When we realize that human marriage—at its most faithful, loving, and intense—is designed to point us to Christ’s love for us, our paradigms shift. The different callings of husbands and wives are not grounded in gendered psychology but in Christ-centered theology. The requirement that marriage be male-female is not a random prescription from a bygone age, but a picture of the love-across-difference. Christ and the church are profoundly different, yet united in one flesh.

Marriage Is a Gateway

When I was in grad school, my friends and I would often counsel each other against “settling”—marrying someone who was good enough, but not the man or woman of our dreams. This was complicated for me. Unbeknownst to my friends, my dreams tended to revolve around women rather than men and marrying a woman wouldn’t square with my faith. But I agreed in principle: marriage should be amazing, or not at all.

A decade into a good marriage to a great man (not the male version of me that I’d thought I would need), I see settling a different way. Married or single, our hearts should never settle. But no man or woman is the person of our dreams. Because our desire for the extraordinary, the ecstatic and exhilarating—the desire to be utterly known and outrageously loved—is not a cruel joke destined for disappointment in the day-to-day ordinariness of marriage, or on the supposed missed-boat of singleness. Rather, it’s a pointer to a better relationship, to which human romance is at best a gateway drug. Let me explain.

Setting the Stage

Genesis 1 and 2 set the stage. Man and woman together image God. It is not good for the man to be alone, and the woman is formed to be his “helper” (Genesis 2:18)—a role we know is not inferior, as that word is almost always applied to God himself (e.g. Ex. 18:4, Deut. 33:26, 29; Ps. 20:2; 33:20; 54:4; 118:7; Hos. 13:9). Man and woman are made different, and yet they come together as “one flesh” (Gen 2:24). There is something important about this connection, something beautiful and expressive of God’s heart. But almost as soon as it starts, it fails. Love turns to disillusionment and nakedness to shame (Gen 3:10). The paradigmatic marriage of man and woman begets blame (Gen 3:12) and breeds murder (Gen 4:8). Talk about an anticlimax!

Missing the Mark

As we follow the thread of marriage through the Old Testament, we see it take two courses. Both are beset with disaster. One is human marriage: polygamous, adulterous, and forced, few Old Testament marriages would make it to the highlights reel of scriptural morality. The other plays out on a cosmic stage: “For your Maker is your husband” declares Isaiah, “the LORD of hosts is his name” (Isa. 54:5). Prophet after prophet rehearses this theme (e.g. Jer. 31:32; Ezek. 16:8; Hos. 2:7; Joel 1:8). God’s love for his people is like that of a passionate, faithful husband for his wife. But time and again, God’s people turn away. The marriage of this holy God to faithless humans fails.

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