Marriage and the Gospel
Can marriage survive when it feels more like a struggle than joy? In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul points us beyond perfection and into the promise of a gospel-shaped love, one that echoes God’s covenant even through brokenness.
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Principles for Marriage
1 Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
6 Now as a concession, not a command, I say this.[a] 7 I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.
8 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. 9 But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife.
12 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you[b] to peace. 16 For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
Adding Context to Our Passage
“Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24
To understand a passage in 1 Corinthians, we first need to identify the problem. The problem that the church in Corinth struggled with in chapter seven is that they didn’t understand how their lives had changed now that they were in Christ.
Throughout 1 Corinthians 7, an issue arises where the distinction between before and after Christ’s conversion has created confusion in the church. They were asking: What stays? What moves on? What’s different now? What’s the same? The Apostle Paul broke that down in varying issues throughout chapter seven, the first of which was marriage.
Russell Moore, editor-in-chief at Christianity Today, acknowledges this tension in his book The Storm-Tossed Family:
“Family can be the source of some of the most transcendent human joy, and family can leave us crumpled up on the side of the road. Family can make us who we are, and family can break our hearts. Family is difficult because family, every family, is an echo of the gospel.”
Whether marriage brings feelings of joy or sorrow, we need to explore what a gospel-shaped, gospel-echoing marriage looks like. This is found only when we look vertically towards God and the gospel instead of looking horizontally at each other or making comparisons about marriage.
We live in a world that’s confused about marriage. There are two primary thoughts for much of the world:
The Ultimate Thing: Marriage is an identity-defining factor that has to happen for you to be truly human.
Meaningless Formality: Marriage is merely a piece of paper that gets in the way of love.
Understanding marriage in light of the gospel is crucial for our good and for God’s glory to be seen in our witness.
What is God’s Design for Marriage?
God does have a design for marriage that followers of Jesus believe, and it’s centered around the idea of covenant. A covenant is a binding formal agreement between two parties, meaning a promise for the future that includes both legality and love wedded together.
Dr. Tim Tennent argues that marriage is the primary covenantal image of God’s nature, as the binding, promise-keeping nature of marriage is the first echo we have of God’s binding, promise-keeping love for us as His creation.
In Genesis 1 and 2, the covenant of marriage is present and beautifully seen in the creation story. The Bible opens with God creating complementary elements: heaven and earth, sea and dry land, and, of course, man and woman—Adam and Eve, two individuals created as image bearers of God, destined to become one new, beautiful union.
Right at the start of Genesis, at the climax of God’s good creation, we see this picture of marriage:
“Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Genesis 2:24-25
This concept of becoming one flesh, two in union, becoming one, shapes and defines Christian marriage. It shows us that Christian marriage is true intimacy between one man and one woman, spiritually, relationally, and physically, in a loving, lifelong covenant.
Anytime there’s a compromise or change in any of these aspects, problems arise, whether in who is getting married, the length of the marriage, or the intimacy found within it—much of our cultural confusion about marriage centers around misunderstanding God’s good design.
Timothy Keller wrote in The Meaning of Marriage:
“If God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to His purposes for it… If you purchase a vehicle, a machine well beyond your own ability to create, you will certainly take up the owner’s manual and abide by what the designer says the car needs by way of treatment and maintenance. To ignore it would be to court disaster.”
God’s good design for marriage shows that marriage is a good thing given by God. Scripture says it’s not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). We were created for relationship and companionship. God is good to let husbands and wives share their lives together in relational, physical, and spiritual intimacy in this loving lifelong covenant.
Exploring the Challenges of Marriage
Anyone who has been married or knows married people knows that marriages come with their share of issues. In Scripture, the issues we see in marriage come right after the descriptions of marital union. Adam and Eve, created to live in peace in God’s design, chose to leave it. Any time you depart from God’s good design, the Bible calls this sin.
