By half past eleven that night, the canopy men had arrived to take everything away. Dayo watched them from a stack of white plastic chairs at the edge of the hall in Surulere, still wearing the cream agbada his uncle had insisted on, the cap pushed back on his head. Eight hours earlier the place had been thunder. The live band, the MC who called his aunties by their praise names, the dancing that went on so long the caterers ran out of small chops twice. His friends had sprayed him until the floor around his feet was green and pink with naira notes. Adanna’s mother had wept when the pastor pronounced them husband and wife. His father, a man who almost never spoke in public, had stood up during the reception and said three sentences that made the whole hall go quiet.
Now the band had loaded their speakers into a bus. The cleaners were sweeping balloons into black bags. The MC had gone home. Adanna was asleep in the back of his cousin’s car outside, her gele finally off and lying in her lap, too tired to climb the stairs to the hotel room just yet.
Dayo noticed a wedding programme on the floor by his foot. Somebody had stepped on it. He picked it up and wiped it on his sleeve, and the page fell open at the vows. He had said them six hours earlier with three hundred people watching and a camera in his face, and he could not remember a single word coming out of his mouth. Now he read them slowly, alone, under the tired fluorescent lights. To have and to hold, from this day forward. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health.
A canopy man folding a table nearby saw him reading and laughed kindly. “Oga, the party has finished,” he said.
Dayo folded the programme and put it in the deep pocket of his agbada. “Yes,” he said. “The party has finished. I think the marriage has just started.”
He told me that story years later, and he said it was the first moment he understood what he had done that day. The ceremony had been a door. He had walked through it. On the other side was a covenant, and a covenant does not end when the canopy is taken down.
The day after the party
Many of us prepare far more carefully for the wedding than for the marriage. We plan the introduction, the traditional engagement and the white wedding. We argue over the aso-ebi colours, the guest list, the venue and the menu. Very little of this is wrong. Celebration is a good and biblical thing, and Jesus Himself chose a wedding feast in Cana as the setting for His first sign. The trouble comes when the size of the celebration hides the weight of what is being celebrated.
What did you actually enter into? Scripture answers with one word. Marriage is a covenant.
Our culture is more familiar with contracts. A contract is an agreement for mutual benefit: if you supply the goods, I pay the money, and if the goods do not arrive, the agreement is void. Contracts are useful, but they are built around performance, and they last as long as each side keeps getting what it signed up for.
A covenant in the Bible is a far more solemn thing. The Hebrew word is berith, and the usual expression for making one is literally “to cut a covenant.” Covenants were often sealed with sacrifice. Animals were divided, and the parties walked between the pieces, as if to say, May what happened to these animals happen to me if I break my word. The prophet Jeremiah refers to exactly this practice when he speaks of men “which have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made before me, when they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof” (Jeremiah 34:18).
The most astonishing covenant ceremony in Scripture is the one God made with Abram. Abram prepared the animals and laid the pieces out. Then a deep sleep fell on him, and God acted:
And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.
Only one presence passed between the pieces that night. The smoking furnace and the burning lamp were signs of God Himself. Abram was asleep. The Lord bound Himself by oath to the promise, and He did it alone. That is the God whose covenant faithfulness stands behind every human covenant in the Bible. He does not keep His word only while we are keeping ours. He binds Himself to us, and then He keeps faith.
So when two believers marry, they are stepping into a category God Himself has filled with meaning. A covenant is a binding of persons, before God, with a promise of lasting faithfulness. It does not ask, “What will I get?” so much as, “Who will I be to you, from this day forward?”
PunchlineA contract asks what I will receive while the other person performs. A covenant asks who I will be to you, before God, from this day forward.
What God said in the garden
To understand marriage, we have to go back to the beginning, because that is where Jesus Himself sends us. In Genesis 2, God has formed the man and placed him in the garden. Everything around him is described as good. Then, for the first time in the creation account, God says something is not good:
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam 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. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
“It is not good that the man should be alone.” Notice that the man was not lonely because of sin. There was no sin yet. He walked with God in an unfallen world. And still God said his aloneness was not good. We were made for communion, with God first and also with one another, and marriage is the first and closest form of human communion that God established.
“I will make him an help meet for him.” The old English phrase help meet means a helper suitable for him, and the Hebrew is ezer kenegdo, a helper corresponding to him or standing opposite him as his counterpart. Some readers have heard the word helper as though it meant an assistant, someone of lesser rank who exists to serve another’s plans. The Old Testament will not allow that reading. The same word ezer is used most often of God Himself. “Our help and our shield” (Psalm 33:20), the psalmist says of the Lord, and elsewhere, “my help cometh from the LORD” (Psalm 121:2). To be an ezer is to bring strength to someone who needs it. The woman is not a lesser being. She is the one who corresponds to the man, the one in whom he finally recognises himself.
