What's so holy about marriage?

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.” Psalm 19:1

Through out the ages God has been revealing Himself to a rebellious and corrupt human race. As the Psalm says, His very creation paints His glory across all the acres of the earth and the canvases of the heavens. We see His power in the raw terror of a volcano that is hurling stone and lava through the air. His grace is painted into the flying leaps of a deer or the smooth sprint of a cheetah. We look and see that God is creative and majestic, for He has uncovered the barest corner of His character in the works of His hands…Or is it just the barest corner? Could it be that God has painted intricate and detailed pictures of Himself into our world and the life we are called to live?

Over the past couple of months I have been wrestling with the concept of the trinity. What does it mean to worship a God who is three persons, but one God? How are we to understand how such a relationship looks? It is a glorious truth that God is three persons, and one God. It means that God is communal; God is love because God has always been in love with Himself and He has always been an entire community within Himself.

But the Trinity is more than a truth to be accepted. It is a reality to be lived. The Trinity recently burst across my brain in all the beautiful colors of marriage. I suppose there are stranger things for a twenty-one year old single man to think about than marriage (although I also know that it is probably still far in my future.) I was questioning the sacredness of marriage. Of course, it is enough that God says it is sacred, but why did He say that. What makes marriage sacred? I believe that the key is the Trinity.

Consider the words of Christ in John 17. Over and over again Christ speaks of the oneness He enjoys with the Father, the closeness of the Divine community. In John 17: 11 He prays that His followers may be one, “as We are one.” In John 17: 21 He asks that “they may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us.” The unity within the Divine community is such that the God head, though three is one united whole, all three the same in essence and character. What struck me most about this passage in John was its similarity to Christ teachings on marriage. In Matt 19: 4-6 Christ says, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ 5 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? 6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh…” The clarity of the Divine perspective is stunning. It is not just that the two shall work together for the rest of their live, or that the two shall raise children together. It is that the two shall become one, just as God is three and yet He is one. God’s ordinance of marriage is a call to imitate the Trinity; and not only to imitate the Trinity, but to invite God Himself to be come the third partner of a three sided relationship. Notice Christ’s words in John 17:21 where He asks that we be one on Him. Or consider Christ’s words in John 15:4, “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.”

Marriage is more than an ordinance; it is a sacred community; a picture of a most holy and beautiful God, painted in the tint of broken and selfish human beings. The marriage vow is more than a promise of respect, it is a promise to seek unity with God and unity with ones spouse in order to give the world a taste of who God is. It is a scary and sacred calling.