The Meaning of Marriage (8/8)

SEX AND MARRIAGE

Page 223

Marriage is a union between two people so profound that they virtually become a new, single person. The work “united” (in older translation, “to cleave (紧贴)”) means “to make a binding covenant or contract”. This covenant brings every aspect of two persons’ lives together. They essentially merge into a single legal, social and economic unit. They lose much of their independence. In love they donate themselves, wholly, to the other.

It is the same with the marriage covenant. When you get married, you make a solemn covenant with your spouse-the Bible calls your spouse your “covenant” partner (Proverbs 2:17). That day is a great day, and your hearts are full. But as time goes on, there is a need to rekindle the heart and renew the commitment. There must be an opportunity to recall all that the other person means to you and give yourself anew. Sex between a husband and a wife is the unique way to do that.

Indeed, sex is perhaps the most powerful God-created way to help to give your entire self to another human being. Sex is God’s appointed way for two people to reciprocally to one another, “I belong completely, permanently, and exclusively to you.” You must not use sex to say anything less.

So, according to the Bible, a covenant is necessary for sex. It creates a place of security for vulnerability and intimacy. But through a marriage covenant is necessary for sex, sex is also necessary for the maintenance of the covenant. It is your covenant renewal service.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)

The Meaning of Marriage (7/8)

SINGLENESS AND MARRIAGE

Page 202 - 203

The fear of marriage brings with it pathologies (病理学). One major fruit of the contemporary culture’s fear of marriage is that singles become perfectionistic and virtually impossible to satisfy as they look at prospective spouses. Unfortunately, this perfectionism often supports gender stereotypes, because both anecdotal evidence and empirical studies show that males will look for near perfection in physical looks while women will look for partners who are financially well off. In other words, when contemporary people say they want the perfect mate, sexual and financial factors dominate the thinking. As a result, modern dating can become a remarkably crass from of self-merchandising. You must look good and make money if you are to attract dates, a partner, or a spouse. And the reason you want a good-looking or affluent partner is for your own self-esteem.

I think it is only fair to say that while there have been many happy exceptions, Christian singles tend to operate in pretty much the same way. In the Christian single’s mind, most candidates are immediately eliminated from consideration on the basis of looks, polish, and financial or social status. This is simply another way in which Christian singles are being shaped by the culture’s idolatry of sexual beauty and money. They are looking for someone already “beautiful” in the most superficial way.

How different seeking marriage would be if, as we argued earlier in this book, we were to view marriage as a vehicle for spouses helping each other become their glorious future-selves through sacrificial service and spiritual friendship. What happens if we see the mission of marriage to teach us about our sins in unique and profound ways and to grow us out of them through providing someone who speaks the truth in love to us? How different it would be if we were to fall in love especially with the glorious thing God is doing in our spouse’s life? Ironically, this view of marriage eventually does provide unbelievable personal fulfillment, but not the sacrifice-free and superficial way that contemporary people want it to come. Instead it gives the uniqueness, breathtaking fulfillment of visible character growth (Ephesians 5:25-27) into love, peace, joy, and hope (Colossians 1: Galatians 5, 1 Corinthians 13).

Page 204 - 205

The History of Dating

So what practical guidance can we give single adults who are interested in seeking a spouse?

To begin, it is helpful to do a quick survey of how this question has been answered in different times and generations. In ancient times, and into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, marriages were ordinarily arranged. Certainly (as the novels of Jane Austen show us) romantic love was one of the reasons for marriage, but not only one. Even more prominent were social and financial motives. You had to marry into a family with which your family wanted a connection. You had to marry someone with whom you could afford a home and children.

But by the late nineteenth century, the motive of marrying for love became more culturally dominant, and a system of “calling” (sometimes called “courtship”) came into being. A man was invited to call on a young women, and they spent their time together on their family’s front porch or in the parlor. In short, the man was invited in to the woman’s home. There he say her in the context of her family and her family saw him. Interestingly, it was the young woman’s privilege to initiate and invite young men to call.

Somewhere after the turn of the century, modern “dating” developed. The world first appeared in print in this context in 1914. Now the young man did not so much come in but instead took the woman out to places of entertainment to get to know her. As dating spread throughout the society, it not only individualized the whole process, removing the couple from family context, but it also changed the focus of romance from friendship and character assessment to spending money, being seen, and have fun.

The last social change is more recent. Not long after the turn of the twenty-first century, the “hook-up” culture emerged. In one of the first reports on the shift, a New York Times Magazine reported how teenagers found members of the opposite sex to be annoying and difficult, and dating involved you in the hard work of give-and-take, communication, and learning to deal with someone who was different. In other words, they rightly perceived that dating involved you, in a preliminary way, in the difficult but rewarding work of building a marriage relationship. To avoid all this, a new form of meeting partners was developed, one that went straight to sex. A hook-up is simple sexual encounter, without the condition of conducting a relationship. After a hook-up, you may want to start a dating relationship, or maybe not, but that is no condition for a hook-up.

