The Greatest Marriage in the Bible is Christ and the Church! We have looked at some good marriages, some bad, and some ugly marriages in the Bible. Now we have the greatest marriage in the Bible – Christ and the Church! And what we can learn from it.
The Mystery of Marriage
We often think about Ephesians 5:22-32 as being primarily about marriage. But in Ephesians 5:32, Paul talks about a profound mystery, This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.
God didn’t create marriage, and then decide to have Jesus model that through his relationship to the church. He did the opposite.
First, there was a relationship between a Holy God and the people He loved.
Then, He instructed us about how to live in a marriage relationship by looking at ourselves compared to Christ and the Church.
That concept is a great mystery to many people. They have never discovered the ultimate purpose of marriage – to portray the love of Christ through Christian marriages.
Marriage is not primarily about making you happy or being in love. You can be happy and in love when you live out that grace relationship, but that is not the purpose of marriage.
When I receive and understand God’s unconditional love for me, His acceptance of me, just as I am, His complete, unlimited forgiveness of my sins…
... then I will have a heart that loves that way, that accepts others, and that forgives again and again. God’s intent for marriage is that I display the most complete and purest form of all of those qualities.
"In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins,
for without it no human fellowship,
least of all marriage, can survive." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
