This post was taken from my book Boring: Finding an Extraordinary God in an Ordinary Life available here.

In Ephesians 5, Paul gives some very practical counsel to husbands and wives in the context of marriage. He then closes his exhortation by cracking the door to something else:

“This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church. To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband” (Eph. 5:32-33).

Paul, in this one single sentence, opens the door to the great mystery of what’s really happening when a man and a woman are joined together in marriage. According to Paul, the great mystery is that marriage isn’t at its core about procreation. It’s not about companionship. It’s not about sex. Marriage is about the gospel.

If you read back through Ephesians 5, you see Paul reflecting on husbands and wives through the gospel lens. Husbands, he says, should treat their wives as Christ treats the church, loving them in a self-sacrificial kind of leadership. Wives, meanwhile, should follow their husbands as the church follows Christ, with confidence in their love and care for them. Simple enough, right? Marriage and the gospel. Husbands and Jesus. Wives and the church. But to really embrace this mystery, we need to consider this question: Does the gospel illustrate marriage, or does marriage illustrate the gospel? The answer is what will really help us grasp the immensity of what we’re dealing with here.

If you have kids, you know the power of an illustration, especially when trying to explain a concept rather than a tangible entity. Let’s say that you want to talk to your kids about something like perseverance. That’s a concept. So how do you explain something conceptual like that? You look for something tangible as an illustration. We do this in parenting all the time.

One of the things our kids have to do every morning is make their beds. It took a while for them to embrace the act, but now that they’ve been doing it for a while, it’s become a regular part of their routine along with brushing their teeth (most mornings) and combing their hair (most of the other mornings). Here’s the thing, though—they aren’t very good bedmakers. You don’t get a traditional Army tuck and tighten with these kids. You get a bedspread pulled up to the pillows and then awkwardly smoothed out as best they can.

Our daughter has even found a loophole in the bed-making process. For a couple of years now, she has chosen to sleep on top of her sheets and quilt, only under a small decorative blanket. She will put on hat, gloves, and socks when it gets cold, all because she knows that it’s much easier to fold that three-by-three-foot square than all the rest of her covers.

My wife and I don’t, on a daily basis, go in and corect their bedmaking. We don’t meticulously respread their blankets and straighten their pillows. The highest goal of the exercise isn’t to have a neatly made bed; it’s to teach them a sense, albeit small, of daily responsibility. The bedmaking is the illustration of the concept. The starting point is the responsibility, and it’s the end game as well. First comes the desire to instill responsibility; then comes the illustration meant to emphasize it. The whole exercise is a failure if all they ever learn is how to neatly fold a few sheets.

The order is important.

The question of whether the gospel illustrates marriage, or marriage illustrates the gospel, is important. The answer points us to the highest end of marriage. So the question, in other words, goes like this: Did God institute marriage, and then think to Himself that what He made looks a lot like what He’s doing through the relationship between Christ and the church, or did He specifically institute marriage to be illustrative of what He has always had in His mind and heart from the beginning of time in the gospel? The answer is apparent. The gospel is the highest end. Marriage is not. Is it really too much of a stretch to think that God specifically designed marriage, even from the beginning, with this end in mind? Is it too hard to believe that He would have that kind of foresight and intentionality? I don’t think it is.

Now we might be tempted to think this truth actually lessens the importance of marriage. It’s just an illustration we might argue. It’s like making the bed; if it doesn’t work, God can find something else to show us to illustrate the relationship between Jesus and the church. But nothing could be further from the truth. The importance of marriage is actually heightened when you see its illustrative relationship to the gospel. We come to understand that marriage cannot be disposable because the gospel is not disposable. Husbands cannot shirk their responsibility because Jesus would never shirk His. Wives cannot get bored and stray because the church is united to Christ. Seeing the gospel as the end serves to propel us into the gravity of what’s happening in our typical marriages.

We are doing so much more than eating, drinking, working, parenting, and sleeping together. We have been chosen by the living and eternal God to be the walking, talking, living, breathing representatives of the greatest and most central news in the universe: the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s the weight we all feel deeply inside of us. That’s the gravity of marriage. And reconnecting with that truth is how we might begin to see marriage not a series of monotonous actions and choices made day after day but instead as a profoundly significant means God has instituted in order to tangibly represent the great news of the gospel.

Suddenly, it’s not just an act of kindness when a husband chooses to do all the dishes; it’s a visible example of the way Jesus tangibly serves the people of God. It’s not just a few nice words when a wife chooses to verbally encourage her husband’s leadership; it’s a tangible representation of the confidence that Christians have in following the great leadership of Jesus. It’s not just an admirable quality when couples celebrate thirty, forty, or fifty years of marriage; it’s a demonstration of the kind of commitment that God has made to all His children, sealing them with the blood of His very own Son. Marriage suddenly gets bigger and weightier than we ever thought possible as even our smallest choices are infused with great meaning.