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God’s Good Design for Marriage: 5 Doctrinal Dimensions
June is the month of many weddings. But is marriage really a good idea? It seems our contemporary culture—where marriage is increasingly delayed, if pursued at all—isn’t sold on the idea.
And yet marriage is a God-designed, good gift. It’s good for us as individuals and good for the world. It’s a means of common grace and a means of special grace. The world needs more defenders of and advocates for marriage, and Christians are well positioned to play that role.
To that end, I’d like to offer a doxological tribute to marriage, a celebration and commendation of God’s good and glorious design.
To commend marriage isn’t to disparage singleness. Nor is it to overlook the overwhelming pain and damage of which marriage may be the vehicle. Yet even with these caveats, the following five biblical angles on marriage blend into a concert of praise to the God who creates men and women for the inherent goodness of marital union, the expansion of humankind, and the glory of his name.
1. Protology/Teleology (Purpose/Goal)
God has a purpose in creation. This is the meaning of “protology.” He created humans and established marriage to show forth his glory (Rom. 11:36). The things God made—including people, their relationships, and their offspring—reveal God’s reality and majesty (1:20).
Specifically, we see protology in the famous creation mandate of Genesis 1:26–28, which may be the most ignored and disobeyed foundational text of Scripture in the Western church today.
This Genesis creation mandate reminds us of the imago Dei, the image of God, the imprint of himself that each human bears. We bear the image respectively as a woman or a man but also corporately in the one-flesh union of marriage. We each possess both personal and social identity. At the core of the social identity of a sustainable humanity is male and female in monogamous, mutual commitment, multiplying and filling the earth, subduing it and having dominion. This is basic but profound biblical protology.
The world needs more defenders of and advocates for marriage, and Christians are well positioned to play that role.
What about teleology, the goal of marriage? We gather clues from the Edenic model of marriage in Genesis 2, which Jesus later affirms as normative (Matt. 19:3). We learn that God deemed Adam alone to be “not good” (Gen. 2:18), meaning not as good as it would be when he made humankind complete by creating Eve. With Eve’s creation, fruitfulness and multiplication can ensue. We see at the end of Genesis 2 the basis and framework for a husband and wife to discover and revel in the love and trust that exist in God and that God extends to humans as they’re in relationship with him.
A great telos or goal of marriage is for the love that’s within God and available from God not just to be realized in two people but shared by two people, who are sustained and transformed over time by the divine presence and their response to each other and God, empowered to love and serve because of that presence.
To summarize the teleology of marriage: God’s goal from Adam and Eve onward was to unite a man and a woman who are in live and holy relationship with him in a conjugal relation with each other, from which procreation might result and within which God-quality love and trust would flourish.
Marriage from the start was about mission. The husband and wife are created and sent forth with a shared purpose. They’re the nucleus of a family unit charged with living not for themselves but for the sake of the Creator and King who calls us all into being, with a purpose. In marriage, that purpose is profoundly a joint enterprise—so joint that the lot of one is the lot of both, as we’re about to see.
2. Hamartiology (Doctrine of Sin)
God’s very good creation was rocked when our first parents transgressed.
Before they sinned, they were right with God and with each other. Their pre-fall Edenic marriage was like a team. They were united, though the team members weren’t identical or interchangeable. They were one, though clearly individual and distinct in their interface with each other, their world, and God. I call this a relational synergy. They functioned in glorious, perfect harmony as designed.
But in Genesis 3, Eve sins. Adam follows suit. Whom does God confront? Eventually both team members, but first and more fully Adam (v. 9): “But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” Adam, now a sinner, violates trust and love, throws his teammate under the bus, and even blames God: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (v. 12, emphasis added).
Eve just blames the Serpent: “Then the LORD God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate’” (v. 13).
Yet despite their transgression, God promises in verse 15 that the woman’s offspring would bruise the Serpent’s head (an elegant understatement), foreshadowing the Messiah’s defeat of sin and evil. Note how God uplifts team member Eve. She—who was the first to sin and who in fulfilling the creation mandate of procreation will suffer in childbirth— will also be the means of grace in the coming Messiah. The seed of the woman, the Christ, will one day be conceived in a daughter of Eve named Mary.
