The thanksgiving service for Mr and Mrs Ogbonna’s fiftieth wedding anniversary was held in a small Anglican church in Enugu, the same church where they had been married in 1976. Their children had flown in from Houston and Abuja. The grandchildren wore matching blue. Someone had found the original wedding photograph, the bride in a borrowed veil and the groom in a suit that was clearly a size too large, and had it printed on a banner that hung behind the altar.
At the reception afterwards, in the church hall, the MC did what every Nigerian MC does at an occasion like this. He put the microphone in front of the celebrant and asked for the secret. “Mama, fifty years! Tell these young people how you did it.”
The hall went quiet. Mrs Ogbonna was a small woman, by then a little stooped, and she held the microphone the way people do who have never liked microphones. She looked at her husband, who was sitting beside her with his walking stick between his knees. Then she said two sentences.
“We kept choosing each other, even on the days we did not feel like it. And in fifty years, he never once made me afraid of him.”
There was a pause, and then the applause came, though I noticed that some of the older women did not clap at once. One of them, a friend of the family, wiped her eyes with the corner of her wrapper. She told me afterwards that the second sentence had been the one that reached her. “Many of us stayed fifty years,” she said quietly. “Not all of us could say that.”
I have thought about Mrs Ogbonna’s answer many times since. In two sentences she held together the two things that God holds together in His design for marriage: a faithfulness that lasts, and a dignity that is never violated. Permanence and safety. A covenant that holds, and a love that does not make the other person afraid.
Back to the beginning
PunchlineWhen Jesus was asked about marriage, He went back to Genesis. If we want to understand what God intended, we have to go there too.
The account in Genesis 2 is quiet and deliberate. God has formed the man, placed him in the garden and given him work to do. And then, in a chapter where everything has been declared good, God says something is not good. “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:18). The man is not yet a sinner. He is not lonely because something has gone wrong. He is simply incomplete, and God says so.
God’s answer is a counterpart. The phrase help meet translates the Hebrew ezer kenegdo, a helper corresponding to him. We have already seen in an earlier article that ezer is used most often in the Old Testament of God Himself, the One who comes to the aid of His people. The word carries no suggestion of inferiority. The animals are paraded before Adam, and he names them, and “for Adam there was not found an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:20). Nothing in creation matches him. Then God makes the woman from the man’s own side and, in one of the tenderest phrases in Scripture, “brought her unto the man” (Genesis 2:22).
Adam’s response is the first recorded human speech in the Bible, and it is a song. “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). This is the voice of recognition, a man who has found his true partner. At last, one like me.
Then the narrator steps out of the story and speaks to every generation that will read it. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The word therefore matters. Marriage exists because of what God did in the garden. It is rooted in creation, so it belongs to the whole human family, believers and unbelievers alike. When a couple in Ikorodu who have never been to church exchange vows before their families, they are entering an institution older than Israel, older than the church and older than every tradition of bride price and engagement ceremony. God made it.
And the chapter closes with a verse we often skip. “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). Before sin, the first marriage was a place of complete exposure without fear. Nothing was hidden, and nothing needed to be. There was no shame because there was no threat. That verse tells us something about God’s intention that we must not lose: marriage was designed to be the safest place on earth.
Male and female in His likeness
Genesis 2 tells the story of the first marriage up close. Genesis 1 and Genesis 5 give the wider frame, and that frame is essential:
This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
Notice who bears the likeness of God. “Male and female created he them.” The image of God is not given to the man and then passed on to the woman through him. Both receive it directly. Both are blessed. And God gives them a shared name, Adam, humankind. Earlier, in Genesis 1:28, the commission to fill the earth and have dominion over it is given to both of them together. Whatever differences God built into man and woman, they stand before Him with equal dignity and equal worth.
This is the foundation under every other thing the Bible says about marriage. Before we speak of roles, or headship, or submission, or permanence, we have to say that the person you married bears the image of God. Your wife is not your project. Your husband is not your provider-machine. Each of you is a person God made in His likeness and for whom Christ died.
Then sin entered, and one of its first effects was felt in the marriage. When God confronted Adam, the man who had sung over his wife now blamed her: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree” (Genesis 3:12). The poetry turned into an accusation. And among the sorrows that God described to the woman was this: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16).
That sentence describes what sin would do to marriage. It does not prescribe what God wants. Domination of one spouse by the other is a symptom of the fall, not a feature of the design. Every time a man rules his wife by fear, every time a wife manipulates her husband by contempt, the curse is being lived out instead of the creation. The gospel does not come to reinforce the curse. It comes to undo it.
