So I’ve been explaining what I think is the purpose of marriage in my previous two posts – the first point I made was that the purpose is not happiness, and the second was that it’s designed to grow us up. Now I want to move on to more theological considerations.
I am no theologian but I have spent a good portion of my life seriously thinking about these things. I know I have readers who come from Christian backgrounds, like me, and others who do not, so I’ll do my best to speak to everyone.
I believe that marriage reveals things to us about the nature of God.
I believe that all earthly experiences and all learning endeavors can teach us about God. Since God invented everything, the more we learn about things – all things – the better we are able to understand the nature of the One who created them. I think all education is essentially about Him, though not everyone realizes it.
But some things in life teach us more vividly or more essentially about his nature than other things do. I think marriage is one of those things. Here’s why.
1. Marriage teaches us about masculinity and femininity, which are both important attributes of God.
I intend to explore the issue of gender more deeply in a future post, but for now I just want to say this: God is both masculine and feminine. I refer to God with masculine pronouns, in accordance with the longstanding Judeo-Christian tradition (as I believe there are good reasons for this tradition), but I truly believe that God is equally masculine and feminine. God is both Father and Mother. God created male and female to express both sides of the spectrum of his nature; a part of God’s nature is revealed in woman and a part is revealed in man.
When the two are unified, as in marriage, I believe we get a slightly fuller picture of God.
2. Marriage helps us to understand God’s relationship to us.
I believe that God invented marriage in part so that we could get a better understanding of His relationship to us.
How does marriage do this? First of all, when a man or a woman falls in love, he or she gets a small taste of what God feels for us. When someone falls in love, she begins to understand what it feels like to be completely selfless towards another human being. Her beloved’s desires become her own; she begins to desire his happiness as much as she desires her own.
In the book of Isaiah, God says, “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you” (62:5). In short, then, the depth of wild, selfless, desperate love that I feel for my beloved, and that he feels for me, is a tiny picture of God’s love for his beloved: us.
The Bible often figures God’s people – first Israel, later the Church – as a woman to whom God is betrothed. This woman is often figured as being unfaithful, and God is a brokenhearted lover (cf. Isaiah 57:7-8; Hosea 2). But someday the bride and groom will be married. The day that Jesus returns to reclaim his people will be the wedding day (Revelation 19:7). “‘In that day,’ declares the Lord, ‘you will call me ‘my husband’” (Hosea 2:16).
On the one hand, you could argue that God uses the earthly imagery of a wedding to help us mortals to understand his unfathomable love for us. However, I think it’s possible that he actually designed marriage to reflect and imitate his relationship to us. I think he had the Great Wedding in mind when he thought up marriage, saying “This will help them understand how I feel and how I am going to bring them back to me.”
3. Marriage helps us to understand the relational nature of God.
As a Christian, I accept the doctrine of the Trinity, which teaches that God is one but exists as three persons. This is a complicated and mysterious doctrine, and I don’t want to get into too much detail here, but essentially the doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that God lives eternally in relationship within his Triune nature. Throughout eternity God has existed in relationship between the Father, the Son, and The Holy Spirit. God’s essence, therefore, is relational.
I said earlier that all learning leads us to a deeper understanding of God. But learning about and experiencing relationship is especially important, since God’s very essence is relational. The more we learn about what it’s like to live in relationship, the better we understand God’s nature.
Just as all relationships enable us to grow up, so do all relationships teach us about God’s relational nature; but marriage is special because of the unique way it unites two individuals, both in body and in spirit. The Bible says marriage makes us “one flesh,” and no other relationship between two people is simultaneously as intentional and as permanent as marriage. Marriage brings together bodily union (sex), emotional union (romance, friendship), and commitment. Marriage is – or ought to be – the most intimate relationship a person can ever experiences. As we experience this level of intimacy, we begin to get at the very heart of God’s nature.
In these three ways, I believe that marriage teaches us about God.
What do you think? Are there more/different ways that marriage might teach us about God? Do you think I’m wrong? Of course, if you don’t believe in God, none of this will make any sense to you.
In my next post, I plan to explore how marriage teaches us what it means to be human.
