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7. Building True Marriage
By Kurt Simons | May 30, 2007
1. What, exactly, is marriage? It is nothing less than a reflection of the mind of God. For God has two basic components, love and wisdom. In other words, He is most fundamentally a combination of Divine Love, which is love itself and the origin of our ability to love, and Divine Wisdom, which is truth itself and the origin of our ability to think. Every human soul or spirit is created in the “image” (Genesis 1: 27) of those two qualities, which form the basis of our ability to feel and think. The love and wisdom combination of God is reflected, though not as fully as in human beings, at lower degrees of creation, further removed from Him, but still reflecting His duality. It is apparent in everything from sex in animals and plants down to the many complementary aspects of physical creation, such as action-reaction in physics, acids and bases in chemistry, and even such everyday things as a plug and socket or bolt and nut. But the key point is that each human soul is made up of a combination of love and wisdom, thinking and feeling.
At the beginning, then, “the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him’” (Genesis 2:18). However, instead of making everybody the same in terms of their balance of love and wisdom, “male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27, 5:2). In other words, it was “not good” for there to be only one sex. So God made two. While both have the loving and thinking combination, He made the woman’s mind and spirit more oriented toward the loving capability and the man’s toward the thinking capability. Is this somehow inequitable? Just the opposite - this distinction contains the secret for achieving the highest happiness that human beings can experience. For in marriage, the loving-thinking “imbalances” of the souls of men and woman beautifully complement each other, and they become “no more two but one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, 19:6). In heaven, where all angels are married, the bond between husband and wife is so close that sometimes, seen from a distance, they may appear as one person. Their spiritual union mirrors the balance of love and wisdom in God more fully than either sex can achieve alone and so that union leads to the greatest happiness God gives to humankind.
2. How important is true marriage? Some indication is given in the fact that in the first chapter of the Bible, right after the description of Creation, the first teaching given is about God creating people, and specifically that “male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). Then in a second account of Creation, in the next chapter of Genesis, is yet another account of the creation of man and woman and the description of man being united to his wife (Genesis 2: 24). So clearly marriage is important. But, again, how important? Important enough to be central to the reason God created the universe.
God is a God of love. Love is fundamentally a reciprocal relationship, with each side loving the other. God, Who is love itself and the origin of all love, thus wanted someone outside Himself to love who would love Him in return. In fact, He, being love itself, needed to have someone to love and be loving in return. So, could He just create people so they had to love Him? No. If they were created to love Him they would have no choice. They would just be robots, doing what they were programmed to and God would just be loving Himself by remote control.
God’s elegant solution to this problem was to create people in spiritual free will, so they could love Him or not, whichever they chose. Then, if they did love Him, it would be a meaningful relationship. The marriage of husband and wife is important to this approach for two reasons: One is that, as noted above, the spiritually “balanced” combination of husband and wife can be more completely in God’s “image” (Genesis 1: 27), and hence able to more completely reciprocate His love, than any individual can do alone. The other is that married couples are the means by which He brings new people into the world that He can love. Since He is infinite, there is no limit to the number of people He can and wants to love.
3. So, while men and women are both images of God, since they are both incomplete images, they feel that incompleteness in their strong attraction for each other. The heart of that attraction is the longing of two incomplete halves to make a whole. The strong and beautiful feelings associated with sexual intercourse are, in marriage, both an expression of and an aid to this conjunction. Angels in heaven, who are all married, have intercourse for the same reason, and it is even more beautiful than it is on earth because there at last their spirits may fully touch one another.
The teachings of the Second Coming also tell us that, in contrast to our cultural belief that romance is mainly based on sensual expression, true marriage is fundamentally based on a deep and intimate form of friendship. “The states produced by [married] love are innocence, peace, tranquility, inmost friendship, complete trust, and a mutual desire in mind and heart to do the other every good…” (Married Love 180). On earth as well as in heaven, marriage is nurtured by the trust and peace you feel in the company of the person who is literally your best friend - your spouse. This marriage friendship finds expression in the special intimacies that are unique to it, but the beauty and power of all forms of intimacy derive from the daily work of a couple’s relationship, the shared struggles, triumphs, humor and pain of their journey toward God’s goals. In time, a good such relationship becomes so close and harmonious that a married pair have but a single outlook, as in the saying inscribed in many a wedding ring: “One heart, one mind, one way.”
