Devotional 127: The Institution of Marriage: A Covenant Between One Man and One Woman

The Confession Read

Marriage is to be between one man and one woman: neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband, at the same time.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, Section 1

Introduction

Before there was a church, before there was a state, before there was a sabbath to keep or a law written upon tables of stone, there was a marriage. The first words of blessing ever spoken over the human race were not uttered in a temple but in a garden, and the first institution God planted in the earth was not a government nor a priesthood but a household. When the Westminster Divines turned to the subject of marriage and divorce, they did not begin, as a modern handbook might, with the mechanics of dissolution, the grounds of separation, or the rights of the parties. They began with a single sentence of definition, a sentence so brief that a child could memorise it, and so deep that the church has been unpacking it for nearly four centuries: "Marriage is to be between one man and one woman." The brevity is deliberate. The Divines were architects, and before an architect raises walls he lays a foundation. Everything that follows in Chapter 24 rests upon this opening stone: the ends of marriage, the forbidden degrees of kinship, the biblical grounds for divorce, and the lawfulness of the innocent party's remarriage. If marriage is not, in its very essence, the union of one man and one woman, then none of the subsequent questions can even be framed aright. One cannot usefully discuss when a thing may be dissolved until one has first declared what the thing is. Our age, which professes to be weary of definitions and suspicious of boundaries, has in fact become obsessed with the very question the Divines settle in a single line. What is marriage? Is it whatever two people decide it is, or is it something given, something discovered, something with a shape that precedes us and will outlast us? The Confession's answer is unembarrassed and unqualified: marriage is not a human invention but a divine ordinance, and its form is fixed by the hand that made it. One man. One woman. One flesh. Not as a preference, not as a tradition, not as a matter of taste or culture — but as the very structure of the thing, written into creation before sin entered the world and confirmed upon the lips of Christ himself. There is something almost austere about the sentence, and that austerity is its strength. It offers no argument, because it is itself the conclusion of an argument God has been conducting since the sixth day. It appeals to no culture, for it is older than every culture. It is the kind of statement that a century which has lost its bearings will call narrow, and that a church which knows its Lord will call a mercy. For the God who made us one man and one woman did not confine us by this design; he spared us by it. When desires multiply and bonds dissolve, the opening sentence of this chapter stands as a fixed star, and the whole of what follows is navigation by its light.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of this section is not a deduction from scattered texts; it is the teaching of the Bible's first pages, reaffirmed by the prophets, by the Lord himself, and by the apostle to the Gentiles. Its foundation is the creation ordinance, and every subsequent witness reaches back to that beginning. The fountainhead is Genesis 2:24: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Every word is weighty. The man leaves — he is to forsake the closest earthly bonds of his previous life, the father and mother who gave him being — and he cleaves. The Hebrew verb is dabaq, a word of fierce adhesion, the same term used elsewhere of things soldered and joined so that they cannot be parted; it describes not a casual association but a covenant-fastening. And the end of this leaving and cleaving is declared in a phrase that has no parallel in the natural world: basar echad, "one flesh." Two distinct persons, two wills, two histories, two bodies, yet before God they are one. The arithmetic of this sentence is the arithmetic of exclusion, and it is worth pausing to notice what it rules out. Two become one; there is no room in this equation for a third. A union in which a man joins himself to many women, or a woman to many men, is not an enlargement of this mystery but its dissolution, for the "one flesh" that Scripture declares cannot be stretched to accommodate a company. Our Lord draws the full weight of this text out of it in Matthew 19:4-6. The Pharisees came to him with a question about divorce, seeking either to entangle him in controversy or to license their hardness of heart. Jesus did not begin with Moses; he began before Moses. "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." The word "twain" is the whole point. Not "the many," not "the household," but two — two, and only two, and one flesh as the result. Christ's method is instructive, for it teaches us where the debate over marriage is actually decided. He does not argue from the customs of his culture, nor even from the Mosaic legislation that his opponents quoted against him, but from the original institution: "from the beginning." Whatever God made marriage to be in Eden, it remains; no later human practice, however ancient, however widespread, however enshrined in law, can alter what the Maker ordained. The concessions that followed, and the Lord will speak of them in later verses, were accommodations to hard hearts, not revisions of the design. Monogamy is not a New Testament refinement of an older, looser arrangement; it is the original, and everything else is a falling away from it. The prophet Malachi supplies a witness that is all the more striking for coming in the midst of a rebuke. Israel had grown cold and treacherous toward the wives of their youth, and the Lord, through the prophet, calls them to account in Malachi 2:14-15: "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." Here is one of the most searching questions in all the Old Testament: "And wherefore one?" Why did God, who had the fulness of the Spirit and could have made from Adam a company of wives, make but one? The prophet's answer reaches to the purpose of the whole arrangement: "that he might seek a godly seed." The one-flesh union is ordered toward the raising of children who know the Lord. It is the singular bond, the exclusive covenant, that provides the settled, stable, God-fearing home in which a holy offspring is nurtured. Polygamy, which Malachi's contemporaries could point to in their own patriarchs, is shown to be a departure from God's design precisely because it undermines the thing the design exists to secure. The prophet's logic is the logic of the Confession: the exclusivity of marriage is not an arbitrary restriction but a provision for godliness. The apostle Paul crowns the testimony in Ephesians 5:31-32, where he takes up the very language of Eden and reads it as a prophecy: "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." Here the doctrine is lifted to its full height. Marriage is not merely a useful arrangement for the ordering of society or the raising of children; it is an icon. It is the God-appointed picture of the union between Christ and his church. And notice the singularity that the picture requires. Christ has one bride, not many. He loves the church as one, cleanses her as one, presents her to himself as one, "a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle." A polygamous marriage would be a false image, a blurred portrait, for it would picture a Christ who is joined to many churches and a church that shares her husband with rivals. The exclusivity of marriage is not a burden laid upon the body alone; it is a sermon preached by every faithful home about the jealous, undivided love of the Saviour for the people he redeemed with his own blood. There is, Paul assures us, more going on in an ordinary marriage than meets the eye. "This is a great mystery," and the mystery is precisely that a man and a woman, and only these two, can mirror the covenant of grace. To this fourfold witness one might add the plain language of 1 Corinthians 7:2, where the apostle, addressing the practical question of purity, writes that "to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband." The possessive singular, his own wife, her own husband, quietly but firmly excludes the very idea of plurality, and it does so in the most ordinary, untheoretical of contexts. Monogamy is not a counsel for the spiritually elite; it is the shape of marriage itself, assumed even in the apostle's most practical instructions to a church immersed in a culture where every manner of sexual licence was practised and defended.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines did not write this sentence in a vacuum, and it was not, as a superficial reader might suppose, a statement of the obvious with which no one disagreed. The seventeenth century had seen the doctrine of monogamy attacked from several quarters, and the Divines had every reason to state the matter plainly and to state it first. The most notorious assault had come a little over a century earlier, when the Anabaptist kingdom established at Münster in 1534 introduced polygamy by public decree, invoking the patriarchs of the Old Testament as warrant. The episode ended in blood and disgrace, but it left a lasting wound in the church's memory, and it taught the Reformers that the doctrine of marriage could not be taken for granted. Luther himself had been drawn into the controversy, however reluctantly, through his counsel in the affair of Philip of Hesse, a landgrave who sought to contract a second marriage while his first wife still lived. The resulting