By Editor Bob Terry
Marriage can be the closest thing to heaven that one can experience on earth if God is at the center of the relationship.”
For centuries, pastors have shared that observation with couples contemplating marriage. But before a pastor ever voiced this reflection, God led the apostle Paul to emphasize that truth through Holy Scripture. In Ephesians 5:25, Paul commanded that husbands and wives love each other “as Christ loved the church.”
The Bible uses marriage as an illustration of God’s love for the church as God invites the church to be His bride and commands that God’s love for the church is to be the model for the love between spouses in marriage.
The Bible is replete with affirmation that God loves us. John 3:16 declares that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son … .” In Ephesians 5:2, one reads that “Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us.”
Love between a husband and wife is to be the same kind of love. It is self-giving love, not self-serving love. God’s love for us cost Him His Son. Too often, human love is equated with passion, but passion is about desire and demand. It seeks to fulfill itself. At its core, passion is selfish.
Self-giving love is not only costly — one gives one’s self away — but it also seeks the welfare of another. God’s love bridged the chasm between God and man caused by sin. God’s love made reconciliation between Creator and creation possible. Humanly speaking, self-giving love does for a person what spring’s warming sun and gentle rains do for a flower. Both the flower and the person bloom with a perfection placed inside them by God when bathed in the nurturing elements that give themselves away for that purpose.
John 3:16 describes another trait of God’s love. It has to be received to be effective. God “gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish … .” To be saved, one must “believe in Him.” While God’s love is offered to all, the object of that love must be willing to receive it. Acts 16:31 makes the same point. When the Philippian jailer asked the apostle Paul what he had to do to be saved, Paul replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”
In the same way, love between spouses must be freely received. God does not violate the human will and force someone to believe on the Lord Jesus. Neither can a human being’s love for another override the decision of the object of one’s desires.
Attempts to compel acceptance of one’s affections only prove the emotions are less than self-giving love because a God-like love never attempts to coerce or manipulate. God’s love is freely offered, and He awaits those who will freely accept His gift of love.
Those who stoop to coercion and manipulation to gain acceptance of their affections reveal only their own baseness. Their goal is compliance and control, not the welfare of another. The model for human love between spouses is love freely offered and love freely received.
Unfortunately human circumstances sometimes cause persons to respond to a God-like love with less than full acceptance. One could be attracted to the idea of marriage rather than in love with the person offering marriage. One could recognize opportunities for personal advantage rather than be willing to give one’s self to another in true love. For whatever reason, people sometimes respond to one another for selfish motives rather than in self-giving love.
The result is like trying to fake the symptoms when one does not really have the disease. In time, the truth will come out.
Perhaps you know someone who contends he or she tried being a Christian for a time, “but it just did not work out.” That person may have gone to church and done all the things expected of a Christian, but it just did not work out. The mistake the person made was trying to act like a Christian without first falling in love with the person of Jesus Christ. Without a love relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, one is not a Christian.
In the same way, unless a couple has fallen in love — true self-giving love — with each other, it has something less than a love that models Christ’s love for the church. For this couple, marriage can become more like an endurance contest than a source of strength and fulfillment.
True love, for God or for a spouse, must also be returned. Genesis 6:3 teaches that God’s Spirit will not always strive with man. Romans 1 teaches the wrath of God is displayed when God gives one over to his or her own desires. Salvation is God’s initiative and one must respond when God invites.
Psychologists talk about “love that dies.” That is a love that is rejected and spurned. In time, it gives up and withers like an unplucked grape left on the vine to bake in the sun. Like God’s Spirit, a human spirit cannot always “strive” with another. Returning love is essential for love to flourish.
First John 4:19 teaches that “We love Him, because He first loved us.” God’s love for us opens the door of relationship. The result of accepting God’s self-giving love through faith in Jesus is an eternal relationship with God. We are loved and that empowers us to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength (Mark 12:30).
Imagine the unspeakable joy of knowing the one you love with self-giving love not only accepts your love but also returns to you the same kind of self-giving love. That is what God does for the believer. That is the model for Christian marriage. A husband and wife give themselves completely to the other in self-giving love. And just as a Christian grows in the likeness of the Savior, the husband and wife grow together at their deepest levels as “the two become one.”
What a marvelous picture: a marriage bound together by a love as strong as God’s love for the church. It is no wonder that pastors point out that a self-giving, God-like love between husband and wife can make marriage the closest thing to heaven one can experience on earth.
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