What is marriage?
Six truths about marriage that the devil doesn't want you to know.
It was the day after my 11th birthday that my parents gave my sister and I the news that they were in the process of getting a divorce. I remember the moment clearly, but it wasn’t until several years later when my mom got married again that the impact of the divorce became obvious. As I grew up into my teens, my heart started to close and I became hardened against the reality of marriage — a trajectory that ultimately yielded its full crop as I entered into a polyamorous relationship style with both men and women.
When Jesus finally came to save me, one of the first convictions I received was about sexual purity and the effects of immorality and fornication. God opened my eyes to the consequences of stepping outside the confines of His design for marriage, and He showed me the true impact of both my own and my parents’ sinful choices. Soon thereafter, Andrew and I received the strong correction from God that we needed to be married, and thus started the journey of diligently seeking His heart for what a biblical and God-glorifying marriage actually was.
What you will read below is the result of several years of learning, not at the hand of men but at the teaching and instruction of God’s Perfect Spirit that lives within me1 — things He taught me through the written word and by His direct revelation to my heart. What I learned throughout this time has turned into a system of belief that is cemented into my very being. It is a foundation of my existence and life and has changed my perspective completely, not only about marriage but also about the kind of commitment we make when we truly choose to believe that God really means what He says.
So without further ado, let’s first dive into a basic understanding of what marriage is. And perhaps this will bring more into clarity and focus why I said what I said about divorce in a previous article.
1. Marriage is an Image.
“And God said, Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.” (Genesis 1:26-27)
Man. Woman. A perfect union between similar yet completely different parts of the same whole. With only one, God called it not good2, but with both pieces properly fitted together and sealed inside His blessing, He called it very good3.
But why?
We find in this verse the very answer to that question — because in this union, we see the unity of God with His own beloved bride.
And who is the Father’s bride except His beloved creation?
Words fundamentally exist as meditations of the heart before they are spoken, and yet — their meaning only comes alive when the intention of those words comes to pass. When He spoke in the beginning, His words brought forth His own internal beauty — His own heart meditations — through His speaking to reside outside Himself. This is what formulated creation — a creation that was fidelitiously4 formed by His words.
When it came to designing creation, there was no other influence except the Father and His voice directing how it should be and where it should go. And this creation perfectly manifested not only the words He said, but the resonance with which He spoke them. His creation sprang forth, radiating with the same love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and faithfulness that resided in the Creator’s heart. The relationship between Creator and creation was pure, undefiled, consecrated, and whole. And in this, it was entirely holy.
As the Father is with creation, so also Christ is with the collective church body — otherwise known as the bride of Christ.
Interesting language!
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, His body, and is Himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that He might present the church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
(Ephesians 5:22-30 NLT)
When a person becomes saved, they become born again by the Word of God. The language here is intentional! The same way the original creation was perfectly intertwined with the words spoken from the Father’s heart, these new people-creatures emerge as completely unified with Christ — His life and His words5.
It was this blueprint that the covenant of marriage was designed after — the loving relationship between Creator and creation, Messiah and collective body of rescued-and-transformed-people.
As married couples, we are walking in the design of these stories — testimonies— of undefiled love. We are made to truly become unified as husband and wife. One body. One heart. One mind.
Knowing that this is the design and gravity of marriage can put into proper perspective the structure we are actually entering into as we speak vows to God and one another before our communities. The vows we speak and the bond that they form are meant to write us into this perfect, undefiled story of love. And as we do, we become living and interactive reenactments of Christ and His bride — a bond that remains eternally unbroken, just as the words originally spoken into creation were designed.
2. Marriage is a Covenant.
Simply put, a covenant is a binding agreement between two (or sometimes more) persons. The difference between a covenant and a contract is that while contracts are legally binding, covenants are binding because of the life or the blood.
All covenants made in the Old Testament were done through sacrificial offerings of spilt blood. This is why the New Testament (or new covenant) was finalized through the spilling of Christ’s blood — a sacrifice to end all other blood sacrifices. A covenant to complete all covenants. Now a covenant is made by the power of words, woven into the sacrifice that Jesus made.
When we think of marriage as a covenant, a lot of modern day Christians tend to have the idea that the covenant is being made between man, woman, and God. And there is sort of this underlying understanding that the agreement is between the husband and wife, with God as the protector, blesser, and covering for that covenant. However, if we look at what God really designed marriage to be… we see a different picture.
