What is a Christian Marriage?

What is a Christian marriage?  Is it fundamentally different from marriage between non-Christians? We hear words related to marriage, such as headship, submission, and love.  What do these terms mean?  Are these cultural relics of the 1st century, or are they vital for our understanding and practice of marriage today?

As noted about previous blog posts, these thoughts will be my opinion based on my study of scripture, 15 years as a pastor doing marital counseling, and as a husband successfully married for 25 years.  Every Monday, for several weeks, I will be writing on marriage, but with the focus being on Christian marriages.  Yet, the principles can be applicable to non-believers as well.  

Throughout a study of God’s Word, you can see a strategy for relationships; Relationships between men and women, parents and children, but most importantly, between God and people. 

Marriage is seen as a good idea because it is God’s idea.  He created it, He designed it, He established it, and defined its parameters.  Marriage is not a human concept.  Mankind did not one day dream up marriage somewhere along the line as a convenient way of handling relationships and responsibilities between men and women, or dealing with childbearing and parenting issues.  Marriage is of divine origin.  God Himself instituted and ordained marriage at the very beginning of human history.

The second chapter of Genesis describes how God, taking a rib from the side of the man He had already created, fashioned from it a woman to be a “suitable helper” for the man.  Then God brought the man and the woman together and confirmed their relationship as husband and wife, thereby ordaining the institution of marriage.  When God created man and woman, He created them to complement each other.  He indicated this when He said, "…It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." (Gen. 2:18-25)

God formed woman to round out man's incompleteness, so that physically, socially, emotionally, intellectually, and even spiritually, male and female would not be rivals, but mates.

Let me stop at this point to clarify something.  The Bible describes an “ideal state” of marriage as God originally designed it.  And as many of you are aware, the “ideal” became “broken.”  In the beginning, Adam and Eve enjoyed a relationship characterized by peace and harmony, along with continual, unbroken fellowship with their Creator.  

And then beginning in the third chapter of Genesis, we see a starkly different picture.  Because of their disobedience, sin had shattered the harmony of the human couple’s relationship with each other, and destroyed their fellowship with God.  Inside the garden they share the same spirit, the Spirit of God; outside the garden the presence of God has departed and they are self-serving and strangers to each other.  Inside the garden they are united in spirit and in flesh; outside the garden all they have is a broken family.

Since God is the one who instituted marriage, He alone has the authority to determine its standards and set its rules.  Another important truth about marriage is that God established it as an essential element of human society.  While the family is the basic foundation of any healthy society, marriage is the foundation of the family.  A healthy “home” is the key to both a healthy community and a healthy society.  It takes only a few minutes to get married, but building a marriage requires a lifetime.  Building a strong marriage takes time, patience, and hard work.  We will never obtain God’s kind of marriage simply by going along with the crowd, doing what everybody else does.  We have to dig deep into the heart of God to discover His principles. 

The Bible presents marriage as an institution that should be highly respected and esteemed above all other institutions.  Hebrews 13:4 says, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”  “Honorable” in the Greek means, “valuable, costly, honored, esteemed, beloved, and precious.”

Marriage, then, should be valued and esteemed, and held in highest honor at all times, in all things, by all people everywhere. That is God’s design.

To be continued next Monday……

Any comments or questions?  I will get back to you as soon as possible. 

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