Days of seeing faces known and newly known run into nights, so again, I think this blog is a day late. Still, as promised, the second part of my musings on how God’s vow-keeping impacts our vow-breaking.
In Scripture, the story of marriage goes like this – God created male and female, two impossibly different beings (‘as opposite to’ as the Hebrew prepositional phrasekenegdo suggests in its description of the woman (Gen. 2:20)), to join together as one flesh and image him. Even more gloriously, he called these two very opposite beings to labor together in managing and multiplying His glorious creation. He created us with awe and gratitude and sent us into the world to become allies living out that awe and gratitude for one another, for His creation, and for Him.
As the story is told, within a short time the man and the woman lost that awe and gratitude. The serpent tempted Eve to believe that God was holding back, and indeed, she began to doubt the wealth of gifts she had received. Adam stood there like a dumb donkey and the first failure of communication between the two led to the shattering of shalom. Hiding, blaming and shaming were the short and long-term fallout. Then they hid by covering themselves with fig leaves; now we hide by covering ourselves with trendy clothes, fast cars, and the right schools for our kids. Eve would suffer loneliness and would want to absorb her husband to make her life work. Adam, overwhelmed with the chaos of wife and weeds, would run and hide in silence and work. The covenant between man and wife is already broken, and we’re only in the third chapter of the Bible.
Now the story goes out of sequence, and this is good news for us vow-breakers. Even as the fallout of the Fall is occurring, God, the vow-creator and the vow-keeper, is in hot pursuit of His shalom-spoiled Creation. “Where are you, Adam?” is His invitation to Adam to remember his makeup, to come out of guilty conscience into forgiven consciousness. Conversing with His vow-breaking creation, God knows that only His work of reparation, reconciliation, restoration, relocation, and all the other R’s of redemption (that’s for another article), can restore these broken things (seeRestoring Broken Things). So God speaks His vow to the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This promise to crush evil is only the beginning of a story that follows many strange plot twists and turns. As the story develops, God continues making vows, also called covenants – all redemptive, all fulfilled, and all leading to the culmination of the story – the great consummation of the PERFECT MARRIAGE.
God’s vow to crush evil is fulfilled oddly by sending His perfect Son to death on a Cross; in Christ’s death, we vow-breakers are transformed into vow-keepers. As Steven Curtis Chapman sings it, Christ “took the hopeless, the life wasted, ruined and marred — and made it new.” And in the stunning conclusion in Revelation, the biblical Story of Marriage reaches its Consummation with the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in which we the Church become Christ’s bride, “bright and pure.” At this wedding Feast, there will be no antagonistic in-laws, no drunken uncles, no rained-out receptions. In this marriage, there will be no more tears because God has wiped them away, no more loneliness because God will be with us, no more frustration because our work will be fruitful and multiplied. We will flourish in the fullness of the intimacy of his kingdom.
It is this Perfect Marriage created by the covenant of a vow-keeping God that gives this vow-breaker hope in the meantime. Perhaps our marriage ceremony twenty-seven years ago would have better defined the contours of reality if I had spoken the vows I have truly lived, promising Kip I would fail him every day. Then the Reverend could have added two questions, one for me and one for Kip: “Elizabeth, will you promise to repent regularly, to feel godly sorrow over your unrelenting penchant to have your way in your marriage?” And to Kip: “Will you promise to forgive Elizabeth every day?” And to those questions, we could have said “yes” with hope. For indeed, because of God the vow-keeper, we are freed to acknowledge the reality of our vow-breaking hearts and live into the new reality our Groom Jesus has created in us – a heart redeemed and transformed to live in Holy Matrimony.
