The Meaning of Marriage Matthew 19:1-6
Introduction
Chapter 19 marks a thematic transition in the book of Matthew. Through chapter 18 the subject has been the institution of the church; in this chapter Matthew addresses the institution of marriage. Often when preachers deal with these verses they take aim on the portion concerning divorce, something we will also address in due time, but today our focus is on Jesus’ point of departure as He reminds the Pharisees of the biblical underpinnings for the institution of marriage itself. To do that He takes them back to the beginning: back to Genesis. It is an issue we should not skim over, living as we are, in a day that has largely moved away from the biblical foundation and purpose for this institution.
God intends marriage, the very first institution He ordained in the Bible, to be the foundation for the family, and His goal is to teach us appropriate priorities within the family. One thing we learn is that the husband’s first responsibility is to the wife, whether or not there are children involved; this is because the marriage itself is what undergirds the family in the home. A child-centric family that subordinates the husband-wife relationship, then, is a distortion of the biblical model. To put it more strongly, it is unbiblical.
If a marriage fails to live up to God’s ideal scriptural model it does not mean that everything else about it will fail. My own father’s case refutes that notion. Although his parents divorced when he was small, God still helped him grow into a godly husband and father and raise a family for the Lord’s glory. So, if you are someone who says, “This model of a godly family is not how my life is turning out,” then you, like all of us, need God’s grace to navigate your situation; and you can be sure that God’s grace is more than sufficient to meet the need, regardless of the circumstances or how they came about.
Whatever our situation, we all need clarity about what God’s Word teaches about marriage, particularly in the face of a prevailing culture that has done nothing but distort its nature and purpose. Even many Christians have either forgotten or never learned what God means marriage to be. So, whether you are already married or are hoping one day to marry, this message is for you; we all need to know what it should look like. If you are single with no plans for marriage, please know that God also places much value on singleness. In due time we will take up that topic, as well.
When the world thinks of marriage (even sometimes when Christians do), they view it with certain preconceived ideas. One person may think, “FIREWORKS!” Another, “BALL AND CHAIN!” To someone else it’s, “and they lived happily ever after...” Frankly, marriage is none of those things, but our culture is often slow to figure that out. Here are just a few statistics for the sake of perspective: since 1960 the divorce rate has doubled; in 1970 eighty nine percent of all births were to married parents, today, sixty percent; in 1960, forty two percent of all adults in the U.S. were unmarried, as opposed to 2008 when it was fifty percent. In 2023 that percentage is likely much, much higher.
Even secular sociologists tracking the Western world’s changing views of marriage, have noticed that today it is often based not on covenantal vows but on a consumer-like contract that factors into the equation its own “cost-benefit analysis.” As long as that ratio remains favorable the marriage stands. When the perceived cost outweighs the benefit, the dissatisfied spouse cuts his/her losses and move on to something else. This is not at all the biblical idea of marriage, which is a relationship based on a loving covenant between husband and wife made in the presence of God.
So, since Christ’s first step in His discussion with the Pharisees is to scripturally define the original meaning of marriage, we will be focusing, as He did, on these things: 1) the original purposes of marriage, 2) the essence of marriage, and 3) the original means of marriage.
The Original Purposes of Marriage
Jesus begins by citing the first non-negotiable in the equation: “Have you not read, He who made them at the beginning made them male and female?” He then repeats to them the rest of the passage, which spells out God’s three purposes for marriage in this way: “‘Let Us make man in Our image according to Our likeness; let them have dominion… over all the earth…’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:26-28). So, then…
1. God made marriage to reflect His own likeness, and the text presents it to us in a unique way: “Let us make man in Our image.” God has, by this point during creation week, already made a great many things, but in each of these cases He has referred to Himself in the singular. Here, He does so in the plural—as the triunity that He is—three distinct Persons each sharing a single divine Essence. As remarkable as this seems to us, just as remarkable is the way this Triune Being in the form of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit arrives at how to accomplish it—by making them male and female.
