Over the holidays, I’ve had the opportunity to attend many weddings. These events fill many of my weekends, perhaps due to my age and children. I even have the opportunity to perform marriages from time to time and to engage in marriage counseling with young couples. Through these experiences, I’ve come to love, rejoice in, and appreciate marriage as a beautiful ordinance created by God for his glory and our good.
Perhaps it’s because my own children are not yet married, or because I’ve heard the constant discussion at weddings of who is dating whom, who is engaged to whom, and the like, that I feel like I have some insight into the ways we as a culture, both Southern and Christian, sometimes put unhealthy expectations on marriage. At times, we even idolize it, which can put pressure on young people to marry and unwittingly render those who are single as second-class citizens within the church, which is patently unscriptural.
Idolizing marriage is nothing new. I was reading a devotional by Tim Keller the other day, who reminded me of the sordid tale of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah in Genesis 29. Jacob is lonely and isolated from his family, living with his uncle Laban. He sees Rachel, who is “fair of face and form.” He decides he must have her and that if he does, it will fix everything, meeting all his needs. He is so captivated by her that he falls prey to his uncle, who manipulates him into working for Laban wage-free for seven years, just so he can have her. Jacob acts like an addict, doing whatever he can to get Rachel. He’s completely compromised.
Therefore, he falls victim to deception on his wedding day. Laban substitutes Leah for Rachel. Yet, instead of taking Leah and leaving, Jacob stays and works another seven years, again for Rachel. He literally “worships the ground she walks on” in unhealthy, dangerous ways. He ignores Leah and loves Rachel’s children more than Leah does, which causes heartache, discord, and dysfunction in his family. Leah, as the older sister, is freed from singleness but into a new kind of captivity, unloved and uncherished, the kind of marriage no one would hope for—single inside marriage. Until she realizes that she will praise the Lord rather than futilely seeking her husband’s love. She decides to pursue maturity in God and a relationship with him first. She becomes the heroine of this story, and it’s through her son Judah that the line of Messiah comes.
Marriage is a creational good that has deep spiritual meaning. John Lee, pastor of Immanuel Church in Orange County, notes that marriage is a gift of God that displays the typological reality of Christ’s relationship to the church (Eph. 5). But singleness also has a deep spiritual meaning, pointing us to the actual reality of the Christian’s lived experience in the New Heaven and the New Jerusalem (where Christ says in Matthew 22:30 we are neither married nor given in marriage).
We are single before we are married, and, statistically speaking, more than half of us will be single again at some point during life on this earth. Marriage will not be our reality in the New Jerusalem, where we will live as resurrected beings for eternity. Marriage is an important part of life, but it’s important to anchor it in the true context of our total existence and not treat it as the totality of that existence.
At the point of creation, God says it “is not good for man to be alone,” and God creates a help-mete, perfect for him. He commands man and woman to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28), meaning to physically procreate through the ordinance of marriage and make new humans. This is God’s goodness, as he made it to be. In the Old Testament, it would have been unusual, even among Levitical priests not to be married, and we’ve talked about the stigma of barrenness (which had many cultural elements, as well as covenantal).
It’s very important to note, however, that God didn’t create females solely so guys could have someone to date. One of the things that made it “not good” for man as a sexually male being to be alone was that he, by himself, did not fully express the image of God in the way God intended humanity to do. Women were created as expressions of God’s image so that, together with men, they could more fully express God’s image. Whether they are married or not, the mystical expression of a greater fullness of God’s image is present, regardless of their marital status. It does not mean that single men and women are less in the imago Dei than married ones.
Furthermore, in the New Covenant, Paul says, “It is good for the unmarried and widows to remain as I am,” meaning single. Indeed, Paul and even (especially) Christ lived chaste and single, not only wholly and without forfeiting their humanity, but living the most spiritually profitable lives in the history of the church.
This doesn’t mean that singleness is better than marriage. But it does mean that, frankly, neither is the ultimate point of the Christian life, and we err and create all kinds of heartache for ourselves and others when we unwittingly make them the point, whether through an unhealthy obsession with romantic love or marriage or unhealthy anxiety over singleness.
