In reading an article today, I came across the following quote which prompted me to write about something which has often crossed my mind.
“In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.â€
While this author is writing to speculate how the loss of Christian morality might effect sexuality and human rights in culture, I seek instead to remind us of how God intentions for marriage should convict us to not thwart those intentions in order to satisfy our own carnal desires.
Ultimately for Christians marriage is about Christ and the Church. The entire reason why marriage is ordered the way it is is to give a accurate picture of the reality of the relationship between Christ and his people, the Church. Just as human fathers should ideally give to us a picture of the care of our Heavenly Father, the relationship between husband and wife should give us a picture of the relationship between Christ and his Church. The implications are manifold. Many of the specifics of the order of marriage are not based on the nature of the people involved but rather on the nature of Christ and his Church. For instance, the wife is to submit to the husband not because of some inherent weakness in her, but because the Church necessarily does submit to the Lord Jesus.
The understanding that marriage is a picture of Christ and the Church is very important also as Christians engage the question of homosexual marriage being discussed in our culture.
The relationship between Christ and the Church is hetero. Hetero linguistically speaks of difference. Put simply the relationship between Christ and the Church is a relationship between those who are fundamentally different from one another by nature. Ultimately, Christ is God and his Church is comprised of people that are not God.
Therefore, marriage is also hetero. It is comprised of two people who are fundamentally different, in this case by their gender. Why? Not because two people of the same sex could not have feelings towards one another but because if marriage is not hetero, it distorts the picture God intends to give of Christ and the Church. If marriage becomes homosexual, between people of the same gender, we give the impression that Christ and the Church are homoousios, of the same substance or being. And they clearly are not. We would be distorting the very picture God gave to help us understand the relationship between Christ and Church.
God has made marriage hetero because Christ and the Church are hetero. I suppose if God has intended marriage to be a picture of the Trinity, he would have ordered it to contain three people of the same gender, but marriage is not a picture of the Trinity but instead a picture of Christ and the Church. This the scripture reveals to us.
Ephesians 5:31-32 "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
There are so many reasons why we should contend for the traditional order of marriage, but here is another and perhaps here is the first. God is rather obsessed with the composition and order of marriage not to restrain humanity but rather to ensure that he gives humanity a beautiful picture of the length and breadth and depth of the love of Christ for his Church. May we all rejoice in this gift he has given to us.