NuggetPermanence and safety belong together in God’s design. A marriage was meant to last for life, and it was meant to be the place where neither spouse needs to be afraid.
What Jesus said when they asked about divorce
Centuries later, a group of Pharisees brought Jesus a question about marriage. Matthew tells us that they came “tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” (Matthew 19:3). The phrase every cause reflected a real debate. One school of rabbis taught that a man could divorce his wife for almost any reason at all, even a spoiled meal. Another school limited divorce to serious sexual misconduct. They wanted Jesus to choose a side.
He refused their starting point. “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Jesus did not begin with the exit. He began with the design. He took them back to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 in a single breath, joining the creation of male and female to the leaving, cleaving and one flesh of the garden. Then He drew the conclusion: “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6).
Look carefully at that last sentence. God is the one who joins. A marriage is more than two people signing a register or two families settling a bride price. God Himself acts. And because He has joined, no human being has the authority to tear apart lightly what He has put together. That includes the husband who wants a younger wife, the wife who has simply grown bored, the in-laws who decide a daughter-in-law has not produced a son fast enough, and the pastor who encourages a couple to separate because it is easier than walking with them through a hard season.
The Pharisees pushed back. Moses, they said, had commanded a writing of divorcement. Jesus corrected their wording. Moses “suffered you to put away your wives” (Matthew 19:8), He said. It was a permission, given “because of the hardness of your hearts.” And then came the decisive words: “but from the beginning it was not so.”
That phrase is the heart of this article. The law of Moses regulated divorce in a fallen world, largely to limit the damage it did to women who were being sent away. But regulation is not intention. When we want to know what God intended for marriage, we do not start with the concession. We start with the beginning.
Jesus then went on to speak of divorce and remarriage, with His well-known exception “for fornication” (Matthew 19:9). Sincere, Bible-believing Christians understand that verse, and the related passages in Paul, in three main ways. Some hold that marriage cannot be dissolved while both spouses live, so that separation may sometimes be necessary but remarriage is not permitted. Others hold that Scripture allows divorce, with freedom to remarry, for sexual unfaithfulness and for desertion by an unbelieving spouse. Others again see those grounds as examples of a covenant being broken, and include abuse, abandonment and other grave and persistent violations among them. Later articles in this series examine those views carefully. Here I want only to notice what all three share. They all begin where Jesus began: marriage was meant to last.
The covenant of her God
The Old Testament has a word for this kind of binding commitment. It is covenant. We usually think of covenants between God and His people, but Proverbs uses the same word for marriage:
To deliver thee from the strange woman, even from the stranger which flattereth with her words; Which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the covenant of her God.
The father in Proverbs is warning his son about a woman who is unfaithful to her own husband. Look at how she is described. She “forsaketh the guide of her youth,” that is, the husband she married when she was young, the companion of her early years. And she “forgetteth the covenant of her God.” Her marriage was not only an agreement with her husband. It was a covenant made before God, with God as its witness and guardian. To break it was to forget Him.
The prophet Malachi says the same thing to the men of his day, who were leaving their wives for younger women: “the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth” (Malachi 2:14). God was present at the wedding. He heard the vows. He has not forgotten them even if we have.
A covenant differs from a contract in its centre of gravity. A contract asks, “What will I receive if you perform?” A covenant asks, “Who will I be to you, before God, whatever comes?” That is why Christian marriage vows have always included phrases like for better, for worse and in sickness and in health. The vows anticipate hard days. They are promises made precisely so that they can be kept when keeping them costs something.
The psalmist describes the kind of person who may dwell in God’s holy hill, and one of his marks is this: “He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not” (Psalm 15:4). A man of covenant keeps his word even when circumstances make it expensive. That is the commitment God intended for marriage. Feelings come and go. This commitment is a decision, renewed daily, to remain faithful to the person you promised yourself to.
And it is meant to be lifelong. The old prayer-book phrase “till death us do part” reflects the plain assumption of Scripture that a marriage lasts as long as both spouses live (Romans 7:2). We do not enter marriage with an escape route mapped out. We enter it intending to grow old together.
Faithfulness meant to be enjoyed
It would be easy, after all this, to think of permanence as a heavy chain. Scripture does not let us. The same book of Proverbs that warns against forgetting the covenant also paints faithfulness in some of the warmest colours in the Bible:
Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. Let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee. Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.
