A Happy Marriage

Christian marriage is important because it is a declaration of true, ultimate love in a world that is hungry for true and ultimate love. It points sinners to salvation through Jesus’ substitutionary, loving sacrifice and leadership. It points to eternity, where marriage itself will no longer be needed because communion will be fulfilled. History’s metanarrative is a love story, and it has a heavenly ending.

We know this on a gut level. This is why happy endings in books and films are satisfying. This is why, in a broken world, we still look for true love and get married. But it seems that the longer you look around, the more complex marriage looks. The fairy tales of childhood all end “happily ever after”; it is easy to believe them until your castle in the air is blown away by adultery or violence or abandonment in a marriage that you have seen or experienced.

Since the garden of Eden, Satan has been attacking God’s plan for marriage. As the initiation of the world’s fundamental social structure as well as a picture of redemption, God’s best earthly gift is a target. The devil has used different tactics through history, but he has never let up in his assaults, from Eden on, often capitalizing on our own sin. Our world is full of unhappy and broken marriages. It is loaded with misrepresentations of Christ’s relationship to His church. And so it is easy to be jaded, resigning ourselves to the fact that “happily ever after” is only for a storybook princess.

But though the fall into sin damages every marriage—some irreparably—God’s good design for marriage is still here. He has given this beautiful, created ordinance, and

best are all things as the will

Of God ordained them; his creating hand

Nothing imperfect or deficient left

Of all that he created. 1

We still have God’s original good pattern, design, and promise to bless His people. Regardless of our personal experience, there is an intended experience of marriage. The ideal still exists because Christ is still committed to His church, His bride, His people. God has designed marriage for great blessing, and so we can expect that. When two Christians make a lifelong commitment to each other, they are effectively and demonstrably declaring that they trust God’s plan for marriage and trust that He will use it for His designed purpose. Marriage is bigger than our happiness, but God designed happiness to go with marriage. When, by grace, we live in a relationship that accords with God’s design for His glory, we can expect the joy that He designed to accompany it.

This expectation cannot be rooted in other people, though. If we look to other sinners to fulfill us and be the basis for happiness, we will be unfulfilled. Jane Austen commented that marriage is the relationship “in which people expect most from others and are least honest themselves.”2 Other people will disappoint us; we will disappoint other people. The closer we are to someone, the more often this is true. But God never disappoints, and because His design is “very good” and for the Christian’s good, because He is working all things together for our good and promises to bless Christian marriage, we can expect happiness from Him as we follow His plan.

Notice that this is biblical, not “traditional,” marriage. Traditions change from era to era, from culture to culture. People start new traditions and update old ones. There is nothing wrong with that, because traditions are often expressions of human creativity and—like stockings above a fireplace, red envelopes at Lunar New Year, or bonfires on November 5—they add legitimate fun to life. We can change traditions, add to them, or even leave them out of our lives with no real consequence.

Marriage is not a tradition. Marriage, as given by God in His Word, just is, whether we like it or not, whether it is part of our cultural background or not. Biblical marriage is part of the Lord’s creation, like Everest or the moon. A shift in tradition does nothing to change it. Noncompliance, though it will change our experience, has no effect on it. Emotions will not affect its existence. And because God created it to bless us, we can enjoy it instead of fight, deny, or reshape it.

But why is happiness in marriage even important? If we are being faithful to each other and doing our work, is happiness just icing on the cake? No. If marriage is supposed to be a picture of Christ and the church, then a relationship that is generally unhappy or bland is a misrepresentation. Having a happy marriage is not first about our avoiding misery, though that is one inevitable result. Just as God does not exist for our happiness, neither does His design of marriage.

But just as we find greatest happiness and greatest blessing in knowing God, so we find great happiness and blessing in following His design for our closest human relationship. All true happiness—all blessing—is a byproduct of something more magnificent: knowing God and being remade in the image of His Son. Obedience to Him as part of our reasonable worship will bring blessing, just as certainly as sin and rebellion will bring misery. Through Scripture, salvation is communicated in terms of joy: God has promised that His people will ultimately be eternally happy in Him even as He rejoices over them (e.g., 1 Sam. 2:1; Ps. 119:162; 126; 132:16; Isa. 35:10; 65:14,18–19; Rev. 19:7).

Happiness in marriage is also about accurately showing—to each other, to children, to church, and to community—the church’s joy in her union with Christ. The church’s destiny is happiness: “Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song” (Isa. 51:3). A faithful marriage that is happy is a clearer, truer picture than a marriage that is simply faithful. That does not diminish faithfulness: it elevates happiness. And rightly so: God Himself repeatedly uses the joy of a happy marriage to picture His own love for His people. Isaiah 62 is a well-known illustration: “For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isa. 62:5).

Contemporary Western culture says that our happiness is essential—absolutely primary. It treats faithfulness as optional or even opposed to happiness. Happiness is to be pursued at nearly any cost by any means. Sadly, confessionally faithful churches often behave the opposite way, as though faithfulness were primary, with marital joy as a bonus. One wedding liturgy still in use actually begins: “Whereas married persons are generally, by reason of sin, subject to many troubles and afflictions, to the end that you . . . may also be assured in your hearts of the certain assistance of God in your affliction.”3 The expectation is fidelity despite misery, not fidelity fed by joy.

Emphasizing either faithfulness or happiness to the detriment of the other is a distorted picture of the relationship between Christ and His church (Eph. 5). They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are intimately connected. Faithfulness is essential: so is happiness.

