What Are the Benefits of Marriage?

God created marriage.

That’s the truth we need to start with.

If we were calling the shots, marriage could look however we want it to look, exist between whoever we want it to exist between, and require as much (or as little) as we want it to require.

If we don’t acknowledge marriage’s divine roots—instituted and defined by God Himself in the earliest days of humanity’s history—then the benefits of a happy marriage are nothing more than a hodgepodge of little factoids you can find scattered across the Internet:

Higher survival rates for heart attack victims. Improved mental health. More social connections and support. Reduced overall stress.

Interesting side points, but not compelling. Not the point.

Marriage has a lot more to offer than that—but before we can understand its most profound benefits, we have to acknowledge that the institution God created and blessed as holy isn’t one we get to tamper with or remake according to our preferences.

There’s a reason for marriage. And it’s not a reason we can discover in a controlled experiment or in a research study or even by personal experience.

It’s something we have to let the Creator explain.

After God created the first woman from the side of the first man, He brought them together. The man recognized that the woman was more than just a fellow human—she was “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). They each provided something unique that the other lacked.

“Therefore,” the Bible explains, “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (verse 24, English Standard Version).

The necessary requirements

The marriage we’re talking about in this article is the kind that can exist only between a Christian husband and his wife—and not Christian in name only, but Christian in the sense of actively seeking to know and obey God. (For more on that subject, download our free booklet What Is a True Christian?)

But why?

When two committed, married Christians make it their goal to live up to the Bible’s lofty instructions for husbands and wives, the end result is something beautiful. Is it impossible to find a loving, respectful relationship between two people who don’t know (or don’t believe in) God?

Hardly. In fact, you can probably point to a half-dozen marriages between two nonbelievers that are in a healthier state than some of the marriages you’ve seen between Christians.

I can too.

But a failure to live up to the ideal doesn’t invalidate the ideal. It just highlights the gap between imperfect human beings and a perfect God.

Even so, the most important core benefits of marriage require a relationship with the God who created marriage—because without that framework, we won’t even know those benefits are there.

It doesn’t mean all Christian marriages are perfect. (They’re not.) It doesn’t mean happy relationships don’t exist outside the sphere of Christianity. (They do.) It doesn’t mean that believing in God is the only key to a healthy, functioning marriage. (It isn’t.)

But it does mean that God gets to set the boundaries for what a marriage is and isn’t. It does mean that God gets to tell us what a marriage ought to look like. And it does mean that unless we’re willing to listen to God’s definitions, the core benefits of marriage are forever lost to us.

(To dive deeper into what marriage ought to look like and what it has the potential to become, download our free booklet God’s Design for Marriage.)

Submission and love

When the apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians, he urged them to live according to the marriage roles God had established.

For women, this meant submitting to their husbands “as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22). For men, this meant loving their wives “just as Christ also loved the church” (verse 25).

Those instructions clash with many modern views of marriage. A woman intentionally submitting to a man sounds like a step backward in women’s rights. What an archaic, chauvinistic approach—are wives really burdened with submission while husbands are only expected to show love?

Not quite.

A deeper kind of love

“This is a great mystery,” continued Paul, “but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (verse 32).

Obedience and love are two key components uniting Jesus Christ and His Church.

“We love Him,” wrote John, “because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

What kind of love are we talking about, exactly? An incredible moment of self-sacrifice on the stake, yes—but more than that. It was also a love that prompted Him to empty Himself of His divine splendor and live out a lowly but sinless human life that ended in crucifixion (Philippians 2:6-8).

Love your wives with that kind of love, says Paul—“just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25, emphasis added).

This is no superficial, transitory kind of love husbands are commanded to show. It’s the kind of love that causes us to see someone else as a precious treasure, “for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church” (verse 29).

A mirror of something bigger

Wives, meanwhile, are called to submit to their husbands—to accept his leadership and become a willing support structure for the family unit.

But, again, this is no arbitrary assignment. It isn’t a mark of inferiority. It mirrors something.

“Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything” (verse 24).

This kind of submission is, in its own way, an act of love.

We love Him because He first loved us, right? But how do we show that love?

Jesus told us how: “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15). But our obedience doesn’t make us ignorant, mindless servants, either: “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

Jesus shows His love through His sacrifice and through His continued service as our High Priest (Hebrews 4:14-15). We show our love by submitting our will to His.

Jesus leads; the Church follows. The husband leads; the wife follows. Jesus loves and gives Himself for the Church; the husband loves and gives himself for the wife.

Four thousand years before Jesus set aside His divine form and came to the earth as a human being, God established marriage as a physical representation of the precious spiritual relationship we could one day have with Christ.

And that, more than anything else, is the true benefit of marriage:

A glimpse of something divine.

What a marriage makes

If each person is doing his or her part—and whenever we’re talking about flawed human beings, that is, admittedly, a big “if”—then the ultimate result of marriage is a model of our relationship with our Savior.

It’s not a perfect model, to be sure. No husband could possibly fill the role of the Son of God. But when both husband and wife are striving to do their part—to love each other through submission and self-sacrifice—their married life together starts to reflect the kind of relationship we as the Church can expect to have with Jesus Christ.

And, inevitably, they change in the process.

A husband with a wife who trusts and respects him is going to have a powerful template for what it means to submit himself to the will of God. A wife with a husband who consistently makes her needs a priority will likewise have a regular reminder of Christ’s own love for her.

And in the process, they’ll both grow to be more like their Father in heaven.

“For this reason . . .”

Here’s Paul again, pointing us back to the Genesis account:

“‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband” (Ephesians 5:31-33).

When two committed, married Christians make it their goal to live up to the Bible’s lofty instructions for husbands and wives, the end result is something beautiful:

A stable, loving, God-centered relationship that continually challenges both husband and wife to become more like the God who created them, strengthening their connection to Him and to each other.

It’s not always easy.

But it’s so, so worth it.