Many people today are disappointed with marriage. They wake up one morning only to discover that the reality they live in looms far from what they had once dreamt or imagined. Because of this, some are getting out of marriage almost as quickly as they got into it.
One foundational element, or truth, that usually comes up when I conduct marital counseling sessions at our church with couples who are wanting to end their marriage is that an individual’s personal happiness is not the primary reason for why God created family or marriage. Being fulfilled and happy, having support and companionship can be benefits of a marriage, but they are not the reasons why God established marriage.
The reason that God established the institution of marriage was for the expansion of His kingdom in history. Yet oftentimes, the well-being of the home is determined by whether the man is reflecting God’s image in his role, or the woman is reflecting Him in hers. Once that mirror gets broken, the reflection that is supposed to happen in the relationship gets broken with it. Virtually every time there is a family breakdown, it is because one or both parties are functioning outside of the covenantal bonds of marriage. They are functioning with a broken mirror, and as a result, they are failing to actualize the rulership God has given to them.
What Satan tries to get us to do is to either relinquish our rule by handing it over to him through deceiving us into believing that he has authority, or he tries to get us to rule poorly based on our own judgments and distorted worldviews. It isn’t until we rule with wisdom under the comprehensive rule of God that we will become the rulers he intended. It is then that we enter into the complete realization of the divine design for a family under God.