This Momentary Marriage E-Book

John Piper

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 263

Beschreibung

Reflecting on forty years of matrimony, John Piper exalts the biblical meaning of marriage over its emotion, exhorting couples to keep their covenant for all the best reasons. Even in the days when people commonly stayed married "'til death do us part," there has never been a generation whose view of marriage was high enough, says Pastor John Piper. That is all the more true in our casual times. Though personal selfishness and cultural bondage obstruct the wonder of God's purpose, it is found in God's Word, where his design can awaken a glorious vision capable of freeing every person from small, Christ-ignoring, romance-intoxicated views. As Piper explains in reflecting on forty years of matrimony: "Most foundationally, marriage is the doing of God. And ultimately, marriage is the display of God. It displays the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his people to the world in a way that no other event or institution does. Marriage, therefore, is not mainly about being in love. It's mainly about telling the truth with our lives. And staying married is not about staying in love. It is about keeping covenant and putting the glory of Christ's covenant-keeping love on display." This Momentary Marriage unpacks the biblical vision, its unexpected contours, and its weighty implications for married, single, divorced, and remarried alike.

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THIS MOMENTARY MARRIAGE

A Parable of Permanence

JOHN PIPER

CROSSWAY BOOKSWHEATON. ILLINOIS

This Momentary Marriage

Copyright © 2009 by Desiring God Foundation

Published by Crossway Books a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design and illustration by: Christopher Koelle and Matt Mantooth at Portland Studios, Inc.

First printing, 2009

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version®. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

To

Ruth and Bill Piper

Pamela and George Henry

whose marriages were broken only by death

CONTENTS

Foreword: Pendulums and Pictures by Noël Piper

Introduction: Marriage and Martyrdom

1 Staying Married Is Not Mainly about Staying in Love

2 Naked and Not Ashamed

3 God’s Showcase of Covenant-Keeping Grace

4 Forgiving and Forbearing

5 Pursuing Conformity to Christ in the Covenant

6 Lionhearted and Lamblike—The Christian Husband as Head : Foundations of Headship

7 Lionhearted and Lamblike—The Christian Husband as Head: What Does It Mean to Lead?

8 The Beautiful Faith of Fearless Submission

9 Single in Christ: A Name Better Than Sons and Daughters

10 Singleness, Marriage, and the Christian Virtue of Hospitality

11 Faith and Sex in Marriage

12 Marriage Is Meant for Making Children . . . Disciples of Jesus: How Absolute Is the Duty to Procreate?

13 Marriage Is Meant for Making Children . . . Disciples of Jesus: The Conquest of Anger in Father and Child

14 What God Has Joined Together, Let Not Man Separate: The Gospel and the Radical New Obedience

15 What God Has Joined Together, Let Not Man Separate: The Gospel and the Divorced

Conclusion: This Momentary Marriage

A Few Words of Thanks

A Note on Resources: Desiring God

Foreword: Pendulums and Pictures

Noël Piper

I know some couples who think and feel so much alike that they can work together, minister together, live together, and raise children together with hardly any conflict. Well, there might be a couple like that. But it’s not us.

On personality analyses we two chart out as almost exactly opposite. According to Ruth Bell Graham, that’s good. She’s famous for saying that if two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary. But there are times I think we’d be more than willing to experiment with that kind of not being necessary.

In our real life, I swing somewhere between two extremes. At one end of the pendulum’s arc, I’m in wonder: “How in the world did I get such an amazing husband? What did I ever do that he should have paid me a bit of notice, never mind that he asked me to marry him?” We took a marriage assessment during one of my blissful periods. The results placed me high on the idealism scale, recognizing few problem areas in our marriage—in other words, according to the “experts,” fairly unreliable.

Somewhere on that upswing is where I wish we could stay, where there’s nothing hindering our enjoyment of each other—like during one vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains:

AWAY

Reading in rocking chair, Butterflies and black bear, Moss and mushrooms,

Pictures and poems, Songs and swing, Woodpeckers on wing, Worship and walking, Time for talking, Scrabble and sleep . . .A quiet to keep.With you.

