Marriage Ceremony Outline: Seeing the Gospel and Covenant in Your Wedding

When something becomes common, its meaning and significance are forgotten. This is true of marriage and the wedding ceremony. Weddings have been in so many movies we begin to think they are good cinema instead of sacred covenant or that they belong to Hollywood instead of the Holy God. We begin to compare the pageantry and the bride’s dress more than we reflect on the eternal message being enacted before our eyes.

If we miss the gospel-rich meaning of our wedding as a covenant ceremony, then living a gospel-centered marriage can easily feel like a bait-and-switch. We must remember marriage is always a covenant. This is true regardless of our awareness or intentionality during our ceremony or appointment with the justice of the peace.

*** This post is meant to be a resource for (1) those planning their wedding, (2) pastors wanting to be more intentional in how they present the gospel through a wedding ceremony, or (3) experienced couples who want to be reminded of what they wedding was all about.

Understanding Covenant

We rarely use the word covenant today. So we need to define the term. If not, we will use our closest cultural equivalent to understand what God designed. This results in two errors. First, we think of marriage as a contract rather than a covenant. Second, we think the Bible only speaks about marriage in a few select “marriage passages.”

The first error creates a profound shift in how we think about marriage. Ultimately, our desires become the measure of our marriage, and there is nothing in our marriage that is bigger than “me.” My happiness becomes the master of the marriage. “Irreconcilable differences” has become code language for, “One (or both) of us is not happy.” Dissatisfaction with service rendered may be a reason for breaking a contract, but not a covenant.

“The covenant made between a husband and a wife is done ‘before God’ and therefore with God as well as the spouse. To break faith with your spouse is to break faith with God at the same time (p. 83).” Tim Keller in The Meaning of Marriage

 “A true Christian marriage proposal is an offer, not a request. Rather than saying in effect, ‘Will you do this for me?’ when we invite another to enter the marriage relationships, the real question should be, ‘Will you accept what I want to give?’ (p. 187).” Gary Thomas in Sacred Marriage

The last covenant our culture holds as sacred is the parent-child covenant (and even that shows signs of weakening). A parent who forsakes the parent-child covenant (abandoning their child) is viewed as having done a very bad thing; not having made a good choice towards self-actualization or expressing their rights according to legitimate preferences.

Because we still view the parent-child relationship as covenant (whether we use the language or not), we expect parents to do whatever is necessary to learn to love and bond with their children. A lazy, neglectful parent cannot at the same time still be viewed as a “good person.” But marriage, which is based upon the command to leave and cleave, should be held in even higher honor than the parent-child covenant.

The second error truncates how much of God’s wisdom we see as relevant for our marriages. God has more to say about marriage than is recorded in Genesis 1-2, a few passing references in the gospels, Colossians 3, Ephesians 5, and I Peter 3.

“That means that we cannot understand what the Bible has to say about marriage by looking only at the marriage passages, because there is a vast amount of biblical information about marriage not found in the marriage passages (p. 16).” Paul Tripp in What Did You Expect?

In the way we see God balancing His love and justice as He pursues His people; we find the example for what we are called to do as husband and wife. In the sacrificial example of Jesus laying down His life in order make relationship with sinners possible, we find the example of what is required of us as husband and wife. In the constant presence and strengthening of the Holy Spirit, we see how we are to interact as husband and wife.

The Wedding as Covenant Ceremony

We will now walk through a traditional wedding. As we do, we will be asking one question – how was the wedding ceremony designed to teach us about covenant? We will look at fifteen parts of the wedding ceremony.

For an article length Bible study and discussion of the how each of these aspects of a traditional wedding ceremony was designed to teach us the nature of covenant click here: Gospel-Centered Marriage Ceremony.