Before God made her, He brought the animals to Adam to be named, as though teaching him what he lacked. None of them corresponded to him. Then God made the woman from his side and brought her unto the man. God gave the bride away. The first wedding had God as its officiating minister.
And Adam burst into the first poetry in the Bible: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” That is a cry of recognition and delight. At last. This one is like me. This one belongs with me.
Then comes the verse that becomes the foundation text for marriage throughout Scripture: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Three movements: leaving, cleaving and becoming one.
Leave does not mean abandon. Scripture commands us to honour our parents all our lives, and in our culture caring for ageing parents is a deep and good obligation. But marriage creates a new household, with a new primary loyalty. A husband who still takes his decisions by consulting his mother before he consults his wife has not yet left. A wife whose family are allowed to settle disputes in her home over her husband’s head has not yet left. A mother-in-law who arrives for omugwo after a baby is born can be a great blessing; if three months later she is still running the kitchen and correcting the parents in front of the children, something has gone wrong. Leaving means the couple decide together, kindly and firmly, how the wider family will be honoured without being allowed to govern the new home.
Cleave is a strong word. It means to cling, to stick fast, to be joined. It is the word used of Ruth when she would not leave Naomi. It describes a loyalty that holds on.
One flesh speaks of the union of two whole lives. It includes the physical union of husband and wife, but it is much larger than that. Two histories, two families, two incomes, two sets of habits and wounds, now bound into one shared life before God. You became part of another person’s story, and they became part of yours.
Jesus took them back to the beginning
Centuries later, a group of Pharisees came to Jesus with a question designed to trap Him:
The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
The question was a live argument among the rabbis. Deuteronomy 24 allowed a man to divorce his wife if he found “some uncleanness in her,” and the followers of Shammai read that narrowly as serious sexual immorality, while the followers of Hillel read it so widely that a man could divorce his wife for burning his food. Hence “for every cause.” They wanted Jesus to take a side in a debate about the grounds for leaving.
Jesus refused to start where they started. They asked about divorce. He answered about marriage. “Have ye not read?” He took them back past Moses, past every rabbinic school, to the garden. God made them male and female. God said the two would be one flesh. “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
Look at who does the joining in that sentence. God hath joined. A marriage is more than a private arrangement between two individuals, which they may dissolve as easily as they entered it. God Himself is a party to the union, and He takes it seriously. When the Pharisees pressed Him about Moses, Jesus said that Moses allowed divorce “because of the hardness of your hearts,” and then He added, “from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). The permission was a concession to human sin. It was never the design.
Jesus goes on in verse 9 to teach about divorce and remarriage, and sincere, Bible-believing Christians have understood Him in three main ways. Some hold that marriage is permanent while both spouses live, so that even where separation becomes necessary, remarriage is not permitted. Others hold that Scripture permits divorce, with freedom to remarry, on the specific grounds of sexual unfaithfulness (Matthew 19:9) and desertion by an unbelieving spouse (1 Corinthians 7:15). Others again understand those grounds as examples of the covenant being broken by one party, and include serious, persistent violations such as abuse and abandonment. Each view is held by careful students of Scripture who honour marriage, and I will not pretend the question is simple. If you are facing it personally, sit down with a mature pastor who knows the Scriptures and your situation.
NuggetWhat all three views share is the point Jesus was making. Marriage is not to be treated lightly. God joins. Human beings are not to tear apart what He has joined.
The wife of thy covenant
Some of the strongest words about marriage in the Old Testament come from the prophet Malachi. The people of Judah had been complaining that God no longer seemed to receive their worship. They wept at the altar and wondered why. Malachi tells them:
Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant. And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth. For the LORD , the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away: for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the LORD of hosts: therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously.
“The LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth.” God was present at your wedding. He was not a decoration in the programme. He was the witness to the vows. When those vows are broken through treachery, He has seen it, and it affects the man’s whole relationship with God. Worship and the way we treat our spouse are not kept in separate rooms.
“Yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.” The men of Judah were trading in the wives who had shared their youth and their struggles. Malachi will not allow it. She is your companion. She is the wife of your covenant. The promise did not expire when she grew older or when the excitement faded.
