The Meaning of Marriage: A Couple's Devotional

by Timothy Keller

  45. See the June 11 devotional in Timothy and Kathy Keller, God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life: A Year of Devotions in the Book of Proverbs (New York: Viking Penguin, 2017), 162.

  46. English Standard Version translation.

  47. Judith Viorst quoted in “How to Stay Happily Married,” Penelope Green, The New York Times, May 4, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/style/judith-viorst-poems.html.

  48. Lewis, Perelandra, 17.

  49. John Newton, “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” (1779).

  50. C. T. Studd (1860–1931), “Only One Life,” public domain.

  51. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Macmillan, 1960), 190.

  52. We are “free to choose or change spouses . . . to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change [who are] our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.” Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 44.

  53. English Standard Version translation.

  54. Joyce G. Baldwin, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 28, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1972), 260–61.

  55. Baldwin, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, 260–61.

  56. W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce” in National Affairs, Spring 2009.

  57. Pieter A. Verhoef, The Books of Haggai and Malachi, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987), 281.

  58. R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), 721. See also the article by John Murray, “Divorce and Remarriage,” available at https://www.the-highway.com/divorce_Murray.html.

  59. See the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, “Of Marriage and Divorce,”which reads “nothing but adultery, or such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the Church, or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage” (Matt. 19:8–9; 1 Cor. 7:15; Matt. 19:6).

  60. See the “The Westminster Divines on Divorce for Physical Abuse.” This paper examines whether physical abuse of a spouse could be seen as a form of “willful desertion.” With a number of qualifications, it concludes that it can. See http://pcahistory.org/pca/studies/2-267.pdf.

  61. David Itzkoff, “‘Avengers: Endgame’: The Screenwriters Answer Every Question You Might Have,” The New York Times, April 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/movies/avengers-endgame-questions-and-answers.html.

  62. See also Psalms 42:5–6, 11; 43:5; 103:1, 22; 104:1, 35; 116:7; 146:1.

  63. Alexander Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” a chapter in For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1970), http://jean.square7.ch/wolfcms/public/SyndesmosTexts/Text_34_Schmemann-Secular%20Age.pdf.

  64. The Wallace address can be found at https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf.

  65. Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/Chalmers,%20Thomas%20-%20The%20Exlpulsive%20Power%20of%20a%20New%20Af.pdf.

  66. This is based on the first line of the hymn by Charlotte Elliott (1780–1871): “O Jesus make Thyself to me/ A living, bright reality/ More present to faith’s vision keen/ Than any earthly object seen/ More dear, more intimately nigh/ Than e’en the closest earthly tie.”

  67. I’m speaking here of Western marriages, not arranged marriages, which can work in the opposite direction, the service-love leading to pleasure-love. See the devotional for January 24.

  68. See Edwards, “Sermon Fifteen: Heaven Is a World of Love,” part V.

  69. For further reflections on this week’s Bible verses see Keller, God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life, 247, 251.

  70. This is the verse Psalm 86:11 in the English Standard Version, paraphrased into a plural form.

  71. Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 15–31, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 529, 532.

  72. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, 521.

  73. Christopher Wright, Deuteronomy (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), 256.

  74. See Edwards, “Sermon Fifteen: Heaven Is a World of Love,” part V.

  75. Respectively, “I Will Always Be with You” by Sheena Easton, “I’ll Be Loving You Eternally” by Petula Clark, “Longer Than” by Dan Fogelberg, and “I Will Love You Forever” by Demis Roussos.

  76. See the third installment of the instructional film The Trumpet by Rafael Mendez, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUij8FCg0z8.

  77. D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1965), 20–21.

  78. “We conclude that it constituted a physical sign in the public domain of respect, affection, and reconciliation within the Christian community, and that its distinctive use among fellow believers underlined and nurtured the mutuality, reciprocity, and oneness of status and identity which all Christians share across divisions of race, class, and gender.” Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 1346.

  79. English Standard Version translation.

  80. English Standard Version translation.

  81. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 117.

  82. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 328.

  83. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 333.

  84. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, Book II:1, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html.

  85. For more on meditation as a means of grace somewhat distinct from Bible reading and prayer, see “As Conversation: Meditating on His Word” in Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 145–64.

  86. These four are taken from Kidner, Proverbs, 45.

  87. English Standard Version translation.

  88. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 134.

  89. “Ten thousand (myria, hence our ‘myriad’) is the largest numeral for which a Greek term exists, and the talent is the largest known amount of money. When the two are combined the effect is like our ‘zillions.’ What God has forgiven his people is beyond human calculation.” R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), 706.

