What is a covenant marriage?

They could not see where they were to blame. "Because the LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant." They were both placed on a common footing with God.

Every right-minded man will look on his wife as the only woman in the world for him, and he will want no other. That is not because he chose her to be his wife, but because God has joined them together. He will look on her as the very woman God made for him. He will treat her as God's gift to him, and more, he will treat her as himself, for the two have become one flesh — and that by no mere human rule, but by God's own act and decree.

The marriage ceremony that civil law requires, which gives the two people a wedded status, is quite distinct from the spiritual union of husband and wife that comes from God's own will and guidance working on the hearts of those same two people. The second is the most serious and yet the happiest side of the undertaking.

Of all the unequal yokes a believer can enter, marriage is the most serious. Other partnerships can be dissolved by mutual consent, but once marriage has been entered, it can rightly be dissolved only by the death of one of the two.

What God ordered in the beginning is strictly maintained. God created man, male and female. He united the two to be one flesh, and this union is indissoluble according to God. Sin may break the bond, but divorce is completely forbidden except in the case where the bond has already been broken by that act. It is God who has formed this link; man has no right to break it.

The purpose of the oneness of husband and wife, the inviolability of the marriage bond, is declared by the prophet: "And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring." The Lord looks to find His people among the children of His servants… The godliness of the children — "godly offspring" — is divinely connected with keeping the marriage relationship sacred and undissolved.

Notice the order of the sins listed here. First there was the corruption of the covenant of Levi; then dealing treacherously, each man against his brother; then dealing treacherously with God in the matter of idolatry; and last, dealing treacherously with the wife of their youth… Where the conscience is not exercised before God, there is no guarantee of faithfulness to other people, or even, as in this passage, to those bound by the closest of all ties. Dissolve the tie between man and God, and you dissolve every other tie that binds people together.

Here the love of Christ for the church is set out as the model that the Christian husband is to shape his own love for his wife by… The love of Christ shown to us here is to be taken in from first to last as one unbroken whole. It is worth remembering in married life: the love that was true before the tie was formed is a love that stays when it is formed, and that should grow to the end.