In their sin, one of the first ways sin and brokenness were displayed in the Bible was in the context of marriage. Created for intimacy together and intimacy with God, they hid from God. They started to fight each other and blame each other. They began to exert control and dominance over one another. Sin entered marriage, brokenness ensued, and problems arose.
This pattern continued throughout the Old Testament and brought us to Corinth, which was specifically struggling with how they approached marriage. They had forgotten God’s good design, and as a result, were experiencing cultural problems unique to their city.
Two Main Problems in Corinth
First: Struggles with Physical Intimacy (1 Corinthians 7:1-5)
Corinth was a city known for sexual immorality. If God’s design for marriage is like a road, many in Corinth had veered off one side into a ditch of allowing immorality to affect their marriages by pursuing physical intimacy outside of God’s design.
But there was also a ditch on the other side, where many in Corinth were not pursuing physical intimacy at all, even within marriage. In opposition to the culture around them, some developed a view of avoiding all intimacy between husband and wife.
The Apostle Paul acknowledged that while there are seasons for devoting yourself to prayer, this wasn’t to be the norm in marriage. Becoming Christian doesn’t mean setting aside physical intimacy because doing so hinders the one-flesh union that marriage consists of.
Second: Struggles with Divorce (1 Corinthians 7:10-16)
The Apostle Paul taught that becoming a Christian doesn’t mean setting aside the lifelong nature of marriage. He made a careful distinction between commands from the Lord (verse 10) and his own apostolic wisdom (verse 12).
In verse 10, the Apostle Paul pointed back to Jesus’ teaching on marriage found in the Gospels (Matthew 5, Matthew 19), where Jesus reaffirmed the one-flesh union from Genesis 2 and showed that the lifelong nature of the marital covenant is God’s ideal, except in cases of sexual immorality.
In verse 12, the Apostle Paul addressed a new situation in Corinth: marriages where one spouse had become a believer and the other hadn’t. His guidance was that everything rested on the non-believing spouse. If they stayed, the believer should stay and trust that the family would be set apart and receive positive influence from the believing spouse. If the non-believing spouse left and abandoned the marriage, the believer could separate and remarry if desired.
Modern Marriage Problems
Many of our problems with marriage are similar to Corinth’s, which is a lack of understanding of God’s design for marriage and how it works out in our lives. We often settle for less, and as a result, problems arise.
Our issues often stem from a strong desire for autonomy and a quest for what we want in marriage. The late Tim Keller discussed the distinction between God’s design of marriage found in covenant and the cheap replacement we often settle for: Seeing marriage as a commodity.
In commodities, you seek to get what you can receive. In a covenant, you desire to do what you can give. Keller wrote:
“Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society, the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today, we stay connected to people only as long as they’re meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us.”
When marriage is a commodity, the only lens you have for physical intimacy is inward on yourself and what you can receive. When marriage is a commodity, the only lens you have for permanency is how long you want it to last when sinned against.
Our Hope: Marriage as an Echo of the Gospel
If God’s design is the ideal and our problems are the reality, where is our hope that bridges the gap? Our hope is not in anything we do. Our hope is in understanding marriage as an echo and picture of the gospel.
When Adam and Eve sinned in Genesis 3, there was judgment, but also grace. God set out in grace to bring restoration to the couple. He sought after them and did what was necessary for them to live. This pattern continued throughout the Old Testament as God established a special relationship with Israel. When He described that relationship, one of the metaphors He used most frequently was marriage; God as the groom and Israel as His bride.
Even when unfaithful, in the Book of Hosea, the message continued that God was determined to take those who were unworthy and bring them back into relationship with Him. This pattern reached its fullness when God Himself, in the person of Jesus, entered our broken world to redeem His people and restore our relationship with Him by paying for our sins on the cross.
It’s no accident that when Jesus described this, the picture He reached for was again marriage; He is the groom, and the church is His bride.
The Apostle Paul reaffirmed this in Ephesians 5, showing there’s more going on than what the eye sees when looking at husband and wife. When people see believers married in Christ, they see a profound mystery of the gospel: how Jesus sacrificially loved and redeemed His bride on the cross.