Page 207-

Some Practical Counsel for Marriage Seekers

1) Recognize that there are seasons for not seeking marriage

2) Understand the “gift of singleness”

3) Get more serious about seeking marriage as you get older

4) Do not allow yourself deep emotional involvement with a non-believing person

5) Feel “attraction” in the most comprehensive sense

One of the more misunderstood passages in Paul’s writing about marriage is 1 Corinthians 7:9, where he says that you should get married rather than “burn with passion”. Many have seen this as a negative view. Paul seems to be saying, “Oh, if you really have to get married because you are too undisciplined to control your urges, go ahead and get married!” But Paul was not really being negative at all. He was saying that if you find yourself having passionate attraction to someone, by all means you should marry that person.

He is also saying that it is quite okay to “marry for love”. Bible scholars Ray Ciampa and Brian Rosner argue that here Paul is rejecting the late Stoic view that marriage should be something you do not for romantic passion but strictly for business and producing children and heirs. And also he does not, as did most pagan authors of the time, teach that you can get release for sexual passion merely through nonmarital sexual liaisons. No, let your passion find its fulfillment in marriage and not there. So Paul teaches that attractions is an important factor to be married.

6) Don’t let things get too passionate too quickly

7) Don’t’ become a faux spouse for someone who won’t commit to you

8) Get and submit to lots of community inputs

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)

The Meaning of Marriage (6/8)

EMBRACING THE OTHER

Page 173-174

When God sees Adam alone, a male without a female, God says it is “not good”. It is the first thing in the universe that God finds imperfect. Adam is the physical source of Eve, and he is given the responsibility of naming her. Both of these elements in the narrative lay the basis for later New Testament statements about a husband’s “headship”. However, despite giving authority to the man, the woman is not described in the expected way – as an inferior. She is called “a helper suitable for him” (Genesis 2:18).

The English word “helper” is not the best translation for the Hebrew word ‘ezer. “Helper” connotes merely assisting someone who could do the task almost as well without help. But ‘ezer is almost always used in the Bible to describe God himself. Other times it is used to describe military help, such as reinforcements, without which a battle would be lost. To “help” someone, then, is to make up what is lacking in him with your strength. Woman was made to be a “strong helper”.

The word “suitable” is just as unhelpful translation. This translates a compound phrase that is literally “like opposite him”. The entire narrative of Genesis 2, in which a piece of the man is removed to create the woman, strongly implies that each is incomplete without the other.

Male and female are “like opposite” to one another. They are like two pieces of puzzle that fit together because they are not exactly alike nor randomly different, but they are differentiated such that together they can create a complete whole. Each sex is gifted for different steps in the same Great Dance.

Page 174

In Jesus Christ’s person and work we begin to see a restoration of the original unity and love between the sexes. Jesus both elevates and underlines the equality of women as co-bearers of the image of God and the creation mandate, and he also redeems the roles given to man and woman at the beginning by inhabiting them, both as servant-heard and ‘ezer-subordinate.

Page 175

Jesus’ willing acceptance of this role was wholly voluntary, a gift to his Father. I discovered there that my submission in marriage was a gift I offered, not a duty coerced from me.

Page 176

The Son submits to the Father’s headship with free, voluntary, and joyful eagerness, not out of coercion or inferiority. The Father’s headship is acknowledged in reciprocal delight, respect and love. There is no inequality of ability or dignity. We are differently gendered to reflect this life within the Trinity. Male and female are invited to mirror and reflect the “dance” of the Trinity, loving, self-sacrificing authority and loving, courageous submission. The Son takes a subordinate role, and in that moment he shows not his weakness but his greatness. This is one of the reasons why Paul can say that the marriage “mystery” gives us insight into the very heart of God in the work of our salvation (Ephesians 5:32).

Page 178

We, the church, submit to Christ in everything, and the parallel of a wife submitting “everything” to her husband is no longer daunting, since we know what kind of behavior the husband has been called on to imitate. To what role must he submit? To that of savior, a servant-leader, who uses his authority and power to express a love that doesn’t even stop at dying for the beloved.

Page 179

Both women and men get to “play the Jesus role” in marriage – Jesus in his sacrificial authority, Jesus in his sacrificial submission. By accepting our gender roles, and operating within them, we are able to demonstrate to the world concepts that are so counterintuitive as to be completely unintelligible unless they are lied out by men and women in Christian marriages.

Page 180

Using all the qualifiers in the world, in general, as a whole and across the spectrum, men have a gift of independence, a “sending” gift. They look outward. They initiate. Under sin, these traits can become either an alpha male individualism, if this capacity is turned into an idol, or dependence, if the calling is utterly rejected and the opposite embraced in rebellion. The first sin is hypermasculinity, while the second sin is rejection of masculinity.

Using all the qualifiers in the world, in general, as a whole and across the spectrum, women have a gift of interdependence, a “receiving”. They are inwardly perceptive. They nurture. Under sin, these traits can become either a clinging dependence, if attachment is turned into an individualism, if the calling is utterly rejected and the opposite embraced in rebellion.

