What Does the Bible Say About Marriage?
I don’t know how many times I have preached Ephesians 5, or how many times I’ve been asked, “What does the Bible say about marriage?” I just know it was meant to be more than how many people treat it now.
Picture this: Room 214. A nursing home on a Tuesday morning. He’s eighty-nine. She’s eighty-seven. And she no longer knows his name.
But every morning at seven o’clock, he comes through the door with her favorite cinnamon roll wrapped in a paper napkin. He sits beside the bed. He holds her hand. And he hums the hymn they sang at their wedding in 1957.
A nurse stopped him in the hallway one morning. “Why do you keep coming? She doesn’t even know you anymore.”
He didn’t break stride. He just looked up and said, “But I still know her.”
That’s what Paul is talking about in Ephesians 5.
A Picture
Before marriage is a partnership, it is a picture. “This is a great mystery,” Paul writes, “but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32, NKJV). Every Christian marriage is meant to preach a sermon the watching world didn’t know it needed.
That changes how we fight. That changes how we forgive. That changes how we love when love isn’t being reciprocated. We’re not just two people sharing a mortgage. We’re a living illustration of the gospel.
A Partnership
Verse 21 sets the table for everything that follows: “submitting to one another in the fear of God.” Mutual submission is the soil. Everything in verses 22–33 grows out of it.
The Greek word translated “submit” is hypotassō. A military formation word about position, not worth. Tassō means to arrange in order. Hypo means under. It says nothing about value and everything about formation. A marriage isn’t a hierarchy. It’s a team taking the field together.
A Priority
Then Paul lands the plane: “Let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband” (v. 33). Two needs. One for each.
She needs love she didn’t have to earn. He needs respect; he doesn’t have to demand. Get those two right, really right, and most marriage problems shrink to a manageable size.
The Greek verb in verse 25 is agapaō. The sacrificial, decisional love Christ chose on the cross. That’s the love an eighty-nine-year-old man carries down a hallway with a cinnamon roll.
The vow wasn’t until-it-gets-hard. The vow was until death do us part. And Christ’s love is the only love long enough to outlast a lifetime. That is what the Bible says about marriage.
Keep Looking Up!
May God bless your day.
Related devotionals: Psalm 1 for men · Bulletproof Christian marriage · Value others above yourself
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