Devotional 128: The Purposes of Marriage: Companionship, Children, and Chastity

The Confession Read

Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, and of the church with an holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, Section 2

Introduction

Six times in the opening chapter of the Bible God looked upon what he had made and pronounced it good. The light was good, the dry land was good, the grass and the fruit-tree and the living creature were good; and of the man and the woman, made in his own image and crowned with dominion, God declared the whole to be very good. Yet into the midst of that unbroken brightness there falls, in the very next chapter, a word that has no parallel anywhere in the record of creation: "It is not good that the man should be alone." The first shadow to cross the new-made world was not sin, not sorrow, not death; it was solitude. The first thing in all the earth that God pronounced "not good" was a man's aloneness. And out of that single divine dissatisfaction, marriage was born. We saw in the opening section of this chapter what marriage is: the union of one man and one woman, one flesh, for life. But a definition, however exact, tells us only half the truth. A thing is not fully known until we know what it is for. To describe a ship as planks and sailcloth and oakum is true but incomplete; the ship is not understood until we know that it is made to cross the sea. So it is with marriage. The Confession has declared its form; now it declares its end. And it does so with the same careful economy, in a single sentence that gathers up four great purposes and sets them before us like the four walls of a home: the mutual help of husband and wife, the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, the increase of the church with a holy seed, and the preventing of uncleanness. Every age forgets purposes, and ours more than most. We speak endlessly of what we want from marriage and almost not at all of what it is for. We ask whether it makes us happy, whether it fulfils us, whether it may be renegotiated when it ceases to serve; we have all but forgotten to ask the older and deeper question, what did the Maker make it for? The Confession is unembarrassed by that question, because it has an answer, and because the answer was given before we thought to ask it. Marriage was not dreamed up by men to serve their passing desires; it was ordained, appointed, fixed by the God who made us male and female, and he built into it the very purposes for which he made it. If we would keep marriage aright, we must recover its ends; for a house that has forgotten what it is for will fall, whatever care we lavish on its walls. The four ends of marriage are not four burdens laid upon the married but four mercies, for a thing without a purpose can have no meaning, and a life ordered to the purposes of God is the only life that can be lived with abiding joy.

Scripture Foundation

The four ends of marriage are not four inventions of the Westminster Divines; they are four threads drawn from the fabric of Scripture, and each may be traced to its source. The first and foundational end is companionship, and its fountainhead is Genesis 2:18: "And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." The sentence is striking for reasons that escape a hasty reader. The man was not yet fallen; he dwelt in perfect fellowship with God, surrounded by the living creatures he had named; and yet something was lacking. His solitude was a defect in the midst of innocence, and God himself supplied the want. The phrase rendered "an help meet for him" is the Hebrew ezer kenegdo, a helper corresponding to him, one who answers to him, who stands before him as his complement, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, fitted to his side as no other creature could be. She is not a servant, not an inferior, but, in the language of the older expositors, "another self." This is the first end of marriage, and the Confession places it first because God placed it first: before the command to be fruitful, before the promise of the seed, before any remedy against sin, there is the simple, glorious good of two lives joined against the desolation of one. And the help is mutual, not one-sided assistance but help given and received on both sides, so that the man is to his wife what she is to him. Scripture returns to this end again and again, and the Preacher states it in the plainest terms: two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Marriage is the cord God has twisted against the loneliness of the human heart. The second end is the increase of mankind, and it too was spoken before sin, in the original blessing of Genesis 1:27-28: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." Marriage is the God-ordained channel through which the human race is continued, and the fruitfulness it bears is called a blessing, not a burden. Notice the Confession's careful phrase, "with legitimate issue." The Divines do not speak of children in the abstract, as though the mere multiplication of bodies were the end; they speak of legitimate issue, children born within the covenant of marriage to a father and a mother bound to one another and to their offspring. Scripture everywhere sets the blessing of fruitfulness within the walls of the covenant home. "Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward," sings the psalmist in Psalm 127:3; and again, "Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table" in Psalm 128:3. The world can multiply bodies without marriage; but the increase that God blesses is the increase that comes through the union he ordained, and the child who is born into the shelter of a father's and a mother's covenant love is an heritage indeed. Nor was this blessing revoked at the fall; when Noah stepped out of the ark into a world washed clean, the same command met him, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," a sign that the goodness of marriage was not cancelled by sin but carried forward, to be recovered and honoured in every age. The third end carries the thought higher still: marriage was ordained "of the church with an holy seed." Here the Divines turn from the increase of mankind to the increase of the kingdom of God. The anchor text is Malachi 2:15: "And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed." The one-flesh union exists, in the last analysis, that God might have a people: that through the stable, covenant-keeping home a godly seed might be raised up, generation after generation, to fear the Lord and to call upon his name. The prophet's question, "And wherefore one?", receives an answer that reaches beyond the happiness of the couple to the purpose of God: the singular, exclusive, settled union is the school in which a holy offspring is nurtured. This is the covenant logic that runs through the whole of Scripture, from the promise made to Abraham, "I will be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee," to the apostle's assurance that the children of even one believing parent are holy. The godly seed is the church's treasure, and the home is the church's nursery; when the Divines speak of a holy seed, they are teaching us that the ordinary way in which Christ builds his church is through the faithful homes of his people. The fourth end is the remedy against uncleanness, and it is stated with the apostle's frankness in 1 Corinthians 7:2: "Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband." And again in 1 Corinthians 7:9: "But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." Here the Confession shows its realism about fallen human nature. God, who knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, has provided within marriage a lawful satisfaction of desires which, outside of marriage, become a fire that consumes. The Divines are neither romantic about human sin nor ashamed of the remedy God has appointed. And lest the remedy be thought cold or merely negative, Scripture clothes it in the language of delight, as in Proverbs 5:18-19: "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 preventing of uncleanness is not a grudging concession but a glad provision, the sealing of a fountain that its waters may flow within one garden and one garden alone.

