Why Is Marriage so Difficult?
I remember sitting on the opposite side of the closed bathroom door from her in our newlywed apartment with tears in my eyes and enough adrenaline running through my veins to lift a car. I could hear her muffled sobs, and I felt so many things at once: anger, sadness, despair, regret, pity.
Why was this so hard?
Why was this person that I loved so much so angry, and how could that little one hundred and twenty-pound woman have the power to make me want to curl up into a ball and hide in the closet?
I read the books. We did the pre-marital counseling, but nothing could have prepared me for the collision course that is marriage: two half-independent twenty-somethings jammed together in four hundred and fifty square feet, navigating childhood trauma eruptions and in-laws. Whose idea was this, anyways?
Turns out it was God’s.
Way back even before the beginning, He had much more than happiness in mind for us, even more than holiness. But wait, I’m not ready to jump into the cliché marriage-book-Genesis-wedding quite yet; don’t worry, we totally will, just not yet.
This glorious idea of marriage was in the mind of God, before clay-dirt Adam took his first breath, before Adam named the first beast, before Eve was pulled from Adam’s side, and even before Eve named her first son. This idea was a mystery hidden in the heart of God, and all of the heavens waited to see what the heck He was up to.
Oh yeah, there were heavens and angels and stuff before the first marriage. They were on the guest list to the first wedding, no doubt filled with wonder at this new thing God was doing. Okay, okay, I’m doing the cliché thing again. Sorry. We’ll get there. But what I want to focus on right now happened before Adam and Eve.
We are wed into a war between God and His enemy. This is a weird place to start a book on marriage, I’ll admit, but hey–this is where it needs to begin. I need you to understand that marriage is very hard before we even buy the diamond.
Look at it this way; the Bible teaches that there was a whole story that happened before our story. There were created beings before us called angels. I’ll spare you the details, but there was a coup. There was an angel named Lucifer that tried to take the throne from God. He mostly failed, but he was able to convince one-third of the angels to go with him.
When we think “angel” in the west, we think of a peaceful white man with a harp and amazing hair, but the bible teaches that these beings were valiant warriors. In some instances, a single one of them was able to defeat whole armies of men by themselves! Every time they would try to talk to a person, the first thing they would say is something like, “You’re okay, I’m not going to kill you, please chill out, I swear I just want to tell you something!” because these creatures were absolutely terrifying.
If you think your family drama was bad before your wedding, well this was the temperature before the first wedding! It was an absolute war. God violently cast Lucifer and his followers from heaven somewhere between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.
Then, He took a breath, and He made man.
The creation of Adam and his marriage to Eve was a declaration of God’s victory to His enemy before the dust of this war had even settled. I imagine that it was a huge slap in the face. Lucifer takes a third of God’s created beings, so God goes on and makes new ones! Wow. Audacious, to say the least.
Then He marries them to each other. He establishes a new idea: an unending covenant, a promise, that there will be no more coups, no more betrayals, and that this one is built to last. With this covenant, He gives us gender, babies, and finally, family. All these new and unbreakable mysterious relationships and ideas had to have pissed Lucifer off real good. Have you ever wondered what was up with that whole snake thing in the garden? Wonder no more.
Satan (Lucifer has many names) has been hell-bent against our marriages working out from even before the very beginning.
Continue reading Chapter Two in Wed Into War.