Notice too what verse 16 places beside the breaking of covenant: “for one covereth violence with his garment.” Treachery in marriage includes cruelty. God sees the man who wears respectable clothing in public while covering violence at home. He is not deceived by the garment.
Covenant faithfulness is usually won or lost in small things long before it is tested in large ones. The office colleague with whom a little too much is shared. The private messages that would not be shown to your spouse. The habit of describing your wife’s faults to your friends, or your husband’s weaknesses to your sisters. The slow withdrawal of attention, where a husband gives his best energy to his career and his church work and brings home only what is left. None of these may look like adultery. Each of them is a small act of dealing treacherously with the wife or husband of your covenant. “Take heed to your spirit,” Malachi says twice. Guard the inner life, because that is where unfaithfulness begins.
Submitting yourselves one to another
The fullest New Testament teaching on marriage comes in Ephesians 5. Here Paul takes the Genesis text and shows us what it was always pointing towards:
Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.
Before we look at the instructions to wives and husbands, look at the verse that introduces them. “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.” In the Greek text, verse 22 does not even have its own verb. It borrows the verb from verse 21. Paul has been describing what it looks like to be filled with the Spirit: speaking to one another in psalms and hymns, giving thanks always, and submitting to one another in the reverence of Christ. Then he applies that mutual submission to the household. Everything that follows about wives and husbands sits under that heading. Neither spouse is excused from yielding to the other. Both live under Christ.
Within that mutual submission, Paul addresses wives and husbands differently. Wives are asked to submit to their own husbands “as unto the Lord,” and husbands are told that they are the head of the wife “even as Christ is the head of the church.” Christians have understood this in two main ways, and both deserve a fair hearing.
Those who hold a complementarian reading understand Paul to be describing a real and lasting difference of role within equal worth. The husband carries a God-given responsibility to lead, protect and provide, and the wife freely respects and supports that leadership. Because Paul grounds this in Christ and the church, they see it as more than a cultural arrangement.
Those who hold an egalitarian reading understand verse 21 as the governing principle and see Paul’s instructions as a transformation of the household codes of his day. In a world where husbands held almost unlimited power, Paul told them to love sacrificially and give themselves up. On this reading, head emphasises source and self-giving care more than authority, and husbands and wives share leadership as their gifts and circumstances require.
Both views are held by sincere believers who take Scripture as their authority. And both agree on more than they sometimes realise. Whatever headship means, it is defined by Christ, and Christ’s headship looked like a cross. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” The Lord Jesus did not use His authority to be served. He used it to wash feet and to die. The position I hold and teach is servant headship within mutual submission. The husband’s leadership, where it is exercised, is a leadership of sacrifice, initiative in love, and responsibility before God for the wellbeing of his wife. It is never a licence to demand, to control or to silence.
Then Paul goes back to Genesis 2:24 and quotes it. “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” That is the deepest thing the Bible says about marriage. From the very beginning, God designed the union of husband and wife as a living picture of the covenant between Christ and His people. When a husband gives himself for his wife, and a wife and husband honour one another in the reverence of Christ, the world catches sight of the gospel. A Christian marriage is a sermon that is preached every day in a kitchen and a sitting room, through ordinary kindness and lasting faithfulness.
A covenant is not a title deed
Here we must be very clear, because the weight of covenant has sometimes been used as a weapon.
Marriage binds two people to one another in faithfulness. It does not make one spouse the property of the other. Your wife is not your possession. Your husband is not your possession. Each of you belongs first to the Lord who bought you, and you give yourselves to one another freely within that greater belonging.
Paul makes the point with remarkable balance when he writes to the Corinthians about the marriage bed: “The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife” (1 Corinthians 7:4). The claim runs both ways, and in his culture that was revolutionary. Then he immediately adds that any time of abstaining must be “with consent” (1 Corinthians 7:5). The language of the passage is consent and mutual care. It gives neither partner permission to force the other.
Some husbands quote Ephesians 5:22 to demand obedience, while ignoring every verse addressed to them. Paul never tells a husband to make his wife submit. He tells the husband to love. The instruction to wives is addressed to wives, as something offered freely to the Lord. A man who reaches for that verse to justify shouting, threats, control of every naira, monitoring of her phone, isolating her from her family or striking her is not exercising headship. He is dealing treacherously with the wife of his covenant, and Malachi has already told us that God sees the violence under the garment.
PunchlineThe same applies when the pattern runs the other way. A wife who uses humiliation, threats or manipulation to control her husband is not honouring covenant either.