In that same passage quoted above, Paul writes that an earthly marriage is a picture of the heavenly one. That man is a representative of Christ and woman is a representative of the church.
If we accept this image as true, then we have to really understand what Paul is saying.
In the marriage covenant between Messiah and His people, Jesus was not obedient to agreements He made to His church, but rather was obedient unto the commands of His Father in coming to the earth, being born in a human body, living a sinless life, dying on the cross, and being raised from the dead. Not once did the church ask these things of Christ, and He did them not to fulfill an agreement He made to her — but rather because God asked it of Him.
This means that Christ’s marriage proposal and wedding vow made on behalf of His Bride were one-sided and exist inside the relationship structure of Himself and His Father, not between Himself and His Bride.
And thank God for that… because that is exactly the reason why we are able to enter into this covenant, not based on our own merit, but His. Our works were not required for Jesus to fulfill His side of the bargain. He fulfilled them in obedience to God regardless of how disobedient His betrothed had been.
But what about the church? Isn’t she obedient to Christ? Well, sort of.
A person becomes born again because of their deep, genuine, spiritual recognition of the truth of the Gospel — that Christ came and died to relieve them of their sin. That His sacrifice was sufficient and it worked and that the resurrection was powerful enough to raise them from the dead.
When this happens in a person’s life, they truly become washed clean and made new. And then the Holy Spirit comes and dwells within them.
As the Holy Spirit takes up occupancy, He binds Himself to every facet of their being — mind, body, emotion, soul, and so on. And as this oneness takes place, the person begins to transform and change.
That transformation brings the person into obedience to God’s will. Every part of their life gets touched and worked on until they are completely, without flaw, walking in the wholeness of God’s design for humankind. That’s “sanctification”.
Part of God’s design of man and woman is that we be submitted to Him. And thereby submitted to Christ. So yes, the church is submitted to Christ. But that’s not a horizontal submission. Its a vertical one.
It is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that a person is able to be brought into this energetic of submission to Christ — out of their direct and personal relationship with the Living God. So the church’s “submission to Christ” is not a willful obeying from person to person, but rather an obedience to God, His word, and His design.
Now apply this framework to marriage.
If man is to be like Christ, then he too is called to “lay down his life" for his wife. Not because she asked for it or requires it. But because God asked him to. On his wedding day, he is not making vows to his betrothed about how he promises to care for and engage with her. He is making vows to His Creator about how He will care for and engage with the woman standing before him. The vows are binding between him and God on her behalf. Not made between him and his wife for God to bless.
Similarly, woman is to be like the church, submitting to and revering her husband. But again, this isn’t because it’s required of her by the husband — but rather because it is required of her by God. Simply put, God reveals to us what He made the dynamic between man and woman in marital union to be and then causes us to be formed into that design as we yield ourselves to Him.
When you can see this, it relieves so much of the burden of marriage, because now instead of a husband being accountable to his wife or a wife being accountable to her husband for how each care for, engage with, or behave toward the other… they both become accountable only to God. That should inspire a holy fear of the Lord.
That means there is waaaaaaaay less room for those sneaking thoughts like, “well he was super mean to me today so I am not going to do xyz thing because I don’t feel like it” and causes us to continue living according to God’s design regardless of how the other party is behaving.
I would also argue that this is where there is far less wiggle room for the idea of divorce. Because if a marital covenant is made between a woman and God on behalf of her husband (or husband and God on behalf of his wife) rather than between a woman and her husband (or husband and his wife), then the requirement placed on us to continue loving our husbands, respecting them, and blessing them is no longer contingent on their reciprocity. The covenant is woven through the covenant of Christ, standing on His character and promise alone, making it an unbreakable requirement for us to continue showing up in a way that pleases Him, despite how our husbands are being.
That also means that if, God forbid, a husband is engaging in genuinely harmful, destructive, and even abusive behaviors, the wife’s entire approach to dealing with these things will change.
Instead of seeking God for retribution or revenge, she will seek God for His counsel in how the heck she is supposed to love and respect a man who is doing such awful things. Instead of asking God to deliver her out of the marriage and bless her decision to leave, she will ask Him to crush her into His image, show her the way forward and seek Him relentlessly to understand how to be like Him through this terrible experience. And she will be filled with a holy fear of God on behalf of her husband, realizing that the real destruction is not even his sins against her as his wife, but his complete disobedience to God. It is a terrible thing to have God as your enemy and a husband who is not properly loving his wife is absolutely in rebellion to God.