By contrast, when inertia and resistance are dragging us downward, I’m asking myself, “How in the world did we get into such a mess? What happened to make us feel this kind of disagreement and unhappiness?” We observed our silver anniversary during such a season:

GOING FOR GOLD

What a way to prepare for our party—was it you who hurt me or I you?But our smiles were constrained to seem hearty—a veneer we were all too used to.“May the next twenty-five be as great as the first!” they said with their hugs and smiles, while I tried to dream up an alias I’d adopt after bolting for miles.But I knew I would stay. How could I flee the one who knew me, yet loved me still?Then Beryl, whose years with Arnold were sixty, matter-of-factly thawed my heart’s chill.“The years that are coming will be the best;the first twenty-five are the hardest.”

Since I apparently can’t see much beyond the emotions of the moment, if we were to ask for a counselor’s evaluation during those hard times, it probably would seem to reveal a marriage in trouble, a judgment just as misleading as that of idealism during days of “all’s well with the world.”

The pendulum of our marriage oscillates and sometimes wobbles, but it is suspended from above and is firmly attached. By God’s grace, it will not crash to the ground. This year we celebrate our fortieth anniversary, and thanks to God, we feel like celebrating as we press toward the gold of our fiftieth, if God should be gracious to give us so many years.

We know it is the weight of our sin that accelerates us into the seasons at the bottom. But here’s the amazing, unbelievable thing—a profound mystery, as Paul says: “‘A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ . . . and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31–32). Marriage refers to Christ and the church—every marriage, no matter how pendulum-like because of our sin; every marriage, even if the couple doesn’t care a bit about Jesus.

To change metaphors, God designed marriage to be a picture. That makes me ask myself, how clear and well-focused is the portrait of Jesus that our marriage is displaying?

I love using my tiny digital camera. But the larger and more complex a subject, the more nearly impossible it is to represent it well and completely. No single photograph can show someone how magnificent the Grand Canyon is. It’s true that my shortcomings as a photographer do nothing to change the majesty of that natural wonder. Still, some snapshots do give a better idea than others of the grandeur. I want to take that clearer kind of picture of the Grand Canyon. And that’s the kind of image of Jesus I want our marriage to portray.

I pray that this book (by my favorite preacher) will focus the lenses of many marriages so that the portrait of Christ and his bride is sharp and clear.

Introduction: Marriage and Martyrdom

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was engaged to be married to Maria von Wedemeyer when he was hanged at dawn on April 9, 1945, at the age of thirty-nine. As a young pastor in Germany, he had been opposed to Nazism and was finally arrested on April 5, 1943, for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

So he never married. He skipped the shadow on the way to the Reality. Some are called to one kind of display of the worth of Christ, some to another. Martyrdom, not marriage, was his calling.

Being married in the moment of death is both a sweet and bitter providence. Sweet because at the precipice of eternity the air is crystal-clear, and you see more plainly than ever the precious things that really matter about your imperfect lover. But being married at death is also bitter, because the suffering is doubled as one watches the other die, or even quadrupled if both are dying. And more if there is a child.

ONE FLESH EVEN IN DEATH

That was the case with John and Betty Stam. They were missionaries with China Inland Mission. Having met each other at Moody Bible Institute, they sailed for China separately—she in 1931, he a year later. They were married by Reuben A. Torrey on October 25, 1933, in Tsinan. John was twenty-six; Betty was twenty-seven.

The region was already dangerous because of the civil war between the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party. On September 11, 1934, Helen Priscilla was born. Three months later, her parents were beheaded by the Communists on a hill outside Miaosheo, while tiny Helen lay hidden where her mother left her with ten dollars in her blanket.

Geraldine Taylor, the daughter-in-law of Hudson Taylor (the founder of the China Inland Mission), published the story of the Stams’ martyrdom two years after their death. Every time I read it, the compounding of the preciousness and the pain by the marriage and the baby make me weep.

Never was that little one more precious than when they looked their last on her baby sweetness, as they were roughly summoned the next morning and led out to die. . . . Painfully bound with ropes, their hands behind them, stripped of their outer garments, and John barefooted (he had given Betty his socks to wear), they passed down the street where he was known to many, while the Reds shouted their ridicule and called the people to come and see the execution.

Like their Master, they were led up a little hill outside the town. There, in a clump of pine trees, the Communists harangued the unwilling onlookers, too terror-stricken to utter protest—But no, one broke the ranks! The doctor of the place and a Christian, he expressed the feelings of many when he fell on his knees and pleaded for the life of his friends. Angrily repulsed by the Reds, he still persisted, until he was dragged away as a prisoner, to suffer death when it appeared that he too was a follower of Christ.

