What the Bible says about Marriage as God Ordained Institution
(From Forerunner Commentary)

Genesis 1:28

Immediately after He created humans as male and female, "God blessed them." The Theological Word Book of the Old Testament says that a blessing is "to endue with power for success," which is its essential meaning in just about every usage in the Old Testament. We can also define it by recognizing its opposite—a curse—the intention of which is "to bring great evil upon" to hinder success.

Thus, God gave the newly created couple a blessing to bestow power for success on them. We could also say that in this context, this divine blessing was their wedding ceremony. By this blessing, God gave Adam and Eve the right and the authority to enter this union, just as a marriage ceremony does today. It also gives them the authority and power to produce what God expected of them. With God's blessing given to the institution and to the individuals involved, the chances for success become significantly greater. In fact, with God's eager blessing, a married couple really has no excuse for failure!

The marriage ceremony used by the churches of God stresses that the bride and groom are making a covenant before God and man. The ceremony includes a laying on of hands that sets the couple apart in their union, showing that God Himself seals the contract—the marriage covenant—between the groom and the bride. In addition, in the prayer that accompanies the laying on of hands, the minister typically asks for blessings to come upon them—a blessing on their relationship, a blessing on their offspring, a blessing for their prosperity, etc.

The apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 1:9, "God is faithful." When God gives a blessing, He follows through by giving what is needed for its fulfillment. God's Word is not empty: "So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it" (Isaiah 55:11). So a groom and his bride have little excuse for not producing what God desires to result from their marriage.

To provide godly blessings, therefore, is a significant purpose for this institution. Marriage is truly a blessed arrangement. Not only does marriage have God's sanction, but He also loads it with benefits from His own hands. He blesses a man and his wife with advantages that are in no other union because He is intimately involved, a party in the covenant. In a Christian marriage, the power needed to make it work is available from God.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Marriage—A God-Plane Relationship (Part Two)

Genesis 1:28

God provides marriage to produce children, and evidently, He wants many of them! The Catholic Church teaches that the primary reason for marriage is to produce children, but spiritually, it is secondary to God's higher purpose. Certainly, marriage is the only union so authorized and blessed to produce children. This purpose contains all the sexual aspects to marriage relations, as regulated by the seventh commandment, "You shall not commit adultery" (Exodus 20:14; Deuteronomy 5:18).

Children produced outside of the marriage union will automatically be burdened by severe disadvantages. Beyond the emotional troubles inherent in illegitimacy, single-parent households are typically poorer than the average and are powerless to improve. The harried single parent is forced to work long hours at his job or several jobs, decreasing the precious time that every parent needs to give to his children. In this situation, children often spend a great deal of time alone and undisciplined, frequently finding themselves in trouble with teachers and administrators, neighbors, and law enforcement. As a result, they often feel unloved, abandoned, and at odds with the world, and many end up repeating the sins of their parents.

Only within marriage and the traditional family can children have the best environment to produce, not just secure, peaceful, useful lives, but also the discipline and character to have the image of God created in them. This does not preclude a child produced outside of marriage from God's calling, although it can make matters more difficult. By the same token, not every child who grows up in a traditional Christian family will answer God's summons to belief and repentance. However, marriage provides the best and the only God-sanctioned relationship for the conception, bearing, and rearing of children. If a child begins his life in the proper environment, he has a head start on reaching both his physical and spiritual potentials.

These purposes of marriage always seem to return to the idea that God is reproducing Himself. The lawful union of man and wife is a vital first step in this process. Once God binds them together and they conceive a child, they bring into being another individual who has the potential to be a member of God's Family. This is the way God intends the process to begin.

Then, after parents train them up in the way that they should go (Proverbs 22:6), they turn them over to God for further development as His children. This is one of the great ironies in all of creation: that God gives often young, immature, inexperienced human parents "first crack" at producing children in His image. He places upon them the tremendous responsibility to mold and shape the next generation into the moldable clay that He can work with to shape righteous sons and daughters for His Kingdom.

Nonetheless, it all begins with marriage, the best environment to turn out the ideal product for God to use in reproducing Himself.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Marriage—A God-Plane Relationship (Part Three)

Genesis 2:18-20

Within the covenant, the blessing of the establishment of marriage is preceded by God preparing Adam's mind for his need for a companion suitable to him. This was no casual activity. It involved a display of the intellectual powers that God gave to Adam. God undoubtedly caused animals or groups of animals to gather for Adam to observe, study, and classify, to see what he would call them.

In giving each animal group its name, Adam demonstrated his right as God's human regent. He was given dominion over the animals, and he used that authority. Furthermore, it appears that the names Adam gave them “stuck.” They did so because he demonstrated good insight into their characteristics, and his descendants later used the names he initially gave the animals.

