Marriage

Marriage, in Scripture, is the covenant union of a man and a woman, and also the standing image Scripture uses for God's own covenant bond with his people.

The text gives the pattern in Genesis 2:24: a man leaves his father and mother, joins with his wife, and the two become one flesh. Ezekiel 16:8 applies that covenant vocabulary directly to God and Jerusalem — "I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you," says the Lord Yahweh, "and you became mine" — and the same spousal language runs through Isaiah 54:5 ("your Maker is your husband"), Isaiah 62:4 (the land "married," called Hephzibah and Beulah) and Isaiah 61:10, where salvation is pictured as a bridegroom decked with a garland and a bride with her jewels. Revelation 19:7 carries the image to its endpoint: "the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready."

On the conduct of marriage the text is direct. Hebrews 13:4 calls marriage honorable and the marriage bed undefiled, and adds that God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers. 1 Timothy 4:1,3 treats the forbidding of marriage, alongside mandatory food abstinence, as a mark of the false teaching the Spirit expressly predicted — so marriage is presented as something God created to be received, not as a concession. 2 Corinthians 6:14 warns against being "unequally yoked with unbelievers" in terms of righteousness and light; interpreters differ over whether the verse is aimed specifically at marriage or at a broader range of binding partnerships. Matthew 19:29 and Luke 14:26 place discipleship above every family tie, including wife and children; Luke's "disregard" renders a Semitic idiom that most interpreters read as a comparative — loyalty to Christ that makes all other loves secondary — rather than literal hatred.

The traditions diverge in how they classify the institution. Catholic and Orthodox teaching holds marriage between the baptized to be a sacrament, a means of grace with covenant permanence, grounded in the Genesis 2:24 "one flesh" text and read in light of the Christ-and-church imagery; most Protestant bodies call it a covenant or ordinance rather than a sacrament, while still treating it as holy and God-instituted. Traditions also differ over the grounds and possibility of divorce and remarriage, over roles within the household, and over how directly 2 Corinthians 6:14 governs whom a Christian may marry. What the texts given do establish across those differences is a marriage rooted in creation, honorable in its sexual union, used as the standing figure for God's faithfulness to his people, and finally gathered up into the wedding of the Lamb.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.