That revelation alone will change a woman and her prayer life will deepen and change in ways that you cannot even fathom as she seeks the Lord to have mercy on her husband’s soul that he might live, be gotten hold of, and receive the transformation he deeply needs.
3. Marriage is a Reconciling Act.
“Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”… The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.’Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
(Genesis 2:18-25 ESV)
Since his forming out of the dust of the earth, there was a beautiful treasure inside of the Man’s heart. Something precious and valuable to him, that only God could see.
Knowing that it was not good for the Man to be alone, God then reached in and took this treasure from out of the Man’s heart and formed it into an entire second person.
This, right here, was a dividing act. The removal of an essential part of one thing to create a second thing.
But God didn’t stop there. He continued as He finished creating the Woman and brought her to the Man. He placed her before him and gave her back to him and here a greater beauty was found.
The treasure of Man’s heart was now something — someONE — he could personally and physically interact and engage with! A human Woman he could have and hold and be with for the rest of his life. And only after this did God call the whole creation very good.
Reconciliation is this — the reunification of two parts that were previously separated. We find reconciliation most often when we move through the process of the cross and choose to repent and forgive. But we also find reconciliation in marriage.
I believe that God is so sovereign that He purposefully designed each person that He calls to marriage with a perfectly-fitting counterpart. In simple terms — we wives come from the “ribs” of our husbands. Something that men were spiritually fitted with before their creation, that God then pulled out and made into a second creature, which is us.
Before I got married, I felt like I was always looking for my “other half”. It was was a longing that had become so painful to me that I tried desperately to deny (and destroy) its existence. And yet, it was something I continuously found myself seeking.
This is because God made me for marriage. And because He made me for this, He also made me for the specific person of my husband, Andrew. As we were united in covenant, everything in our dynamic changed. I realized suddenly how intricately I was woven for the specific purpose of being this specific man’s wife. Our bodies fit together perfectly. Our stories wove together like a tapestry. Our minds complimented each other. And we had perfectly-suited callings.
Just because this is true, doesn’t mean that our marriage has been easy. No, in fact, there has been a LOT of sanctifying that God has had to do in each of us so that this marriage would be less painful and hard. But that is only because sin has warped who God originally intended each of us individually (and us as a couple) to be. So in bringing us together, those warpings are exposed and He works to transform and change each thing, one-by-one, as we are returned to His original design. As He does this, the changes He makes only seem to deepen my conviction that I was predestined for this good work of being Andrew’s wife. The more God changes me, the more it makes sense that I am with Andrew, specifically. And I truly feel that — should my husband die or be carried away by the Spirit into the Lord’s presence — there would be no other husband for me. My mind cannot even fathom such a reality.
All of this to say that God has designed marriage as a reconciling act — the reunification of two parts of one whole. And when we understand this, we can then understand why He says that we should not separate what He brings together in this way6. Because doing such a thing would be like taking the head away from its own body — something that would kill any living being quite quickly!
4. Marriage is a Calling.
“But I wish everyone were single, just as I am. Yet each person has a special gift from God, of one kind or another.”
(1 Corinthians 7:7 NLT)
Just as God appoints individuals into formal positions of ministry (like pastors, preachers, and oversea missionaries), He appoints people to marriage. As with any vocational calling, wherever the Lord sends you is the best place for your gifts to flourish and be used for the advancement of the Kingdom of God.
This is also true about marriage.
If the Lord has called you into a marriage, this means that He intends to use the specific strengths, weaknesses, gifts, life skills, and biological design of your being for the betterment of another human person as you build a life with them.
If you think of God calling a man to pastoral leadership, that man (if truly called by God) will have undergone a series of events in their lives that will prepare, equip, and anoint him for that calling. Not just for general pastoring, but also for the specific church body in which God will appoint him. He will be made ready to teach, train, and lead that congregation into closer intimacy with God. This means his skills, strengths, and spiritual gifts will be used for the betterment of the individuals who he is shepherding, spiritually, emotionally, and materially.
Well, the same is also true for marriage.