John had turned to the leader of the band, asking mercy for this man. When he was sharply ordered to kneel—and the look of joy on his face, afterwards, told of the unseen Presence with them as his spirit was released—Betty was seen to quiver, but only for a moment. Bound as she was, she fell on her knees beside him. A quick command, the flash of a sword which mercifully she did not see—and they were reunited.1

NOTHING IS LOST

Yes, they were reunited, but not as husband and wife. For Jesus said, “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25). There is no human marriage after death. The shadow of covenant-keeping between husband and wife gives way to the reality of covenant-keeping between Christ and his glorified Church. Nothing is lost. The music of every pleasure is transposed into an infinitely higher key.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John and Betty Stam today are closer to each other in love than John and Betty Stam were, or Dietrich and Maria would have been, in marriage. They “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt. 13:43). Their magnificent perfection points to the glory of Christ. And in the age to come, their bodies will be restored, and all creation will join with the children of God in everlasting joy (Rom. 8:21).

AS THE CROWN MAKES THE KING, MARRIAGE MAKES ONE

The month after Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment, and two years before his death, Bonhoeffer wrote from the military section of the prison at Tegel, Berlin, “A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell.” His text was Ephesians 1:12: “. . . so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.”

Marriage is more than your love for each other. . . . In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, and office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.2

The aim of this book is to enlarge your vision of what marriage is. As Bonhoeffer says, it is more than your love for each other. Vastly more. Its meaning is infinitely great. I say that with care. The meaning of marriage is the display of the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his people.

This covenant-keeping love reached its climax in the death of Christ for his church, his bride. That death was the ultimate expression of grace, which is the ultimate expression of God’s glory, which is of infinite value. Therefore, when Paul says that our great and final destiny is “the praise of [God’s] glorious grace” (Eph. 1:6), he elevates marriage beyond measure, for here, uniquely, God displays the apex of the glory of his grace: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25).

A STRANGE WAY TO START A BOOK ON MARRIAGE

Thinking about martyrdom may seem like a strange way to begin a book on marriage. If we lived in a different world, and had a different Bible, I might think it strange. But here is what I read.

Let those who have wives live as though they had none. (1 Cor. 7:29)

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.” (Luke 18:29–30)

I take those verses to mean: Marriage is a good gift of God, but the world is fallen, and sin abounds, and obedience is costly, and suffering is to be expected, and “a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Matt. 10:36). High romance and passionate sexual intimacy and precious children may come. But hold them loosely—as though you were not holding them. This is what Bonhoeffer represents. To keep his life and meaning before us throughout this book, I will let him speak briefly on the facing pages at the beginning of each chapter.

Romance, sex, and childbearing are temporary gifts of God. They are not part of the next life. And they are not guaranteed even for this life. They are one possible path along the narrow way to Paradise. Marriage passes through breathtaking heights and through swamps with choking vapors. It makes many things sweeter, and with it come bitter providences.

WE MADE IT

Marriage is a momentary gift. I have only scratched the surface of its wonders and its wounds. I hope that you will go farther and deeper and higher. As this book is published, Noël and I are passing our fortieth anniversary of marriage. She is God’s gift to me—far better than I deserve. We speak often of the wonder of being married till one of us dies. It has not been trouble-free. So we imagine ourselves in our seventies or eighties—when divorce is not only sin, but socially silly—sitting across from each other, perhaps at Old Country Buffet, and smiling at each other’s wrinkled faces, and saying with the deepest gratitude for God’s grace: “We made it.”

To those who are just beginning, I simply join Dietrich Bonhoeffer in saying,

“Welcome one another . . . for the glory of God.” That is God’s word for your marriage. Thank him for it; thank him for leading you thus far; ask him to establish your marriage, to confirm it, sanctify it, and preserve it. So your marriage will be “for the praise of his glory.” Amen.3

As you gave the ring to one another and have now received it a second time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER,

Letters and Papers from Prison, 27–28

1Mrs. Howard Taylor, The Triumph of John and Betty Stam (Philadelphia: China Inland Mission, 1936), 107–108. The child had been hidden and was found by Christians and saved.

2Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 27. All the quotes from Bonhoeffer on the facing pages of each chapter of this book were taken from Letters and Papers from Prison; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (London: SCM Press, 1954); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

3Letters and Papers from Prison, 32.

CHAPTER ONE: STAYING MARRIED IS NOT MAINLY ABOUT STAYING IN LOVE

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 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

There never has been a generation whose general view of marriage is high enough. The chasm between the biblical vision of marriage and the common human vision is now, and has always been, gargantuan. Some cultures in history respect the importance and the permanence of marriage more than others. Some, like our own, have such low, casual, take-it-or-leave-it attitudes toward marriage as to make the biblical vision seem ludicrous to most people.

AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE VISION OF MARRIAGE

That was the case in Jesus’ day as well. But ours is worse. When Jesus gave a glimpse of the magnificent view of marriage that God willed for his people, the disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Matt. 19:10). In other words, Christ’s vision of the meaning of marriage was so enormously different from the disciples’, they could not even imagine it to be a good thing. That such a vision could be good news was simply outside their categories.

If that was the case then—in the sober, Jewish world in which they lived—how much more will the magnificence of marriage in the mind of God seem unintelligible in a modern Western culture, where the main idol is self; and its main doctrine is autonomy; and its central act of worship is being entertained; and its three main shrines are the television, the Internet, and the cinema; and its most sacred genuflection is the uninhibited act of sexual intercourse. Such a culture will find the glory of marriage in the mind of Jesus virtually incomprehensible. Jesus would probably say to us today, when he had finished opening the mystery for us, the same thing he said in his own day: “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. . . . Let the one who is able to receive this receive it” (Matt. 19:11–12).

WAKING UP FROM THE CULTURAL MIRAGE

So I start with the assumption that my own sin and selfishness and cultural bondage makes it almost impossible for me to feel the wonder of God’s purpose for marriage. The fact that we live in a society that can defend two men or two women entering a sexual relationship and, with wild inconceivability, call it marriage shows that the collapse of our culture into debauchery and anarchy is probably not far away.

I mention this cultural distortion of marriage in the hopes that it might wake you up to consider a vision of marriage higher and deeper and stronger and more glorious than anything this culture—or perhaps you yourself—ever imagined. The greatness and glory of marriage is beyond our ability to think or feel without divine revelation and without the illumining and awakening work of the Holy Spirit. The world cannot know what marriage is without learning it from God. The natural man does not have the capacities to see or receive or feel the wonder of what God has designed for marriage to be. I pray that this book might be used by God to help set you free from small, worldly, culturally contaminated, self-centered, Christ-ignoring, God-neglecting, romance-intoxicated, unbiblical views of marriage.

The most foundational thing to see from the Bible about marriage is that it is God’s doing. And the ultimate thing to see from the Bible about marriage is that it is for God’s glory. Those are the two points I have to make. Most foundationally, marriage is the doing of God. And ultimately, marriage is the display of God.

1. MARRIAGE IS GOD’S DOING

First, most foundationally, marriage is God’s doing. There are at least four ways to see this explicitly or implicitly in Genesis 2:18–25.

a) Marriage Was God’s Design

Marriage is God’s doing because it was his design in the creation of man as male and female. This was made plain earlier in Genesis 1:27–28: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’”

But it is also clear here in the flow of thought in Genesis 2. In verse 18, it is God himself who decrees that man’s solitude is not good, and it is God himself who sets out to complete one of the central designs of creation, namely, man and woman in marriage. “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Don’t miss that central and all-important statement: God himself will make a being perfectly suited for him—a wife.

Then he parades the animals before Adam so that he might see there is no creature that qualifies. This creature must be made uniquely from man so that she will be of his essence—a fellow human being in God’s image, just as Genesis 1:27 said. So we read in verses 21–22, “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.” God made her.