How are we to understand this? One thing we can say is that while the male-female dichotomy is certainly a biological construct, it is in its essence quite a bit more than that. There is something fundamentally spiritual (another term would be ontological) about male and female. God creates male and female in His likeness, in order that through their uniting in marriage they might in some way depict His nature. So, while marriage as an institution may not be an exact approximation of the Trinity itself, it is still designed to reflect its unity and its fellowship, and in doing so to glorify God. I Corinthians 11:3 expresses the idea in this way: “the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God…” thus somehow equating the relationship of Father to Son with that of husband to wife, at least in the sense of identifying who is subordinate to whom. We’ll look into this more later. For now it’s enough to take in just how profound and weighty it is that we as married couples are meant to reflect in our matrimonial union both the character and the triunity of God Himself.
2. God created marriage to result in a family. “Then God blessed them [lit., He gave them a function], and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it…’” (Genesis 1:28a).
3. God created marriage to be on mission for the Lord together. “[Let them] have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28b). It’s clear that God brings us together as couples to fulfill a mission that we can accomplish better together than apart. In the case of Adam and Eve, God saw their role as that of having dominion over the earth, and in creative organizational ways—as in vocationally. So, if God has called you to a particular vocation, don’t diminish it by seeing it as somehow less that, say, going into the ministry. As Tim Keller remarks, when God establishes the new heaven and the new earth, it’s likely we will follow vocations, and without the limitations that sin brings with it we will be able to pursue them flawlessly, but among the redeemed ones in that new heaven and new earth the role of pastor will no longer be needed. Christ will be there, readily accessible to His children. Do not diminish the vocation, the mission, and the purpose that God has designed the two of you to fulfill in your lives together. So the question is: If our marriages are designed to resemble aspects of God’s nature and character, how are we doing with that job?
The Original Essence of Marriage
“And the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.’ [since] for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him” (Genesis 2:18-20). This is the original essence of marriage. After creating Adam, God remarks that it is “not good” that man should be alone. His use of the phrase “not good” is significant, because every time in chapter 1 that He adds something onto His creation we read, “and God saw that it was good.” When He creates man, He calls it “very good,” but for man to be found without a suitable helper is “not good.”
That God sees Adam’s aloneness as “not good” is not necessarily because He thinks Adam is lonely per se. It’s more that God is acknowledging a deficiency. Without woman, Adam will not be able to fulfill all the purposes the Lord has in mind. But, if you are single, you should not automatically assume that this passage is telling you to go in search of someone to “complete you” in this way. The Apostle Paul certainly does not see it like that. In I Corinthians 7:7 he writes, “I wish that all men were even as I myself,” as in, unmarried, and he gives reasons. However, for the married men in our congregation: you do need to understand that God has given you your wife because she does complete you. Without her there would be deficiencies in your life. Frankly, you don’t need the Bible to realize that. You need only to picture what your life would be like without her. My own would be a mess, disorganized, and certainly miserable without my wife. Simply put, there is a deficiency in our lives that, by God’s grace, marriage makes up for.
Returning to the text, the phrase ‘helper comparable” to him is an interesting one. The word for “comparable” in the original language conveys the idea of one thing joined together with another in an opposite and corresponding way. Wood workers use the term “dovetailing” in that same sense to describe two boards that have been notched so as to allow them to fit together and be joined in a unified way. This is precisely what God intends for the female and the male—to fit together in opposite and corresponding ways in a complementary fashion. So, in Genesis 2:21-24 God, recognizing Adam’s need, solves the deficiency by creating woman in a way that truly completes the man. “…Then the LORD God made the rib He had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said: ‘This one, at last, is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; this one will be called woman, for she was taken from man.’ This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh.”
Two becoming one flesh includes the idea of a physical union, certainly, but as a figure of speech it means more than that. The same word appears later in Genesis leading up to the Great Flood, when God observes how “all flesh,” as in “all mankind,” has become corrupt. And in Joel 2:28 God says, “I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh…” In each of these cases the word “flesh” stands for something broader, being used as a type of literary device called a synecdoche (sih-NEK-duh-kee). A synecdoche is a figure of speech that uses a part of something to stand for the whole, or vice versa. So, when we say we are doing a “head count,” we are using a synecdoche, because by counting heads we are actually counting whole people. One head equals one whole person.