What the Divines Meant

The Divines wrote this section, as they wrote the first, against a background of controversy, but the controversy here was of a different kind. The assault on monogamy had come from the fanatics of Münster and the counsels of a German prince; the assault on the goodness and purpose of marriage came from an older and more respectable quarter. For a thousand years the church had laboured under a teaching that depreciated the married estate, exalting virginity and celibacy as the higher calling and permitting marriage only as a reluctant concession to the weak. Monks and nuns and a celibate priesthood stood at the summit of piety, while the husband and father, the wife and mother, were consigned to a lower shelf of the spiritual life. It was against this long shadow that the Reformers preached, and their recovery of the doctrine of marriage is among their most enduring gifts to the church. Read the section in that light and its emphasis falls into place. The load-bearing word is "ordained." Marriage was not merely permitted to the fallen, as though it were a thing God tolerates with a sigh; it was ordained, appointed, established by God for ends of his own devising. The Divines are answering, point for point, the depreciation of marriage. To those who said the married life was a second-best, fit only for those too weak for the cloister, they answer that marriage has positive, glorious, God-given ends; it is not a concession but an ordinance. And lest anyone swing to the opposite error and despise marriage as a merely carnal arrangement, they set forth its fourth end, the preventing of uncleanness, and show that even in this marriage is holy, a remedy appointed by God against the corruption that would otherwise rage unchecked. The apostle had long before warned that in the latter times some would depart from the faith, "forbidding to marry" and commanding abstinence from meats, and had branded such teaching a doctrine of devils. The Divines, standing on that warning, refused to let marriage be either despised or idolised; they set it in its proper glory by declaring what it is for. Observe, too, the order of the four ends, for the order is itself instructive. Mutual help comes first, because it came first in Eden: the woman was given as a helper before any command to multiply had been spoken. The Confession does not reduce marriage to its procreative function, as though the childless union were a lesser thing or a failure; companionship stands at the head, and a marriage of the aged or the barren may yet fulfil its first end to the full. Then comes procreation, the increase of mankind; then the higher end, the holy seed by which the church is enlarged; and last, the remedy against uncleanness. The Divines place the remedy last, not because it is least, but because they would not have the remedial be mistaken for the whole. Marriage is more than a safeguard against sin, as it is more than a means of bearing children; it is first a fellowship, and all its other ends are joined to that. Mark also the distinction between the two increases the Confession names. Mankind is to be increased, and the church is to be increased, and the two are not the same; yet they are joined, for the holy seed is born into the race of men, and the family that God blesses serves both ends at once. The child born in lawful wedlock enlarges the human family, and, if raised in the nurture of the Lord, he may also enlarge the family of God. The Confession thus refuses to sever nature from grace, or the common blessing of fruitfulness from the covenant blessing of a godly seed; both flow from the one ordinance, and both are to be sought in prayer. Two phrases repay a closer look. The first is "legitimate issue." The Divines are careful to distinguish the fruitfulness God blesses from the fruitfulness of fornication. The increase of mankind is a blessing when it comes through the covenant and a sorrow when it comes outside it; the child born within marriage is a heritage, while the child born to lawless desire enters the world under a shadow that the Confession will not pretend away. The second is "an holy seed," drawn straight from Malachi. The Divines were covenant theologians, and in this phrase the covenant shines through: the promise is to believers and to their seed, and the godly home is the ordinary means by which the church is propagated from one generation to the next. This is not a promise of automatic regeneration; the Confession nowhere teaches that every child of believers is born again. It is a declaration that the covenant family is the sphere within which God ordinarily works, and that the church grows, under God, through the faithful rearing of children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Theological Depth