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Another fantastic post! I agree in the viewpoint that (while I too use the masculine when describing God) he is equally made of the feminine and masculine and that’s why stronger relationships have an equal balance of the two.
I also think that marriage gives us the chance to really live the way he wants us too. I’m often drawn to the beatitudes in Matthew when thinking about the sacrifices a person makes in marriage and family life and the rewards you receive from it.
This is a beautiful, thoughtful and all-around awesome post, Kathleen! My wife and I have been preparing presentations for a marriage retreat, and there is a heavy focus on all of the incredible issues related to sexuality (in the masculine/feminine sense).
For us Catholics, this speaks to the heart of the issue of the relationship between God and his Church (Jesus as bridegroom and Church as bride)…and it’s a big reason why we only let men be priests despite the cultural pressures to do otherwise.
But I digress…my main point is that I totally agree that marriage definitely teaches us about God. And the mystery of sexuality is a big part of that education!
Kathryn–enjoying this series. You’ve really thought things out. It’s hard to add more to what you already have here. I do sometimes think that marriage is difficult for a reason–that it is God’s way of forcing us to learn how to truly love. If it were easy, we wouldn’t know what love (as a verb) really was.
And I knew your name was Kathleen. Oy. Middle of the afternoon.
My husband feels that the marriage relationship is the closest thing on earth that we will ever experience with regard to our relationship with God. I’d have to agree. Everything is there: joy, sorrow, intimacy, fear, humility, vulnerability, discord, laughter, tears…..all the things we experience with the Father we experience with one another.
I also believe that the reason for marriage is to conform us to the image of Christ. The more we strive to be like Him, the more we die to self, the deeper our relationship with Him and with our spouse.
As marriage becomes family, that too tells us something about God. Love wants to overflow, to grow and bear fruit. God’s people, the Church, is patterned on the family. For Catholics, we like to say the family is the domestic church. But one can also switch it around and say that the Church is God’s family, His people.
And what do we learn in God’s great family? Like the human family, we learn to bear with one another, forgiveness, virtue, sacrifice, the true meaning of love, and many other things that people have been mentioning in the comments.
Nice post.
Wow, you guys all add so much. Thanks for all your great insights!
I’m not entirely sure if this is related or not, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. I just heard a speaker talk about how some people won’t worship God because he comes across as such an ego-maniac. What our speaker suggested, in a nutshell, was that God knows what satisfies us most and that is what he requires. He knows that when we worship him, we are most satisfied and this is a small reason for why he requires our praise. After this talk, which took awhile to digest, my boyfriend and I had a conversation about another implication of this new revelation. He told me that the more he seemed to get closer to God, the more he was enabled to feel a deeper love for me as well. I thought this was an incredible and very true way of looking at it. God is love and when we open up to that, we can experience it more on earth as well.
Sorry about the essay, and I hope that made sense.
Kathleen, dearest, are the pics of you and your hubby? Luv em! You look like a medieval princess!
Annalea
All three of your points are fantastic!!
To build on your masculine/feminine point, I have to say that I don’t just think of God as a combination of masculine and feminine traits, but a being so completely above us that our understandings of masculine and feminine are drops in the bucket. Does that make sense? It’s like “He” certainly is both masculine and feminine, and yet so much more than that. Man and woman are both sneak peeks at His nature, and the rest of it is just unfathomable to us.
I believe that both partners should be spiritual. Only then they are able to trust and believe in each other. When one is spiritual and the other is not, then there seems to be ego clashes.
Yes, yes, the Beatitudes! I’ve been thinking a bit about sacrifice in relation to marriage, too. The more we sacrifice, the more we gain. Thanks for mentioning this!
Thanks, Annalea, that’s what we were going for!
I totally think this is related, Anita! I agree that our relationship with God brings us closer to the people in our lives just as our relationships with people can help us to get closer to God.
I think you made more sense than me here.
Ah yes; excellent point, Elizabeth. God is above and beyond gender. And yet I still thinks he gives us hints about his nature through gender. I do think there’s a clue to God in masculinity and femininity although of course he is far more than that, too.