The Beauty of Marriage: God’s Reflection in Us
What Paul saw when he looked at an ordinary marriage.
In a church lobby somewhere this Sunday, a woman is standing in front of her husband buttoning his coat. She starts at the bottom and works up, because he cannot manage the buttons anymore and both of them know it. She talks the whole time about somebody's grandchildren so that neither of them has to make it a moment. Decades ago she promised something in a different building, in language neither of them fully understood. She is keeping it now with her hands.
Nobody watching is thinking about theology. Paul would have been, and what he saw in a marriage like that has almost nothing to do with the arguments marriage usually gets dragged into.
The Mystery Paul Named
At the close of his instructions to husbands and wives in Ephesus, Paul quotes the oldest sentence in Scripture about marriage and then says something that would be presumptuous coming from anyone else.
"For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:31-32, NKJV)
He quotes Genesis and then tells you Genesis was never only about Genesis. The one-flesh union was a picture, and the thing it pictured is the union between Christ and the people He died for. Marriage came first in time. It came second in meaning. Every wedding from Eden forward was a rehearsal of something that had not happened yet, and then it happened on a hill outside a city, and the rehearsal finally had a subject.
Love That Has Already Happened
So what is a husband actually being asked for in that chapter? Paul gives one measure, and he does not leave it open to interpretation.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her. (Ephesians 5:25, NKJV)
The standard is a death that already occurred. A husband is not being asked to generate a love strong enough to hold his marriage together. He is being asked to imitate one that already held everything together at the worst possible cost, which is a far heavier assignment and a far lighter burden at the same time.
Does the same order hold for what Paul asks of a wife? It has to, because it is the same chapter and the same logic, and the word he uses is worth putting on the page rather than characterizing from a distance.
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. (Ephesians 5:22-23, NKJV)
The governing clause is the last one. He is the Savior of the body. Whatever Paul is asking here, he is asking it of a woman who has already been rescued, already secured, already loved to the point of death by the very One her husband is supposed to be imitating. The church's answer to Christ has never been anxious compliance; it is the settled trust of people who know how the story already turned out. Nothing in the chapter converts that trust into a price she pays to stay loved.
Every instruction in that chapter runs downhill from something already finished. Paul had said as much before he ever reached the household.
Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. (Ephesians 5:1-2, NKJV)
Dear children first, imitation second, and the love being imitated stated in the past tense: Christ has loved us and given Himself. The fuel is behind you before the instruction arrives. Build a covenant out of your own reserves and you will run them down, fastest in the years that cost the most. Live from a covenant that was signed for you and you have something to spend that never came out of your account.
A Picture the World Can Read
So what is a marriage saying to people who never asked to hear anything? Your covenant was made to say something out loud about how God loves: strong and gentle at once, distinct and unified at once, bound by promise rather than by convenience. When two people stay when it costs them, they are telling the truth about God whether they mean to or not.
A marriage becomes that kind of picture because of what the two people in it already are, not because of how well they perform. Paul had told the Ephesians what they were before he ever told them how to live: you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord (Ephesians 5:8). Light is the one thing in a room nobody has to point out. It is what everything else gets seen by, and it does that by being what it is.
When the Picture Did Not Hold
Some of you are reading this with a marriage that ended. Maybe you fought for it and lost anyway. Maybe you were the one who broke it, and the word covenant has sounded like an accusation ever since. So keep Paul's order where Paul put it. The marriage was the picture. Christ and the church is the reality, and a cracked picture has never once damaged the thing it was picturing.
His union with His church does not fluctuate with the quality of the illustrations. He has never left anyone. He has never revised the terms. The love that marriage was pointing at is the same love that met you on the day the papers were signed, not diminished one degree by anything that happened in your house. Grace did not step into that wreckage to defend an institution. It stepped in to keep you, and it had hold of you long before your marriage did.
Back in the lobby, the buttons go one at a time, bottom to top, and the conversation stays on somebody's grandchildren. Neither of them would call it theology, and neither of them learned it at a conference. It is one small echo of a covenant Someone signed in blood knowing exactly what it would cost.