The four ends of marriage engaged the deepest reflection of the Reformed tradition, and the great teachers of that tradition expounded them with a tenderness that the caricature of their supposed severity entirely misses. Calvin treats the creation of the woman in his commentary on Genesis with a warmth that has surprised many a reader who knew him only by reputation. "It is not good that man should be alone," he writes, "for God designed the society of marriage for man's benefit." The woman is ezer kenegdo, a helper answering to him, and Calvin is at pains to insist that she is not a servant but the man's "inseparable associate," the companion of his life, bone of his bone, so that the husband who loves his wife loves his own flesh. Here is the first end, companionship, placed where Scripture places it, at the head. But Calvin does not stop there. In his treatment of the seventh commandment in the Institutes he orders the ends of marriage with characteristic clarity: it was instituted by God partly for the society of man and woman and partly as a remedy against incontinence. And he warns with great plainness against despising that remedy as though it were something base; for God, who is not ashamed to provide it, is not to be reproached for having provided it, and those who make light of marriage because of its remedial end make light of the wisdom of God. Calvin holds the two together without embarrassment, the high end and the low, the companionship and the remedy, because he will not let marriage be either an idol or a snare. Watson turns the same doctrine toward the heart, and his Body of Divinity is full of the sweetness of the godly companion. He speaks of a wife as a "bosom friend," the nearest and dearest of earthly companions, given by God to be the partner of a man's sorrows and the sharer of his joys; and he presses the mutual help as a spiritual thing, a partnership in prayer and in the service of God, so that the godly couple are "heirs together of the grace of life." On the remedial end Watson is plain and pastoral without a trace of prudery: God has appointed marriage as a lawful outlet for those desires which, denied their proper channel, become a snare and a fire, and it is "better to marry than to burn." And on the holy seed he is urgent, insisting that the home is the nursery of the church, and that the father and mother who train their children in the fear of the Lord are doing the work of God for the generation to come. Watson, like Malachi, refuses to separate the happiness of the couple from the purpose of God. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, gathers the fourfold end into a system with an orderliness that is itself a kind of sermon. The ends of marriage, he observes, answer the several wants of our nature: the want of society, the want of posterity, the want of a godly seed for the church, and the want of a lawful remedy against the corruption of the flesh. Marriage, so understood, is no artificial arrangement superimposed upon mankind from without, but the natural and revealed institution suited to man as God made him, the one relation that answers, at once, his need for fellowship, his calling to fruitfulness, his place in the covenant, and the weakness of his flesh. Hodge is careful to insist that the ends are not of equal prominence in every case, and that a marriage which is childless, or entered late in life, may yet serve the first and the third of its ends to the full; the institution is not measured by any single purpose but by the whole counsel of God that established it. His treatment is a standing rebuke to every reduction of marriage to a single function, whether the romanticism that forgets the remedy or the utilitarianism that forgets the fellowship. To these voices the tradition adds a further note through Turretin, who connects the holy seed to the covenant of grace. Turretin argues that the godly seed is the ordinary means by which the church is propagated from age to age, and that the promises made to believers and to their seed, "I will be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee," are the very ground of this end of marriage. The home is not merely a cradle for the human race but an instrument in the hands of God for the gathering of his elect; and the father who prays with his children, and the mother who catechises them at her knee, are labouring in that great work by which the kingdom of Christ is built in the earth. Robert Shaw, with his accustomed economy, gathers the strands into a sentence: marriage was instituted for the mutual comfort of the parties, for the propagation of the species, and for the preservation of purity, and in all these respects it is "honourable in all." The testimony of the tradition is unanimous, and it is a beautiful thing to see the same four ends taught by the Genevan Reformer, the English Puritan, the Princeton theologian, and the Scottish expositor, each in his own idiom but all in one accord. To read these four together is to see the beauty of a single testimony: the same four ends of marriage taught in Geneva and in Puritan London, in Princeton and in the Scottish kirk, not because the church devised them but because Scripture declares them, and because the God who ordained the institution has made its purpose plain to all who will read aright.

