The Mystery of Marriage

For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh (Ephesians 5:31).

In every culture the world over, men and women bond each day in marriage ever since the world was created, and continue to do so today. Many weddings try to live up to the statement above which is also invoked by church ministers charged with the task of joining couples. Prior to this happening, we are bound to enquire to establish what marriage is.

Marriage is a state where two people are voluntarily joined in a close and intimate union for life or until death parts them. A wedding or marriage ceremony is conducted by a church minister or a legal officer, where guests are invited to witness the public union between the bride and bridegroom. Private civil or traditional weddings are also constitutionally accepted where two or more guests attend to witness the occasion.

Marriage is characterized by a bond generated through love between individuals, which culminates in intimacy, romantic feelings and thoughts towards each other, leading to a union which ensures the two live together as husband and wife in an arrangement which is legally binding and unanimously accepted by the society in which they live.

Marriage is supposed to last a life time. This is evidenced by words spoken in vows between couples during wedding ceremonies. This means that the union is binding for as long as the couple lives. Vows bind two people for life or until one or both cease to exist.

A proportion of modern unions have had a short average life span which is evidenced by divorce cases piling up in our courts as couples seek to dissolve their marriages for one reason or another.

Man is a social creature and therefore needs company. Marriage is a coupling where a man and a woman give everything, withholding nothing. It is you or nothing. It is you or I would rather die.

A rewarding marriage bears fruits. There are emotional, psychological and even physical fruits in marriage which include companionship, intimacy, love and children among many others. Marriage is acceptable in many communities for the purposes of propagation and preservation of a race against its imminent extinction.

A creature that does not couple up with the opposite gender faces extinction with the passage of time unless there are hermaphroditic capabilities. Every creature has an inbuilt tendency to multiply. The institution of marriage is also embraced for intimacy that comes with romance after the union takes place.

Love is only perfect when experienced within the institution of marriage. A married couple never feels complete until they are in each other’s company. They yearn for each other’s company. Their thoughts, imaginations, dreams and desire are always after each other.

One party tends to be uneasy in the absence of another and may even exhibit a type of love sickness which disappears with the coming of the missing partner.

A couple that bonds intimately outside marriage always feels the guilt of committing a felony among friends, family, community and God. Such couples tend to hide in all interactions fearing reproach from their community.

Children born outside marriage are usually regarded as bastards who are prone to the public’s rebuke.

Marriage remains popular in most communities and will continue being popular for as long as man is alive. For marriage to last, a couple must be loving, caring, trustworthy, and faithful to each other.

Marriage should primarily be driven by love between two individuals. However, in modern times, people are getting married for the wrong reasons which include culture, desperation, selfishness, stature, experimentation, convenience, greed for money, assets, relocation among many other reasons.

Marriage based on anything but love is often doomed to fail leading to divorce. Divorce cases have continued to increase due to adultery and some of the factors stated above.

This makes observers to imagine marriage is becoming unpopular despite weddings occurring every day.

Most marriages take place in churches or places of worship. Scripture says; “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband”

Scripture maintains that when God created man (Adam), he also created a woman (Eve) from within a man. Everything was perfect until God observed the loneliness in Adam which led to his creating a companion for him. He extracted the woman from the man in order to drive away the loneliness in the man’s heart.

We need fellowship with each other and with other human beings. We are wired for companionship. We are generally social creatures. Like Adam, a lonely person is extremely miserable.

The church champions the doctrine upon which marriage is based, as a way of creating a disciplined society. The church is based on communion and fellowship among members of the human race without which the church would cease to exist.

A congregation of several individuals forms a church. Therefore, churches must champion the union between couples from which it draws its membership. On the other hand, people love being joined in the church.

A church wedding is often upheld in many communities simply because the church regards marriage as holy matrimony sanctioned by God. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.