  90. There are boundaries. Romans 12:9, “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good,” reminds us that we are not loving wisely or truly when we enable someone to sin or sin against us. It is not loving someone to allow them to abuse or to make it easy for them to do so. See Part Three of Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, Bold Love (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1992), 229–310, which distinguishes between loving an “evil person,” a very “foolish person,” and a “normal sinner.”

  91. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 110–11.

  92. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 120.

  93. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2010).

  94. Mine is, writes Tim.

  95. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87.

  96. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87–88.

  97. “[Christians pulled off a] transformation in the deep logic of sexual morality. Even where the rules of conduct remained the same (such as the nearly unchanging expectations placed on respectable women) the moral sanctions [deep logic] changed. Christian sexual morality marked a paradigm
shift, a quantum leap to a new foundational logic of sexual ethics, in which the cosmos [God] replaced the city [polis—social order] as the framework for morality. . . . For the Greeks and Romans, public sexual ideology was an organic expression of a social system. . . . Even pagan philosophy tended, at its deepest level, to offer a duty-based sexual ethics that accepted the logic of social reproduction while devaluing pleasure as such. But . . . Christianity broke sexual morality free from its social moorings. The . . . new model of moral agency centered around an absolutely free individual whose actions bore an eternal and cosmic significance. . . . Into this . . . cityscape of tremulous paganism crept a missionary [St. Paul] with a startling message: ‘Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?’” Kyle Harper, “The First Sexual Revolution: How Christianity Transformed the Ancient World,” First Things, January 2018, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-first-sexual-revolution.

  98. See entry on “symphero” in Johan Lust et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, Revised Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 2008).

  99. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 119–20. See the endnote about this in Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, 277n172.

  100. See Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 462.

  101. See the Second Collect for Peace in “The Order for Morning Prayer Daily throughout the Year” in the Book of Common Prayer.

  102. “Paul will argue in the next few verses that being-in-Christ entails a bonding and binding (κολλάω) which is threatened with a wrenching apart if the body (τὸ σῶμα) is ‘bonded’ with that which contradicts the Christ bonding, or pulls in a different direction.” Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 464.

  103. D. S. Bailey, The Man-Woman Relation in Christian Thought (London: Longmans, 1959), 10.

  104. Harper, “The First Sexual Revolution.”

  105. “[I]n the context equally of union with Christ and of physical union the issue becomes one of fully ‘giving’ oneself to the one to whom one belongs.” Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 474.

  106. Harper, “The First Sexual Revolution.”

  107. “Porneia, fornication, went from being a cipher for sexual sin in general to a sign for all sex beyond the marriage bed, and . . . [for] same sex love, regardless of age, status, or role [which] was forbidden without qualification. . . . The code of sexual rules that came to prevail in the early Christian church was highly distinctive. It came to mark the great divide between Christians and the world. Its moral logic was more innovative still.” Harper, From Shame to Sin, 85.

  108. English Standard Version translation.

  109. “[Walter] Brueggemann argues that the phrase “my/your bone and flesh” is actually a covenant formula. . . . Thus when representatives of the northern tribes visit David at Hebron and say to him, ‘we are your bone and flesh’ (2 Sam. 5:1), this is not a statement of relationship (‘we have the same roots’) but a pledge of loyalty (‘we will support you in all kinds of circumstances’). Taken this way, the man’s this one, this time, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh becomes a covenantal statement of his commitment to her.” Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990), 179–80.

  110. See Ed Wheat and Gloria Okes Perkins, Love Life for Every Married Couple: How to Fall in Love, Stay in Love (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan), 256.

  111. Judson Swihart, How Do You Say “I Love You”? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1977).

  112. Don Carson, Love in Hard Places (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002), 83.

  113. “Most scholars believe that some in Corinth were saying that ‘it is good for a man not to have (any) sexual relations with a woman’ (7:1) and were consequently advocating celibacy in marriage, divorce from unbelieving partners, and remaining single if you were a ‘virgin’ or a widow. In other words, they were promoting celibacy as a rule or norm and considered sex to be a sin (cf. ‘sin’ in 7:28, 36).” Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010), 267.

