In a separate work not on this blog site, I noted how in Genesis 2, man and woman are joined as one flesh, then in the very next chapter, the serpent arrives. This was in reflection on the fact that there is not a single verse of separation between God’s establishment of marriage and Satan’s attack on what God created.
But the last several weeks a single verse has been circling through my thoughts, and what I never truly considered before about that quick plunge into a fallen world is why.
Let’s think about the creation of woman and her purpose for a moment, and not the usual “women are called to be helpers” or “the significance that God used a rib” that you so often hear. I mean the original purpose for which more creatures were created after Adam. Earlier in Genesis (the verse I’ve been turning over lately specifically is 2:18), we are told “It is not good for man to be alone.” In God’s perfect, newly created world, the cycle of God declaring His creation to be good is appallingly broken. As we know with Biblical repetition, when a cycle is broken, it is meant to catch our attention.
It caught Satan’s attention, too. This is the why behind the devil’s attack on God’s authority.
In the Garden of Eden, this world of perfection, the idyllic realm reveals an imperfect situation; something for the first time was “not good.” God identified this “problem” and also created His perfect solution, but Satan was watching closely all along. He had found the weak spot, the chink in the armor so to speak. No vulnerability had ever been revealed to him as an option before to challenge God. By no means am I suggesting God has a weak spot, but that Satan intentionally used the “not (yet) good” spot as the prime place to mount his attack.
This is why the devil chose to go after that new union in order to undermine God’s creation. And to this day, he has not changed strategies. Dividing marriages and destroying relationships to sow discord and make us feel we are alone in this world, even separated from our Creator God, is exactly the evil he is after. In every aspect of culture today, from skyrocketing divorce rates to primarily digitized, “faux” relationships to plummeting levels of generations getting married and having children to even the gender wars we are fighting, our society is being ripped apart from our smallest “mini society” of relational unity.
We have seen the battle between sexes play out since this Fall of mankind. In considering how this scene unfolded in the garden, where Eve was tempted by Satan, posing as a serpent to get her to rebel against God’s decree, then to tempt her husband also with the promise of becoming the gods of their own lives, many commentators have rightly recognized that Adam shares partial blame because the serpent should never have been in the garden in the first place. Adam had been given the charge to guard and cultivate, to exercise dominion over the beasts and the field. This perfect pre-fall dominion was never intended to be domination, but a loving and watchful authority. Had Adam displayed the leadership he was called to, defending and protecting his wife and his domain, the serpent would never have had the opportunity.
Yet when the serpent appears, Adam is either absent or silent. We are not told what he is doing, only that he is not doing what he was called to do. When the serpent approaches Eve, we don’t know where Adam is. We don’t know how much work there truly is in pre-Fall tending of the garden, so regardless of intents and purposes, Adam is off doing his own thing and clearly inattentive and ignorant to the need for and call to leadership. Without his protection, Eve is led astray to eat the forbidden fruit, then she offers the same to Adam. They flee from the shame of seeing their sin and its ramifications.
When God searches for and confronts them, the rot spreads through blame. Upon inquiry, Eve could just as reasonably have accused Adam of being at fault for his abdication of leadership, she could also have rightly owned her own guilt, but she chose to blame the serpent. Adam, instead of accusing the serpent who caused the attack or accepting his portion either, blames his wife for both falling for Satan’s wiles and deceiving him, and then also blames, wait for it…God himself. He lashes out, not that God allowed the serpent in, but for giving him the burden of this woman in the first place. “It’s the woman you gave to me!” In a single sentence, he distances himself from both his bride, “flesh of his flesh,” a gift directly from God his Creator. Thus the universe, creation itself, was irreparably damaged and the fabric of time was forever altered.
And also the male-female blame game began. I can only imagine the centuries of their remaining lives where every hardship and heartbreak became a “This is all your fault” series of accusations hurled back and forth across the dinner table of human history. And damn it, if we aren’t still having the same fight today.
We’re reading from the exact same script constantly in the battle of sexes. Remember, Adam’s display of leadership should have included standing beside Eve to resist the evil intruder and confront the lie. The modern-day dominion and loving authority of male leadership is still being neglected. Women are being left to step up to the plate and fill this vacuum, fulfilling their post-Fall curse, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16). Instead of repenting of their own passivity, we’re seeing a social war begin to rage as men are still pointing the fingers of blame at the way women are handling the situations they are handed. Women then continue to carry resentment and respond with control, contempt, and withdrawal.