The point of life is abiding in Christ and spiritual maturity in him. Lee asks a good diagnostic question, one I would modify slightly: What’s more important for a single person—to be married or to be godly? And, what’s more important for a married person—to be married or to be godly? If we search our hearts deeply, and the answer to either of those questions is “married,” then we’ve missed the point and threatened to plunge into making another human being or the ideal of marriage our idol, something no person or idea that isn’t God is created to be.
Regardless of whether you’re single or married, holiness in God, and abiding in him, calls for the same responses. And, in offering obedience and surrender through these responses, singleness and marriage both become vehicles for holiness, rather than ultimate goals in and of themselves.
First, pursuing maturity in Christ is the goal. This life, every experience, and everything we endure can shape us into who we are and will be in the New Jerusalem. This is the hope we have in Christ. If we’re married, our spouses, with all their shortcomings and imperfections, are vehicles to help make us holy, to sand off our rough edges, as we submit to the Lord (just as we are these things for them). If we’re single, and as we live in relationships with friends, family, and coworkers, God will use these relationships in the same way. Married people have more potential for in-house sanctification, while single people generally have greater opportunities and freedom to find experiences outside the four walls of their homes.
Married couples are enabled by their covenant to reproduce physically and biologically and follow Christ’s Great Commission to make disciples within their home. Yet, those who are single also have opportunities to reproduce. In John 3, Christ reminds us that we who are reborn are a new creation; the old has died, the new has come. Paul refers to Timothy as his spiritual son, as one he led to the Lord and discipled into spiritual maturity. Single people have the opportunity to develop spiritual sons and daughters of their own many times over through sharing the gospel and discipling others, participating with the Lord in populating the New Earth.
Second, each should find contentment in their own circumstances. Cultural pressure to marry by a certain age, along with the resulting expectations and pressures, contributes to singleness and dissatisfaction. As a people of God whose Word values both singleness and marriage, we should be counter-cultural and support and value those who, through their own choices and life circumstances, have chosen singleness, as well as marriage. Always asking single people about their plans for marriage as our lead-off conversation point, or harping on it as a recurring topic of conversation, reinforces cultural pressure rather than showing support (as I know most of us desire to do).
But singleness also leads to dissatisfaction when we focus on what we don’t have, rather than what we do. Singleness offers greater focus, flexibility, and freedom in serving the Lord, unencumbered by “I’ll have to check with my spouse” (which you should always do if you’re married, by the way). But, primarily, singleness in Christ points the world to the reality of being a new creation, and that, as Lee says, “what they possess is of more value than their relationship status.” They prove Christ’s sufficiency. This doesn’t mean at all that those who have the desire to marry should give up that desire as some kind of holy self-flagellation. The desire to be married is good and holy, too. It also doesn’t mean that we can’t be content, yet also struggle with the difficulties that come with singleness, which can be lonely and hard. But it does mean that we should find contentment within all circumstances, not despite them.
Incidentally, those who are married should find contentment in their marriage, as well. As those who are married know, it’s no picnic. At times it can be lonely, isolating, and flat-out hard, as many of my friends have experienced as their children entered adolescence, or when they first became empty nesters, or at other times in their marriage. The story of Leah is one of isolation in marriage. But God brings fulfillment, and he is our sufficiency in a way that no human being can be.
Finally, God gives us a new family in Christ, and we all have the opportunity to be fulfilled in it. This is true whether we’re married or single. If we’re married, our spouse and children may be a critical ministry for us, but they were never intended to be our sole family. Jesus promises a family that’s greater than any we could hope for: “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and childre and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.” Mark 10:29-31. Whether we’re single or married, we have a family in the here and now, the body of Christ, created to serve and be served, love and be loved. These are our genuine siblings, with whom we will share eternal dominion.
I love the family that birthed and raised me, but those that I chose—my friends who love me closer than a brother, who would do anything for me, this community that I love and that has cared so deeply for my family and me–are worth more to me than anything else in the world. God gave us each other as the antidote to loneliness, so that in him, and in each other, we may at times be lonely, but we’ll never be alone. But we have to step into it. We have to invest. We cannot remain on the periphery of the body, observing from the outside or merely dabbling in it. Full immersion is what God intended. Membership literally means being an organ of the body, part of what makes it live and move. That requires a commitment and a choice.
Marriage is something to be loved and cherished. But so is singleness, and the body of Christ functions best when we love, support, see, and are for each other in whatever state God has called us, whether for the moment or for life.
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