This exercise demonstrated to Adam that there was no one like him in the animal world. No animal was created in the image of God. If he had chosen one of them, communication and all it entails would necessarily have had to remain at the animal's level. He was now better prepared for God's gift of Eve.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Leadership and Covenants (Part Five)

Genesis 2:21-24

It is a damning testimonial of our society's state of morality that changing the definition of marriage is being seriously discussed. If the discussion results in marriage being opened up to combinations of people other than one man and one woman, we can mark it as the death-knell of the nation. No society has ever endured far beyond the demeaning of the marriage institution.

From a biblical perspective, marriage is humanity's founding institution. After He created Adam and Eve, God immediately united them as husband and wife. Their union became the bedrock upon which human civilization was built. As much as evolutionists have tried to dispel the notion, humanity is one large family, and family begins with marriage.

Various kinds of families have been tried throughout history—polygamous, incestuous, communal, etc.—but none of them have really worked. All stable, enduring societies cherish the one-man-one-woman lifelong bond of marriage. Rome, for instance, flourished during its centuries as a republic due to its tenacious grip on what has become known as the "traditional family." It is renowned for its total lack of divorce throughout this period. Rome's slow decline can be traced to the time when easy divorce and open promiscuity began to cheapen the marriage covenant's worth.

This should give us an indication of where America—and to a similar extent, the rest of the Western world—is on the timeline of societal decline. Divorce and promiscuity became commonplace not long after World War II. In the nearly sixty years since that time, divorce rates have hovered around 50%, and out-of-wedlock sex is nearly universal. Roughly a third of America's births are illegitimate. And since the late 1970s, homosexuality has increasingly become accepted as just another lifestyle choice, despite the ravages of AIDS.

The legal recognition of traditional marriage acknowledges its benefits to society as a whole. Traditional marriages produce children, who extend the nation's existence, ideals, goals, and wealth for another generation. Traditional families are healthier, more stable, and more productive than other kinds of families, resulting in a net gain for society. Homosexual unions can never even hope to provide society any of these benefits.

The apostle Paul writes in Hebrews 13:4, "Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge." The use of both "fornicators" and "adulterers" is significant here because the former covers all sexual immorality, while the latter describes marital infidelity. Homosexuality, then, included under the general term "fornication," has no place in godly marriage. Using Paul's language, it is defiling, thus perverse, base, and unwholesome. There should be no debate within the church of God that such an abomination has any place among God-fearing Christians.

Looking beyond this ungodly attempt to pervert the noble institution of marriage, Christian husbands and wives need to take stock of their own relationships, asking such questions as: Are we making the most of our marriages? Are we good examples of what Christian marriages should be? Are we honoring God in these God-plane relationships? Do our children see how much we love each other? Are we truly united in belief and practice? How can we improve our marriages?

Then, even if society crumbles around us, we will have created an environment of strength and unity in which to rebuild an even better world for our children and grandchildren.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
In Defense of Marriage

Matthew 19:3-6

Jesus' teaching on marriage follows the pattern set in the first two chapters of Genesis. Matthew 19:4-6 appears in a passage on marriage and divorce in which Jesus answers a question posed by some Pharisees about divorce, specifically, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?" (Matthew 19:3). At that time, divorce was quite rampant because of the general notion among Jews, taken from a misreading of Deuteronomy 24:1-4, that the law allowed a man to divorce his wife simply by giving his wife a certificate of divorce and sending her away.

Notice, however, how Jesus answers their cynical question: "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female' . . .?" (Matthew 19:4). He answered their question with Genesis 1:27! This gives us insight into what Jesus based His understanding of the institution of marriage on: God's original instruction just after creation. In the very next breath, He quotes from Genesis 2:24: "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh" (Matthew 19:5).

So what did Jesus do in answering their question? He reached back to the very beginning of mankind and reminded them of God's intentions at that time, explaining that, in His judgment, nothing had changed. His purposes and instructions regarding marriage have not "evolved" over the millennia. He still considers marriage a God-plane union between a man and a woman with significant implications regarding being created in God's own image. In other words, God's reasons for the marriage institution have not been altered by mankind's inability to fulfill them.

Jesus continues in Matthew 19:6, "So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate." His answer can be paraphrased as, "Look, you have got things all wrong. Marriage is not just a physical relationship that one can make or break at any time and for any reason. Genesis shows what God intended when He created people male and female, and clearly, He made marriage a divinely ordained, lifelong institution." He explains in verse 8, "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so." He then proceeds to give the biblical reasons for divorce.

In this New Testament context, Christ shows that God has endorsed the marriage relationship from the beginning as an excellent way to produce righteous character in His children. He is preparing children in His image—not just children who look like Him but also ones who live as He does. Thus, His creation of mankind was not complete with His physical creation in Genesis 1, but it continues to move forward spiritually within the conversion process. As can be seen in Jesus' comments, the marriage institution plays a prominent role in it. Divorce, sundering the union of man and wife, can be a great hindrance to the spiritual growth of both parties involved.