No one sex is to blame, but the message from the dawn of time rings just as true today: when one sex tries to win at the other’s expense, unity breaks and both lose.
“If two people serve the same unity, they can work together, sacrifice together, navigate treacherous and difficult terrain together; can cooperate and compete together, and can do so voluntarily, productively, and peacefully. People aiming at the same unified target are psychologically integrated embodiments of the same spirit.” –Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God
Had Adam and Eve stood together as a united front against the powers of evil, each bringing their strength to the same mission, the story might have unfolded very differently. Had the two worked as a joint front against the powers of evil, perhaps both their strengths in unity would have prevailed. Perhaps…
A marriage and a society that remembers this fights the real enemy instead of each other. As the father of lies, Satan will try to convince you that your marriage will never work, that it is too hard, that you made a mistake, that it would be easier with someone else. Peter’s warning is not abstract: “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8)
“The concerns Eve brings to Adam force him to restructure his personality and, more broadly, the social order he has established and is responsible for both maintaining and updating. Every man is, of course, a work in progress, and the social order is always incomplete, not least as a consequence of its exclusionary and often too-arbitrary nature… Further, the inadequacy of man does not imply the superiority of women, and the presumption of that superiority, on moral grounds, inevitably leads to devastating consequences. Of course, the reverse is equally true.”—Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God
And with all of this in mind, especially how Satan attempts to rob us of interpersonal unions, I find it beyond beautiful that God still uses the language of a marriage covenant to describe how He seeks after us. He deliberately uses this language to reveal more of Himself to us, from Eden’s first marital union through the entire arc of redemptive history.
From Genesis to Revelation, He describes His relationship with His people not merely as ruler to subjects, but as husband to bride. Israel is called His unfaithful wife in the prophets; the Church is named the Bride of Christ in the New Testament. The story ends not with a contract fulfilled, but with a wedding—the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7). This is not accidental imagery. It is the clearest possible declaration that covenantal love (binding, costly, enduring) is not just something God commands, but something He embodies.
And unlike Adam in the garden, God does not stand passively while His bride is deceived and fractured. He moves toward her. Again and again throughout Scripture, He pursues a people who wander, betray, and forget Him. In Hosea, He tells a prophet to marry a woman who will be unfaithful as a living picture of His own heart: steadfast love in the face of repeated rejection. In Christ, that pursuit reaches its climax: not only does He come after His bride, He takes upon Himself the consequences of her failure. Where Adam deflects blame, “the woman you gave me,” Christ absorbs it.
This is what makes the covenant language so staggering. God is not describing an ideal; He is revealing a pattern. He binds Himself to people who cannot hold up their end of the promise and then remains faithful anyway. He does not love at a distance, and He does not love conditionally. He enters into the mess, the betrayal, the fracture—and stays.
That reframes everything about marriage. If God chooses this metaphor to describe His love, then marriage is not merely a human institution under attack; it is a living parable of divine faithfulness. It is meant to show, however imperfectly, what it looks like when two people refuse to walk away, when they absorb offense instead of amplifying it, when they choose restoration over retaliation. Not because it is easy, but because it is true to the nature of the God they claim to follow. Without God, who decides what love is? Paul writes, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
“In marriage, do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus. The rest will follow.”—Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God
Homes without Christ’s brand of selfless love descend into chaos. Selfishness reigns; personal agendas cause discord. Couples exchange favors and acts of affection like currency: I’ll give you what you want as long as I get what I want. That is not covenant compatibility; that is a mutually beneficial contract.
From the beginning, marriage was designed as a covenant, not a lifestyle upgrade. Your marriage covenant is supposed to bind you together through hard times so that you have nowhere to go except to Christ for help and back to each other for reconciliation. It is meant to be the place where you practice keeping promises when every feeling argues against it. Modern culture disciples us in the opposite direction. It tells us not to go to either of those two places—Christ or covenant—but to treat the self as the final authority, to find our purpose and identity in our own desires as the ultimate goal.