The imagery is drawn from water in a dry land. In ancient Israel, a family’s cistern or well was precious. You did not let strangers draw from it, and you did not go stealing from your neighbour’s. The father tells his son to drink from his own well, and the meaning is clear. Find your delight in your own wife. Keep the marriage bed for the two of you. “Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.”
Notice the verbs. Rejoice. Be thou ravished always with her love. That last phrase uses a Hebrew word that can mean to be intoxicated, to stagger as though drunk. Faithfulness here looks far more like delight than endurance: a lifelong pleasure in one person, a love that keeps choosing the same beloved year after year and finds that the well does not run dry.
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes, who looked so honestly at the frustrations of life under the sun, says something similar:
Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun.
“Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest.” Life is short and uncertain. Much of our labour seems to vanish like vapour. But this, says the Preacher, is “thy portion in this life”: a shared life, lived with joy, with the one you love. Permanence gives marriage the time it needs to become deep. A couple married for thirty years know things about each other that no new romance can know. They have buried parents together, paid school fees together, waited in hospital corridors together and laughed at the same old jokes ten thousand times. That depth cannot be rushed, and it cannot be built by people who keep one foot outside the door.
Many young couples in our churches today have watched marriages around them fall apart, and they enter their own with a kind of nervous half-commitment. They keep separate accounts as an insurance policy. They hold back trust in case it is betrayed. Some caution is wise, and nobody should marry blindly. But a marriage built on a permanent backup plan rarely becomes the marriage God intended. Covenant faithfulness frees you to give yourself fully, because you are not waiting for the moment it ends.
The great mystery
When Paul wrote to the Ephesians about marriage, he quoted Genesis 2:24 and then said something astonishing:
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.
“This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” In the New Testament, a mystery is something hidden in God’s purpose and now revealed. Paul is telling us that from the very beginning, when God brought the woman to the man in the garden, He was drawing a picture of something greater: the union of Christ with His people. Human marriage was designed as a living parable of the gospel.
That changes how we understand permanence. Why should a marriage last? Because Christ does not abandon His bride. He said, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5). He does not divorce His church when she disappoints Him, and she disappoints Him often. His covenant faithfulness is the pattern for ours.
But the same passage changes how we understand that faithfulness, because Christ’s love for His church is never cruel. Paul’s instruction to husbands in this chapter is the longest of all his instructions. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). Then he adds that a husband should love his wife as his own body, “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church” (Ephesians 5:29). The words nourish and cherish come from the world of care for children and for the sick. To nourish is to feed and help grow. To cherish is to keep warm, as a nursing mother warms her infant.
The whole passage is introduced by the call to mutual submission, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21), and every instruction to wives and husbands sits underneath it. Christians have understood the language of headship and submission in more than one way, and earlier articles have set those views out fairly. What no faithful reading can do is turn this passage into a licence for domination. If marriage is a picture of Christ and the church, then a husband who frightens, humiliates or strikes his wife is preaching a lie about Christ with his life. Christ died for His bride. He did not beat her into submission.
So the great mystery holds together the two things Mrs Ogbonna named. It calls for a faithfulness that does not walk away. And it defines that faithfulness by the self-giving love of Jesus, which never makes the beloved afraid.
Permanence was never meant to protect cruelty
PunchlineHere I must speak carefully and plainly, because covenant language has been misused in many homes and many churches.
Some husbands, and some wives, have learned to hide behind the permanence of marriage. They know that their spouse takes the vows seriously, so they behave badly without fear of consequences. They shout, threaten, control the money, monitor the phone, cut their partner off from family and friends, force sex, or use their fists, and then they quote “what God hath joined together” when the injured person tries to leave. And sadly, there are pastors and family elders who have sided with them, telling a terrified wife that her duty is to go home and pray harder.
That is a terrible misreading of Scripture. Malachi, in the very passage where God says He hates the putting away of a wife, also says this: “for one covereth violence with his garment” (Malachi 2:16). God places violence beside treachery. The man who wears a respectable agbada to church while terrorising his family at home has already broken covenant. The permanence of marriage was designed to protect the vulnerable, never to trap them.
Remember that the law of Moses itself made provision for a wife who was neglected. In Exodus 21:10-11, a husband who withheld food, clothing and marital care from his wife lost his claim on her, and she was to go free. Even in that ancient setting, God did not bind a woman to a man who refused his basic duties toward her.
