stay together for the kids” commitment. In fact, the marriage metaphor described in (2) above depends not just on the level of commitment (though sometimes it is reduced to that, as in the book of Hosea), but also the level of intimacy - Paul likened the mystery of the unity of Christ and his Church to the one-flesh relationship between husband and wife. That one-flesh intimacy is not just a commitment to remain together.
The Desiring God blog provides a beautiful reflection on marital oneness, which notes the following:
Marital oneness is the oneness of one body. God created Eve from Adam’s own body.
“When Adam sees Eve, he says, ‘Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’ (Genesis 2:23). And so, the Scriptures say, it is for this reason that ‘a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (Genesis 2:23–24; Ephesians 5:31). Because they are one flesh, they shall become one flesh.”
It is because of this one-flesh union that “Paul says in Ephesians 5:28 [that] to love your spouse is to love yourself.”
All of this to say that, if you seek to fulfill the purposes God laid out for marriage, you are more likely to reap the benefits that many seek in marriage than if you made those benefits your primary goal. Or, as Jesus promised in Matthew 6:33 “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”