The Bible has a lot to say about manhood, womanhood, and marriage. Let’s explore some of the key points.

Manhood

Our culture values “strength” in men, which is either physical strength, suavity, or capableness (wilderness survival like Bear Grylls’, fighting skills like John Wick’s, cleverness like MacGyver’s, etc.). The Bible, on the other hand, emphasizes man’s dependence on God, not his independence. Godly men turn to God consistently when scared or overpowered. Vulnerability is not contemptible in God’s sight.

Furthermore, wisdom is the most highly sought prize (Proverbs 8), not the ability to beat people up, and wisdom comes from humble submission to God and careful study of His Scripture. As Proverbs 1:7 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

Thus, machismo is not valued in the Bible. Likewise, stoicism (the forcible conquest of one’s emotions) is also not upheld as a Biblical ideal. Christian manhood is not about suppressing emotions but rather about not allowing them to interfere with doing what must be done. Men cannot realistically face difficult situations without fear or sadness, but like Jesus, who was so sorrowful in the Garden of Gethsemane that He sweated blood (Luke 22:44), they should courageously fight through despite their negative emotions to persevere in fulfilling their responsibilities.

And what are a man’s responsibilities? Going back to Adam, we see that his duties in the Garden of Eden were twofold: to tend the garden and to keep it (Genesis 2:15). This is the fundamental purpose of man, so it’s critical to understand these words. The first has the sense of “cultivate,” meaning to carefully build up and cause to thrive through hard, consistent labor. The second has the sense of “guard,” meaning to protect from harmful forces, especially from the outside.

These are the two functions that defined a “judge” in Israel: they fought off oppressors and then mediated conflict between Israelites. However, these two jobs extend beyond the civil government and into every area of life. The truth is: men are the “bones” of society. When the bones are firm and fixed in godliness, a society thrives. When the bones are broken, a society will eventually crumble. That is why the forces that have labored to undermine and destroy America from within since the Sexual Revolution have consistently belittled, dehumanized, and disenfranchised men. They have spread the lie that there is nothing a man can do that a woman cannot do just as well, making men unnecessary.

In truth, men have specific natural abilities and a “male energy” (which is often diverted by sin into uncontrolled anger) that make them ideally suited for a wide variety of leadership responsibilities, especially in the home and in the assembly of God. This enables them to work diligently to bring about fruit and prosperity through careful cultivation, being sure to fight off malevolent forces that seek to destroy that which is under their care, much as David defended his sheep from lions and bears (1 Samuel 17:34-35). In the Bible, men exclusively constitute the legal heads of families, political and religious leadership (except for Deborah, whom I will discuss in the Church section), and the military.

Womanhood

To understand women, we can also go back to the beginning, to see what Eve’s role was: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him” (Genesis 2:18). When he was created, man was expected to manage and protect the resources of the world. He was given both the ability and the responsibility to tend and keep the garden. Nonetheless, he was missing something. Alone he could not fulfill his responsibilities. He needed a helper.

What’s interesting about the Hebrew word for “helper” is that it is almost always used in the Bible to describe God’s deliverance. Thus, Eve was not intended to be merely an assistant; rather, she was “comparable” to Adam, with a perspective and abilities that would save her male partner from stumbling into foolishness or even destruction. The beautiful imagery here suggests that the woman was to be a visible symbol of God’s presence forever by Adam’s side.

Much ado has been made about the patriarchy, but while the world of the Bible is indeed one in which men are tasked with the primary responsibilities in society, women are to be their partners, absolutely essential to the proper functioning of everything. Men and women are to work hand in hand, treasuring one another and allowing each to excel where God has given them unique skills.

Unfortunately, thanks to sin, historically men have used their power and dominance to oppress and minimize women, only for women to progress from establishing equality in recent times to taking the upper hand in the war of the sexes, diminishing the value of men and securing unjust advantages for themselves. Both oppression of women by men and men by women are violations of God’s intended order.

This animosity traces back to the complete collapse of male-female partnership at the Fall. In the Garden of Eden, Adam failed to guard, and Eve failed to help Adam guard. Eve indulged her sin by telling herself that if the serpent was evil, Adam would have stood up against him. Adam indulged his sin by telling himself that if the serpent was evil, Eve would not be “helping him” by bringing him the fruit. In this way, both Adam and Eve renounced their God-given roles and responsibilities.

Adam’s punishment for refusing to do his job was to toil endlessly (Genesis 3:17-19), while Eve’s punishment for failing to be a good partner to Adam was that she would seek to dominate her husband but would forever be frustrated in her efforts (Genesis 3:16). These are therefore the default states of men and women who are not in an intimate covenant relationship with Jesus. For men to escape the futility of work and for women to escape the war of the sexes, we must both live inside the protective circle of God’s family.