[I]n marriages in the heavens there is no predominance; for the will of the wife is also the husband’s will, and the understanding of the husband is also the wife’s understanding, since each loves to will and to think as the other, that is, mutually and reciprocally. Thus are they conjoined into one. This conjunction is actual conjunction, for the will of the wife enters into the understanding of the husband, and the understanding of the husband into the will of the wife, and this especially when they look into one another’s faces; for, as has been repeatedly said above, there is in the heavens a sharing of thoughts and affections, more especially with husband and wife, because they reciprocally love each other. From all this it can be established what the conjunction of minds is that makes marriage and produces married love in the heavens, namely, that one wishes what is his own to be the other’s, and this reciprocally” (Heaven and Hell 369).
4. The destructive power of sexual intercourse outside of the marriage of man and wife results from the fact that the act has been separated from the special married love it was created to express. Thus, for instance, sexuality in hell is the opposite of that in heaven. With the “spirit” of true marriage removed, hellish spirits engage only in a loathsome and degraded imitation of the delights of heavenly intercourse.
(A note on vocabulary: In some translations, the word for married love used in teachings of the Second Coming is “conjugial love,” from the Latin word Swedenborg used for this special love, “conjugial” - which should not be confused with the term “conjugal.”)
5. What about marriage after death? The fairy tales were right. True marriage does live happily ever after - into eternity. The Second Coming has revealed that when you become an angel you are still a man or woman in every detail and that all angels are happily and romantically married. Marriage services based on the Second Coming teachings do not include the phrase “till death do us part” because death never parts a married pair who truly love each other. Those teachings also make clear that everyone who earnestly seeks this deep, eternal love will find it. People who do not find their true spiritual partner in this world will find him or her after death in the spiritual world on the way to heaven.
There has been considerable confusion about marriage after death caused by the traditional interpretation of Jesus’ statements that, after death “they are neither married nor given in marriage but are like angels of God in heaven.” (Matthew 22: 30; Mark 12: 25; Luke 20: 35). A hint of what Jesus was really saying here is suggested by the fact that He made this statement in a discussion with the Sadducees about the Jewish law that a woman whose husband died could be given to her husband’s brother, illustrating the fact that women were at that time considered virtually pieces of property, owned in a way not very different from animals. In other words, what the Sadducees understood as “marriage” was not at all what that term truly means. In keeping with that, note that part of Christ’s statement was that in heaven no one is “given in marriage.” In other words, the kind of property transaction illustrated by Sadducees’ example of a woman handed down from one brother to the next, or in the case of the women being bargained for in the story of Shechem and Dinah (Genesis 34), is not true marriage and so is not found in heaven.
That even on earth there had originally in earlier times (i.e. the Golden Age) been a better concept of marriage is suggested by Jesus’ statement in His discussion with the Pharisees about divorce that, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19: 8).
6. So how do you build a successful spiritual marriage? The Old and New Testaments have remarkably little to say explicitly on the subject of marriage-building, given its central importance. There are a few very clear and strong statements on the subject, such as the Commandment against adultery (Exodus 20: 14), its extrapolation in Jesus’ teaching that thinking about lust is as dangerous as doing it (Matthew 5: 28), and, most notably, Jesus’ statement that people should both get married and stay married (Matthew 19: 5, 6). The happiness of bride and bridegroom are also mentioned in several places (e.g. Isaiah 62: 5, Jeremiah 33: 11), and Jesus used the imagery of bridegroom and bride symbolically in some of His teaching (e.g. Matthew 9: 15; 25: 1-10; Revelation 21: 2), but these teachings, while they support the ideal, provide little practical advice on making marriage work.
Why this silence? It seems inescapable that, just as the Apostles only dimly understood who Jesus was, so true marriage was a concept that most people in New Testament times were just not ready to grasp. In other words, a full understanding of marriage appears to be one of the teachings that Jesus was referring to when He said, “I still have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now” (John 16: 12). And, in fact, Jesus at His Second Coming has brought the full explanation of what marriage is all about, spiritually and naturally, since people now can “bear” - understand - those teachings.
For Further Reading
From the Teachings of the Second Coming
Wisdom’s Delight in Marriage (”Conjugial”) Love: Followed by Insanity’s Pleasure in Promiscuous Love - The book of the teachings of the Second Coming that comprehensively covers both the ideals of building an angelic marriage and realistic advice on how to cope with the non-ideal to, if possible, save the potential for true marriage.
Other Titles
Chauncey Giles, The Sanctity of Marriage - A brief reflection on marriage in Giles’ usual inspiring and thought-provoking way.
Stephen R. Simons, Preparing for Real Marriage - Practical and realistic advice on how to build an ideal marriage.
To Chapter 8: Correspondences: The Great Lost Secret