As a wife, you have been called by the Lord to the “appointment” of marriage. So this means you are to primarily use your skills, strengths, and spiritual gifts for the betterment of your husband.
Your biological disposition toward nurturing? Intended to bless and care for your husband.
Your prophetic gift? Intended to bless and care for your husband.
Your artistic ability? Intended to bless and care for your husband.
Your discernment and wisdom? Intended to bless and care for your husband.
Your beautiful singing voice and/or ability to write powerful songs of worship to the Lord? Intended to bless and care for your husband.
Seeing your marriage as your primary ministry changes everything about your relationship to your husband. Instead of it being just a “thing that you do” (get married, buy a house, have kids)… it becomes a spiritual field that God has set your hand to in order for you to expose and reveal more of His love. And as you work to showcase the Father’s Heart to this one person, day after day, you become a living embodiment of His faithfulness, steadfastness, and patience.
Marriage will cause you to grow in your creativity, spiritual gifting, and intimacy with the Lord in ways you could never imagine if you choose to see it as God’s call on your life. You will find more purpose, motivation, and satisfaction in loving your husband than you could ever dream. So I encourage you to meditate on this reality!
5. Marriage is an Identity.
“So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
(Matthew 19:6 NKJV)
In the Jewish tradition, there is a beautiful practice called ‘mikveh’ where individuals fully sumberge themselves in water as an act of ritual purification before significant spiritual and natural events in life. It is a picture of our present-day ‘baptism’, pointing to the ultimate purification we receive when we accept the salvation offered to us by Christ.
Well, the first time a person would mikveh was different depending on their gender. Men first mikveh’d on their 13th birthday before entering the temple on Shabbat. They would then participate in weekly mikveh before the sabbath day and on high holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But women would not mikveh for the first time until the night before their wedding.
The idea here was that the living waters would wash away any impurities to make the person spiritually (emotionally, and mentally) clean.
So participating in a wedding mikveh is a significant event.
For a bride, her wedding mikveh was seen as a way to purify her identity, washing away the “maiden” life before becoming joined to her husband. This meant she was fully prepared to “leave” any of the training or patterning of her family of origin to truly become “one” with her husband as his wife. She was ready to be transformed and changed by her marriage, allowing herself to become the woman he needed her to be.
What a picture of the gospel!
When we come to Jesus, we too receive a mikveh as His Bride. We undergo the ritual purification of a baptism to “wash off” the “old life” and be “made a new creature in Christ”. We go into the water one way, and come out clean.
In the same way that giving our life to Christ changes our identity, so does becoming a wife, if we truly surrender to that process.
You leave the loyalty of your old family when you surrender the old last name.
You join into loyalty with your husband as you claim his name.
The two become one person — no longer individual people but now a unified, reconciled single entity operating together in two bodies.
Just as you become God’s daughter on the day of your salvation, you become your husband’s wife on the day of your marriage. These aren’t just titles, they are reality statements about the very fabric of your being. Facts — Truths — about who you are as a person, that you cannot separate from. They are sealed and baked in to your existence.
Seeing marriage as an identity can give you a deeper sense of the permanency of this covenant that is being made. This is why Christ said that the only way to get married again to another person was through death. And that death can happen in two ways — either your husband physically dies and therefore no longer exists on the planet, thereby removing his identity from you… or your husband spiritually murders you by committing adultery. Adultery is a form of murder because in order for someone to commit it, they have to justify that their spouse “does not exist” in order to join themselves to another. When a husband leaves his wife for another woman, he does this — essentially pronouncing his wife “dead” or “not existent” (even if just for the moment of copulation) in order to fornicate with another.
Because God is a God of Truth, His Ways and His Words literally formed reality.
What He says you are is what you are, no matter how much you decide to agree or disagree. You are either in coherence with His Truth and willfully partnering with it to become more and more manifest in your life, or you are rebelling against it, trying to make your own reality.
So if God says, “you are one person now” when you get married, that really means you are ONE person. You cannot be separated, except by death… because death is the only reality of separation.
Make sense?
6. Marriage is a Scaffolding.
“Whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have — Jesus Christ.”
(1 Corinthians 3:10-11 NLT)
Christ being a foundation for our lives is a structural statement. So many times I see Christians reaching burnout in their spiritual walks because they try to make Christ first rather than foundational.