So let me say clearly what this ministry has always said. Abuse is never a covenant obligation. No one is required by God to remain in danger in order to prove faithfulness to marriage. If you are being hurt, threatened or controlled, please seek safety. Go to a trusted person and a safe place. Contact the police, a doctor, a trusted pastor or a qualified counsellor, and the domestic and sexual violence response services in your state. Protecting yourself and your children does not make you unfaithful to God. Whatever view a Christian holds about divorce and remarriage, no faithful reading of Scripture requires a person to stay in harm’s way. Those questions can be worked through later, with wise counsel, from a place of safety.
Choosing each other on ordinary days
If permanence is God’s intention, how is it lived? Mostly in ordinary ways, on ordinary days.
It is lived in the decision to keep talking when silence would be easier. It is lived in the apology offered first, before the other person has apologised. It is lived in the husband who comes home after two hours in Lagos traffic and still asks how her day went, and in the wife who notices the strain on his face when the business is struggling and does not add to it. It is lived in the couple who decide, early, that they will not threaten divorce in arguments, because some words cannot be taken back.
Commitment also means getting help early. Many marriages that end in the courtroom could have been helped years before in a counsellor’s office. Pride keeps couples from admitting they are struggling. Fear of gossip keeps them from speaking to their pastor. By the time anyone outside the house knows, the damage is deep. If your marriage is in trouble, do not wait until it is broken. Speak to a mature couple you trust, a pastor who will keep confidence, or a trained Christian counsellor.
And commitment means guarding the inner life. Jesus taught that adultery begins in the heart before it reaches the body (Matthew 5:28). Unfaithfulness rarely arrives all at once. It grows from small permissions: the conversation that is a little too personal, the messages deleted before your spouse sees the phone, the habit of comparing your husband with someone else’s, the slow withdrawal of affection while all your energy goes to work or ministry. Covenant faithfulness is guarded in the small places.
Above all, commitment draws its strength from the faithfulness of God. You will not keep a lifelong covenant by willpower alone. The God who said “My covenant will I not break” (Psalm 89:34) is the One who lives in you by His Spirit. The grace that saved you is the same grace that teaches you to love your spouse on the days when love is hard. You are not asked to manufacture a faithful marriage. You are invited to draw on a faithful God.
I visited Mr and Mrs Ogbonna again about three years after that thanksgiving service. Much had changed. Mr Ogbonna’s memory had begun to fail, and by then he no longer recognised most of his grandchildren. Some days he did not know where he was. His daughter had come back from Abuja to help, and there was a nurse who came three mornings a week.
But in the late afternoon, it was always Mrs Ogbonna who sat with him on the veranda. She fed him his pap with a spoon, a little at a time, and wiped his chin, and talked to him about the old days in a voice so soft I could hardly hear it. He did not always know her name. He knew her hands. When she stood up to go inside, he would reach for her and hold on.
I asked her, as gently as I could, whether it was very hard.
She thought about it for a long time. “It is hard,” she said. “But I told you before. He never made me afraid of him. For fifty years he honoured me. It is not difficult to honour him now.”
That is what God intended. A covenant that does not end when the strength fades. A faithfulness kept to the very end. And a love that, from the beginning of the marriage to its last afternoon on a veranda in Enugu, was safe to come home to.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What phrases in Genesis 2 most shape the way you think about your own marriage or the marriage you hope for?
- Why do you think Jesus answered a question about divorce by going back to the beginning? What does that teach you about how to approach hard questions?
- In what ways might you be keeping one foot outside the door of your marriage, and what would it look like to give yourself more fully?
- How does Christ’s love for the church shape your understanding of both faithfulness and safety in marriage?
- Do you know anyone who has been told to stay in danger in the name of covenant? How could you help them toward safety and qualified support?
This Week
This week, read Genesis 2:18-25 and Ephesians 5:21-33 aloud with your spouse, slowly, on two different evenings. After each reading, each of you name one way the other has kept covenant with you in the past year, and one thing you would like to do differently in the coming month. If you are single, read the same passages and write down the kind of covenant you want to make, and the kind of person you want to become before you make it. If you know your marriage is not safe, use this week to speak to one trusted person about it.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for designing marriage from the beginning as a covenant of faithfulness and love. Thank You that You made both man and woman in Your image, and that Your Son loved His bride and gave Himself for her. Teach me to keep my promises when keeping them is costly, and to choose my spouse again on ordinary days. Guard my heart from small unfaithfulness. Make our home a place where no one needs to be afraid. Protect every husband and wife who is suffering harm in their marriage, and lead them to safety and help. Let our marriages show the world something of the faithful love of Christ. 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.