  114. “. . . a low view of the body, which was rife in Greek and Roman thought, may have impacted the Corinthians . . . to their movement in an ascetic direction. Stoic and Cynic philosophy taught that the unmarried may have an advantage in the pursuit of wisdom. Similarly, Greek popular piety viewed virginity as a means to religious power, as, for example, with the priestesses of the Oracle at Delphi. Thus, some in Corinth may have taken the irrelevance of the body to things of the spirit (cf. ‘body and spirit’ in 7:34) to imply license and libertinism in sexual matters (see 6:12–20), while others took it as an encouragement to celibacy and denial of bodily pleasures (see 7:1–40).” Ciampi and Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, 267.

  115. See Harper, From Shame to Sin, 182–85. The Christian emperor Theodosius II in 428 A.D. passed a law that said men could not force daughters or slaves or other women with less social status into sex. It was a remarkable first step toward the idea that sex had to be consensual, and it was also a major bulwark against the exploitation of women.

  116. Courtney Sender, “He Asked Permission to Touch, but Not to Ghost,” The New York Times, September 7, 2018.

  117. See Matthew 15:19; Mark 7:21; Acts 15:20; Romans 1:29; 1 Corinthians, 6:9–10, 18; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 5:3–5; Colossians 3:5; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; 1 Timothy 1:10; and Hebrews 13:4.

  118. “One . . . clear difference between Christianity and Judaism [and all other traditional religions] is the former’s entertainment of the idea of singleness as the paradigm way of life for its followers.” Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 174.

  119. Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 191.

  120. From John Newton, “I asked the Lord that I might grow” in Olney Hymns, https://hymnary.org/text/i_asked_the_lord_that_i_might_grow.

  121. Genesis 3:16 says that one of the results of sin is that the husband will “rule over” his wife. In the context it is the consensus of interpreters, regardless of their view of roles in marriage, that this is speaking not about loving authority but tyranny.

  122. Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 249.

  123. “Applied to Genesis 3:16, the desire of the woman for her husband is akin to the desire of sin that lies poised ready to leap at Cain. It means a desire to break the relationship of equality and turn it into a relationship of servitude and domination. The sinful husband will try to be a tyrant over his wife.” Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, 202.

  124. This is referring to Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Silly Love Songs,” which appears in the 1976 album Wings at the Speed of Sound.

  125. Iain M. Duguid, The Song of Songs: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 40.

  126. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 82–83.

  127. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 93.

  128. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 87.

  129. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 92–93.

  130. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 96.

  131. Elisabeth Elliot, The Savage My Kinsman. 40th anniversary edition (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1996).

  132. The article is found several places on the internet. Here is one: static.pcpc.org/articles/singles/singledout.pdf.

  133. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 116.

  134. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 116.

  135. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 117.

  136. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 117.

  137. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 46.

  138. Dan Allendar and Tremper Longman, Intimate Allies: Rediscovering God’s Design for Marriage and Becoming Soul
Mates for Life (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), 254.

  139. Duguid, The Song of Songs, 156.

  140. Kathy Keller, “Don’t Take It from Me: Reasons You Should Not Marry an Unbeliever,” The Gospel Coalition, January 22, 2012, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/dont-take-it-from-me-reasons-you-should-not-marry-an-unbeliever/.

  141. The Greek word agape is used widely in the New Testament and it often denotes God’s gracious love for us, something like the Hebrew word chesedh that means God’s covenantal, steadfast love. However, the Greek word does not always mean ‘unconditional love’ in the New Testament as a technical term whenever it is used, as is commonly thought. For more on this, see the article by Mark Ward, “What Agape Really Means,” Logos Talk, November 4, 2015 found at https://blog.logos.com/2015/11/how-to-pronounce-logos-and-what-agape-really-means/.

  142. Harper, “The First Sexual Revolution.”

  143. For example, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 276–79.

  144. English Standard Version translation.

  145. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 450–51.

  About the Authors

  Timothy Keller was born and raised in Pennsylvania and educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. His first pastorate was in Hopewell, Virginia. In 1989 he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City with his wife, Kathy, and their three sons. Today, Redeemer has nearly six thousand regular Sunday attendees and has helped to start more than three hundred new churches around the world. He is the author of The Songs of Jesus, Prayer, Encounters with Jesus, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, and Every Good Endeavor, among others, including the perennial bestsellers The Reason for God and The Prodigal God.

  Kathy Keller grew up outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended Allegheny College, where she led Christian fellowship groups, before attending Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She met Timothy Keller while studying there, and they were married at the beginning of their final semester. She received her MA in Theological Studies at Gordon-Conwell in 1975. Kathy and Tim then moved to Virginia, where Tim started at his first church, West Hopewell Presbyterian Church, and their three sons were born. After nine years, Kathy and her family moved to New York City to start the Redeemer Presbyterian Church.