What’s the difference?
When Christ is first this means that you compartmentalize your time with Him as top priority before moving into the rest of your day and life. Maybe you have scheduled devotional time at the beginning of your day and a prayer time at night. Maybe you have church on Sunday and a Bible study or home-group you attend midweek. Whatever it is, there are little pockets of time that you spend with the Lord — but these windows are isolated from the rest of your life and schedule.
When Christ is foundational, then the structure is completely different. Rather than Him being the top on your list of hierarchal priorities, He is quite literally the source-point of your whole being and therefore director of every activity you partake in.
Having Christ be foundational means that you do everything for the glory of God and that you are truly walking in continuous, ongoing fellowship with Him through His Spirit that dwells inside you. You talk to Him while you get dressed in the morning and brush your teeth. You consult Him about your meal plan for the week. You are seeking His counsel as you deal with behavioral issues in your kids. His Spirit directs your tone of voice as your husband gets home from work.
When speaking with the woman at the well, Yeshua told the woman we would no longer worship in this building or on that mountain. Instead, He said, we would worship “in spirit and truth”. This means that our worship of God is not based on a set of rituals and rites we perform each week but rather in the ongoing, intimate relationship we hold with our King and the fruit of godly expression that this produces in every aspect of our lives.
And, just like a foundation of a building, if your relationship with Christ is anything other than healthy, whole, strong, and alive… the rest of your life is going to suffer.
So if we see everything else that God appoints us to from this kind of structural lens, rather than a hierarchal one, then it starts to bring everything to life and make more sense.
So, just as Christ is foundational, your marriage is central. It is the heartbeat of everything else you do and everything else you do should be an extension of your life as a married person.
As a wife, this means that your purpose, plans, and personality are yielded to the discernment and discretion of your husband. It means that he is seeing your gifts and your skillsets and sending you (or not sending you) into whatever “field” God has appointed you to harvest.
If you have bad fruit showing up in your home life, your husband is likely not going to feel confident in sending you into additional work outside the home. If you are disrespectful to him or often irritated and angry toward your children, his leadership skills will likely not organically feel inclined to appoint you beyond the borders of your own family until those things begin to be straightened out. This isn’t because he is neglectful. It is because God made him this way — he is protective. And that design goes beyond his own cognitive comprehension. It is instinctual fabric woven into the depths of his identity as a man.
Similarly, if you are navigating fruitfully through your work as a wife and a mom and seem to have an excess of wisdom and overflow, your husband will likely begin to suggest other things you could set your hand to as a “creative outlet”. Again, not because this man is a good husband and the other is not, but because it is his design as a man to lead and protect. To watch out and to guard. So he will see his incredibly competent wife (who is likely chomping at the bit to get her hands into some additional creative outlets) and he will send her where he sees she could most fruitfully bless to those in her community.
This is just one example of how your marriage operates as a scaffolding for all the rest of what you do.
Just like Jesus won’t send us into missions work unless our relationship with Him is firm, unshakeable, and strong… our marriages must be strong before we begin building anything upon them.
Seeing your marriage as another foundation, or scaffolding, in your life will help you to orient better to reality as a wife. It is not just a piece of the puzzle. Being a wife and having a husband is a central contributing factor to who you are as a person and your marriage’s health will affect everything else that you do.
I believe this is why Paul writes:
“for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?”
1 Timothy 3:5 ESV
My hope in sharing this article is that it would challenge your present view of marriage and, hopefully, give you a stronger conviction of the beauty, strength, and power this life calling holds. My prayer is that it would edify your walk as a wife, call you higher in love toward your husband, and it would bless your marriage in many, many ways.
And if your marriage is something you would like support in — I do have two spaces for 1:1 mentorship opening this fall. The application is currently OPEN, and you are free to apply at any time. You can find more information by using the button below.
Thank you for reading! And, as always, I invite you into (respectful) discord in the comments below. Would love to hear your thoughts as you read through this and how it impacted your own viewpoint on what this special covenant relationship is!
May God bless you mightily,
<3 K
John 14:26
Genesis 2:8
Genesis 1:31
Yes, I made this word up, but it was the only one that seemed fitting!
2 Corinthians 3:3, Ezekiel 36:26, Jeremiah 31:33, Hebrews 8:10
Matthew 19:6