Weddings

We’ve been to a lot of weddings lately.  Last month my niece married her longtime sweetheart.  Last week it was a couple whose families are both precious to us.  Last night it was the wedding of a couple of 40-year-olds who had been through some rough times in their lives because of serving themselves instead of the God who created them.  But they had both turned their lives entirely over to God and through the power of the blood of Jesus had been transformed by the renewing of their minds (Romans 12:2).  They attend the church our son-in-law helped start in the Cincinnati area, and my wife and I had the privilege of doing some pre-marriage counseling with them. 

God created marriage for a lot of reasons, so the best way to cover them all in one phrase is to say that He created it for His glory.  While He gave some very specific guidelines for married life (see Ephesians 5:22-33 and Exodus 20:14), He did not give a lot of details about weddings.  In fact, the first marriage did not begin with a “ceremony,” but God simply brought Eve to Adam, and later “Adam knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 2:22, 4:1).  Later, Jesus uses the imagery of Jewish wedding customs to describe part of His role in our redemption (“I go to prepare a place for you,” John 14:2) and the coming of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 25:1-13).  So while wedding feasts are commonly noted in the Scriptures, the wedding ceremony is nowhere delineated, which provides a lot of freedom for couples to express their covenant publicly or privately.

Now this couple loves Jesus with everything in them and wanted their unbelieving friends and families to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  So they sought God’s leading for their wedding ceremony more than I think I have ever witnessed a couple do.  And it was beautifully different.

Because this couple wants their life together to be an act of worship, they found a worship band to open the ceremony just like a lot of American charismatic church services, using worship songs that were popular enough that most of the Christians there could sing along with at least one of the songs.  Then after a prayer, the bridegroom and bride each shared their testimony about how much their life had been changed by their relationship with Jesus Christ.  His story was direct and to the point.  He talked about “a screaming hole inside” that he had tried to fill with “sex, drugs and rock & roll,” then about how Jesus had filled it so he was “not the man I was.”

The bride’s testimony, while not as direct, was one of the most touching, humble and self-aware stories of conversion I had heard.  Because she had a lot of family and friends from work present who knew of her struggles, she was very open about her failures and her reliance on the saving grace of God through Jesus Christ.  You could see them acknowledging the truth as she shared some of her struggles and all the times she realized God must have chuckled at her attempts to bargain with Him, and how in His love He met her need for Him. 

After their testimonies, their pastor shared the gospel very clearly and concisely.  Then the bridegroom gave an “altar call,” giving an opportunity for anyone present to acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ.  He then led the congregation in a prayer, during which some people came into a new relationship with the Lord.  It was a beautiful demonstration of Revelation 22:17, “And the Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.” (NKJV)

Then they went through the procedures of declarations, vows and rings, during which there were various times that the pastor was speaking and the couple seemed oblivious to his words and everything else because they were standing across from each other, looking at each other, and whispering to each other.  Their love for and joy in each other was very evident.

For me, it was wonderfully instructive, because I am working on a chapter about marriage for the book.  So I have been considering the purposes and processes of marriage and searching for understanding of the various aspects of the marriage covenant.  This wedding reinforced something I felt God showing me yesterday morning, how the love of God is expressed in marriage, that He has given mankind the pleasure of the marriage bed because he wants us to understand how great His love is for us, and how strongly he desires us to have a relationship with Him, and why He was willing to pay the price of His Son’s death to regain the intimacy for which He created us. 

In a Christian marriage, the giving of sexual pleasure to each other is just a preview of the joy of our eternal intimacy with God. “But as it is written: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.’” (1 Corinthians 2:9).  So as wonderful as the holy pleasures of the marriage bed are, God has even greater intimacy and joy waiting for us in our relationship with Him, pleasures which are not carnal, but “spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).  Now I just have to learn how to express all of that in one chapter.