The Image of God in Marriage

What does it mean to be made in God's image, as Genesis 1 and 2 maintain, and how do we live out that image on this earth? There have been many attempts to try to locate God's image in some single attribute like rationality or language or decision making. The Bible never tries to do that sort of thing and I think it is a mistake to attempt it. However, I do think we can identify some of the elements of being in His image directly from the Bible.


Genesis 1:26-28 is a key text on this topic, saying " Let Us make man in our image, according to Our likeness....And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And He blessed them and said, 'Be fruitful and multiply...'


In our culture much of the emphasis in teaching about marriage has been about companionship, but this is talking about much more than companionship. It is talking about the male/female union in marriage as an important part of bearing God's image on earth.


In his book The Mission of God (chapter 13, p. 427), Christopher J. H. Wright makes these observations about this passage: "Genesis 1 sets human male/female complementarity closely alongside the image of God.

• So God created man in His own image
• In the image of God he created him
• Male and female he created them

The implication from the tight parallelism seems clearly to be that there is something about the wholeness of human gender complementarity and the mutual relationship it enables that reflects something true about the very nature of God."  Pope John Paul II in his Theology of the Body indicates that the love relationship of the Trinity is pictured in marriage and in the bodily union of male/female; he goes on to say, 'the definitive creation of man consists in the creation of the unity of 2 beings'. He goes on to talk about the meaning of the body itself, what he calls 'the spousal meaning of the body' as an important component of this complementarity. This is to say that the very maleness and femaleness of the body has meaning, and is part of what it means to bear God's image on earth. The body itself enables us to bear God's image in the union of male and female in unity.



In talking about this in chapter 2 of  his book Genesis in Space and Time, Francis Schaeffer points out, "male and female constitute one whole,  become one flesh. Man, with a capital M, equals male and female..." This is to say that to fully bear God's image requires both male and female in union.


All of these agree that marriage bears God's image in a special way. This image requires complementarity and fruitfulness, as shown in the verses immediately following where the man and woman are blessed and the blessing specifically involves fruitfulness to multiply. This is clearly about much more than companionship; it is about being God's image on this earth, living out His image here and now. The fundamental purpose of marriage is to bear God's image on this earth in a way that male or female alone cannot do.


Same-sex marriage cannot do this. It cannot because it denies the basic meaning of the body by joining 2 bodies not designed to be joined; it cannot because of its inherent sterility rather than an inherent design to be fruitful; it cannot because it lacks the differences between male and female natures that must join to more completely bear God's image.


Most evangelical churches totally fail to teach the importance of marriage in bearing God's image on earth. That is a huge failure. Is it any wonder that there are so many divorces in the church now, since we don't seem to know the fundamental purpose of marriage?