1. By Elevating Marriage To The Status Of God-Glorifying Mystery
Marriage is regularly degraded in culture. Legal scholar John Witte laments: “[the earlier] ideal of marriage as a permanent contractual union designed for the sake of mutual love, procreation, and protection is slowly giving way to a new reality of marriage as a ‘terminal sexual contract’ designed for the gratification of the individual parties.”1 Comedian Chris Rock expressed this degradation of marriage quite poignantly: “Do you want to be single and lonely or married and bored?”2 Marriage has fallen on hard times. In fact, so diminished has our culture’s estimation of marriage that some have taken to extolling Homer and Marge Simpson as a fine example of marriage commitment. After all, whatever else might be said of Homer and Marge, after twenty-eight seasons (as of 2016), they are at least still together!
No matter how much disdain our culture might pour upon the institution of marriage, this most basic of human institutions is highly exalted in the pages of Scripture. John Piper, in his excellent book This Momentary Marriage, rejoices over the fact that the Bible takes marriage out of the gutter of the culture and lifts it high above our sinful tendencies. Piper writes: “Marriage exists ultimately to display the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his church.”3 This is a great summary of Ephesians 5. God redeems marriage by infusing it with the ultimate symbolism: the man and the wife are not just about themselves, but point to the much greater reality of Christ and the church. Your marriage is not just about you! It is about God’s glory being on display.