Page 182

As Genesis says, male and female are “like-opposite” each other – both radically different and yet incomplete without each other. I have had homosexual friends, both men and women, tell me that one of the factors that made homosexual love attractive to them was how much easier it was than dealing with someone with of a different sex.

Page 187-188

In the home, the Bible directs male and female to reflect our different gifts in our family functions – our job descriptions in the team. Wives are more directly and more often exhorted to be gentle supporters, to be encouragers (1 Peter 3:1-2,4), and more directly and more often to be nurturing children and the home life (Titus 2:4-5). Husbands are exhorted more directly and more often to lead, provide for and protect the family, but are not let off the hook for the education and nurture of the children (1 Timothy 3:4; 5:8).

Page 188-189

Submission to God’s pattern in marriage gets your more in touch with some deep things in yourself, your primary maleness or femaleness, yet marriage balances you and broadens you, too. The qualities of the other sex “rub-off” on you, making you each strong and tender, serving each other in distinct ways. Tim likes to say that after years and years of marriage he often finds himself in situation where he is about to respond, but he knows instinctively what I would say or do if I were there. “In that split second, I have the opportunity to ask myself, ‘Would Kathy’s typical reaction be more wise and appropriate than mine?’ And I realize my repertoire of possible words and actions has been greatly expanded. My wife has taught me how to look at life as she does, and now I have a greater range of responses and a greater likelihood of doing the right thing.”

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)

The Meaning of Marriage (5/8)

LOVING THE STRANGER

Page 134

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while, he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is…learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

The Power of Truth – Facing the Worst

Page 138-140

Marriage is different from these others. The merged life of marriage brings you into the closest, most inescapable contact with another person possible. And that means not only that you see each other close up, but that you are forced to deal with the flaws and sins of one another.

But while your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage. For example, a tendency to hold grudges could be a problem within friendship, but within marriage it can kill the relationship. No one else is as inconvenienced and hurt by your flaws as your spouse is. And therefore your spouse becomes more keenly aware of what is wrong with you than anyone else even has see.

When conducting marriage services, I like to explain this aspect of marriage using the analogy of a bridge. Think of an old bridge over a stream. Imagine that there are structural defects in the bridge that are hard to see. There may be hairline fractures that a very close inspection would reveal, but to the naked eye there is nothing wrong. But now see a ten-ton Mack truck drive onto the bridge. What will happen? The pressure from the weight of the truck will open those hairline fractures so they can be seen. The structural defects will be exposed for all to see because of the stain the truck put on the bridge. Suddenly, you can see where all the flaws are. The truck didn’t create the weaknesses; it revealed them.

When you get married, your spouse is a big truck driving right through your heart. Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your weaknesses (through you may blame your spouse for your blow-ups) – it reveals them. This is not a bad thing, though. How can you change into your “glory-self” if you assume that you’re already close to perfect as it is?

Marriage shows you a realistic, unflattering picture of who you are and then takes you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to pay attention to it.

This may sound discouraging, but it is really the road to liberation. Counselors will tell you that the only flaws that can enslave you are the ones that you are blind to. If you are in denial about some feature of your character, that feature will control you. But marriage blows the lid off, turns the lights on. Now there is hope. Finally you can begin dealing with the real you. Don’t resist this power that marriage has. Give your spouse the right to talk to you about what is wrong with you. Paul talks about how Jesus “washes” and “cleanses” us of stains and blemishes. Give your spouse the right to do that.

Page 144

Many people have asked me, “How can you tell whether you’ve got a friendship on which you can base a marriage?” The answer that Kathy and I have always given is this. When you see the problems in each other, do you must want to run away, or do you find a desire to work on them together? If the second impulse is yours, then you have the makings of a marriage.

The Power of Love – Renewing the Heart

Page 146

Marriage has the power of truth, the ability to reveal you who you really are, with all your flaws. How wonderful that it also has the “power of love” – an unmatched power to affirm you and heal you of the deepest wounds and hurts of your life.

Page 147

But now into your life comes someone who has the power to overturn all the accumulated verdicts that have ever been passed upon you by others or by you yourself. Marriage puts into your spouse’s hand a massive power to reprogram your own self-appreciation. He or she can overturn anything previously said about you, to a great degree redeeming the past. The love and affirmation of your spouse has the power to heal you of many of the deepest wounds. Why? If all the world says you are ugly, but your spouse says you are beautiful, you feel beautiful. To paraphrase a passage of Scripture, your heart may condemn you, but your spouse’s opinion is greater than you heart.

Page 152

It is not enough to simply say, “I love you”. Nor it is enough to give love to your spouse in the way to which you feel most accustomed. If you want to give a person $100, there are many ways to do so. You can give it in cash or by check or in gold or in kind. You can give in different currencies. So you ask, “In which form do you want the hundred dollars?” In the same way you learn to give your spouse love in the way he or she finds most emotionally valuable and powerful. That is the only way to bring the remarking and healing power of love into your spouse’s life.

