Marriage as a Bumper Sticker for the Gospel: A Wedding Reflection

Stories typically have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it’s often not until we know the ending of a story that we realize all that was happening in the beginning, and for that matter, in the middle. When we think about the story of God’s love for the world—what Christians call the gospel—and we reflect upon what that good news story has to do with marriage, we learn something precious about God.

Bumper Stickers

Before we get there, I’ll tell you a story. My first pastorate was in Tucson, Arizona. In Tucson there was one particular, prominent church that gave its attendees bumper stickers with the church’s name and logo on it. I guess I should say that I presume that they gave out the bumper stickers and asked people to put it on their cars, as opposed to simply sending out covert volunteers during the service to slap the stickers on cars in the parking lot. I assume they did not do that. I do think if we had that “ministry” at our church, there would be people who would want to join the team, which is one of several reasons why we don’t.

I would see these bumper stickers all over Tucson. Nearly every time I saw one, I would wish I was privy to a conversation that I was not privy to; I wish I had been in the staff meeting when a leader presented the idea for the bumper stickers.

I imagine it going like this: “So, I have an idea I want to run by you,” says the summer intern. “I’m thinking that the Christians who call our church home, have lives so wonderfully transformed by Jesus, that Jesus is actually influencing the way they drive. In fact, our people drive so courteously, thoughtfully, safely, and law-abidingly, that we should capitalize on their good Christian driving. I think more people will come to our church based on how our people drive if we put our logo on their cars. Let’s have their driving advertise how wonderful it is to come to our church.”

I would have liked to have been in that staff meeting to hear the response. Evidently, they bought the sales pitch.

I’m poking fun at that idea and all of our poor driving, which, whether we are Christians or not, is often not done so courteously and law-abidingly.

But in a real way, God has set up the story of redemption to be a story about marriage. God has chosen—as strange as it might seem to us—to advertise his goodness through the vehicle of marriage. Marriages are to display not merely the couple’s love for each other but God’s love for his bride.

The Beginning

In the beginning of the story of God’s love for his people, God creates a man and a woman in his image. He creates two co-rulers of creation, a King and a Queen if you will, to multiply and have dominion over the earth.

Sometimes when we hear the language in Genesis of having dominion and subduing, we think of carbon footprints and corporations polluting the oceans and so on. In other words, we think of the bad kind of subduing. But in the context, the King called Adam and the Queen called Eve, are to rule the way God was ruling: In each subsequent day of creation, God took raw, unformed material and made it better; he made an environment more and more cultivated and suited to life and beauty. And as Adam and Eve ruled, they were to do the same. God’s intention for their ruling was not just for their benefit but for others too.

Consider the familiar phrase, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). In the story, there’s no mother and no father yet, so what is that about? God is setting up a pattern that he intends to continue after the garden of Eden. It’s a good pattern. God has a grand purpose for marriage, not only for the individual couple but the work of advertising that he’ll do through marriage, if you allow me to use that word advertising.

What we see in the biblical story, however, is that shortly thereafter, Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and everything about everything got hard and ugly. When they fell into sin, Adam’s sin plunged all of us into ten thousand problems, including those in marriage (cf. Romans 5:12–21).

The Middle

And yet, despite all our issues of sin and struggle, in the middle of God’s story, we see that God still chose to liken the joy of marriage and the joy of a bride and groom, to the joy of knowing him. One example of that is from the prophet Isaiah where God likens the joy of being clothed in the garments of salvation to the joy of being decked out on your wedding day.

. . . for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;
    he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress,
    and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. (Isaiah 61:10b)

In the New Testament, which is that part of the Bible written ]after Jesus came to earth, an author says something similar in a letter to a church in a city called Ephesus. But this time the wording is more specific. After quoting the passage from Genesis about a man leaving his father and mother to become one flesh with his wife, the apostle Paul writes, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). Paul sees in marriage an advertising scheme, a way to display to the world how much God loves the world.