The first purpose of marriage, then, is that it provides a fitting environment for producing divine character.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Marriage—A God-Plane Relationship (Part Two)

Romans 1:24-32

The apostle's words are playing out openly in our daily news as marriage loses its traditional value in this society. In this passage, Paul describes the current generation—how men have rejected God's will and supplanted it with gross idolatry and how they have become lovers of themselves, exalting the creation and their desires above the Creator. With this foundation and with God allowing mankind to pursue its own course for the present, human nature desires to remake all of God's institutions in its own image, and the marriage covenant is in its cross-hairs.

Marriage and family are the foundations of any healthy society, and these two bedrocks of civilization are slowly being dismantled before our eyes. When these foundations, which God formed in righteousness, are weakened further, it will prepare for a different foundation—one formed in unrighteousness to support the coming of the lawless one, the son of perdition, as II Thessalonians 2:3-10 foretells.

Marriage and family were undefiled when God gave them as a gift to mankind before sin entered the world. In Genesis 2:18, God enacted the first social foundation for mankind: "And the LORD God said, 'It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.'" Then, in verse 24, God sanctifies Adam's relationship with Eve by declaring that the two would be joined together as one flesh, that a man and his wife should leave mother and father, cling to each other, and become their own family unit. In other words, marriage was dignified and defined by God as a joining of one man and one woman.

Why did God do it this way? He could have just kept on creating one man after another to populate the earth. It was unlikely that He would run out of the dust of the earth. However, He made them male and female for a reason.

The prophet Malachi reveals a major reason why God created man and woman to become one flesh. The answer is part of God's castigation of Judah for tolerating easy divorce laws. In Malachi 2:11, He says that by doing so, the Jews had profaned the holy institution of marriage that God so dearly loves.

Yet you say, "For what reason [are you angry]?" Because the LORD has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you have dealt treacherously; yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant. But did He not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth. "For the LORD God of Israel says that He hates divorce, for it covers one's garment with violence," says the LORD of hosts. (Malachi 2:14-16)

Because He wants godly children, God made humans male and female. Within the structure of a proper, married family life, strong in unity and free from worries of separation, it would produce the best results.

From this comes a second reason why God made them male and female. With the blessing of children, God has bestowed on mankind the gift of allowing parents to become His partners in His creative works by rearing children who are prepared to answer His calling. This spiritual reproductive process will one day bring many sons and daughters into God's Family. This realization places families and marriage far above what most in the world consider them to be. It elevates them to a moral level unrecognizable in this world of sin.

The wisdom and depths of love that God has for mankind are beyond our abilities to know fully, but it is clear that marriage and family are prominent in God's plan. Any changes to the divine structure are an affront to God and His plan. Marriage is of divine origin, and changes to it are nothing less than man's rebellion against his Creator.

James Beaubelle
The Sacredness of Marriage

1 Corinthians 6:9-10

We tend to look at our lives in a very physical manner, and this applies to our relationships, including marriage. For instance, many young people, influenced by this world's highly sexualized culture, believe that a top factor in a marriage is sexual compatibility. This leads them to indulge in fornication—often with multiple partners—and cohabitation without the benefit of the marriage vow.

Statistics show that following this path actually increases the chances of destroying any subsequent marriage. Depending on the study, there is a 40 to 85 percent higher risk of divorce between couples cohabiting before marriage than those waiting until after marriage to live together. This tragic result can be traced back to a merely physical viewpoint.

However, when God introduces humanity and marriage, the first thing He does is to put relationships on a spiritual plane. His initial concern is that we have been created in His image—after the God-kind. Our relationships, then—especially our marriages—should include this God-plane quality. While there are many physical aspects to marriage, the most crucial facet of married life is spiritual in nature, concerning our preparation for the Kingdom of God.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Marriage—A God-Plane Relationship (Part Two)

Revelation 19:6-9

God blesses marriage in the first chapter of Genesis, and it is interesting that as the Book nears its end, in Revelation 19, marriage and His blessing on it once again take center stage. Clearly, the institution of marriage has a far higher purpose than just the physical union of a man and a woman.

Here we have a prophetic portrayal of the ultimate marriage, and God's blessing goes out to those who comprise the wife—the bride—of Jesus Christ. This blessing in Revelation 19:9 gives the blessing in Genesis 1:28 its true context. Our human marriages are types of this greater spiritual marriage. The experiences that we go through during a blessed physical marriage are designed by God to prepare us for our part in the ultimate intimate relationship with our Savior.

Marriage is a representation on the human plane of union between God and man. A similar intimacy exists in both relationships. Just as the sexual bond between a man and woman makes them "one flesh" (Genesis 2:24; see I Corinthians 6:16), a close, spiritual unity between God and a converted human being—which Jesus says is "to know" God in John 17:3 (compare this term to the sexual imagery of Genesis 4:1)—makes them "one spirit." On this, the apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 6:17, "But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him" (see also Ephesians 4:4). Physical marriage, then, can teach us how to be spiritually one with God.

Just as surely as God will bless the union between His Son and the Bride, He will also endue the physical type with the ability to fulfill its purpose—that is, to create unity between marriage partners to prepare them for union with God.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Marriage—A God-Plane Relationship (Part Three)


 

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