Marriage

Marriage has been with us since the first day humanity existed, so fundamental to human nature that, with the exception of a few outlier people groups, every society throughout human history has practiced marriage. In the West, however, the institution of marriage is disintegrating because it has become so divorced from its spiritual basis.

First of all, to be clear, as Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians 7, Christians can rightly choose to forego marriage due to either societal upheaval or a calling to a specific ministry that would be more focused if we remain single. However, in most times and places, for most Christians, marriage is a blessing and confers favor from God (Proverbs 18:22). Indeed, a joyful marriage is man’s reward for his hard work (Ecclesiastes 9:9). When husband and wife work together to tend and guard their family, their household will be like a fruitful garden full of joy and flourishing (Psalm 128:1-4).

Unfortunately, so many marriages end up in divorce or misery because the people in those marriages don’t understand why God gave humanity marriage. The reason is simple but counterintuitive: beyond the previously explained partnership aspect, God gave us marriage so we would each have someone to give love to constantly. It is more blessed to give to receive (Acts 20:35), which is why marriage is a blessing. You find joy in marriage not from being catered to by your spouse, but from finding ways to lavish gifts on and serve your spouse continually.

When people think marriage is about getting, instead of giving, they end up in a pattern of selfishness that leads to misery and eventually divorce, because they believe they are not getting what they are rightfully owed. To illustrate this, let’s imagine for a second that you just got married. Then, imagine that you decide: “I’m going to get the most from my spouse while giving the absolute least. I won’t do a single thing for him/her that I don’t have to, and I’m going to coerce, manipulate, shame, and deceive him/her into doing as much for me as I possibly can.”

Imagine how that would turn out. Not only would you have an extremely toxic marriage, but you would actually get less love, care, attention, and benefit from your spouse than you would if you were giving, kind, and caring. Being selfish and manipulative is not only wrong, it isn’t even to your ultimate benefit.

Note: The Bible emphasizes the importance for Christians of marrying fellow Christians (2 Corinthians 6:14-18), using the metaphor of being “unequally yoked.” In Paul’s day, oxen were yoked together to enable them to work together in performing a single set of agricultural duties (such as plowing a field). Imagine two oxen being yoked together who are attempting to plow different fields – it would be nothing but stress and chaos. We cannot make the most efficient use of our lives as Christians if we are in constant conflict with our spouses, as we pull toward righteousness, but our spouses pull toward sin, especially because, as Deuteronomy 7:1-4 shows, you are far more likely to follow your spouse into sin than he/she is to follow you into righteousness.

The exception is if one of two unbelieving spouses converts after being married – in that case, the Christian is permitted to remain married so long as the spouse is content to remain married as well (1 Corinthians 7:10-16).

Keys to a Thriving Marriage

The foundation of marriage is not the sensation of infatuation, which naturally peters out within a few years. Rather, it is about commitment. That is why arranged marriages do just as well as (if not better than) love marriages. If you think a marriage is over when the feeling of being madly in love is replaced by the harsh realities of making a life with someone, your marriage is unlikely to last long. If, however, you remain committed to your spouse for as long as there isn’t a marriage-ending violation of trust, your honeymoon period will eventually be replaced by a comfort and a care that are more stable and long-lasting.

Absolutely essential to a successful marriage are the behaviors of love and respect. Love involves putting the needs and happiness of your spouse above your own, while respect involves treating your spouse as an equal in dignity, not as an inferior. It is essential that husbands and wives treat each other with both love and respect, though as Ephesians 5:22-33 makes clear, love is typically more of a challenge for husbands, while respect is typically more of a challenge for wives. This makes sense when we consider that as a leader, a sinful man would see his power as making him more important, while as a helper, a sinful woman would see her husband’s inability to succeed without her as contemptible. Men are also in particular challenged to understand that their wives don’t always think the same way they do, meaning they need to strive to engage with them kindly rather than harshly (“dwelling with them with understanding” – 1 Peter 3:7).

Two essential habits of good marital hygiene are “focusing on the outcome” and “repair.” To understand “focusing on the outcome,” consider the following hypothetical for men:

Let’s say you are fighting constantly with your wife. When your wife says something nasty or something that upsets you, your natural belief might be: “I need to fight back against my wife when she attacks me.” So, your psyche runs with that ball and finds hateful and hurtful things to say back.

However, hopefully you figure out that:

• You married your wife because you love her.
• Your wife is your ally and not your enemy.
• Your wife is not going to physically attack you, and even if she did, she is not a serious threat to you, and therefore you are not in a situation where you need to defend yourself for your survival.
• As long as you are choosing to remain married to your wife, you should really be attempting to use every encounter you have with her to build up your marriage, not tear it down.