Marriage: Not a Job Interview but a Covenant Relationship

For us to make sense of that, we have to understand marriage, not how most people understand it today, but how God intends it to be. Here’s what I mean. It’s common for people to think that marriage is simply a more serious version of dating and living together. But that’s not actually true. Yes, marriage is more serious than dating, but marriage is not just the next level of dating or living together; marriage is a new, special type of relationship. When couples date and, sadly, live together before marriage, that positions the relationship like a job interview that doesn’t end.

However, God considers marriage a covenant relationship, not a consumer relationship or an extended job interview. In marriage, you already have the job. Thus, a covenant relationship is not focused on whether the other person delivers the goods. A covenant relationship is one based on a solemn vow to uphold your end of the agreement regardless of whether the other person does.

And this is why covenant relationships are so beautiful. In a covenant relationship you can be truly known—known in all of your glory, but also known in all of your depravity and shame and failures and insecurities—and not only known but still loved. This is the meaning of unconditional love: truly known and dearly loved.

It’s God’s intention that marriage would be this type of relationship—one not based on what the other person does, but rather, through “better and worse, sickness and health, richer and poorer,” the marriage holds.

God has designed marriage to work this way to display to the world the way he loves people in what Christians call the gospel; the gospel is the heart of Christianity. God doesn’t love us because we always look the way a couple looks on their wedding day, a handsome groom and a beautiful bride. The gospel is the good news that, in Jesus, God has undertaken a rescue mission for his enemies or, we might say, for a faithless bride. It’s good news that God is not interviewing me for the job of being a Christian, as though if I just perform well enough for long enough, well, then he’ll love me. If this is how you experience God, you don’t know him as he desires to be known.

Let me be more specific. The Bible teaches that Jesus lived a perfect life; he was utterly faithful to God his Father and loved him supremely. Then out of love for his Father and us, Jesus went to a cross and died, suffering the ultimate punishment for our sin, not his. Then he rose again, indicating that all punishment for anyone who trusts in Jesus is gone. The posture of God toward his children is now only that of strong, warm covenant love.

This is the mystery that Paul wrote about, the mystery that is no longer a mystery. A pastor once wrote a poem that has a few lines that speak to this. The lines go like this:

. . . marriage, from / the first embrace, is but the small / and faulty echo of a thrall / and union high above . . . (John Piper, “Joseph: Part 4,” Desiring God, December 21, 1997)

Marriages are but a faulty echo of the greater union, the author says, the union of God with his people, the union of Christ the groom with the church, his bride. I think that’s true.

You might ask the question if this is only true of good marriages. It’s not. Even our imperfect marriages testify that there is something greater, something better out there. I’ll explain. When a couple has a rotten season of marriage, or when a person wants to be married but is not married, it’s not usually that they think marriage itself is terrible. They feel disappointment because they hope for better from marriage. To use a metaphor, if I were eating cardboard, I wouldn’t be surprised that it tasted awful; it’s cardboard—of course it tastes bad. But if we were feasting, and the food was rotten and made us sick, we would be frustrated because we know feasting should lead to joy.

And so, the hurt of a sad marriage is compounded because we know, in our heart of hearts, that it was not supposed to be this way. In other words, even our sadness over broken marriages testifies, sometimes as a whisper and sometimes as a shout, that marriages are supposed to be good and that there is more to marriage than a marriage.

The End

Look what God says about marriage in the last book of the Bible, the end of the story.

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
    the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
    and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
    and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
    with fine linen, bright and pure”—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” (Revelation 19:6–9)

As I wrote above, stories typically have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s often not until we know the ending of a story that we realize all that was happening in the beginning, and for that matter, in the middle.