Page 156

Most marriages start with an in-love “high” during which time both partners feel profoundly loved by the very presence of the other. But eventually that high wears off and then love must become a deliberate choice.

Page 162-163

When we see how devastating truth-telling in marriage can be, it can push us into the opposite error. We may then decide that our job is to just affirm. We avoid telling our spouse how disappointed we are. We shut up. We stuff and hide what we really think and feel. We exercise the power of love, but not the power of truth.

But then marriage’s enormous potential for spiritual growth is lost. If I come to realize that my spouse is not really being truthful with me, then her loving affirmations become less powerful in my life. Only when I know that my spouse regularly tells me the truth will her loving affirmation really change me.

The point is that – truth and love need to be kept together, but it is very hard.

The Power of Grace – Reconciling

Page 163

Truth without love ruins the oneness, and love without truth gives the illusion of unity but actually stops the journey and the growth. The solution is grace. The experience of Jesus’s grace makes it possible to practice two most important skills in marriage: forgiveness and repentance. Only if we are very good at forgiving and very good at repenting can truth and love be kept together.

Page 164-165

Jesus gives us the solution. He says that Christians, knowing that they live only by the forgiving grace of God, must do the work of forgiving wrongdoers in their hearts and then go to confront them. If you do that, the confrontation will be so different. In other words, without the “compound” – the power of forgiving in your life – you will use the truth to hurt. The other person will either attack you back or withdraw. Your marriage will go either into a truth-without-love mode, with constant fighting, or a shallow love-without-truth mode, in which both partners simply avoid the underlying problems.

One of the most basic skills in marriage is the ability to tell the straight, unvarnished truth about what your spouse has done – and then, completely, unself-righteously, and joyously express forgiveness without a shred of superiority, without making the other person feel small. This does not mean you cannot express anger. In fact, if you never express anger, your truth-telling probably won’t sink in. But forgiving grace must always be present, and if it is, it will, like salt in meat, keep the anger from going bad. Then truth and love can live together because, beneath them both, you have forgiven your spouse as Christ forgave you.

Page 166

But the gospel transforms us so our self-understanding is no longer based on our performance in life. We are so evil and sinful and flawed that Jesus had to die for us. We were so lost that nothing less than the death of the divine Son of God could save us. But we are so loved and valued that he was willing to die for us. The Lord of the universe loves us enough to do that! So the gospel humbles us into the dust and at the very same time exalts us to the heavens. We are sinners but completely loved and accepted in Christ at the same time.

Page 167

Marriage has unique power to show us the truth of who we really are. Marriage has unique power to redeem our past and heal our self-image through love. And marriage has unique power to show us the grace of what God did for us in Christ Jesus. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells us that Jesus laid down his life for us, forgiving at great cost us to make us something beautiful. And because he has done it for us, we can do the same for others.

Page 168

Here is why you can say to your spouse who has wronged you, “I see your sin, but I can cover it with forgiveness, because Jesus saw my sin and covered it.” It is because the Lord of the universe came into the world in disguise, in the person of Jesus Christ, and he looked into our hearts and saw the worst. And it wasn’t an abstract exercise for Jesus – our sins put him to death. When Jesus was up there, nailed to the cross, he looked down and saw us, some denying him, some betraying him, and all forsaking him. He saw our sin and covered it.

I do not know of any more powerful resource for granting forgiveness than that, and I don’t know of anything more necessary in marriage than the ability to forgive fully, freely, unpunishingly, from the heart. A deep experience of the grace of God – a knowledge that you are a sinner saved by grace – will enable the power of truth and love to work together in your marriage.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)

The Meaning of Marriage (4/8)

THE MISSION OF MARRIAGE

Page 111

So here is Adam, created by God and put into the garden of paradise, and yet his aloneness is “not good”. The Genesis narrative is implying that our intense relational capacity, created and given to us by God, was not fulfilled completely by our “vertical” relationship with him. God designed us to need “horizontal” relationships with other human beings.

Page 118

The primary goal of Christian marriage is not social status and stability, as it was in ancient cultures, nor is it primarily romantic and emotional happiness, as it is in our culture today. Paul points husbands to Jesus’ sacrificial love toward us, his “bride”. But Paul does not stop there, he goes on to speak of the goal of that sacrificial love for his bride. It is “to sanctify her” (verse 26) to “present her to himself” in radiant beauty and splendor (verse 27a), to bring her to be perfectly “holy and blameless” (verse 27c). He wants the new creation for us! He wants to remove all spiritual stains, flaws, sins, and blemishes to make us “holy”, “glorious”, and “blameless”.

Page 119

In John 15:9-15 this is accomplished because he is our Divine Friend, but in Ephesians 5, he accomplishes this because he is our Divine Husband. In his redemptive work, Jesus is both Friend and Lover, and this is to be the model for spouse in marriage. Husband and wife are to be both lovers and friends to one another as Jesus is to us.