We’re called to remember that we’ve been bought with a price (1 Corinthians 7:23). Because of Jesus’ great sacrifice to us and for us, we can approach marriage with this calling and desire to sacrifice for one another.
Just as God’s marriage to us cost Him nothing less than the death of His Son, our marriages carry within them costly reminders of sacrificial love, including laying down our lives repeatedly for one another. Their essence isn’t a selfish commodity (“What can we get?”) but a loving covenant (“What can we give?”).
Gospel-Shaped Physical Intimacy
The Apostle Paul pointed the Corinthians back to sacrificial love of the covenant, reminding them they’d been bought with a price and their bodies weren’t their own anymore; instead, they were to be given to one another. This was as countercultural then as it is now.
In Roman culture, the theme was dominance; the husband alone had sole authority over bodies. In our culture, the theme is autonomy; it’s unheard of to enter a relationship where you’d give authority over your body to another.
But when approached through the gospel lens, physical intimacy in marriage is:
A joyful act of living within God’s design.
A regular act of renewing the marriage covenant.
Not founded on manipulation or seeking one’s pleasure.
A good gift from God is to be expressed in this covenantal relationship.
Gospel-Shaped Permanency
The Apostle Paul pointed them to the reality that their bodies had been bought with a price and to the sacrificial love found in covenant. The ideal is to remain married except in cases of sexual immorality or abandonment.
When sinned against, many view that as reason the relationship’s value is gone, and they can run away. But the Apostle Paul called Christians to see that they shouldn’t because they’re part of a greater story, which is the story of the gospel. This was countercultural then and now.
Standing steadfast and living sacrificially is hard work. We must continually learn to lay our lives down for one another, just as Jesus has done for us. But we’re promised that as these things take work, they’re the very things our marriages are made for, like oil that helps a car run the way it was intended.
Living the Gospel Echo
The hope in the Apostle Paul’s message that extends to us today is that when appropriately understood as an echo of the gospel, marriages can be called to the highest ideals God designs them for. More than that, when we live in response to the perfect, all-sufficient sacrifice of Jesus for His bride and are empowered by the Holy Spirit, we gain the ability to actually sacrifice for one another.
This doesn’t make our marriages perfect, but it makes them:
Faithful
Steady
Self-sacrificing
Life-giving
They can be centered on sacrifice, placing the good of the other above one’s own good. As that happens, the world will notice the way husband and wife live together and continually submit to and sacrifice for one another.
Marriages on mission, where partners jointly sacrifice, love, and hold a high view of covenant together, are a beautiful way to point people towards the coming kingdom of God.
The Ultimate Wedding
We’re promised in Scripture that one day our Creator God will restore and redeem every broken piece of this world. The picture God gives of what happens when this world is remade is a wedding.
In Revelation 21, the new Jerusalem will come down like a bride adorned for her husband. We’ll see that this is what God had in mind all along, that marriage would be a way to point people to the coming kingdom where all things are brought together anew in Christ.
Until that day, we’re called as the church to live faithfully into this design, to be people known for our sacrificial love for one another, and to let that sacrifice pour out of our marriages in a way that leads us onto mission and to living differently in a world greatly confused about marriage.
Let us, by God’s grace, faithfully live in response to this beautiful echo of the gospel we see in Scripture.
TL;DR
In a culture that sees marriage as either ultimate or unnecessary, the Apostle Paul reminds believers in 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage is neither idol nor afterthought—it’s a gospel echo.
Drawing on God’s original design in Genesis, Paul addresses the Corinthians’ confusion around intimacy and divorce, offering a vision rooted in covenant, sacrifice, and mission.
Whether restoring God’s vision for intimacy or honoring the lifelong nature of commitment, Christian marriage points beyond itself to Christ’s love for His bride.
This blog unpacks that call, contrasts covenant vs. commodity views, and ends by lifting our eyes toward the wedding feast in Revelation.