Throughout the biblical story, we get hints of the greater purpose of marriage, which becomes explicit in the book of Revelation. All the joy, all the feasting, all the celebration, all the love, all the “for better’s and for worse’s,” point to the great day of feasting and joy and celebration at what the Bible calls the “marriage supper of the Lamb,” a phrase used twice in this passage to refer to the great feast of the redeemed at the end of time. The Lamb is a way to refer to Jesus, the one who paid for the wedding. Weddings are expensive. I know those who sit on the front row of a wedding know this well. Jesus paid for the great wedding feast with his life. And one day all the forgiven will feast together.

On Christ’s behalf, as a preacher of the gospel, I invite you to that feast. You only need to give God your empty hands and your hungry belly. And he promises to feed you rich food (cf. Isaiah 55:1–3; John 6:35).

Marriages display this gospel, which is why marriage is a high and honorable calling. May God, in his grace, enable the good news of the covenant love of God to be the centerpiece of our marriages. And may our marriages become beautiful bumper stickers pointing people to the fierce and forever love of God.

* Photo from Marc A. Sporys by Unsplash

More Than Amnesty

Neither every moment nor every aspect of pastoral ministry enthralls. However, I am convinced—through the study of the Word and pastoral life within the local church—that every endeavor to promote connection between God and his people is nothing short of participation in God’s intention for the universe.

Said another way: laboring towards genuine, God-besotted, gospel-community is laboring with the grain of the universe, not against it. And because this is true, our labors to cultivate this type of community are always deeply meaningful, whether we palatably perceive it in every moment or not.

Furthermore, in my experience, as summertime ends and the school year begins, people tend to be more inclined to involve themselves in this type of genuine, God-besotted, gospel-community in a local church. They sign up to serve in the nursery; they join the worship team; they commit to a small group Bible study. 

This year, in order to celebrate the beauty of these commitments and the reconciliation which was hard-won for us by Jesus Christ, I reworked a poem I wrote a few years ago. It’s called, “More Than Amnesty.”

Amnesty means one group has pardoned another group of wrongdoing. But amnesty doesn’t necessarily mean the two groups are now reconciled, and it certainly does not imply that they are friends; it merely means they are neutral.

In the gospel, we have far more than amnesty. Yes, God has pardoned, but the sacrificial death of the Son of God does not bring us into a neutral relationship with God, a merely pardoned relationship.

Rather, through the gospel, we are reconciled with God; we are made his friends; we become beloved sons and beloved daughters of God. That is more than amnesty. And this is what we were made for.

May God stir deeper longings in our hearts for this type of genuinely God-besotted, gospel-community. And may God enable our churches to make greater progress towards it.

*     *     *

More Than Amnesty

In God’s likeness with no shame
Eve and Adam rule and reign
Stretching glory ‘cross the earth
‘til they doubted God’s great worth

Now scorched and frayed and fractured
Father’s connection shattered
Like concrete cracked with hammer
Change Garden’s bliss to clamor

A willful grab for power
Caused Paradise to sour
Now a fire guarded gate
None will circumnavigate

So flounder, flop, flail—long years
Try to fix, yet smudge and smears
To sin’s shackles bondage bound
With no way by man yet found

But wait, but wait, oh—but wait
upon us no crushing weight
Now the curse of sin undone
By the beauty of the Son

More than our forgiven debt
We have deepest longings met
More, more, more than amnesty
A blood adhered family

Restored, redeemed, reconciled
Children no longer exiled
Now, the Father holds us dear
“I will be your God,” we hear

[Photo by Christopher Michel / CC BY]

Words and Deeds, and a Few Comments on Balance

Currently I am studying for my ordination exams in the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA). It’s a three-year process that has three major steps in it: one at the start, one at the end, and one in-between. The steps at the beginning and the end of the process are similar; each requires a long, doctrinal paper and an oral examination over that same paper. The difference between the two is that the first step requires a 20-page paper and a three-hour oral examination, while the last step is double that—40 pages of writing and a six-hour oral exam.

What’s the middle step? Three years of faithful, gospel ministry in the context of a local EFCA church.

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On May 21 of this year, I participated in the first step and passed. (If interested, you can read my paper here.)