Genesis 2:25 tells us, “Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.” The wording here is meant to reflect that within marriage there is a special kind of freedom. The world sometimes looks at marriage, as a “ball and chain,” but that runs counter to the way God intends marriage to be. Our culture, with its relational consumer-mindedness favoring informal, live-in relationships, puts the pair of individuals under constant pressure to perform one for the other because in that setting there is no sense of permanence, no real freedom to be one’s self in a vulnerable way. The legal bond of marriage, however, with the commitment that bond signifies, creates a secure relationship in which both people can be at ease and feel free to be open, exposed, and vulnerable with each other—physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. The freedom that marriage brings with it is not possible in any other relationship on earth because it is much more than a physical union. It is the joining of souls.
The Original Means to Marriage.
How do people biblically become married? In Matthew 19:5 Jesus tells the Pharisees, “‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh…’ So then, they are no longer two but one flesh.” How does this happen? The answer is two-fold. 1) God does it. 2) Each party has a hand in it. Scripture takes for granted that God is the one who joins couples together, because in Genesis, as in Matthew, it says, “Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.” Biblical marriage, therefore, does not just consist of a binding contract between two people. God means marriage to be a covenant relationship, as Proverbs 2:17, Malachi 2:14, and Ezekiel 3:22-27 demonstrate—one that He participates in, and indeed, creates by joining the couple together Himself—not a contract, not something to go into after doing a cost-benefit analysis. It is to be a covenant. Perhaps a good way to illustrate this is to compare it to the structure of an A-frame house where the roof is joined at the apex as well as at the foundation. For the structure to remain intact, all the joints must remain solidly fixed together. If not, the entire structure will collapse. When it comes to marriage, are we clear about the degree to which that relationship affects our relationship with God? And, do we understand to what degree our relationship with God affects our marriage relationship? The two things are inseparably linked. See I Peter 3:7.
A New Bond, a New Beginning
As Jesus answers the Pharisees’ question He also adds, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning, ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? The idea of two people leaving parents and being joined to each other emphasizes their new life in a new beginning with new identities as members of a new nuclear home. The expression “be joined to,” (the KJV says “to cleave together”) means “to be glued to, or cemented to.” It can also mean “to attach firmly, or to join by mortising,” and it appears many times in Scripture. One such place is in I Corinthians 6:16, 17, where Paul writes, “Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For ‘the two,’ He says, ‘shall become one flesh.’ But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” How repugnant it must be to the Lord for such a physical joining to take place without the accompanying spiritual union!
So, the covenant relationship formed through marriage includes both a moving away from past familial relationships and a cleaving to, or bonding with the spouse on multiple levels—socially, economically, personally. We remain distinct individuals, but from what we see in Scripture, God wants husband and wife to be joined together, united in what we do and how we live—not independent spirits but dependent upon one another and fulfilled in each other. Covenantal love, as Scripture sees it, is the strongest kind of love. We need only look at portions of Song of Solomon to see the power, intensity, and exclusivity of the covenantal love God wants our marriages to have.
Our Responsibilities in Marriage and Family
· We need to treat marriage as a covenant relationship, not as a consumer relationship where people fall in love, and fall out of love based on personal benefit or enjoyment.
· We need to “love” in order to “like.” Love is a decision, a choice, one that ends in an emotion. The world mistakenly thinks it’s the other way around.
· We need, as men and fathers, to lead without lording. What does that look like?
1. The husband/father sets the mission in the home. Spiritual leadership is one thing that cannot be delegated.
2. The husband takes primary responsibility for the spiritual development of his wife and his children—as Ephesians 5 clearly lays out.
3. The husband has a heart of service, because loving leadership serves.
· We as wives/mothers, husbands/fathers, must understand biblical marriage in such a way that it reflect the character of God and undergirds the family so that our children are blessed by it.