Let me say it plainly. Abuse, coercion and control are never covenant obligations. No one is required by God to endure violence, sexual coercion, threats or systematic intimidation in the name of submission or of keeping the marriage together. If you are in danger, seek safety now. Go to a safe place. Tell someone you trust. Contact the police, a trusted pastor, a doctor or a qualified counsellor, and in Nigeria the domestic violence response services available in your state. Protecting yourself and your children does not make you unfaithful to God. Whichever view of divorce a Christian holds, no faithful reading of Scripture requires a spouse to remain in harm’s way. The God who hates the breaking of covenant also hates the violence that breaks it.
Keeping covenant on ordinary days
Most marriages are not tested by one dramatic crisis. They are tested on ordinary Tuesdays, when the alarm goes at five to beat the traffic on the Lekki-Epe expressway, the generator needs diesel, and both of you come home tired to dinner, homework and a phone call from your mother-in-law that needs a careful answer. Covenant faithfulness is lived out in a thousand small decisions in seasons like these.
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes saw the strength of two lives bound together:
Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone ? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
“If they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.” That is covenant in daily life. When one spouse falls ill, loses a job or goes through a season of discouragement, the other lifts. Faithfulness means you do not walk away when your partner is the one who needs carrying.
“A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Christian couples have long applied that line to a marriage with God at its centre, and it is a fair application. Two people bound only to each other will strain under pressure. Two people who keep returning to Christ together have a third strand holding them.
In practice, keeping covenant looks like apologising first, praying together briefly even when you do not feel like it, and letting your spouse’s burdens matter as much as your own.
And it looks like returning again and again to the God who passed between the pieces alone. On the days when your own faithfulness feels thin, His does not. You did not enter this covenant in your own strength, and you are not required to keep it in your own strength. The grace that saved you is the grace that will teach you to love.
Dayo found the programme again six years later.
He had taken the old cream agbada out of the wardrobe for a cousin’s wedding in Ibadan and felt something stiff in the deep pocket. It was the programme, flattened, slightly stained, folded twice. He sat down on the edge of the bed and opened it.
It had been a hard year. Adanna’s father had suffered a stroke in Enugu, and she had spent most of the past four months travelling back and forth to care for him, while Dayo managed two children, a demanding job and a commute that took two hours each way on a good day. His own relatives had begun to make comments. A wife’s place is in her husband’s house. He had not defended her as quickly as he should have. They had both been tired, and polite, and far apart.
That night, when she came in from the bus park with her travelling bag, he did not ask about the journey first. He handed her the programme. She looked at it for a long time, and then she laughed, and then she cried. He read the vows to her aloud, standing in the bedroom, the way he had not been able to read them on the day itself because he had been too nervous to hear his own voice. For better, for worse. In sickness and in health.
“I said this,” he told her. “I am still saying it. Your father’s sickness is our sickness. I am sorry I have let people speak as if you were the problem.”
They did not fix everything that night. But they prayed together for the first time in weeks, and the following Saturday he drove the family to Enugu so that the children could see their grandfather, and so that Adanna would not have to make the journey alone.
The canopy man had been right. The party had finished long ago. The covenant was still being kept.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Before reading this, did you think of your marriage more as a contract or as a covenant? What difference does the word covenant make to the way you see your spouse?
- In what ways have you and your spouse “left” your families of origin, and where might that leaving still be incomplete?
- Which small acts of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, the kind Malachi warns about, are you most tempted to excuse?
- How does Christ’s way of exercising headship challenge the way you lead, follow or submit in your home?
- Is there anyone in your circle who may be suffering abuse in their marriage, and how could you help them reach safety and qualified support?
This Week
Find your wedding vows this week, whether in a programme, a video or your memory. Sit down with your spouse at a quiet moment, read them aloud to each other, and talk about one way each of you wants to keep those promises more faithfully in this season. If you are not yet married, read Genesis 2:18-24 and Ephesians 5:21-33 and write down what you want your future covenant to look like, before the planning of a wedding takes all your attention.
A Prayer
Lord God, You are the covenant-keeping God who bound Yourself to Your promise and kept faith with Your people. Thank You for the covenant You made with me in the blood of Jesus. Teach me to honour the covenant of my marriage with the same faithfulness. Forgive me where I have treated my spouse as a contract to be enforced instead of a companion to be loved. Guard my spirit, so that I do not deal treacherously in small things. Help us to submit to one another in reverence for Christ, and let our home show something of the love of Christ for His church. Protect every husband and wife who is suffering harm, and lead them to safety and help. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.