Page 120

What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have.

Page 121

Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, “I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to be partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses on earth, but now look at you!’”

Page 122

Not so you can create the kind of person you want, but rather because you see what kind of person Jesus is making. When Michelangelo was asked how he carved his magnificence David, his reply is reputed to have been, “I looked inside the marble and just took away the bits that weren’t David.” When looking for a marriage partner, each must be able to look inside the other and see what God is doing and be excited about being part of the process of liberating the merging “new you”.

In this view of marriage, each person says to the other, “I see all your flaws, imperfections, weaknesses, dependencies. But underneath them all I see growing the person God wants you to be.”

Page 123

What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness. You’re committed to his or her beauty. You’re committed to his greatness and perfection. You’re committed to her honesty and passion for the things of God. That’s your job as a spouse. Any lesser goal than that, any smaller purpose, and you’re just playing at being married.

Page 126

Screen first for friendship. Look for someone who understands you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them. And then explore whether that friendship could be a romance and a marriage.

Page 127

Your marriage must be more important to you than anything else. No other human being should get more of your love, energy, industry, and commitment than your spouse. God asks that a man leave his father and mother, as powerful as that relationship may have been, to forge a new union that must be an even more important and powerful force in his life.

Page 129

Over-commitment to parents is one problem that sinks many marriages. Arguably, over-commitment to children is even more of a problem.

Page 130

The best way for you to be a great mother to your daughter is by being a great wife to your husband. This is the main thing your daughter needs from you.

Salvation is a fresh start. Old things have passed away – behold, the new has come. And when through the gospel we enter into a marriage-like relationship with Jesus as our Divine Spouse, that means giving Christ the supremacy in our life (Colossians 1:15ff). In other words, Jesus asks for nothing than any spouse doesn’t ask for. “Put me first”, he says, “have no other pseudo-gods before me”. It is the same with marriage. Marriage won’t work unless you put your marriage and your spouse first, and you don’t turn good things, like parents, children, career, and hobbies, into pseudo-spouses.

Page 131

The reason it must have priority is because of the power of marriage. Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won’t matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength. However, if your marriage is weak, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are marked by success and strength, it won’t matter. You will move out into the world in weakness. Marriage has the kind of power – the power to set course of your life. It has the power because it was instituted by God. And because it as that unequalled power, it must have an unequalled, supreme priority.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)

The Meaning of Marriage (3/8)

THE ESSENSE OF MARRIAGE

Page 78

But when the Bible speaks of love, it measures it primarily not by how much you want to receive but by how much you are willing to give of yourself to someone. How much are you willing to lose for the sake of this person? How much of your freedom are you willing to forsake? How much of your precious time, emotion, and resources are you willing to invest in this person? And for that, the marriage vow is not just helpful but it is even a test. In so many cases, when one person says to another, “I love you but let’s not ruin it by getting married,” that person really means, “I don’t love you enough to close off my opinions. I don’t love you enough to give myself for you that thoroughly.” To say, “I don’t need a piece of paper to love you” is basically to say, “My love for you has not reached the marriage level.”

Page 81

The Bible sees God as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feeling and duty, passion and promise. That is because the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.

Page 81-82

Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit – that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back – then we “cut our losses” and drop the relationship. This also has been called “commodification”, a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of “covenant” is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept that is increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage, so we must take some time to understand it.

Page 82-83

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and cleave (紧贴) to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

There in Genesis 2:22-25 we see the first marriage ceremony. The Genesis text calls what happens “cleaving”. This archaic English term (which you can find in the King James Version) conveys the strength of the Hebrew verb, which modern translations render “united to”. It is a Hebrew word that literally means to be glued to something. Elsewhere in the Bible, the word “cleave” means to unite to someone through a covenant, a binding promise, or oath.

Why do we say that marriage is the most deeply covenantal relationship? It is because marriage has both strong horizontal and vertical aspects to it.

Page 83-84

This is the reason that so many traditional Christian wedding services have both a set of questions as well as a set of vows. In the questions, each spouse is asked something like this:

Will you have this woman to be your wife? And will you make your promise to her in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and tenderness – to live with her, and cherish her, according to the ordinance of God, in the holy bond of marriage?

Each spouse answers “I will” or “I do”- but notice they are not speaking to each other. They are looking forward and technically answering the minister, who asks them the questions. What they are really doing is making a vow to God before they turn and make vows to one another. They are “speaking vertically” before they speak “horizontally”. They get to hear the other person stand up before God, their families, and all the authority structures of church and state and swear loyalty and faithfulness to the other. Now, building on this foundation, they take one another by the hand and say something like this:

I take you to be my lawful and wedded husband, and I do promise and covenant, before God and these witnesses, to be your loving and faithful wife. In plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.

Imagine a house with an A-frame structure. The two sides of the home meet at the top and hold one another up. But underneath, the foundation holds up both of the sides. So the covenant with and before God strengthens the partners to make a covenant with each other. Marriage is therefore the deepest of human covenant.

