In my now 23 year old understanding of humanity and my six months of married life I will try to put to words what I feel God’s covenant of marriage is all about. First off, why does God think marriage is such a good idea? Why was it not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18)? God is infinite, yet God can only create that which is a part of him. You may say, well isn’t this everything then, since God is infinite? (Aside: Did God create evil? If he did, then doesn’t that mean that part of God is evil If he didn’t then how did evil get here?…that’s a whole other conversation). God, being in relation with his triune-self, could not create an independent self. He was unable to create a human, in the imago dei, that was self-sufficient, since God the Father is not self-sufficient, he has Jesus and the Holy Spirit. So God looked down on Earth and saw that Man was lonely, not even a dog could keep him company, “But for Adam no suitable helper was found” Genesis 2:20. Hence, God created the female gender. God used what he thought was beautiful and shaped it into a human being, not just any human, but the female gender. Think about the most beautiful woman that you have ever seen, now triple, quadruple her beauty, and you will begin to understand how beautiful Eve must have been. No wonder Adam called her “Whoa-man,” he was amazed with her presence and her face. Now that God has created both male and female the writer of Genesis wants us to know that “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. Genesis 2:25. The word shame here is more than the feeling of regret, or the memory of a one-night stand that you aren’t proud of, or the feeling of failure. The word shame means so much more, it means so much more that we, fallen humans, cannot even comprehend what this word means. The English phrase “felt no shame”, is as close as we get to defining the perfect marriage, how God intended it, how it was supposed to be. I long for that day, I long for the day where I do not fail my wife, I long for the day where we are completely redeemed. Yet, as it sits today marriage is tough, no, marriage is impossible. All our efforts to live a perfect happy life are only glimpses of being completely redeemed in the kingdom of God. The mans curse is never feeling like they are good enough, a womans curse is feeling like they are too much for their man to handle. The curse (or blessing…) in chapter 3 of Genesis puts a lot of words to essentially saying that man will work in vain for everything, man will have to toil and toil and try and try and suffer and suffer, but man will never feel like they have accomplished anything. Now women, “and he (man) will rule over you.” Does this mean that women are to submit to men because it is part of the curse? I think that this is man’s arrogant way of interrupting this text. What if this text means that women will feel like they are too much, and then they will compromise to being too little, therefore allowing man to rule over them. What if, women are supposed to be strong, just as strong as men, but with a heart to be tender and beautiful? What if we as a culture allowed women to be beautiful in the ways they wanted to be? What if sex didn’t sell but beauty sold? What if beauty didn’t have to sell? What if men grew up and respected beauty and respected the female gender? What if…the list could go on. Do men really think that when they whistle at girls it makes them feel beautiful, or when men pick up a girl at the bar and physically trade a night of pleasure for a life-time of shame? All that to say, women should demand more, and men should give more, no, men should want more. A woman fully alive is God’s glory exposed. When my wife demonstrates her beauty through fighting for me, or taking a stand her herself, or speaking words of strength to me, or looking at me just perfectly with her big brown eyes, I melt, I literally feel my body relax and feel as though I have been tranquilized. Those moments hint at redemption. These are the moments that I hope for.

I keep using this word, redemption, but why? What is so important about this word? Why is redemption necessary? Why is redemption good? Well, I will start with saying that redemption is only needed because we are sinful creatures. The image of God is still very much present in us, but sin has tainted something, I will not say, like many scholars of the past, that sin tainted the image of God, but I will say that sin has tainted our relationship with God. This seems to jive better with what the writer of Genesis says, “I heard you in the garden and was afraid…” Genesis 3:10. So now that it has been established that redemption is necessary how does God bring redemption to a world that very much needs it. I would argue, besides sending his Son to forgive us of our sins, that the context of marriage is one of the places where God works the miracle of redemption. Why marriage, heterosexual monogamous marriage? Because the male and female souls portray different characteristics of God, and when they are put together in their most glorious form, the image of God cannot be mistaken. This image of God cannot be seen, as completely in male to male relationships or female to female relationships (this is not only referencing couples it is referencing friendships.) It can only be completely seen when all parts of God’s image are brought together, male and female. Notice, I did not say that the glory of God cannot be seen in homosexual relationships, I fully believe that God can still work in homosexual relationships, and God can still bring redemption. All I am saying is that something is missing, the image is not complete. If I were to say that homosexuals needed to be redeemed more than me, then I would be arrogant and naïve. Jesus came to save the whole world and came to redeem the whole world, not just the people that I like (that’s not supposed to mean that I don’t like homosexuals), not just the people that I feel should be redeemed. The whole world. Even the AIDS victims in Africa that 92% of Christians said that they would not donate money or their time to. That’s funny, Jesus’ best female friends were prostitutes.

…Well getting back to marriage, God uses the female to redeem the male and God uses the male to redeem the female. By nature the female is tender, by nature the male is strong. By nature the male sees things as black and white (hmmm, look at the male-dominated theology from the past 400 years), by nature the female does not see things as black and white, they weren’t created to. So how can the female redeem the male? She can teach the man to be tender in his strength, she can teach the man that everything isn’t black and white and that mystery is just as relevant as black and white. How can the male redeem the female? By teaching her to be strong in her tenderness.