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.

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.

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.”

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