Confusion reigns today regarding the definition and purposes of marriage. This uncertainty has spawned devastating societal consequences. Governments, religious institutions, and special interest groups are painfully mired in a state of increasingly bitter debate regarding the form and function of marriage, even as the more aggressive factions seek to impose blatantly anti-biblical public policy.

However, despite how complex or nuanced progressive ideas of marriage are argued to be, all lack of agreement is rooted in one simple cause-and-effect reality. Marriage is of vital importance to the One True God’s gracious and good program for humanity. Therefore, destroying biblical marriage is a top priority for God’s preeminent enemy, Satan. Honest inquiry into any aspect of the ongoing marriage debates reveals a binary certainty—God’s truth is ever pitted against Satan’s damaging, purposeful lies. It is that simple, that black and white.

 As a pastor, I’m saddened by the insanity of the secular world as God’s beautiful design for everything—including marriage—is dismantled and trampled at every turn. However, I am especially concerned about the confusion I see within the believing church on topics so vitally important to God as the marriage covenant! Therefore, I’d like to offer the following for you to reconsider for a moment how God’s perfect design and purposes for marriage—the biblical view—differs from erroneous contemporary social science and psychotherapeutic views.

In his insightful book Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage: Critical Questions and Answers, Pastor Jim Newheiser offers a Scripture-based definition of marriage as “a lifelong covenant of companionship between a man and a woman that has been established under God and before the community. “ Newheiser rightly locates marriage as a “creation ordinance” established and clarified the sixth day when, “the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him” (Gen 2:18). God established marriage to meet man’s need for companionship. Marriage counters man’s loneliness, which according to God, is “not good.”

Therefore, “the LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man’” (2:22–23).

Upon bringing the man and woman together, God permanently established the fundamental components of marriage. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (2:24).

Everything else the Bible teaches about marriage flows from these foundational inspired passages. As the Creator, Sustainer, and Lord over all, God is sovereign over mankind—including every human relationship. Moreover, He has revealed to people through his inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative, and all-sufficient Word, as Newheiser says, “the nature of marriage, the obligations of marriage, who may be married, and when divorce and remarriage are permissible.”

Beyond defeating loneliness, other vital purposes emerge from God’s clear plan for marriage. Wayne Mack, in Sweethearts for a Lifetime, offers five: to have and raise children properly, to co-labor together, to exalt and serve Christ while building up His church, to experience and enjoy comprehensive oneness in the relationship that is akin to the beauty of the Trinity, and to demonstrate a holy example of human relational completion and complementarity. Considering what Christians should know about God as he has revealed Himself in Scripture, we must see that no created human being has the right to modify what God has established.

Yet, the contemporary world, inspired by Satan, aggressively seeks to redefine marriage based on the premise that marriage is a social contract established by humankind, and not an ordinance commanded by transcendent God. Hence, in an unpredictable culture, marriage is malleable and must progress to meet the needs of changing political and societal norms. As nothing more than a social invention, people are free to redefine the marriage covenant as they consider myriad anti-biblical philosophies and compulsions such as the perversions of the LGBTQ+ agenda and radical feminism.

In his book, Solving Marriage Problems, Jay Adams details many unbiblical concepts of marriage and the associated sinful living patterns that emanate from the rotting roots of the secular contemporary marriage estate. Doomed from conception, such ideas and sin patterns inevitably produce brokenness and pain that progressive psychotherapeutic methods and treatments then seek to address, with predictably poor results.

Every faithful Christian must see God’s design for marriage as being perfect and permanent. Its nature and purposes are non-negotiable, which of course, makes biblical marriage the primary target of the unholy trinity—the world, the flesh, and the devil. Do you see how marriage is under relentless satanic attack? Do you see that every secular idea about marriage outside of God’s Word is fatally flawed? Resist the siren song of modernity! Do things God’s way, and return to what He wants for each of us: salvation in Christ alone, a transformed state that comes by faith, and from which every blessing of a good and loving God can flow.