Therefore, you stop yourself from responding with hostility when you are triggered and tell yourself, “Responding with anger is counter-productive – responding calmly, patiently, and lovingly is going to create the best outcome for me.” Pretty soon your anger subsides, and your psyche begins to offer other options for your response. For example, you could assess if something is bothering your wife (the messiness of the house, her having trouble sleeping, etc.) and attempt to fix it to make for a more positive environment. Or if you did do something wrong, even if it didn’t justify her level of response, you could and should still apologize for it, because you were in the wrong.

This leads into the concept of “repair,” which is the tool we have as spouses to keep our failures and flaws from ruining our marriages. When we have behaved inappropriately, we repair by listening, acknowledging, and apologizing. Importantly, it does not matter how the other spouse behaved, nor does it matter how much we put into the marriage in other ways. Nothing justifies sin on our part, and just as we heal our relationship with God by repenting, we heal our relationship with our spouses by owning our wrongdoings.

In fact, apologizing is so effective that we don’t necessarily have to have done something wrong to apologize. If we did something that unintentionally hurts our spouse (such as unknowingly using a word that digs up old pain or trauma), we can still apologize, which in this case is not admitting fault but rather declaring clearly that we did not intend to harm. We can also apologize when our spouse has been harmed by someone or something else (“I’m sorry to hear that”), simply as an expression of sympathy and care.

The only time it’s not appropriate to apologize is when our spouse is wrongly attempting to make us take responsibility for a conflict or hurt, when in fact we were in the right. While we should be calm and kind in the discussion about what happened, it is an enabling behavior to apologize for something we should not in fact want to take back. Instead, you should try to find something you could reasonably apologize for, such as phrasing something in a less-than-ideal way, to help defuse the situation (“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” – Proverbs 15:1).

Understanding Divorce

Unfortunately, it is all too easy to let into the vineyard of our marriage the “little foxes that spoil the vines” (Song of Solomon 2:15). Perhaps we get bored with the mundane lives we live that don’t measure up to the dreams and fantasies of our youth. Perhaps we believe our spouses should be the source of our happiness and are letting us down by having flaws or not being perfectly attentive to our needs.

We have two places to take these kinds of negative thoughts that creep into our heads: God or entitlement. If we take them to God, God will help us pull down these strongholds and bring our thoughts into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). But if we choose to indulge our entitlement instead, we end up in destructive patterns of behavior.

I could write 1000 pages on the various ways human beings are inherently entitled, but we have a particular issue with this in marriage. We go into marriage with the assumption that we are the most desirable person on the planet, that our spouses are blessed simply to be with us, and we are free to drop the hammer on our spouses when they fail to please us, even though we see all their flaws clearly and never think of them as perfect or ourselves as blessed to merely be in their presence.

This is a toxicity that defines many marriages. How could it not? Human beings worship themselves as God by nature, and it takes years of repentance and humility to make real headway into that kind of mentality, it’s so hard-wired into us. Therefore, we expect our spouses to be perfect, but we don’t expect that from ourselves. We forget Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In other words, Christ did not wait for us to be perfect and fully loving to Him to pursue us. He pursued us in our sin, and we responded to his pursuit positively.

This is a paradigm shift that can save a marriage. You can’t hold back from being all in just because of perceived slights or injustices on your spouse’s part. Instead, ask yourself this: Is your spouse your enemy? If so, due to abuse or adultery on his/her part, you are permitted to divorce him/her and marry someone else. But if not, then God expects you to love your spouse completely and unconditionally.

If you don’t, you are liable to engage in adultery.

Understanding Adultery

Consider 1 Corinthians 7:2,9:

Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband… if [the unmarried and widows] cannot exercise self-control, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

If sex can be morally experienced outside of marriage, then one would not burn with passion. One would simply have sex and find release. Therefore, Paul is indicating that such release would be immoral.

This is the general thrust of the entirety of Scripture. In fact, in Israel, if a man seduced (not raped – different Hebrew word) a woman who was neither betrothed nor married already (that would be a capital crime), he had to marry her (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). This is very different than the “rampant sex without commitment is excellent” mentality of post–Sexual Revolution modern America.

Sexuality is a gift meant to be given by each spouse to the other, binding the two together. Therefore, any selfish sexual activity, whether an affair, soliciting a prostitute, pornography, masturbation, or even being demanding in the bedroom with a spouse, falls under a category that the Bible calls “sexual immorality.” When this occurs in a marriage, it qualifies as adultery. Even if your spouse claims not to care about some form of adultery, that does not mean it’s not a marriage-damaging sin.