Page 85

Love needs a framework of binding obligation to make it fully what it should be. A covenant relationship is not just intimate despite being legal. It is a relationship that is more intimate because it is legal.

Page 91

Promising is the key to identify, it is the very essence of marital love. Why? Because it is our promises that give us a stable identity, and without a stable identify, it is impossible to have stable relationships.  

Page 94

When you first fall in love, you think you love the person, but you don’t really. You can’t know who the person is right away. That takes years. You actually love your idea of that person – and that is always, at first, one-dimensional and somewhat mistaken.

Page 91

Passion may lead you to make a wedding promise, but then that promise over the years makes the passion richer and deeper.

Page 100-101

Actions of love lead to feelings of love

Though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings…The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less…Whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned it to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less…The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he “likes” them: The Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on – including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

Lewis then used and illustration that had great potency, particularly at that time:

This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you have, the more cruel you will become – and so on in a vicious circle forever.

Page 103

I had been loving them even when I didn’t like them, and the result was that, slowly but surely, my emotions were catching up with my behaviour. If you do not give up, but proceed to love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to you.

Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love. Love between two people must not, in the end, be identified simply with emotion or merely with dutiful action. Married love is a symbiotic, complex mixture of both. Having said this, it is important to observe that of the two – emotion and action – it is the latter that we have the most control over. It is the action of love that we can promise to maintain every day.

Page 103

It Ephesians 5:28, Paul says, “Husbands ought to love their wives.” He had already urged them to love their wives in verse 25, but here, just to be clear, Paul uses a verb that stresses obligation. There is no doubt about what Paul is saying. He commands husbands – they ought to love their wives. Emotions can’t be commanded, only actions, and so it is actions that Paul is demanding.

Page 104

In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love seem to dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of a marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling.

Page 108-109

Many people hear this and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t give love if I don’t feel it! I can’t fake it. That’s too technical for me.” I can understand that reaction, but Paul doesn’t dimply call us to a naked action; he also commands us to think as we act. “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

This means we must say to ourselves something like this” Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn’t think, ‘I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.’ No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us – denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him – and in the greatest act of love in history, he stayed. He said, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’ He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse.” Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011) 

The Meaning of Marriage (2/8)

THE POWER OF MARRIAGE

All married partners need the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The work of the Spirit makes Christ’s saving work real to our hearts, giving us supernatural help against the main enemy of marriage: sinful self-centeredness. We need the fullness of the Spirit of we are to serve one another as we should.

Page 50

Paul describes several marks of a person who is “filled with the Spirit.” The last mark of Spirit fullness is in this last clause: It is a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humble serve others. From this Spirit-empowered submission of verse 21, Paul moves to the duties of wives and husbands.

Page 53

Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.

Page 54

You can offer to serve the other with joy, you can make the offer with coldness or resentment, or you can selfishly insist on your own way. Only when both partners are regularly responding to one another in the first way can the marriage thrive.

Page 55-56

It is at this very point that the Spirit of God helps us so much. In each text, Paul links a willing ‘servant heart’ to the gospel itself. And what is the gospel? It is that you are so lost and flawed, so sinful, that Jesus had to die for you. Now you are fully accepted and delighted in by the Father, not because you deserve it but only by free grace.

Page 58

You can only afford to be generous if you actually have some money in the bank to give. In the same way, if your only source of love and meaning is your spouse, then anytime he or she fails you, it will not just cause grief but a psychological cataclysm. If, however, you know something of the work of the Spirit in your life, you have enough love “in the bank” to be generous to your spouse even when you are not getting much affection or kindness at the moment.

Some will ask “If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs – then what do I get out of it?” The answer is – happiness. That is what you get, but a happiness through serving others instead of using them, a happiness that won’t be bad for you. It is the joy that comes from giving joy, from loving another person in a costly way.

Page 59

Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God’s image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God’s glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, “Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:25). He is saying, “If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.”

Why would this be true? It is because marriage is “instituted of God.” It was established by the God for whom self-giving love is an essential attribute, and therefore it reflects his nature, particularly as it is revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Page 60

You must be willing to give something up before it can be truly yours. Fulfillment is on the far side of sustained unselfish service, not the nearside. It is one of the universal principles of life:

Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simple try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before), you will, nine times out of ten, become original without having noticed it. Lose you live and you will save it…Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours…

Page 63

There is the essence of sin, according to the Bible – living for ourselves, rather than for God and the people around us. This is why Jesus can sum up the entire law – the entire will of God for our lives – in two great commands: to love and live for God rather than ourselves and to love and put the needs of others ahead of our own.

Page 65

If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.

Page 66-67

The Christian principle that needs to be at work is Spirit generated selflessness – not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself but thinking of yourself less. It means taking your mind off yourself and realizing that in Christ your needs are going to be met and are, in fact, being met so that you don’t look at your spouse as your savior. People with deep grasp of the gospel can turn around and admit that their selfishness is the problem and that they’re going to work on it. And when they do that, they will often discover an immediate sense of liberation, of waking up from troubling dream. They see how small-minded they were being, how small the issues is in the light of the grand scheme of things. Those who stop concentrating on how unhappy they are find that their happiness is growing. You must lose yourself to find yourself.