scandal, Luther's qualified toleration of the bigamy in a secret counsel that later came to light, demonstrated just how much pastoral confusion could be sown when the original institution was not held firmly in view. And beyond these particular cases, the Socinians and other rationalist currents of the age were openly arguing that the prohibition of polygamy was a matter of mere positive law, a relic of Hebrew custom rather than a dictate of nature and grace. It is against this background that the opening section of Chapter 24 must be read. The Divines are not merely recording a truism; they are drawing a line, and drawing it where Scripture draws it, against every attempt to reduce marriage to a human convention that men may reshape at will. Their language is deliberately careful. "Marriage is to be between one man and one woman": the phrase fixes both the number and the sexes of the parties, so that neither the plurality of wives nor the plurality of husbands finds any foothold. "Neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband": the negative restatement is no mere repetition but a guard against evasion, closing off the suggestion that the general principle admitted of exceptions. And the final qualifier, "at the same time," is a stroke of precision whose importance is easily missed. It distinguishes polygamy from legitimate remarriage: the Divines are not forbidding a man to marry again after the death of his wife, nor a woman after the death of her husband, a liberty the Confession nowhere questions, but only the simultaneous possession of more than one spouse. Bigamy and polygamy are condemned; the lawful remarriage of the widowed is not. Observe, too, the word "lawful." The Divines could have said "unseemly," or "imprudent," or "contrary to custom." They said "lawful": not lawful, that is, because the magistrate so decrees or because the church so counsels, but lawful as measured against the unchanging moral law of God. Marriage is not a human institution that the state may define and redefine at pleasure; it is a divine ordinance, and its form is settled by the Creator's original word, not by any legislature. This is why the sentence stands at the head of the chapter. The Divines understood that the entire doctrine of marriage and divorce hangs upon the answer to this first question: what, before God, is marriage? If it is the lifelong, exclusive union of one man and one woman, then the subsequent teaching about its ends, its permanence, and its dissolution follows of necessity. If it is something less, a contract, a convenience, a vehicle for self-fulfilment, then everything else collapses into sentiment. The Divines began where God began: in the garden, with two. The placement of the section also teaches something about the order of right reasoning. Modern discussions of marriage tend to rush to the hard cases first: to divorce, to remarriage, to the failures and brokenness of the thing. The Divines will come to those, and will treat them with pastoral care and biblical candour. But they will not begin there, because a doctrine of divorce built before a doctrine of marriage is a house built upon the sand. Before we ask how a marriage may be ended, we must be sure what a marriage is; before we minister to the broken, we must know what was broken. The Confession's order is itself a pastoral act, insisting that the church look first upon the beauty of the institution as God gave it, and only then upon the tragedy of its fracture.

Theological Depth

The doctrine that marriage is the exclusive union of one man and one woman has engaged the deepest reflection of the Reformed tradition, not because it is difficult to state but because it is difficult to defend against the counter-argument that history seems to supply. The patriarchs had many wives; David and Solomon had many; how, it is asked, can monogamy be a matter of the moral law? It is a fair question, and the great theologians of the tradition did not evade it. Calvin meets it squarely by insisting that the standard of marriage is the original institution, not the subsequent practice. In his commentary on Genesis, and again in his treatment of the subject in the Institutes, Calvin argues that Christ's appeal "from the beginning" is decisive precisely because the first marriage was the pattern and the rule. God did not create one man and many women but one of each, and from the two he made one flesh; the form of that first union is the law of every union. Calvin is unsparing in his treatment of the patriarchs' plurality of wives, which he refuses to excuse: it was a corruption introduced by fallen men, a violation of the primal order that God patiently endured but never sanctioned. His reasoning is characteristically direct — a body with one head cannot rightly have two, and the husband who takes a second wife tears in two what God joined as one. To Calvin, monogamy is not a