Whatever state you’re in—married, single, divorced or widowed—the Bible commands everyone to honor marriage. The Bible says in Hebrews 13:4, “Marriage should be honored by everyone.” Everyone, married or not, should honor earth’s oldest institution.
Sadly marriage is no longer honored by everyone in our society. Today, marriage is dismissed as irrelevant by many people. It’s demeaned by many people. People are delaying marriage more and more—many times for the wrong reasons. And marriage is being redefined. It’s being ridiculed. It’s being demeaned. It’s being denounced. It’s being discouraged. Marriage is disrespected.
Part of the problem is that nobody knows the basics of marriage any more. God gave us marriage and He expects the church to stand for it and to support it. Most people don’t know why marriage matters. As we teach from the Scriptures about marriage, there are at least six divine purposes for marriage to communicate.
1. God gave marriage for the connection of men and women.
First Corinthians 11:11 says, “In God’s plan men and women need each other.”
God wired it this way. God thought up gender. God thought up sex. What a God! And God thought up marriage. The Bible says this in Genesis 2:18, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a companion who is right for him.” You need companions in all different areas. But there is nothing like the companionship of a marriage.
Mark 10 says, “God’s plan has been seen from the beginning of creation, when he made us male and female. [God made males, God made females. And God chose what he wanted you to be.] This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united as one body. Now since they are no longer two but one, [God sees a married couple as one] no one should separate them, for GOD has joined them together.” That passage says three things.
- Marriage is God’s plan. It’s not a tradition we can just throw out. God invented marriage when he invented you, when he invented me, when he invented humanity. Marriage is God’s plan.
- Marriage is between a man and a woman. There are a lot of other relationships, but those aren’t marriage.
- Marriage is to be permanent. What God joins together—God joins a couple in marriage—no one, no one else, should separate. It’s meant to be permanent. It’s meant to be for life.
2. God created marriage for the multiplication of the human race.
God chose to populate the human planet through marriage. For thousands of years, billions of people have come into existence because men and women got married. God chose for everybody who’s going to be in heaven to come into existence through marriage and sex.
Malachi 2:15 in The Message paraphrase says, “God, NOT YOU, made marriage! His Spirit inhabits even the smallest details of marriage. And what does he want from marriage? Godly children from your union. So guard the spirit of marriage within you.”
If you’re married and you can’t have kids, God is not disappointed in you. That’s not what this verse is saying. What it is saying is that we’re all alive because some couple got together. For thousands of years, God has used marriage to populate heaven. And if men and women weren’t getting together, marrying and having sex, then there would be nobody in heaven.