Page 68

“Fear” in the Bible means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by something. To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his lover. It means that, because of his bright holiness and magnificent love, you find him “fearfully beautiful.” That is why the more we experience God’s grace and forgiveness, the more we experience a trembling awe and wonder before the greatness of all that he is and has done for us. Fearing him means bowing before him out of amazement at his glory and beauty. Paul speaks of the love of Christ “constraining” us (2 Corinthians 5:14). What is it that most motivates and moves you? Is it the desire for success? The pursuit of some achievement? The need to prove yourself to your parents? The need for respect from your peers? Are you largely driven by anger against someone or some people who have wronged you? Paul says that if any of these things is a greater controlling influence on you than the reality of God’s love for you, you will not be in a position to serve others unselfishly. Only out of the fear of the Lord Jesus will we be liberated to serve one another.

Page 75-76

It is possible to feel you are “madly in love” with someone, when it is really just an attraction to someone who can meet your needs and address the insecurities and doubts you have about yourself. In that kind of relationship, you will demand and control rather than serve and give. The only way to avoid sacrificing your partner’s joy and freedom on the altar of your need is to turn to the ultimate lover of your soul. He voluntarily sacrifices himself on the cross, taking what you deserved for your sins against God and others. On the cross he was forsaken and experienced the lostness of hell, but he did it all for us. Because of the loving sacrifice of the Son, you can know the heaven of the Father’s love through the work of the Spirit. Jesus truly “built a heaven in hell’s despair.” And fortified with the love of God in your soul, you likewise can now give yourself in loving service to your spouse.

“We love – because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)

The Meaning of Marriage (1/8)

THE SECRET OF MARRIAGE

Page 27

Legal scholar John White, Jr., says that the earlier “ideal of marriage as a permanent contractual union designed for the sake of mutual love, procreation, and protection is slowing giving way to a new reality of marriage as a ‘terminal sexual contract’ designed for the gratification o f the individual parties.

Page 27-29

The purpose of marriage was to create a framework for lifelong devotion and love between a husband and a wife. If was a solemn bond, designed to help each party subordinate individual impulses and interests in favor of the relationships, to be a sacrament of God’s love (the Catholic emphasis) and serve the common good (the protestant emphasis).

However Witte explains that a new view of marriage emerged from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment. Older cultures taught their members to find meaning in duty, by embracing their assigned social roles and carrying them out faithfully. During the Enlightenment, things began to shift. The meaning of life came to be seen as the fruit of the freedom of the individual to choose the life that most fulfils him or her personally. Instead of finding meaning through self-denial, through giving up one’s freedoms, and binding oneself to the duties of marriages and family, marriage was redefined as finding emotional and sexual fulfillment and self-actualization.

Proponents of this new approach did not see the essence of marriage as located in either its divine sacrament symbolism or as a social bond given to benefit the broader human commonwealth. Rather, marriage was seen as a contract between two parties for mutual individual growth and satisfaction. In this view, married persons married for themselves, not to fulfill responsibilities to God or society. Parties should, therefore, be allowed to conduct their marriage in any way they deemed beneficial to them, and no obligation to church, tradition, or broader community should be imposed on them. In short, the Enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any “broader good” such as reflecting God’s nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.

Marriage used to be a public institution for the common good, and now it is a private arrangement for the satisfaction of the individuals. Marriage used to be about us, but now it is about me.

But ironically, this newer view of marriage actually puts a crushing burden of expectation on marriage and on spouses in a way that more traditionally understandings never did. And it leaves us desperately trapped between both unrealistic longings for and terrible fears about marriage.

Page 30

When I met my future wife, Kathy, we sensed very quickly that we shared an unusual number of books, stories, themes, ways of thinking about life, and expectation that brought us joy. We recognized in one another true “kindred spirit” and the potential for a bond of deep friendship.

Page 30

Sexual attractiveness was not the number one factor that men named when surveyed by the National Marriage Project. They said that “compatibility” above all meant someone who showed a “willingness to take them as they are and not change them.”

Page 31

This is a significant break with the past. Traditionally, men married knowing it would mean a great deal of personal alteration. Part of the traditional understanding of marriage was that it “civilized” men. Men have been perceived as being more independent as less willing and able than women into relationships that require mutual communication, support, and teamwork. So one of the classic purposes of marriage was very definitely to “change” men and be a “school” in which they learned how to conduct new, more interdependent relationships.

Page 32

Marriage was traditionally a place where males became truly masculine: “For most of Western history, the primary and most valued characteristic of manhood was self-mastery…A man who indulged in excessive eating, drinking, sleeping or sex – who failed to ‘rule himself’ – was considered unfit to rule his household, much less a politic…”

Page 32-33

Both men and women today want a marriage in which they can receive emotional and sexual satisfaction from someone who will simple let them “be themselves”. They want a spouse who is fun, intellectually stimulating, sexually attractive, with many common interests, and who, on top of it all, is supportive of their personal goals and of the way they are living now.