When the adultery is concealed from the spouse, it is called “cheating,” because it is an attempt to have sex outside the bounds of marriage while also enjoying the pleasures of a marriage in which the person is trusted by his/her spouse. The cheater only gets the marital benefits by lying, which is why it is a “cheat.” It is thus a double sin.

Is Divorce Biblical?

In Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9, Jesus explicitly calls out sexual immorality by a spouse as a legitimate basis for divorce. Similar passages in Mark and Luke don’t mention sexual immorality because they don’t have to – the Bible already covered it in the Gospel of Matthew.

Interestingly, Matthew 5:32 indicates that a man divorcing his wife for any other reason causes his wife to commit adultery, while Matthew 19:9 indicates that he commits adultery. Why would such a divorce cause the wife to commit adultery? Because, as adultery is the only Biblical basis for divorce, if a man divorces his wife, then he is spiritually declaring his wife an adulteress. Else, why would he be divorcing her? It is thus more of a legal statement than a condemnation of the wife, who is the victim in this situation.

An interesting question about these passages is: why doesn’t Jesus mention abuse as grounds for divorce? To understand this, we must realize that the Trinity (of which Jesus is a member) directed the writing of the Old Testament. Therefore, we would not expect Jesus to contradict the Old Testament. And indeed, in Malachi 2:14-16, God connects “treachery” towards a spouse to the idea of “covering one’s garment with violence.” It is obvious that if adultery is metaphorical violence, then physically or sexually assaulting a spouse would be literal violence and would qualify even more as “treachery.”

As a side note, authoritarian Christian leaders actually use these verses from Malachi to forbid a woman from divorcing her husband (because “God hates divorce”), even if the husband has been treacherous (adulterous and/or abusive). They thus twist this passage to mean exactly the opposite of what God is trying to communicate. God hates divorce because it means horrible things that He hates have happened, to the extent that a divorce is necessary. His heart for the betrayed wives should never be flipped on its head and used as a cudgel to trap a betrayed woman in a violent marriage.

Anyway, as 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 plainly reveals, in the Roman world of Jesus’ day, men could divorce their wives, but women could only leave their husbands, not divorce them. This explains why Jesus phrases his commands around divorce to only reference men divorcing women, and it also explains why abuse is not mentioned: women physically or sexually abusing men is a rare enough occurrence that it would have been a legal side case, and thus it would have been odd to include it. His instructions were thus culturally contextual. In our modern society, where women can divorce men, we can easily extrapolate the words of Jesus and Malachi to conclude that either spouse can divorce the other on grounds of sexual immorality or abuse.

Note: Another example of cultural context for laws surrounding divorce is the lack of a divorce statute for women to use against men in the Law of Moses. You see, Israelite society prior to the intertestamental period was polygamous. Because men could marry multiple women, sleeping with another woman who wasn’t married wasn’t technically adultery. Rather, it was an act that would necessitate the man taking on the other woman as an additional wife. Of course, as already mentioned, if the other woman was already married, the man would be put to death, making divorce unnecessary.

Forgoing Divorce

In the event that a spouse commits adultery, but both spouses wish to salvage the marriage, it is critical to understand that once the bond of trust in a marriage is broken, the marriage is dead. It is like a brain-dead human, whose body may be kept alive artificially but whose brain can never function again. Fortunately, while revival is not possible, resurrection is.

To resurrect a marriage, both spouses must recognize that the marriage is dead, grieve the loss of what was once a treasured relationship, and spiritually “bury” the marriage. They must then begin courting anew, beginning from where they are right at this moment. They must look at the failure of the original marriage with clear eyes, discerning why trust was broken and what must be done to keep it from being broken again. Both spouses must take responsibility for any sin they committed against the other. Then they must “remarry” (spiritually, not legally, if they never got legally divorced) and begin a new marriage.

If, however, your marriage is not dead but only on the rocks, you can fix it by being like Jesus. If you have decided that your spouse is not your enemy (in that case, divorce may be appropriate), pursue your spouse with unfailing devotion. Love him/her so thoroughly that he/she cannot help but respond in kind, even if it takes a while for him/her to trust you in the way you want him/her to. You must show consistency in your integrity of love, which could take months or even years to have an effect, depending on how damaged your relationship has become. Your spouse needs to know it’s not a fad.

But once you convince your spouse through action and deed, not just words and promises, that you are not going to leave or forsake him/her in any way, whether fully through divorce or in your heart through pornography or affairs or distractions (like sports or video games), he/she will respond. God will do a work in your marriage, I promise you that. But you must be transformed through the renewing of your mind. Bury deep into your hurt and then your entitlement, healing the former and deconstructing the latter, until you have discovered how to love your spouse like Jesus and the Church love one another.