restraint upon human freedom but the shape of the freedom God intended: the man is to leave all others and cleave to the one, because in the one he has received back, as it were, a part of his own flesh. There is a tenderness in Calvin's treatment of marriage that the caricature of the Genevan Reformer entirely misses; for him the exclusivity of marriage is the condition of its intimacy, and the two cannot be separated. The objection from the patriarchs receives its most thorough and rigorous answer in Turretin, who takes up the question whether polygamy was ever lawful under any dispensation and answers with a firm negative. Turretin grants the historical fact that Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon did multiply wives, but he denies the inference drawn from it. The sins of the saints, he insists, are not the law of God. Scripture records the polygamy of the patriarchs as it records their other failings: as history, not as example; as evidence of human frailty, not of divine permission. Where the Old Testament seems to tolerate the practice, it tolerates it as it tolerated divorce, as an accommodation to hardness of heart, never as an approval of the thing itself. Turretin's deeper argument, however, is the one that matters most: polygamy is contrary to the very nature of marriage as God instituted it, for the "one flesh" of Genesis and the "one" of Malachi define the essence of the union, and what is against the essence of a thing cannot be made lawful by any amount of precedent. To argue from David's many wives that polygamy is lawful is to argue from David's adultery with Bathsheba that adultery is lawful. The same Scripture that records the practice also records the sorrow it bred: the jealousy of Rachel and Leah, the strife in Abraham's tent, the idolatry into which Solomon's many foreign wives led him; and Turretin reads that sorrow as God's commentary on the departure from his design. Watson, whose Body of Divinity turns the doctrine toward the heart, treats marriage not merely as a matter of law but as a covenant of the closest earthly fellowship. He speaks of the sweetness of the union and of the order God has placed within it, and he insists that the exclusivity of marriage is the guardian of its tenderness. A divided affection, Watson observes, is no affection at all; the husband who loves many wives loves none of them as God designed a wife to be loved, for love, to be what God intends, must be entire. There is a pastoral wisdom here that modern ears would do well to hear, accustomed as we are to the language of "open" arrangements and divided loyalties. Watson would have us see that the boundaries of marriage are not a cage but a hearth, that the "one" of the Confession is not a restriction on love but its condition, the enclosure within which alone the fire can burn brightly and without which it scatters and dies. He also presses, as Malachi did, the end of the union: the one-flesh bond is the God-appointed nursery of godliness, and the man who multiplies wives does violence to his children as surely as to his spouse. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession of Faith, draws the several strands together with an economy that has made his work a standard among English-speaking Presbyterians. Shaw observes that polygamy was "a breach of the original institution", that God, having the residue of the Spirit, made but one woman for one man, and thereby declared the law of marriage to be an exclusive union, and that the practice of the patriarchs proves nothing against it, for their conduct in this respect was "expressly against the divine institution." He notes as well that the New Testament nowhere relaxes but everywhere confirms the primitive rule, so that monogamy stands as a duty "of perpetual and universal obligation." Shaw's treatment is valuable because it refuses to let the doctrine drift into the realm of mere debate; for him, as for the Divines, the matter is settled by the word of God, and the church's task is not to reopen what God has closed but to bear faithful witness to it. To these voices we may add a final word from A. A. Hodge, who in his commentary on the Confession grounds the definition in the very constitution of our nature. Hodge argues that marriage is not an artificial arrangement superimposed upon human beings but the natural and original relation for which God made them, male and female, one and one, and that the monogamous union alone corresponds to the Creator's design. Where Scripture is silent he will not legislate, and where it speaks he will not whisper; but on this point Scripture has spoken from the beginning, and Hodge is content to stand where Calvin and the prophets stood. The testimony of these witnesses is unanimous and unbroken, and it is the strength of the Reformed tradition that on a question the world will always contest, it has never needed to improvise.