To understand what is at stake here, we have to recover the weight of covenant itself. As Kevin DeYoung writes in Daily Doctrine, “In his introduction to Economy of the Covenants, the classic work by the Dutch theologian Hermann Witsius (1636–1708), J. I. Packer argues that covenant theology is a hermeneutic, a way of reading the whole Bible. Biblical redemption starts with the covenantal relations among the persons of the Trinity. Biblical doctrine has to do with the covenantal relationship between God and man. And Biblical ethics has to do with our covenantal relationships with others. We can’t make sense of the gospel of God, the word of God, or the reality of God unless we view these through a covenantal frame.”
Covenant is mentioned more than 300 times in Scripture, topped only by topics on how to treat the poor, how to view money, and the command, “Do not be afraid.” Covenant is not a niche topic; it is the frame. Marriage sits inside that frame as a small picture of God’s own faithfulness. “It is not your love that sustains your marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That is the opposite of our era’s romance script.
This is why what you believe about God matters more than how you feel about your relationship on any given Tuesday. “The success of your marriage depends far more on what you believe about God than how you feel about each other,” says Sheila Gregoire, publisher and counselor of Fierce Marriage books and articles. If marriage is just a contract between two autonomous selves, then when the feelings dip, the contract can be renegotiated or torn up. If marriage is a covenant before God, your vows are not simply an expression of current emotion; they are, as G. K. Chesterton put it, an appointment in which you will confront your choices again, not always with the same willing spirit, when he said, “The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place.” You promised to choose this person again later, not just to love them as they were on a single day in the past.
“The Christian husband displays what he thinks of Christ by the way he treats his wife.”—John MacArthur.
Covenant, in practice, looks much more ordinary and much more difficult than the fantasies that tempt you throughout life. Marriage isn’t about never arguing or always being perfect. It is about choosing each other, even when it is messy. It is about listening more than you speak, forgiving more than you expect, and holding space for each other’s growth. The little things matter: checking in, saying I love you, being patient when the other is tired or frustrated. Over time, those small moments build trust, intimacy, and a love that lasts. The big things matter too, and we should always strive to have our partner by our side in lockstep with major milestones. “Growth in your marriage isn’t measured by perfection, but by how fast grace leads you back to each other,” writes Benjamin Foust.
Marriage is messy, beautiful, frustrating, and full of joy—and the couples who make it work are the ones who keep showing up for each other, day after day. As J. I. Packer summarized, “The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God’s help to do just that.”
“Love is not the cause of commitment, but the effect. You don’t wait until you have the perfect relationship to commit to a person—you commit to the person in order to create the perfect relationship. Soulmates are built, not found,”—Mark Manson.
In a world quick to discard what is cracked, choosing to repair your marriage is a noble good. You did not just vow to love your spouse; you made a promise to yourself, to God, and to your future. One bad season should not end your marriage. Even strong couples fall apart sometimes. Choosing to rebuild is choosing love again, precisely what your vows call you to do. That is what makes your love deeper, wiser, and more unshakeable than before.
“We don’t fall into and out of love; we either choose love or we don’t. Marriage is the promise to choose love whenever a choice must be made.”—Fierce Marriage
No matter what negative traits you are fixated on right now, you should remind yourself that at one point you realized what a special blessing your spouse was, just as Eve was to Adam. They have a heart, mind, and energy that cannot be replaced. Caring for them through these challenges can make all the difference. A healthy relationship requires two people willing to change behaviors that are hurting the other; there are marriages where one partner refuses and, humanly speaking, you may never recover trust or intimate connection. But as far as it depends on you, your call in life is not to treat covenant as disposable. It is to let your view of God dictate how you behave in your marriage, to do for your spouse what God has done for you in Christ, and to trust that the marriage itself—this vow before God, this crucible of daily choices—can, with His help, sustain and even deepen love long after the fireworks of early feeling have faded.
This is why Christ’s calling to love his bride, the church and His people, is so meaningful. As theologian R.C. Sproul stated, “The first Adam said, ‘Don’t blame me; blame my wife.’ The second Adam said, ‘Don’t blame my wife; blame me.’” Men today are still called to love their wives as the second Adam, Jesus Christ, did, and to shepherd and protect them in this same way.
This is the only way we as people can do our small part to tell Satan he has no power over our deepest, most important relationships, and that his recognition of this vulnerable spot cannot prevail in the face of God’s rightful authority. Fight culture and you fight the devil, the way Adam and Eve should have stood to do. Then thank God that He provided the saving grace through the only power that could destroy Satan for all time in our second Adam. Because, you know what? It is not good otherwise.