Seriousness of marriage!

 This is a quote from a John Piper book that will make you think more deeply about the seriousness of marriage in regard  to Jesus and the church and your spouse!! Read carefully!

  “Jesus commands that husbands and wives be faithful to their marriages. He does not assume this is easy. But he teaches that it is a great thing because marriage is the work of God himself whereby he creates a new reality of “one flesh” that surpasses human comprehension and portrays to the world in human form the covenant union between God and his people. Marriage is sacred beyond what most people imagine, because it is a unique creation of God, a dramatic portrayal of God’s relation to his people, and a display of God’s glory. Against all the diminished attitudes about marriage in our day, Jesus’s message is that marriage is a great work of God and a sacred covenant breakable only by death. Marriage: The Mirror of God’s Covenant with His People Jesus knew his Jewish Scriptures and saw them as coming to fulfillment in himself and his work (Matt. 5:17–18). This includes his awareness of what God had said about his relationship with his people when he portrayed it as marriage. For example, God said, “Your Maker is your 322 Command #40 husband, the Lord of hosts is his name” (Isa. 54:5). And “In that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband.’ . . . And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord” (Hos. 2:16, 19–20). And “When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine” (Ezek. 16:8). And “Surely, as a treacherous wife leaves her husband, so have you been treacherous to me, O house of Israel, declares the Lord” (Jer. 3:20). With these Scriptures as the backdrop, it is inevitable that Jesus would see God’s creation of marriage in the beginning as a means of portraying his relationship with his people. So Jesus read in Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” When God said this—and Jesus explicitly says that God said this, not just Moses, the writer of Genesis (Matt. 19:4–5)—he had in view (as he has all things in view) that he would call his people his wife and himself her husband. Therefore, the union between a man and a woman is uniquely God’s creation with a view to portraying the relationship between himself and his people. “

Tom