Douglas Wilson has posted a wedding sermon and exhortation that is probably dripping with more intelligent Bible commentary and insight than what leaks out of most pulpits in a month. He begins by introducing and quoting Matthew 19:4-8.

One time the Pharisees came to Jesus in order to test Him, and they made that attempt in a question about marriage and divorce. Is it lawful, they asked, for a man to put away his wife “for every cause”? Christ replied in the negative, as we know, but I would like to draw your attention to a point He made several times in His reply.

“And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:4-8).

Invoking Adam and Eve during a wedding is nothing new, of course. I think they’ve been mentioned in every Christian wedding since the beginning of time, before Christians even technically existed. And its usually to invoke the guilt trip.

“You’re one flesh now, so divorce would be the same as killing yourself, and suicide is wrong so…”.

Thankfully, Wilson doesn’t feel like regurgitating what everyone has heard before.

At the beginning. From the beginning. We need to reflect on this for a few moments. God is the master storyteller, and He is the one who has given us the concept of a beginning, middle, and end. History has chapters. The front cover has been opened, and we will all one day arrive at the back cover. But what separates a novel from a series of short stories? There is a theme from beginning to end. The characters are consistently and identifiably the same characters (even including their transformations and changes and all) from beginning to end. If something is established in the first chapter we expect it to still be there in the last chapter. We therefore see that God is a novelist.

He offers other choice nuggets, including his direct dialogues to the bride and groom that make me appreciate the importance of my relationship to my wife in the grand scheme of things, but I want to focus on what he hints upon here. God as novelist.

I’m a big fan of the “Human History as Grand Story” motif, especially as laid out in the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and declared it good. Man screws up and corrupts the good creation, is banished from the tree of life, and God undertakes a plan to rescue and restore what was always meant to be good.

At the end of Revelation we get a glimpse of the ultimate goal, the happy ending, the idea of a “new heavens and a new earth”, a new creation (21:1). And in this new creation, a new tree of life, whose leaves heal the nations(22:2).

Things will eventually come full circle in God’s grand narrative. He has already written a thrilling and unexpected climax in the resurrection of Jesus. We must now act out the rest of the story.

Read the rest of Wilson’s post to get an idea of the place marriage has in God’s grand epic.

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