What is the true PURPOSE of marriage? Weddings are wonderful in all, but they’re also expensive! According to one recent report, brides and grooms could spend anywhere from $15,000 to nearly $40,000 on a wedding ceremony, depending on the guest list and the location. That’s a lot of money, even for what many see as the most important day in a person’s life.
But it also begs a question: If we’re willing to spend that much money on the wedding, how much are we willing to invest in the marriage? After all, the nuptials are just the starting point. Once we say, “I do,” we actually have to get down to the much tougher business of doing life together. We have to figure out the purpose behind marriage.
Identifying the purpose behind our marriage is a lot easier said than done. But for Christ-followers, digging into God’s idea behind becoming husband and wife is a great place to start.
Start at the beginning
God created a lot of cool things in the book of Genesis. Light and sky and plants and animals all made their grand entrance at God’s spoken word in the Bible’s early verses. But one of the most powerful things God established in Eden was marriage.
Sometimes, it gets lost in the shuffle, but marriage—a man and woman coming together for a lifetime covenant commitment—was God’s idea. He created Adam and Eve in His image and brought them together to work as a team to take care of creation and populate the earth (Genesis 1:26-28; 2:20-25).
Since God never does anything without a purpose, we can safely assume that He has a purpose for marriage.
The purpose of marriage
Like most things related to faith, God’s purpose for marriage comes down to one thing: His glory. God instituted marriage to bring glory to Himself. His plan is for a husband and wife to come together and to reflect Him to the watching world. When people see an accurate reflection of His sacrificial love and His desire for a relationship, they are drawn to Him.
That’s why the apostle Paul said that wives are called to submit to their husbands as to the Lord (Ephesians 5:22) and why husbands are commanded to love their wives like Jesus loves the church (Ephesians 5:25). God’s purpose for marriage emphasizes pointing others to Him so they can see Him and know Him.
But one of the great things about God is that when we seek to honor Him, we end up being blessed. The same is true for marriage. As couples strive to fulfill His ultimate purpose for marriage, they reap the benefits behind the purpose.
Emotionally, couples live in fellowship with each other. God never created us to live in a vacuum, and marriage is one way He brings people together. Plus, as we already saw, the relationship between spouses can go a long way toward showing others what God is really like.
Physically, marriage provides the only true context for “safe sex.” Like marriage, sex was also God’s idea, but He designed it for the marriage relationship. Marriage offers men and women a healthy way to physically express their love for one another.
Spiritually, marriage challenges couples to draw closer to God. It makes sense that the purpose of marriage would be for husbands and wives to draw closer to one another. But that only happens when they draw closer to God as individuals. When our relationship with God grows stronger, so will our relationship with our spouse.
Reflecting Jesus on purpose
When we remember that God’s glory defines the true purpose of marriage, it shifts our thinking. It reminds us that our relationship with our spouse carries a lot more weight than the world sometimes wants to admit. But it should also motivate us to work through the inevitable tough times that we never imagined on our wedding day.
Plus, we can take comfort in knowing that God has a purpose for marriage. He has a design, a plan, and He thought about it long before we ever did.
He’s got it all worked out, and He’s shown us which way to go.
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