We praise God for marriage preservation despite our first parents’ violation. We praise him because wrapped within well-deserved punishment was also eternal promise. Marriage and procreation—though now marred by the fall—became a means of God’s redemptive plan.
3. Soteriology (Doctrine of Salvation)
What do we need saving from? Answer: sin, of course. One aspect of that sin is the hostility in our hearts against each other and against God—even against ourselves. Scripture calls this animosity many things, but one of them is “enmity.”
In Genesis 3:15, the same verse that promises the Christ through the bruising of the Serpent’s head, God introduces “enmity” (LXX ἔχθρα) into the world. Formerly, Adam and Eve knew harmony. Then they sinned. The “very good” shalom (peace) of creation is fractured. Adam and Eve—and all people since—will feel the sting of estrangement from God, and each other. There will be disagreement and rancor and division between us.
With this enmity, the potential for marital conflict begins. It spreads to their progeny. Adam and Eve’s firstborn son, Cain, will kill their son Abel (4:8). The Old Testament is the story not only of God’s work of redemption but of the proliferation of enmity: from the sibling rivalry of children, to tensions in marriage, to male exploitation of women, to the geopolitical rivalries of nations and thrones. Where will it end? How will God redeem the world?
The theme of ἔχθρα (hostility, estrangement, alienation, malice) introduced in Genesis finds its resolution in Ephesians, where Paul uses that same word potently. Speaking of Christ, Paul states, “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility [ἔχθρα] . . . [and reconciled] us both [i.e., Jew and Gentile] to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility [ἔχθρα]” (Eph. 2:14, 16).
The enmity Eden ushered in, God in Christ decisively and eternally defeated.
Correlating with the macrocosmic social effects of the salvation Christ offers, at the microcosmic level men and women can overcome the implications of enmity that began to be their nemesis in Genesis 3. This is true in marriage for those in Christ. It’s true for congregational life under the headship of Christ as he delegates his leadership through the apostles by his Holy Spirit to pastoral leaders, other caregivers, and the witness of every congregational member. This brings us to ecclesiology.
4. Ecclesiology (Doctrine of the Church)
The discourse flow of Ephesians signals that the doctrine of the church is intertwined with the doctrine of marriage. Part of the reason is that the early churches met in homes—house churches. In Judaism, you could start a synagogue and support a rabbi with 10 families. Something similar must have happened as early church plants became congregations. They had male leaders, called elders or shepherds or overseers. They were mostly married. The harmony of marriages, or lack thereof, is difficult to hide when you meet in homes. Conversely, Christ-centered, self-giving marriages would have formed an attractive role model to nonbelievers seeking a richer married life than pagan marriages tended to offer.
What were healthy, Christ-centered marriages like in those congregations? They weren’t marked by brash male authority or by some version of today’s gender equality. The gospel rightly accepted was meant to produce ordered relational synergy in fulfillment of God’s creation mandate and eventually Christ’s Great Commission.
Genesis 1–2 exhibits a microcosmic ecclesial social order in which husband and wife were equal, though asymmetrical in their origin, biology, responsibilities, competencies, and fundamental outlook. Adam and Eve’s unity, dinged in the fall but not destroyed, lay in the mystery of their diversity as much as in their human oneness. The celebration of that diversity is at the core of marital love and helps explain Adam’s delight when he first glimpsed Eve (2:23).
Sin soured that delight for them both. But from Genesis to Revelation, God invites us into a redemptive story that will reintroduce his Edenic shalom into human relationships to the extent possible in this age. In the early church—as Paul’s Ephesians 5 instruction on marriage highlights with its call for the woman’s trust in her husband and her husband’s Christlike love for her—this shalom comes neither by gender equalization nor gender stratification. It comes through the regeneration of hearts to enter into a synergy that sanctifies lives, marriages, families, and congregations. Healthy Christian marriages are to permeate this world of enmity with cruciform pursuit of God’s will.
Healthy Christian marriages are to permeate this world of enmity with cruciform pursuit of God’s will.
Our mission in marriage and church is neither to perpetuate male hierarchy nor to erase male-female distinctions but to see the covenantal bond that was established in Genesis 1–2 transformed into its original purpose. It’s to appropriate the grace grounded in the cross that, post-fall, enables God’s ordered relational synergy. Here, women and men can mediate the peace of Christ to a world racked with enmity. We can mediate this peace because at the most basic, daily level—first in marriages and in households, and thereby in congregations—we’re living it out.