Puritan Application

First, let the singularity of your marriage be guarded with jealous care, for it is the very structure of the thing and it is assailed on every side. The practical disciplines of exclusivity are not mere sentiment; they are the daily keeping of the covenant. A man may never take a second wife and yet be a polygamist in his heart, dividing the affection that belongs to one alone among screens and strangers, among colleagues and memories and wandering desires. The commandment is negative, but it does not end there; it is positive: give to your spouse the whole of that regard which the one-flesh union claims. Guard your eyes, your thoughts, your devices, your friendships; be ruthless with the affections that would scatter. The world will tell you that this is repression and that a love that is not free to wander is no love at all; the Scripture tells you that a love that is entire is the only love worthy of the name, and that the enclosure of the covenant is the only place such love can live. Second, receive the one-flesh union as the God-appointed nursery of godliness, and order your home to that end. Malachi's question, "And wherefore one?", and its answer "that he might seek a godly seed," remind us that the exclusivity of marriage serves a purpose beyond the happiness of the two who enter it. The stable, settled, undivided home is the school in which children learn to trust, to obey, to forgive, and to fear the Lord. The man who is wholly his wife's and the woman who is wholly her husband's are building, by the very constancy of their love, the walls within which a holy offspring is nurtured. Let this shape your priorities: the quiet fidelity of daily life, the keeping of promises, the refusal to let the world's distractions crowd out the souls entrusted to you. These are not small things but the very seedbed of the covenant from generation to generation. Third, remember that your marriage is a sermon, and let it preach the gospel faithfully. Paul tells us that the union of husband and wife is a great mystery, and that the mystery is Christ and the church. This means that the exclusivity of your marriage is not about you alone; it is a public testimony to the singular, undivided love of the Saviour for his one bride. When a husband loves his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it, when he cherishes her as his own flesh and keeps himself for her alone, he is preaching a sermon that no pulpit can equal. And when a marriage fails, when hearts grow cold or bonds are broken, it is the picture of the gospel that is marred, and the world, watching, draws its conclusions about the faithfulness of God from the faithfulness of his people. Let your marriage, then, be guarded for your own sake, and for the sake of the watching world and the honour of the Christ whose love it images. Fourth, honour the institution of marriage itself, whether you are married or not, and refuse the two great temptations of the age: to idolise the thing or to despise it. There are those who make of marriage an idol, expecting from a spouse what only Christ can give, and who are crushed when the creature fails them; there are others who, wounded or disappointed or simply conformed to the spirit of the times, speak of marriage with contempt, as a relic to be escaped or a chain to be broken. The Scripture calls us to neither extreme but to a sober joy: "Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled." Honour it in your speech, honour it in your conduct, honour it in the weddings you attend and the vows you witness and the homes you encourage. The church that treats marriage lightly will soon find that it has treated the gospel lightly, for the two stand and fall together in the counsel of God. Fifth, and finally, let those who have fallen short of this design flee not to despair but to the grace of the Lord who heals the broken. The Confession states the law of marriage plainly, and the law, honestly heard, will condemn every one of us, for who among us has kept even this first command with a perfect heart? The same God who made marriage in the garden and spoke the exclusive "one" over the first couple is the God who redeems the broken, forgives the penitent, and restores the years that the locust has eaten. Christ, the friend of sinners, met a woman at a well who had known five husbands and a man who was not her husband, and he did not drive her away; he offered her living water. If the law of the section humbles you, let it humble you into the arms of the Saviour, whose own marriage to his church, exclusive, eternal, and purchased with his blood, is the hope of every failed and forgiven heart.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the beginning didst make man and woman, and didst join them in the holy estate of marriage as one flesh, we bless Thee for the mercy and wisdom of Thine ordinance. We confess that we have too often treated lightly what Thou hast made holy, dividing our affections, neglecting our vows, and conforming our homes to the spirit of the age rather than to the word of Thy grace. Forgive us, we pray Thee, for the sake of Thy Son, and teach us to honour what Thou hast joined. Grant, we beseech Thee, to every husband and wife the grace to keep the covenant of their youth, to love with an entire and undivided love, and to guard the singularity of their union against every assault of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Make their homes nurseries of godliness, wherein a godly seed may be raised to the praise of Thy name. And where marriage has been broken, O Lord, Thou who art the healer of the broken-hearted, bind up the wounds, grant repentance and forgiveness, and restore the years that the locust hath eaten, according to the riches of Thy grace. We thank Thee, O Father, that Thou hast set over Thine own people a marriage that cannot fail: the union of Christ and his church, bought with his precious blood and sealed by his Spirit. Help us so to love one another, and so to keep ourselves for Thee, that our homes may be living pictures of that great mystery, and that the watching world may see in our fidelity a glimpse of Thy faithfulness. Keep us, we pray, from every form of the divided heart, and bring us at last, one and all, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, where we shall know even as we are known, and where the Lamb's wife shall be presented without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish, to the praise of Thy glorious grace. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our beloved Bridegroom. Amen.