A Covenant Before—and with—God

by Skip Heitzig | May 24, 2024

Marriages that start out well often do not end up that way. What begins with flowers and love notes and opening doors for the girl of one's dreams can end with the couple sleeping back-to-back or in separate rooms.

The topic of sex in marriage never stands alone—it's related to every other part of a couple's relationship. It's more than just adding a little spice and sizzle.

In Proverbs 5, Solomon wrote poetically about the sexual relationship of a man and his wife, but here I want to focus on just one aspect of it: a mutual covenant.

"Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth" (v. 18). These words are not limited to the experience of youth or newlyweds. I think the term "the wife of your youth" implies a covenant, though it's not written explicitly in the text. The idea is of a lifelong monogamous relationship.

To have a stable marriage requires a covenant. It's a word that means an agreement with binding force. God is a covenant God, and marriage is to be a covenant relationship. By contrast, Proverbs 2 describes an adulteress as someone "who has left the partner of her youth and ignored the covenant she made before God" (v. 17, NIV). When a couple makes vows to each other, they're in covenant with each other and also with God.

Covenant means you can't go into it partway. You have to go all-in. It's a total commitment, a choice you make not just on your wedding day but every day. A covenant marriage has no escape hatch, no back door. You enter into the relationship and all the doors and windows are closed and locked. That's why until death do us part is in the vows.

Now, a lifelong monogamous relationship will not solve all your problems; in fact, some problems begin with that. But intimacy and safety begin when you go into it knowing this is permanent, this is a covenant.

We live in a time when people look at marriage and want to test it out first. They want to live together first, to test the waters, to get intimate, to see if it works. That is not a covenant relationship.

Research shows the most successful marriages are those entered into with a sense of permanence. Couples who live together before marriage have a 50 percent greater chance of divorce than those who don't. They also have less satisfying and more unstable marriages. Why? Because they later regret having violated their moral standards and having stolen a level of intimacy that was not warranted at that point.

The phrase stolen a level of intimacy reminds me of the foolish woman in Proverbs 9 who said, "Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant" (v. 17). Oh, it tastes good going down, perhaps, but later on it's bitter.

Proverbs 5:21 says, "For the ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord, and He ponders all his paths." Since God knows and sees everything, He is watching and weighing everything.

So don't leave God out of your marriage. He is part of that covenant. Put Him at the center and live in accountability. People who make a spiritual commitment to His lordship find it easier to say no to sin.

God created life and He invented marriage, so it makes sense that He knows exactly how it ought to work. With the power of the Holy Spirit, the principles of the Bible, and the help of Christian friends around us, we can have stable and satisfying covenant marriages.

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