The Sacred Domain of Marriage
When a male and female, a husband and a wife cannot see beyond themselves, that marriage will be destroyed by their own authority.
Marriage was designed to be complimentary. In her book, God’s Design for Man and Woman, Margaret Kostenberger writes that even after The Fall, God never left us. He remains the final authority over marriage.
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26
When He had done this
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Genesis 1:28
That man is superior and the woman inferior is proved to be untrue in the scriptures. Partners with different roles that jointly represent the Creator is scripturally true. I encourage you to read Male and Female: Embracing Your Role in God’s Design by Jonathan and Christa Petzold as a scripturally defining book explaining this partnership.
This partnership is scripturally designed.
1. God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26 We are created completely male or female, different in every way, but becoming one.
2. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. Matthew 19:6 This is scripturally assuring in good times and in bad times.
3 A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:24 They create a whole new domain unlike the family domain from which each came or the family domain they will create by having children.
5. In this domain of love,wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Colossians 3:18 In this domain, God is the final authority for both, the husband to God and the wife to God. Their allegiance to each other in this domain of love is ruled by the giver of that domain, God their Heavenly Father.
4. In this domain of love, husbands are to love their wives in the manner in which they love their own bodies. Husbands, love your wives. Colossians 3:19 All that is expected of him in this love is according to the fruits of the spirit.
6. This domain is a mystery as in the mystery of Christ and the church. Think of the kingdom of God as a big net. God has reached down to draw the souls of people back to heaven. To help us better understand what the soul is, C. S. Lewis explains, “At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow ‘inside’ the body. But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive it – the sensuous life raised from its death – will be inside the soul.” As brilliant as C. S. Lewis was, he ought to have given simple explanations to a statement such as the above. Using the words of Lewis, what I perceive him to mean is that the images in which God created us are completely spiritual, just as the soul is completely spiritual. And the sensual lives we will be raised with dwell within the mysteries of our souls just as do the mysteries of marriage and of Christ and the church. This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. Ephesians 5:32
As Jesus came and gave His life that we might live as a people redeemed, the domain of marriage is one in which a man and a woman give up themselves for purposes which God has designed.
