How Marriage Shows the Beauty and Poetry of the Gospel
“It was the breakdown of marriage that broke everything,” writes Ray Ortlund.
God created gender. He created man and woman, and he instituted marriage. All of this was a gift meant for his glory and for our joy.
But things went horribly wrong in the garden. Yes, they sinned, but part of that sin was the breakdown in how marriage is supposed to function. Kent Hughes says, “Everything was upside-down. Eve followed the snake, Adam followed Eve, and no one followed God.”
Both sinned. Their sins are similar, but they’re also different. As Victor Hamilton notes, Eve’s sin was one of initiative; Adam’s sin was one of acquiescence. To paraphrase Spurgeon they struck a match together and set the world on fire.
Ortlund puts it so well:
The wife acting as the head, but not a wise head, and the husband acting as the helper, but not a wise helper — it was the breakdown of marriage that broke everything. The greatest glory in the universe (Genesis 1–2) became the greatest tragedy in the world (Genesis 3).
All of this helps me to see the beauty and poetry of the gospel.
If the story of sin is the story of a marriage gone wrong, the story of the gospel is a love story gone right. In Ephesians 5, Paul draws a line between our marriages and the relationship between Christ and the church. His point isn’t that Christ’s love for the church is a metaphor for marriage. It’s the opposite. It’s that our marriages are metaphors and illustrations for the eternal romance. To quote Ortlund again:
The eternal romance — not, in the final analysis, the love of the couple getting married but the love of Jesus for us and our joyful deference to him — the eternal love story is why God created the universe and why God gave us marriage in Eden and why couples fall in love and get married in the world today. Every time a bride and groom stand there and take their vows, they are reenacting the biblical love story, whether they realize it or not. The Son of God stepping down out of eternity, entering time, taking on flesh, pursuing and winning his bride as his very heart and body with his inmost, sincerest love so that he can fit her to be with him forever above—that dramatic super-reality is the breathtaking reason why human marriage exists. It is truly profound. And Christian married couples have the privilege of making the mystery of the gospel visible in the world today by living out the dynamic interplay of an Ephesians 5–quality marriage.
A breakdown in marriage led to the mess we’re in. But God loves to redeem broken things. A marriage, functioning as it should, is a pointer to the way God has fixed and is fixing the mess we’re in.
The world was ruined by a marriage gone bad, but God has chosen marriage as a powerful display of the gospel for everyone to see.
What beauty. What poetry. How like a gracious God to redeem what, to us, looked irretrievably broken.