Puritan Application

First, recover the companionship of your marriage, and give it the first place God gave it. The first end of marriage is not children, nor even the pursuit of holiness, but the simple, glorious good of two lives joined against the desolation of one. Many homes are full of activity and empty of fellowship, busy with the keeping of the house and the raising of the children and the earning of bread, and yet the husband and wife who sleep under one roof are strangers to one another. Let this be examined. Do you speak to your spouse, or only about the affairs of the day? Do you pray together, or merely in the same room? Do you walk together, and laugh together, and bear one another's burdens, or have the years thinned your fellowship to a shared address? Guard the friendship at the heart of the covenant as you would guard a fire in the wind; for companionship is not a luxury added to marriage but its very first end, and when it dies the rest will not long survive it. Second, receive children, where God grants them, as a heritage and not a burden, and order your home so that they may be a godly seed. The child is the fruit of the womb, and the fruit of the womb is God's reward. So Scripture declares, against every age that counts children a cost. But the heritage carries a duty with it, for the third end of marriage is not merely that children should be born but that a holy seed should be raised. Train them in the fear of the Lord; teach them the Scriptures from their earliest years; gather them for family worship at the table and the fireside; do not leave their souls to chance, or to the school, or to the world's devices, as though the church would build itself without you. The parents who catechise their little ones are labouring in the very work by which Christ builds his church; and the seed sown in the nursery of the godly home may bear fruit for generations yet unborn. Third, keep the marriage bed undefiled, and honour the remedy God has appointed. The fourth end of marriage is set down in Scripture with a frankness that embarrasses only those who are embarrassed by the wisdom of God: it is given, in part, for the preventing of uncleanness. Let the fountain be sealed, and let it flow within one garden alone. Flee the uncleanness that prowls at the edges of every life: the wandering eye, the secret indulgence, the friendship that inches toward a flame; for the remedy is only a remedy where the heart is kept. And let satisfaction be sought in your own spouse alone, with gladness and not with grudge, remembering that God who gave the remedy gave it for your joy. A marriage in which each keeps the other's bed and heart undefiled is a fortress against the corruption that has drowned many a life in sorrow. Fourth, set before yourself the high end of the holy seed, and labour that your home may enlarge the church. It is a low and unworthy thing to desire children only that they may prosper in the world; the covenant parent desires children that they may fear the Lord, and prays over them with the prayers of Hannah and of the aged saints who travailed for their offspring's souls. Pray for the conversion of your children; speak to them of Christ while they are yet young; live before them a faith so consistent that the gospel you profess is legible in your life. And remember that this end is not the property of parents alone. The childless may labour for the holy seed by prayer, by teaching, by the sponsorship of the young, and by the encouragement of the homes that are raising a godly generation; for the church is one family, and the seed that is holy belongs to us all. Fifth, rest the weight of these ends upon the grace of God, and not upon your own strength. None of us has kept the ends of marriage as they ought to be kept. Our companionship has grown cold, our homes have been disordered, our beds have not always been undefiled, and our children have not always been raised as a holy seed. The law of this section, honestly heard, will humble every one of us. But the ends of marriage, rightly seen, point beyond themselves to a greater marriage, the union of Christ and his church, which is itself fruitful, for it brings forth a holy seed from every nation, and sanctifying, for Christ gave himself for the church that he might "sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle." If our own marriages have fallen short of their end, let us flee to the Bridegroom who never fails his bride, whose love is the fountain of every faithful love, and whose grace is sufficient to restore the years that the locust hath eaten.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst see that it was not good for man to be alone, and didst ordain marriage in Thy wisdom for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, for the increase of the church with a holy seed, and for the preventing of uncleanness, we bless Thee for the goodness and the purpose of Thine ordinance. Forgive us, we pray Thee, that we have so often lived in the house Thou hast built without honouring the ends for which Thou didst build it. Grant, we beseech Thee, to every husband and wife the grace to be true companions, each to the other, that their fellowship may be sweet and their prayers united, and that the solitude which Thou didst declare not good may find no foothold in their home. Where Thou hast given children, make them a heritage and a joy, and give to parents wisdom and patience to raise up a godly seed that shall fear Thy name and serve Thy church. Keep, we pray Thee, the marriage bed undefiled, and let the remedy Thou hast appointed be received with thanksgiving, and the fountain of their love be sealed for one another alone. And where these ends have 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, fruitful, sanctifying, and eternal, bought with his precious blood. Help us so to love, and so to keep our homes, that they may be living pictures of that great mystery, and that the watching world may see in our fidelity a glimpse of Thy faithfulness. Bring us at last, one and all, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the Bridegroom shall receive his bride without spot or wrinkle, and where we shall know even as we are known, to the praise of Thy glorious grace. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our beloved Bridegroom. Amen.