Marriage portends care for and from another person, fellowship with others and companionship. It brings with it warmth, love, intimacy, a closeness in union, a protective and binding relationship which deeply contrasts with the loneliness and lack of love and fellowship that the absence of marriage carries. Paul says it is good for men to marry than burn with passion.

A loner lives alone like a hermit with no companion, no one to eat with, relax, sleep or communicate with. Living creatures need to mix and mingle.

God made man in his own image and likeness to have a person of his likeness to fellowship with. Like begets like.

God is love. His love is greater than what man can imagine. God cannot afford to love you and be away from you. His love and care for man is far above the one portrayed within marriage.

The love displayed is matrimony falls short of God’s love in that it is more romantic than selfless, unconditional, undeserved or unmerited heavenly “Agape” love.

God’s love is so intense that he cannot afford to love you and stand a few feet away from you without desiring to inside you and perceive issues the way you do.

God expresses his love best when we welcome him to dwell inside our bodies.

This is evidenced in scripture as follows;

• Don’t you know your body is the temple of God (1Corinthians 3:16)
• Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world (Matthew 28:20)
• I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5)
• The Spirit dwells with you, and shall be in you (John 14:17)
• They two shall be one flesh (Ephesians 5:31)
• Love God with all your heart and soul (Deuteronomy 11:13)
• Love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18)

We need to understand that God is love. Scripture becomes meaningful in intimate love and fellowship with God. The indwelling presence of God is called the spiritual birth which enables an intimacy that is beyond description.

In nature, we cannot know the love of a man or woman until we get married to them. This is a practical lesson to the reality of a relationship with God. Marriage gives everything withholding nothing. It is you or nothing. It is you or I would rather die because you are like oxygen to me.

Marriage was given to us to teach us the existence of God’s intimacy towards man who is formed in own image and likeness in the spirit. God’s desires are geared towards man. Scripture says you are the only creature that God visits.

Jesus said we must be born again to see or enter his Father’s kingdom and be in perfect union or marriage with him. It is only then that we can say we know God. This enables us to see, hear, think, taste, smell with God’s eyes, ears, mind, tongue and nose respectively.

The fruit of your marriage with God produces eternal spiritual children who are most precious to God. Our Father Abraham and Mother Sarah produced many spiritual sons for God who include all the patriarchs.

Temple of God

We can only be a temple of God when we welcome and allow God to step into our bodies and live inside us. We must be born again in order to host God as temples. Such intimacy cannot be mimicked by marriage between a man and a woman because it only gives us a taste of the iceberg. The real marriage was designed to happen between man and God.

Can you imagine loving someone to a point of entering their body and living in them? It enables us to feel, think and walk with them more intimately.

The Song of Solomon describes the intimacy that God feels towards those who have welcomed him to dwell in their spirits.

God desires close intimacy in a permanent marriage with man. Spectators are not encouraged in a binding intimacy. Yet there are too many spectators in the world.

Just like in your relationship with people you are not married to, those who are outside this union with God never get to know God. They separated from God, not by their sins, but by having descended from Adam’s sin by birth, hence are not children of Abraham.

I am with you always

This statement can be uttered with surety only if a person is certain of being in your presence at any time or place where you expect them to be. God’s omnipresence and union with us in the birth of the Spirit perfects this. Similarly, God designed his habitation in us to ensure He would always be with us, inside us. This is a perfect demonstration of a permanent and unfailing, unconditional, married love.

I will never leave thee

By declaring his availability at all times, God gives assurances of his presence whether we need him or not. Being born again welcomes his in-dwelling in a marriage-union that ensures he actually never leaves us. God never withdraws his word. This is why God hates divorce, for not preaching the reality of his permanent marriage to man. When we get born again, he comes into our bodies and never leaves us, no matter what. If you sin and repent, he restores you back to the Garden of Eden status.

