Christian Songwriter's Network

I’ve been doing some research lately. My research is far from complete, but it's giving me a better picture of things. As a Christian, having been raised to see marriage as a good thing, I’ve realised that if it’s something that could be in my future, I better find out what it’s really about. After all, marriage today seems to be very important and specific to individuals, but on a universal scale it often appears to be nothing more than a retractable contract.

I have a friend who, last I checked, was opposed to marriage. He claims it doesn’t make sense. Under any other circumstance, you wouldn’t sign a contract with a lifetime commitment. 1 year? 3 years? 10 years? Sure, depending on the business. But until you die? Most people would call that a bad business move.
So I decided to see if I could get to the bottom of it. I wanted to see the roots of this union. My research is far from complete, both based on biblical sources and non-biblical sources. But some important questions I wanted to find answers for are: Where do the traditional marital vows come from? Are they what defines marriage? If marriage is just business, why would God want it for us? What is marriage, according to the bible?

Traditional marital vows appear to be around 500 years old, and taken from The Book of Common Prayer. They pave the way for what marriage should look like, but aren’t necessarily the definition of marriage. In effect, I believe the definition of marriage is the heart of the message, and the vows are just some basic ethical guidelines to uphold that message.

This is an issue common in biblical matters. Many laws are passed within the bible, but the best summary I can offer on the subject is that the laws are an expression of the heart behind them. It’s often hard to find the heart in the message, because some of the laws are brutal, particularly in relation to punishment. We’re all familiar with basic laws, such as don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, respect your parents, and the list goes on. One of the arguments against the bible, however, is that there are laws which appear to condone corporal and capital punishment, such as by beheading, or stoning an individual. It’s easy to see this as a law teaching people to be vengeful and to pour out wrath. But I think the heart of the message is how important it is to do (or not do) whatever is causing the execution. For example, if the law says that you can stone a disobedient son, it is not emphasising that it is good to bring harm to your family – instead it is emphasising the importance of loving and obeying your parents.

I think the same is applicable to marriage. Becoming married is a rather complicated process, with many rituals. However, ritualistic weddings do not appear to be a huge issue in old-school Christianity. In fact, early Christians did not seem to favour marriage like Christians do today, and through reading the books of the New Testament by Paul, this is not necessarily surprising. Paul recommended that those who are not married stay single unless they cannot control themselves, in which case they should marry so that their natural urges can be expressed without sin. I haven’t found a passage where he says that marriage is a bad thing, but he recommends singleness so that you can devote yourself entirely to God without distraction. It should be noted that this is his recommendation, and not a command from God.

Comparatively, while there seems to be no scripture suggesting that Jesus ever married, he does emphasise the significance of marriage throughout the New Testament. In particular, his famous Sermon on the Mount. In this sermon he describes marriage as being so important that a legal divorce is spiritually insufficient. He describes that unless the divorce is occurring due to adultery, a man who divorces his wife turns her into an adulteress. Likewise, he says that adultery does not require you to have sex with another person. If you look at others lustfully, then you are committing adultery with your heart.

These are all important issues, but they still don’t answer the question: what is the meaning of marriage?

When I refer back to the book of Genesis and relate it to marriage, my first thought is that marriage doesn’t seem to be specifically defined in that early book of the bible, it just seems to be a fact. But here are some factors that seem to address marriage:
- One of God’s first instructions to Adam and Eve (who we understand to be the first husband and wife) is to go forth and prosper. This is a famous line, with the implication that God wants us to be productive and reproductive.
- There are also stories, such as Lot and his virgin daughters. Once they had escaped from Sodom, the daughters realised they had no husbands to give them children, so they got their father drunk and had their way with him, to get children. Obviously, their virginity went out the window, too – that just goes without saying.
- Abraham has a mistress at some point. When his wife disapproves, God tells him to follow his wife’s wishes and separate from the mistress.

In a very basic sense, this tells me a few things:
- Marriage should be productive. It is something that is supposed to benefit those within the marriage.
- Marriage should be reproductive. Not to say that you should be forced to have children, but that they are a blessing.
- Looking for the benefits of marriage (such as sex and parenthood) outside of marriage leads to bad behaviour. If you are in a marriage, you should seek the benefits of marriage from within the marriage itself. And if you’re not in a marriage, you should not look to seek the benefits of a marriage without entering into one.

So, is marriage just about sexing it up and making babies? The short answer is no. I feel the need to refer back to Paul for this one. Even though he thinks it is better to be single and devoted entirely to God than to marry and risk focusing on your husband/wife to the point of neglecting God, he seems to have had some very beautiful philosophies about marriage, based around the words of Jesus.

The synopsis, as I’ve extracted, seems to be that, according to Jesus, marriage is not so much a contract as it is the spiritual binding of two people, and it’s a binding that should not be broken. Paul’s elaboration tells me that, in theory, within a marriage, love and communication should be complete. Because in marriage, your body is not your own. Everything of the man’s belongs to his wife, and everything of the woman’s belongs to her husband. So in the truest sense of marriage, without corruption, you would fulfil the “love your neighbour as you love yourself” half of the laws. Because the love you have for your husband/wife would be continuous with the love you have for yourself.

This is where all the laws of God come into play surrounding marriage. The laws are there to tell you what to do and what not to do to express that love. If a man loves his wife, he would not want to hurt her be it physically or emotionally. Hurting her would be hurting himself. And he would not want to deprive her of love, comfort, faithfulness or intimacy. Depriving her would be depriving himself. And that’s a two-way street. A wife would not want to hurt or deprive her husband, as it would be hurting and depriving herself.

So what is the meaning of marriage? It’s not some legal form or joint bank account. It’s not the duty to have babies. It’s not the wedding ceremony or a few scripted promises sealed with a kiss. It’s the union of two people through God, so that they can experience love between humans as he intended it.