A man knocked on my office door and asked me if I would officiate his marriage. I asked him to sit down so we could chat about his plans, timing, and spiritual life. “Oh, I’m not sure you understand,” he said, “I’d like you to marry me today, like in the next hour.” The story is complicated, but his fiancée was from a country in Asia and was living in the US with a short-term visa. For numerous reasons he wanted to marry right away, but he didn’t want a civil authority to perform the ceremony. He wanted a church and a pastor.

While there were many factors at play in this man’s situation, he clearly understood that marriage was a holy thing. Even in his predicament, he wanted to ensure that he and his fiancée recognized God in their vows.

This impulse was right, for Scripture tells us that marriage is—at its core—not foremost about a human action but God’s action. Matthew described how the “Pharisees came and tried to trap [Jesus] with [a] question” (Matthew 19:3) concerning the appropriate conditions for divorce (a question designed to force Jesus to take sides in a heated religious dispute). But Jesus refused to answer the question on their terms. Rather, He reasserted the central biblical teaching that the union of a husband and wife is not a matter of human creation or human dissolution (Matthew 19:4-5). In marriage, man and woman are “no longer two but one,” Matthew wrote, because “God has joined [them] together” (Matthew 19:6).

Marriage is God’s idea. It’s one of the ways He makes His love visible in the world. The healing of broken marital relationships is His work. The poet Rilke described marriages as “roots that drink from heaven.” What a perfect description!

NLT 365-day reading plan passage for today: 2 Kings 2:13-25