And if your desire is for a spouse who will not demand a lot of change from you, then you are also looking for a spouse almost completely pulled together, someone very “low maintenance” without much in the way of personal problems. You are looking for someone who will not require or demand significant change. You are searching, therefore, for an ideal person – happy, healthy, interesting, content with life. Never before in history has there been a society filled with people so idealistic in what they are seeking in a spouse.

Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.

Page 34

Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are all looking for a marriage partner who will “fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.” And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry. This is the reason to many put off marriage and look right past great prospective spouses that simply are “not good enough”.

This is ironic. Older views of marriage are considered to be traditional and oppressive, while the newer view of the “Me-Marriage” seems so liberating. And yet it is the newer view that has led to a steep decline in marriage and to an oppressive sense of hopelessness with regard to it. To conduct a Me-Marriage requires two completely well-adjusted, happy individuals, with very little in the way of emotional neediness of their own or character flaws that need a lot of work. The problem is – there is almost no one like that out there to marry! The new conception of marriage-as-self-realization has put us in a position of wanting too much out of marriage and yet not nearly enough – at the same time.

Page 36

You can say, “I want someone who will accept me just as I am,” but in your heart of hearts you know that you are not perfect, that there are plenty of things about you that need to be changed, and that anyone who gets to know you up close and personal will want to change them. And you also know that the other person will have needs, deep needs, and flaws. That all sounds painful, and it is, and so you don’t want all that.

Page 37

I have hear them say over and over, “Love shouldn’t be this hard; it should come naturally.” In response, I always say something like, “Why believe that? Would someone who want to play a professional baseball say, ‘It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a fastball?’ Would someone who wants to write the greatest American novel of her generation say, ‘It shouldn’t be hard to create believable characters and compelling narrative?’” The understandable retort is, “But this is not baseball or literature. This is love. Love should just come naturally if two people are compatible, if they are truly soul mates.

The Christian answer to his is that no two people are compatible.

Page 37-38

Duke University ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas has famously made this point:

Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect of marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a whole and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is…learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

Page 40-41

Hauerwas gives us the first reason that no two people are compatible for marriage – namely, that marriage profoundly changes us. But there is another reason. Any two people who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things means to be self-centered – living life incurvatus in se. As author Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love…?” That is why a good marriage is more painfully hard to achieve than athletic or artistic prowess. Raw, natural talent does not enable you to play baseball as pro or write great literature without enduring discipline and enormous of wok. Why would it be easy to live lovingly and well with another human being in light of what is profoundly wrong within our human nature? Indeed, many people who have mastered athletics and art have failed miserably at marriage. So the Biblical doctrine of sin explains why marriage – more than anything else that is good and important in this fallen world – is so painful and hard.

Page 45

Paul declared that marriage is a “great mystery”…that can be understood only with the help of God’s Spirit.

Page 45-46

What is the secret of marriage? Paul immediately adds, “I am talking about Christ and the church,” referring to what he said earlier in verse 25: “Husband, love your wives as just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her..” In short, the “secret” is not simple the fact of marriage per se. It is the message that what husbands should do for their wives is what Jesus did to bring us into union with himself. And what was that?

Jesus gave himself up for us.

Page 46

As one commentator put it, “Paul saw that when God designed the original marriage, He already had Christ and the church in mind. This is one of God’s great purposes in marriage: to picture the relationship between Christ and His redeemed people forever!”

Page 47

There is so much to do that we don’t know where to start. Start here, Paul says. Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow.

This is the secret – that the gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another. That when God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind.

Page 48

Marriage is a major vehicle for the gospel’s remaking of your heart from the inside out and your life from the ground up.

The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)

The Meaning of Marriage (0/8)

Page 13

Marriage is “instituted by God, regulated by his commandments, blessed by our Lord Jesus Christ.” What God institutes he also regulates. If God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to his purposes for it.

Page 14

Plenty of people who do not acknowledge God or the Bible, yet who are experiencing happy marriages, are largely abiding by God’s intentions, whether they realize it or not. But it is far better if we are conscious of those intentions.

Page 15

Two of the most basic teachings by the Bible on marriage – that it has been instituted by God and that marriage was designed to be a reflection of the saving love of God for us in Jesus Christ. That is why the gospel helps us to understand marriage and marriage helps us to understand the gospel.

The work of the Spirit makes Christ’s saving work real to our hearts, giving us supernatural help against the main enemy of marriage: sinful self-centeredness.

Table of Contents

1. The secret of marriage

2. The power of marriage

3. The essence of marriage (What is love)

4. The mission of marriage (What marriage is for)

5. Loving the stranger

6. Embracing the other

7. Singleness and marriage

8. Sex and marriage

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)