The Spirit dwells in you

Marriage is made perfect when your partner leaves parental cover and joins you in your humble abode. There is privacy in your sacred intimacy. Before Jesus, the Holy Spirit would come go back to heaven. Jesus sent him here to stay and live in the bodies of all born again believers. This is because God designed the human body to be his temple. No wonder, Jesus said we must be born again to enable God to live in us.

They two shall be one flesh

Before we come to know God, we are separated from him. We are literally strangers who only hear about God. When we open the doors of our hearts to allow him in, we become one in flesh. We are totally yoked to him. Our DNA blends. Marriage is our practical earthly lesson about our ultimate eternal union with God in love. This can only happen when you are born again of the Spirit of God

Love God with your heart and soul

The human soul is always at war with the spirit. The soul seeks to obey the body against our spiritual needs. God inside our bodies has enough influence to cause our souls and spirits to desire and pursue God’s love. “Peter Agapao me, Master you know I Phileo you” this talk between Peter and Jesus clearly shows man does not have God’s kind of love, until God starts dwelling inside man’s body. No wonder Jesus said you must be born again to enter the kingdom of God. Only then can we know God.

Love your neighbor as yourself

How much do you love yourself? Have you ever wondered how you can bring yourself to love your hateful neighbor the way you love yourself? This is impossible between men. But when we get born again, God inside us puts Agape love in motion and makes his love for your neighbor possible through our bodies. God in us is able to work his love through our bodies towards fulfilling all his commandments.

Marriage only occurs when a man willingly weds a willing woman. A good marriage is never forced because it has to be based on love.

Scripture talks about a marriage in heaven between the Body of Christ and the Lamb of God. The Bride must bend her will towards God in surrender to God’s will. Only then will thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This seems to be the ultimate goal the concept of marriage is geared towards in God’s design. The concept of marriage is a practical example or teaching aid that physiologically, psychologically, mentally and spiritually prepares all human beings on earth to awaken them to a realization of a final union with their creator in heaven while revealing on earth in a small scale, how this union will be in heaven.

Any human being who will not be willing to be yoked to his creator by simply inviting God to dwell inside his physical body, which God calls “his temple”, will not be part of this union and will be destroyed like it happened with those who refused to enter Noah’s ark as in the day of the great deluge.

It is imperative therefore that all of us prepare for a final blissful union with our creator as revealed in scripture.

Marriage still remains a mystery to many people who get yoked together without knowing what they have committed themselves to.

Marriage has been given to man as a gift to explain his intimacy with God. The true meaning of marriage is exhibited in scriptures below and gains meaning only after the creator starts dwelling inside a man’s body;

• And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,
• And said, this fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.
• Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
• If any man defiles the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.
• And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
• Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.
• Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.
• And he says unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he says unto me, these are the true sayings of God.

How to see and enter the kingdom of God

Marriage portends perfection of love. This is a love relationship between two individuals. When you invite God to come and dwell inside your body which is his temple, an intimate fellowship begins where you love him without any reservations. You give him everything withholding nothing. He only desires your reciprocal unconditional love and you too desire God alone. The empty hole in your spirit is finally plugged. The marriage between us and God begins when we pray as follows:

“Lord Jesus, I believe you are the son of God who died on the cross and rose again to reconcile me with God. Come into my heart. Wash away my sins and make me a new creature. Write my name in the book of life. Thank you for hearing my prayer. In the name of Jesus Christ my Lord and savior. Amen”

NB: Ask Jesus what you ought to do next and wait for his response because he will definitely speak to you.

Holy Bible. Old and New Testaments. Peoples Parallel Edition. King James Version presented side-by-side with The Living Bible. Tynedale House Publishers, Inc (1981). Wheaton Illinois. U.S.A.

(Matthew 21:12, Matthew 26:61, 1Corinthians 3:16, 1 Corinthians 3:17, 1Corinthians 7:2, 2 Corinthians 6:16, Ephesians 5:31, Hebrews 13:4, Revelation 19:7, Revelation 19:9 – King James Version)

T. Anjili – Alabaster Ministries