Both will take work. Happiness, as more abstract, might take deeper thought and conversation. It might take more emotional effort and understanding. But these are the warp and woof of a healthy gospel union, byproducts of loving and following our Creator. An unhappy marriage can be functional at one level. It can be faithful. A happy marriage, though, is the most accurate picture of healthy Christian faith in Jesus. It will also be a marriage in which faithfulness flourishes.

But this happiness is not without context. Feeling “happy” with no context or boundaries for the happiness can lead to distortion and spiritual death. Some marriages are happy that should not be. Look at Ahab and Jezebel: they helped each other reach goals and fulfill dreams. They supported each other and shared ambitions, working together toward perceived success (1 Kings 21:1–16). Things were probably pretty harmonious in the palace in Samaria. Partnering together for an evil goal can bring union and fleeting happiness. Ananias and Sapphira had no discord when they decided to lie about their donation to the church (Acts 5:1–11). Both of these couples had a unity that showed its distortion in the death and misery that it spawned. When happiness in marriage is an end in itself or is a means to sin, then it is not a worthy goal. Happiness should be part of Christian marriage not only for our blessing, but as the most accurate advertisement of the love and joy demonstrated in God’s work of salvation. It is a reflection of our happy submission to Jesus’ lordship. If happiness is not there within this context, then we have a problem.

Neither is happiness without definition. It is sometimes difficult to touch on what it is, though, or to identify happiness. Personality and culture will affect the expression of relational happiness. Circumstances will change our experience of it. Time will change its tempo. Robert Browning wrote about the happiness in his marriage as being like a spider’s web: something that can’t always be seen and that breaks when touched. “Help me to hold it!” he tells his wife, Elizabeth: “Silence and passion, joy and peace.”4

Silence and passion might be a personal experience, but joy and peace are biblical ideas that all happy Christian marriages share. Different marriages will experience it in different ways and to different degrees at times, but for a Christian marriage, blessing—including happiness—should be present to some extent. It develops and deepens over time, often in fits and starts. But when, by faith, we walk in God’s design for marriage with another believer to God’s glory, can we expect Him to withhold His promised blessing?

We can expect this when we understand that we do not define happy. We do not have the knowledge or the power to do so. God is the One who does, and we see His definition in Scripture as it links happiness with holiness—with God’s blessing. The word sometimes translated “happy” in the English Standard Version can also be translated as “blessed” ( Gen. 30: 13; Eccl. 10:17; Isa. 32:20, KJV). It is tied primarily with the blessing of relationship with God, but also with the covenant community. Yet this happiness is not a stoic, positive knowledge: there is deep emotion here. The blessing of relationship with God and another saved human should bring emotional life to us. In other translations, the word translated “happy” in the ESV is substituted with “cheer up” (Deut. 24:5, KJV) and even “making merry” (1 Kings 4:20, KJV).

The Old Testament speaks many times of happiness, and regularly associates covenantal union with joy. In one place, it commands it: “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth. . . . Be intoxicated always in her love.” (Prov. 5:18–19). Biblically, happiness is living under God’s covenant favor and not His displeasure. It is enjoying His blessing, having been redeemed from the curse of the fall and sin. It is living according to His Word.

Scripture assumes that there should be happiness in marriage. Adam and Eve, especially before the fall (Gen. 2:23), Isaac and Rebekah (Gen. 24:67; 26:8), Ruth and Boaz (Ruth 4), and many other couples through the Bible show their enjoyment of God’s great gift of marriage as they find happiness, comfort, and fun in each other’s love. Anonymous couples also play a role, particularly in Psalm 45 and the Song of Solomon. Individual anonymity allows the focus to be on the happiness of union—the joy of two becoming one in covenantal bonds.

God uses the familiar joy of marriage as a picture that we know and experience to help us understand His joy in His people. This is not limited to Ephesians chapter 5, which contains the most explicit connections between marriage and salvation. God also uses this analogy from the Old Testament right through to Revelation (e.g., Isa. 62:4–5; Jer. 2:2; Matt. 9:15; Rev. 21:2). The places where Scripture speaks of a lack of wedded joy and faithfulness are places of darkness and judgment (e.g., Ezek. 16; Hos. 4:14). God Himself connects marriage with happiness and blessing and uses that familiar blessing to help us understand the joy of salvation. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote that “the picture is of our Lord rejoicing in the relationship, happy in it, triumphant in it, glorying in it.”5 This salvation is the root of all lasting marital happiness. It is the source.

But real happiness does not exclude sadness, hardship, or suffering in a marriage. Our own sin and sheer fallenness are the biggest obstacle to relational joy. Sin in ourselves and our spouses conspires against happiness. So do the fallen world and the devil. Just as the church walks through this pilgrim journey often feeling the thorns and thistles, so most (if not all) marriages go through valleys and dark places. A relationship can still be happy without being all roses and sunshine. Blessedness can coexist with grief, past or present. “In happiness,” Augustine wrote, “I remember past sadness, and in sadness I remember past happiness.”6 Life is complex. Circumstances can change and influence, but they do not dictate. A couple can grow closer together while walking through situations that threaten and press in. A happy marriage is not the fruit of pleasant circumstances: a couple can have a miserable relationship in comfortable, easy surroundings, as Hollywood gives us daily proof. Happiness might not look like bliss or ease, and it can experience growth even in a hostile environment.

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Ligonier Ministries