This text ends in verses 24–25 with the words, “They shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” In other words, this is all moving toward marriage. So the first thing to say about marriage being God’s doing is that marriage was his design in creating man male and female.

b) God Gave Away the First Bride

Marriage is also God’s doing because he took the role of being the first Father to give away the bride. Genesis 2:22: “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” He didn’t hide her and make Adam seek. He made her; then he brought her. In a profound sense, he had fathered her. And now, though she was his by virtue of creation, he gave her to the man in this absolutely new kind of relationship called marriage, unlike every other relationship in the world.

c) God Spoke the Design of Marriage into Existence

Marriage is God’s doing because God not only created the woman with this design and brought her to the man like a father brings his daughter to her husband, but also because God spoke the design of marriage into existence. He did this in verse 24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Who is talking in verse 24? The writer of Genesis is talking. And what did Jesus believe about the writer of Genesis? He believed it was Moses (Luke 24:44). He also believed that Moses was inspired by God, so that what Moses was saying, God was saying. We can see this if we look carefully at Matthew 19:4–5: “[Jesus] answered, ‘Have you not read that he [God] who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said [Note: God said!], “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”’?” Jesus said that the words of Genesis 2:24 are God’s words, even though they were written by Moses.

Therefore, marriage is God’s doing because God spoke the earliest design of it into existence—“A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

d) God Performs the One-Flesh Union

The fourth way that marriage is God’s doing is seen in the fact that God himself performs the union referred to in the words “become one flesh.” That union is at the heart of what marriage is.

Genesis 2:24 is God’s word of institution for marriage. But just as it was God who took the woman from the flesh of man (Gen. 2:21), it is God who in each marriage ordains and performs a uniting called one flesh. Man does not create this. God does. And it is not in man’s power to destroy. This is implicit here in Genesis 2:24, but Jesus makes it explicit in Mark 10:8–9. He quotes Genesis 2:24, then adds a comment that explodes like thunder with the glory of marriage. “‘The two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

When a couple speaks their vows, it is not a man or a woman or a pastor or parent who is the main actor—the main doer. God is. God joins a husband and a wife into a one-flesh union. God does that. The world does not know this. Which is one of the reasons why marriage is treated so casually. And Christians often act like they don’t know it, which is one of the reasons marriage in the church is not seen as the wonder it is. Marriage is God’s doing because it is a one-flesh union that God himself performs.

So, in sum, the most foundational thing we can say about marriage is that it is God’s doing. It’s his doing:

a. because it was his design in creation;

b. because he personally gave away the first bride in marriage;

c. because he spoke the design of marriage into existence: leave parents, hold fast to your wife, become one flesh;

d. and because this one-flesh union is established by God himself in each marriage.

A glimpse into the magnificence of marriage comes from seeing in God’s word that God himself is the great doer. Marriage is his doing. It is from him and through him. That is the most foundational thing we can say about marriage.

Now we turn to the most ultimate thing we can say about marriage. It is not only from him and through him. It is also for him.

2. MARRIAGE IS FOR GOD’S GLORY

The ultimate thing to see in the Bible about marriage is that it exists for God’s glory. Most foundationally, marriage is the doing of God. Most ultimately, marriage is the display of God. It is designed by God to display his glory in a way that no other event or institution does.

The way to see this most clearly is to connect Genesis 2:24 with its use in Ephesians 5:31–32. In Genesis 2:24, God says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” What kind of relationship is this? How are these two people held together? Can they walk away from this relationship? Can they go from spouse to spouse? Is this relationship rooted in romance? Sexual desire? Need for companionship? Cultural convenience? What is this? What holds it together?

THE MYSTERY OF MARRIAGE REVEALED

In Genesis 2:24, the words “hold fast to his wife” and the words “they shall become one flesh” point to something far deeper and more permanent than serial marriages and occasional adultery. What these words point to is marriage as a sacred covenant rooted in covenant commitments that stand against every storm “as long as we both shall live.” But that is only implicit here. It becomes explicit when the mystery of marriage is more fully revealed in Ephesians 5:31–32.

Paul quotes Genesis 2:24 in verse 31: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Then he gives it this all-important interpretation in verse 32: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” In other words, marriage is patterned after Christ’s covenant commitment to his church.

Christ thought of himself as the bridegroom coming for his bride, the true people of God (Matt. 9:15; 25:1ff.; John 3:29). Paul knew his ministry was to gather the bride—the true people of God who would trust Christ. His calling was to betroth the church to her husband, Jesus. Paul puts it like this in 2 Corinthians 11:2: “I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.”

Christ knew he would have to pay for his bride with his own blood. He called this relationship the new covenant—“This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). This is what Paul is referring to when he says that marriage is a great mystery: “I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” Christ obtained the church by his blood and formed a new covenant with her, an unbreakable “marriage.”