AL: After I found out about Lisa’s affair and began to sort through the feelings of betrayal, rejection, anger, and hurt, I realized I could not let my emotions guide my actions toward Lisa or my thoughts about how we would relate to each other in the future. I only knew one trustworthy source of wisdom and advice—the Word of God. No matter how I felt, I could not deny that the Bible affirms marriage as a permanent union. At first, I struggled to accept what the concept of permanence meant for me on a personal level, but over time, I had to admit something I had known for years—that honoring and obeying God’s Word is always the path to blessing. If God says marriage is to be permanent, then I wanted to do everything I could to rebuild my relationship with Lisa, not even allowing something as devastating and serious as infidelity to separate us.
In today’s culture, values like loyalty and perseverance are becoming a lost art. If we decide we don’t like certain people, we can “unfriend” them at the touch of a button. Some sectors of our society seem to be losing appreciation for longevity in relationships; instead of permanence, many are seeking relationships that are valuable for a season, like when people need a new job or a friend with benefits. We believe these trends are detrimental to people, individually and collectively, and we see them as particularly dangerous to the institution of marriage, which always has been and always will be designed to be permanent and unbreakable.
When the Bible speaks of becoming “one flesh,” that’s about as permanent an arrangement as anyone could come up with. Of course, this idea includes God’s intention of intimacy in a sexual relationship, when two people become one anatomically. It’s also the reason behind the tradition of a husband and wife sharing the same last name. When we married, “Al and Lisa” became “the Robertsons.”
Once two people have joined their lives together in unity, they become something different than they were before they entered the marriage covenant.
Once two people have joined their lives together in unity and become one, they become something different than they were before they entered the marriage covenant. Making this unified creation separate again is painful. Think about it: Even something as simple as an apple is one unified object. It cannot be made “two” without cutting. Any time a relationship that is intended to stay together gets separated, neither person involved can go back to being exactly who they were before the breech. They’ve become one with someone else, and they cannot simply take back everything they put into the marriage or they will lose part of themselves.
We once visited a beautiful place in Arkansas, a lookout point with gorgeous views of mountains and valleys. We could envision lots of weddings taking place there, with this breathtaking vista as a backdrop. Before we left, we looked down and saw a broken glass container with some sand in it. Immediately, both of us thought we knew what had happened.
In many wedding ceremonies, a bride and groom each pour a small amount of sand, sometimes sands of different colors, into a container and mix it to symbolize their new unity and life together. The point of this gesture is that once grains of sand are mixed, they cannot be separated again. They’re together forever.
We will never know for sure how the broken container we saw ended up at the lookout point. The wind had blown away most of the sand, but we could clearly see grains of two colors remaining. Our theory is that someone once got married there, then the marriage went bad, and the person went back to that spot to shatter the glass vessel as a representation of their devastated relationship. When we saw it, we looked at each other with so much sympathy for this couple, whoever they were, and thought about the depths of pain they must have felt.
When we teach or counsel couples, we tell them marriage is a “no surrender, no evacuation” arrangement. We also talk to them about the fact that they cannot just “opt out” of their marriage without severe consequences. The reason a broken marriage is so painful is that marriages were never meant to be torn apart. From the very beginning, God has intended for people to stay together as husband and wife, allowing nothing but death to separate them.
No doubt marriage is an environment in which to make mistakes, and plenty of mistakes are made. But marriage is also a place to make amends. In a relationship designed to be permanent, grudges and hard-heartedness cannot be allowed. A marriage relationship has to be a place where apologies flow freely. It’s a relationship of ultimate accountability and constant forgiveness, and the keys to permanence are honesty and trust. That’s the only way to live together forever in peace, joy, and blessing.
Just as a human being is designed to be “one” for life and cannot easily disconnect from an arm or a leg, marriages are also created for unity that lasts a lifetime. A commitment to a husband or wife cannot be viewed as temporary or “until things get really hard” in an ideal marriage. To live under God’s blessing, both husband and wife have to understand that it’s a permanent arrangement. God knows it will be hard at times. There may even be times when one or both spouses want to leave the marriage. We know what that’s like. We also know the rewards that come with choosing to stay together, no matter what difficulties arise. By God’s grace and a lot of trust in His ability to heal hurts, habits, and hang-ups, Lisa and I were able to reconcile and not divorce—and what a great thing that has turned out to be!