14/03/2020
The Bible’s Teaching on Marriage and the Family
Marriage: Contract or Covenant?
Today, marriage and the family are regularly viewed
as social conventions that can be entered into and
severed by the marital partners at will. As long as a
given marriage relationship meets the needs of both
individuals involved and is considered advantageous
by both sides, the marriage is worth sustaining. If
one or both partners decide that they will be better
off by breaking up the marriage and entering into a
new, better marital union, nothing can legitimately
keep them from pursuing their self-interest, selfrealization, and self-fulfillment. To be sure, there is
talk about the cost of divorce and the toll exerted on
the children caught up in the marital separation of
their parents, but even such a toll is considered to be
worth paying in order to safeguard the most cherished principles of our independent-minded, free-dom-worshipping, individual rights-exalting culture.
If one or both marriage partners want to get out of
the marriage, nothing should hold them back, or else
the culture’s supreme values—individual choice and
libertarian freedom—are not given their due.
By contrast, the Bible makes clear that, at the root,
marriage and the family are not human conventions
based merely on a temporary consensus and timehonored tradition. Instead, Scripture teaches that
family was God’s idea and that marriage is a divine,
not merely human, institution. The implication of
this truth is significant indeed, for this means that
humans are not free to renegotiate or redefine marriage and the family in any way they choose but that
they are called to preserve and respect what has been
divinely instituted. This is in keeping with Jesus’
words, uttered when his contemporaries asked him
about the permissibility of divorce: “What therefore
God has joined together let not man separate” (Matthew 19:6). For this reason, marriage is far more than
a human social contract; it is a divinely instituted covenant.
But what is a “covenant”? In essence, a covenant is a
contract between two parties that is established before God as a witness, a contract whose permanence
is ultimately safeguarded by none other than God
himself. In this sense, marriage is a covenant: it is entered into by the husband and the wife before God as
a witness. Because it is ultimately God who has joined
the marriage partners together, the husband and the
wife vow to each other abiding loyalty and fidelity
“till death do us part.” Rightly understood, therefore,
a marriage entered into before God involves three
persons: a husband, a wife, and God. For this reason,
it is not self-interest, human advantage, or an unfettered commitment to personal freedom that governs
the marriage relationship, but the husband and wife’s
joint commitment to conduct their marriage based on
God’s design and sovereign plan.