How Can Your Marriage Bless the Future?

Excerpted with permission from To the Tenth Generation by Ray and Jani Ortlund. Copyright 2024, B&H Publishing.

But your marriage is not only sacred, your marriage also makes a bold gospel statement to this world. And the gospel, you can be sure, is the message God will faithfully declare throughout the coming generations of your family.

The Bible says marriage is both “profound” and a “mystery” (Eph. 5:32). That’s not how this world sees our marriages. In all our fifty-plus years of marriage, no one has ever said, when meeting us as husband and wife, “Wait, you two are married? Wow, that’s a profound mystery!” But what no one ever says to us, the Bible does say to us, and to you. Marriages are so common, so familiar, it’s easy not to notice what’s really going on. But Ephesians 5:22–33 gives us eyes to see how our ordinary marriages are declaring the profound mystery. Marriage is portraying the romance of the gospel—Jesus and his bride, united in love forever! That’s the deep, lasting, and beautiful mystery your marriage reveals and displays. And your family gets a front-row seat to watch, in living color, your reenactment of the ultimate romance.

Yes, the gospel is a story of romance, the love between Christ and his bride. And to show us the Eternal Marriage, to make it more real to us, God made us man and woman and gave us our momentary marriages. He helps us embody this epic love story. So whatever else you may envision as being a reason or purpose for your marriage, here’s the main one: your marriage portrays the gospel love story.

Sadly, our generation has lost confidence that manhood and womanhood really mean something. The confusion of future generations might sink into even deeper darkness.

But the gospel can always help us understand ourselves. It answers even basic questions like: How is a man a man, and not a woman? How is a woman a woman, and not a man? The Bible paints that picture for us. The gospel insight into manhood and womanhood is this: “It’s not about difference from each other, but difference for each other.”

The romantic, euphoric love of a man and woman together is a major theme running through the entire Bible. For example, the Song of Solomon is all about manhood and womanhood, each for the other, helping men be better men and helping women be better women. That’s the point of Song of Solomon 8:6, the climactic moment in the whole book:

In this verse, the bride is speaking to the groom. By marrying him, she has made herself vulnerable. She is pleading with him, basically saying, “Make me near and dear to yourself. Wear your wedding ring with pride. Keep our romance burning.” Why? Because marriage costs us something. As with death, getting married means we lose someone—our single selves. So marriage is powerful in its finality, even though it’s a death we gladly die. God himself set it up like this, filling romance with a fiery passion that sweeps us away. We want to belong to another, for the rest of our days, whatever the cost. But we long to know that the love of the one who has pursued us will last, the way God’s love for us is certain to last. As the years go by and we start discovering how intense marriage really is—“the very flame of the Lord”—he burns away our selfishness to create a deeper beauty within us. God reveals something of the glory of his covenant love through our imperfect marriages. And our children watch us returning again and again to one another, keeping the romance alive. It’s how a faithful marriage, even in the hard and rocky places—especially there—can help a whole family feel the warmth of his fire.

So now we’re starting to see how the everyday dance of marriage, with all its nuances and subtleties of a man and a woman truly but imperfectly in love—that marriage really is a profound mystery. Each moment—no matter how plain, no matter how painful—is our next opportunity to invest in the future of our family, not by achieving perfection but by stepping into the grace of the gospel. It’s the message that marriage is designed to declare. Here is that beauty, described in one verse: “To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband” (Eph. 5:33 CSB). The more our marriages paint that picture, the more richly we bless our children who will carry this gospel mystery into the future.