Marriage is a Secondary Pleasure

 Because God has set eternity in the hearts of men, only God can fill the void. Solomon pursues wealth and power and sex and achievement as objects of primary satisfaction, but nothing can hold the water. Death levels the playing field. “You fool, tonight your soul will be required of you!”

Solomon has taken great pains to rip everything out of our hands that could be an idol. None of it worth selling your soul for. We dare not worship even good things. “Fear God and keep his commandments.” Only God matters. At the point when our heart surrenders, God is gracious. Now that He is alone as our primary pleasure, He- as the Father of lights and the Giver of good gifts, begins to restore what has been taken.

But those pleasures have been transformed. The good gifts, wealth, food, and sex, are no longer vying for supremacy in our lives. Instead, God does two things, according to Solomon:

1. He gives us these secondary pleasures because they have finally learned their place in our lives. We recognize them as coming from the hand of God.

2. He gives us the power to enjoy them. In Solomon, the gifts from the hand of God and the power to enjoy them are two different things.

Eating, drinking, working, and marriage are listed by Solomon as those things that come as secondary pleasures from the hand of God. Marriage, then, is a secondary pleasure. When it occupies the primary position, it is an idol.

How can marriage be an idol? Whenever we love or worship the gift more than the Giver, we have traded the creature for the Creator. When we make the relationship an end in itself, we forget that all things must point to God or they detract us from real purpose. Christian culture must uphold the dignity of marriage as part of the creation ordinances, but be careful not to make it a god.

Marriage after all is for life “under the sun.” Jesus told the those who denied the resurrection that men and women will not be given in marriage in eternity. Marriage is the shadow for which our relationship to Christ, is the substance. Christ’s relationship to the church is not like marriage, but marriage is like the church’s relationship with Christ. Marriage here foreshadows the eternal relationship: That relationship is the ultimate reality.

When we make marriage primary, we make single believers second-class citizens in the Kingdom of God. But Paul commended singleness for its singular passion for Christ and His mission. In Isaiah, God promises to give Eunuchs and foreigners “a memorial and a name” better than sons and daughters. Jesus said, there are three reasons that people are Eunuchs: They are born that way, they are made that way by the hand of men, or they choose to remain single for the Kingdom of God. We must not minimize their service for God as second-rate. Marriage is a gift. So is singleness. Both come from the hand of God as blessing for the believer.

Christopher Yuan tells the story of Ken and Floy Smith, a couple whose life of ministry resulted in the conversion of Rosaria Butterfield. When Floy died, Ken was comforted by this thought: “Our marriage was not interrupted (by death), but fulfilled. So I took my ring off. Marriage completed. Interestingly enough, this brought me immense comfort, peace, and thanksgiving.”