“I do.“
Have you ever wondered, why marriage? Aside from the obvious scientific biological reason that a male and a female are required to engage in marital sex and produce 2 children for the human race (or any species for that matter) to maintain the population (and I realize that is a controversial statement here in the past 5 minutes of human history, but so be it).
However, it’s also evident that human males and females can physically mate and reproduce and continue the Homo sapiens species without this idea of marriage. Where did this idea of a lifelong promise of exclusive devotion, this covenant, come from? WHY does it exist?
The answer is the typical Sunday school answer – JESUS. This post thinks through why that’s true.
Everything that exists was created by God (Genesis 1, John 1) and was created for the purpose of displaying God and His glory. A HUGE part of him displaying his character is not only in the act of creation, but his providential guiding the overall arc of history: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Renewal. That is “His story” that we call history, and this word ‘redemption’ is a massive part of that. But redeem WHO?
The answer – Christ’s bride. THAT is the basis of marriage, and why God instituted it as a symbol of a far greater reality.
John 17 is an inter-trinitarian glimpse into Christ praying to the Father and is a deep, deep well we can’t plumb the depths of. But we read this:
6 “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
John 17:6, 24 ESV (emphasis added)
If you are a believer, do you realize the weight of what this says? You are a gift, a bride of worshippers, that God the Father has given to His Son. You can think on that sentence for a long, long time. If you get to those ultimate questions like “why do I exist?”, then camp out in John 17.
Marriage is an earthly picture of this huge heavenly reality, one in which God is displaying his glorious character. The apostle Paul says this very interesting thing in Ephesians 5:22-32 where he speaks for 10 verses on marriage – husbands and wives. But he lays it on the line at the very end in vs. 31-32:
31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
Ephesians 5:31-32 ESV (emphasis added)
If you read no further, understand this: marriage between a man and woman, where they leave their parents and cleave to each other as a new nuclear family unit and become one flesh is a picture, a symbol of a heavenly reality of Christ and his church.
NO WONDER it is under attack in the world. If it is God’s picture of Christ and his church, it will be hated and fought and destroyed and redefined and denigrated. The world will fight against it and redefine it as anything BUT what God has said. If you ever wonder why…it’s not like it’s a secret why God’s definition of marriage is under attack. Our Lord told us clearly why. It’s a picture of Himself and His bride, the church.
If you are familiar with your Bible from reading through it all, you’ll know that throughout its entirety it refers to God’s people in marital terms. When in the OT and NT people were unfaithful to God, what did He call them? Adulterers. Ever stop to think about that’s a term related to the definition of marriage? When His people go off in sin, chasing after the world and its false gods, what does God call it? Whoredom. Ezekiel 16 is one of the most R-rated chapters in the Bible, but it’s talking about us in terms of our faithless part in relationship to our God. To a believer, this graphic language will bring tears to our eyes as we see ourselves in it. It’s labeled in the ESV “The LORD’s Faithless Bride” and as we see ourselves in it chasing after the pleasures of the world, it brings strong conviction. If you ever wonder why God created marriage and sex, it is far deeper than merely continuing the species; it is so we understand what He is saying here when we turn our backs on our Creator and lust after other worldly things. It makes us understand what He is saying here at a gut level. I can’t read it without seeing…myself. Don’t you see that our sin has our Lord speaking of himself as the jilted husband? He’s created sex and marriage so we so deeply understand what he is saying in the first 59 verses. But then he shines forth his glory in Ezekiel 16:60-63. The last verse, vs. 63, is full of the weight of the glory of His redemption of His faithless bride. When I read this chapter, I can’t get over that last verse.
But that’s the negative side for us in our sinful state, but there’s also a glorious positive side for believers. Jesus Christ is the bridegroom, the perfect bridegroom preparing for his pure bride. God uses Hebrew weddings and marriage as a picture of the arc of the gospel. Just think about it.
First, the Father of the bridegroom arranges the wedding. Look at John 17:2,6,9,24. Four times in that prayer, Jesus calls the church those the Father has given to Him. The Son’s bride is a gift to the Son from the Father.
Then is the paying of the bride price, the purchase of the bride. That was the mission of Christ’s first advent and the cross as in this verse:
25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
Ephesians 5:25 ESV (emphasis added)
Then there is the betrothal period, where the groom and his bride are separated for a time until the wedding:
2 For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.
2 Corinthians 11:2 ESV
What is Jesus as the bridegroom doing now during this betrothal period, just as bridegrooms did then? He tells us:
2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.
John 14:2-3 ESV
He is preparing for his bride. What is the bride doing during this betrothal time? Waiting and watching expectantly for the return of her groom as we are repeatedly commanded and encouraged to do.
When the groom has prepared for his bride, he returns for the “fetching of the bride”. Christ speaks of this in Matthew 25:1-13 as he uses this to teach them in his parable of the 10 bridesmaids or virgins. In vs. 10 the groom suddenly returns for his bride, and they go in to the marriage feast. This is a picture of the rapture where Jesus suddenly returns and gathers His bride to himself.
16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 ESV
Once the bridegroom has returned and fetched his bride, the marriage feast begins. What we know of this Christ revealed to us in Rev 19:6-9.
After the marriage feast and celebration, in Rev 21:1-2 we see the church, the bride, in the new prepared city of God, the new Jerusalem, coming down to earth “as a bride” for the eternal state.
1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
Revelation 21:1-2 ESV
So all of history is a giving of a bride, the church, to the Son of God by His Father, a paying of the bride price, redeeming them from their sin (the cross), a going away of the groom to prepare for his bride (the ascension), the groom’s sudden return (the rapture), and then the marriage feast in heaven (marriage supper of the Lamb), followed by the eternal state.
It strikes me at this point that this is the real and true “happily ever after…”