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I hope you’re all finding our Family of God sermon series engaging and encouraging, even if it’s challenging to consider some of the different subjects we’re touching on. Over the past two weeks we’ve thought together about both fatherhood and motherhood. If you’ve missed either of those sermons you can watch them online here.

This week we’ll be turning to marriage. What does the Bible have to tell us about this fundamental structure in society? What difference does Jesus make? I hope that by now you’ll be realising that God uses so many of these relationships to point, ultimately, to his great gospel work in Jesus. And marriage is just the same. We might even say it points to Jesus more than any of the other topics.

If all we read was the Old Testament then we might quickly come to the conclusion that marriage was the default for all of humanity. The first man and woman have a marriage (Gen. 2:24) and Jesus himself confirms that this is a natural outcome of our being made male and female (see how he says one leads to another in Matt. 19:4-5). And yet in the same conversation Jesus also introduces us to what seems to be a new category of person; the chaste single. How come when Jesus arrives this is now a new way of being? More than that, it’s now actually a better way of being (1Cor. 7:7 et. seq.)! This strikes right at the heart of how so many of us view marriage as one of the great goals of life. But then Jesus throws us a curve ball by declaring that “when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mark 12:25)! In the Resurrection there will be no marriage between men and women!

This ought to make us stop and think hard. If the New Creation is the very best that anything could be, then why does it not include marriage which so many of us treat like the very best thing that there can be?

The answer is that Jesus is going to start a new marriage. Actually, that’s not quite true – he has already started a new one. One of Jesus’ favourite ways to talk about himself is as “the bridegroom”. But who is the bride? It’s the church, as Paul makes clear in Eph. 5:32. We the church together – whether we’re married or single – have one husband Jesus. And in eternity as we enjoy him forever this is who we will always be; the bride of Christ. No longer married to each other but married together to Jesus.

Which means that our marriages here and now are not the ultimate thing. They’re good things that point to the ultimate best thing. The great goal of life is not to get married but to be part of the bride of Christ.

This doesn’t mean that we make less of marriage now. Quite the opposite. Jesus affirmed the goodness of marriage himself at Cana (John 2). When we see how marriage wonderfully points to Jesus we’ll want to do our very best to live out our married lives in ways that reflect that great truth. We just do everything with a little perspective. We can look at married people and see a wonderful image of what is waiting for us all in the New Creation. And we can also look at single people and see not just an image but a living reality of what is waiting for us all in the New Creation.

So we’ll learn not to treat marriage like the very best thing that there is. That position is reserved for Jesus alone. He is the best thing that every one of us should be longing for, whether married or single. And the more we understand marriage, the more we’ll see Jesus for who he is: our wonderful bridegroom.

See you on Sunday, bride of Christ.

David Ould
Senior Associate Minister

Pray for a deeper longing for our true bridegroom

Give thanks that Jesus is the true bridegroom who gathers his people into a new and eternal marriage with himself. Ask God for deeper understanding among his people of how earthly marriage points to the greater reality of Christ’s love for the church. Ask God to help both married and single members of the church to live with joyful anticipation of their eternal union with Jesus.