We live out that deliverance from enmity, that shalom, that care for others, that diligence unto God in our work and daily lives, that spreading of the gospel message, in keeping with the sexual identity God established for us at conception. We live it out singly and in marriage units and in congregations, disciples together who devote our personal and shared lives to the call to embody and spread the gospel call throughout the world, flourishing in “fellowship . . . with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” together “so that our joy may be complete” (1 John 1:3–4).
Thereby are the creation mandate (Gen. 1:26–28) and the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19–20) fulfilled in advance of Christ’s return to make all things new. This brings us to eschatology.
5. Eschatology (Doctrine of Last Things)
In a dispute with some Sadducees, Jesus warned about overinterpreting the connection between marriage and the age to come. He said, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). Yet marriage and last things aren’t unconnected, as we read in Hebrews 13:4: “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”
The scent of the age to come permeates a godly, growing Christian marriage. In marriage, we discover a mighty means of grace, a wellspring of divine enablement and outpouring, that enables us to fulfill our calling and mission. We see the perfection of life in the age to come foreshadowed in the grit and grime of daily life as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), not all by our lonesome but alongside our spouse.
The age to come will reveal the true meaning of our lives in this age. I believe that for believers in Christ who are married, the most important fruit we bear will be most directly related to the quality of our married lives. In the case of married church leaders, for example, God’s blessing on their publicly visible service—preaching, teaching, blogging, publishing, or whatever—grows out of the integrity of private lives only their spouses really know.
The scent of the age to come permeates a godly, growing Christian marriage.
In 2010, I left a wonderful seminary position because my wife and I agreed we should move next door to my mother and stepfather, who were in their 80s, had health issues, and needed care. They lived hundreds of miles away, but I could continue my call to teach New Testament at the seminary where I currently serve. First Timothy 5:8 says, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” I was writing a commentary on 1 Timothy. That verse nailed me. My wife, Bernie, left a cherished and fulfilling nursing position; I left a calling and location and people I loved. We sold our house in a down market and moved, not exactly full of cheer.
There followed 13 years of elder care, shouldered mainly by my wife. Her retirement from nursing was an income hit. She drove my parents to countless medical appointments. She cooked meals. She oversaw home health visits from other caregivers. After some years, she oversaw my mother’s care in a nursing home. She did hundreds of loads of laundry. She reached out to my mother’s several roommates over the years. She bore the angst and sometimes ire of her mother-in-law, the lot of many primary caregivers of the elderly. For my part, I became the trustee and caretaker of a house and 10 acres. The burden over time, physical and emotional and psychological, was enormous. In January 2024, my mother died. Fittingly, Bernie was at her bedside.
If my dying mother could hear voices in her final hour, she heard her daughter-in-law reading Scripture and singing that great Reformation hymn “I Greet Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art” in her ear. My mother would have been borne up in her final moments by the third verse:
Thou art the Life, by which alone we live,
and all our substance and our strength receive
O comfort us in death’s approaching hour,
strong-hearted then to face it by Thy pow’r.
There’s a reason Proverbs extols wives: “An excellent wife is the crown of her husband” (12:4). “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD” (18:22). “An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels” (31:10).
Husbands who fear, love, and serve God have their good points, too, though they’re portrayed with less sublimity in Proverbs. The point is that in ministry and in the Christian life at every level, if God has granted us the grace of marriage, we sink or swim by the often unseen, private ways we relate to and regard our spouse.
In their low moments, marriages simply reflect the enmity of a fallen world. But at their best, marriages are pictures and foretastes of the Edenic relational synergy that was lost but will one day be restored and perfected as God eternally dwells with his people in harmony.
I don’t know what form our earthly relational synergy with a spouse will take in the age to come. Jesus said that in the resurrection, husbands and wives now will then be like angels in heaven. So it’ll be different, as I’m far from an angel here. I do know that our life then and there will resound forever to the glory and praise of “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22). And if, as I among the heavenly host, I feel my wife, now transformed, take my hand, I won’t be surprised.
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