While preparing for this step, I read Evangelical Convictions, which is an exposition of our denomination’s statement of faith. One place I found the book particularly helpful was in the discussion of the relationship between gospel deeds and gospel proclamation. When you hear “gospel deeds,” think of Christ-like acts of service in the church and the world. And when you hear “gospel proclamation,” think communicating the content of the gospel with words. To explain the relationship between the two, the authors of Evangelical Convictions use a musical analogy. They write:

Words often attributed to Francis of Assisi are frequently quoted in [regard to sharing the gospel]: “Preach the gospel all the time; if necessary use words.”

This is misstated, for our words are necessary, just as God’s words are necessary for us to understand his message. But it is true, nonetheless, that how we live provides the context for the content of the message we proclaim. It provides the music that accompanies the lyrics of the gospel—the music which helps to display the beauty of those lyrics to the world.

Thus, proclaiming the gospel in words and living the gospel through loving service to others ought to go hand in hand. Actions without words are insufficient, but words without action lack credibility. We declare God’s love to the world with more power when we also demonstrate that love in how we live. (Evangelical Convictions, 208)

This analogy—words and deeds likened to lyrics and music—is helpful. Gospel deeds by themselves are like instrumental music: good and beautiful, yet open to ambiguity and misinterpretation. And gospel words by themselves are like lyrics without a melody: good and true, yet all the more powerful when set to music.

A Few Comments on Balance

Perhaps you have heard serious debates about the tension between these two and which is more important: practice or proclamation? Should I shovel the snow in my neighbor’s driveway or should I invite them to a Bible Study? Should I volunteer at soup kitchens or hand out gospel tracts? Which is it, deeds or words?

Often in the debate, the word “primarily” is inserted to soften absoluteness—should Christians primarily be involved in gospel deeds or primarily in verbal gospel proclamation. This helps a little, but I agree with the authors of Evangelical Convictions; there is no ultimate tension between the two—words and deeds should go together like lyrics and music.

But just because they “go together,” I do not think our ultimate goal should be to “balance” them. I say this—that balance is not the goal—for three reasons.

First, how could we possibly know if we have just the right amount of each, the perfect balance of words and deeds? Sure, it’s possible to see gross imbalances, especially in others, but what “scale” shall we use to know when things are slightly off?

Second, balance—however it is measured—is something that must be measured over a period of time. For example, in a given moment, I might be engaged in a gospel practice, and in another moment verbal gospel proclamation. The only way to know that my life is “balancing” these two, practice and proclamation, is if you look at the period of time that includes both.

To use a different analogy, if I say, “I haven’t eaten anything in 10 hours!” you might think, “Whoa, that’s unhealthy and out of balance.” However, it might be very normal if when I said this it was 7am and I’d just had a good night’s sleep. We all have natural rhythms of eating and not eating, and in order to see if a person has a balanced diet you need to examine the right period of time. This is what I mean about words and deeds; you have to observe the right period of time. In different seasons, a person (or even a church or parachurch ministry), might rightly be focused more on one than the other.

Third, to complicate this even more, Christians exist in a body, a body made up of different members with different functions just like the human body (Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31). Therefore, by God’s great design, some of us will be more inclined to word proclamation and some more to deed proclamation. We can see this clearly displayed in 1 Peter. At one point, Peter writes that all Christians are to “proclaim the excellencies” of God (2:9). Yet later in the epistle, Peter notes that some Christians will do this through speaking and others through service. “Whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies” (4:11).

For these reasons, to make balance the highest goal is not only impossible to evaluate, but the wrong goal altogether. Thus, I’m not so worried about how I balance the two in my own life, as much as I am concerned about obedience for this is Paul’s emphasis in Ephesians.

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:15-16)

Notice the phrase: “when each part is working properly.” The goal is not to make sure we are always in perfect balance, but perfect obedience so that together—the whole body—can sing gospel lyrics to the tune of gospel deeds. That’s the concert I want to be a part of.

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