Marriage and the Sabbath, celebrated and blessed by God at creation, are two sacred institutions provided for our happiness. Christ honored marriage by performing His first miracle at a wedding feast and by making marriage a symbol of the union between Himself and His church. Both institutions are founded on love, honor, respect, faithfulness, and commitment.

Adventist Christian marriage is rooted in God’s covenant with His people. Covenant love never fails. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Adventists believe this love is a product of God's Spirit and provides the power for couples to maintain their marriage covenants amid life’s challenges.

“Issues related to marriage can be seen in their true light only as they are viewed against the background of the divine ideal for marriage. Marriage was divinely established in Eden and affirmed by Jesus Christ to be both monogamous and heterosexual, a lifelong union of loving companionship between a man and a woman. In the culmination of His creative activity, God fashioned humankind as male and female in His own image; and He instituted marriage, a covenant-based union of the two genders physically, emotionally, and spiritually, spoken of in Scripture as one flesh.

“However, the estate of marriage is not God's only plan for the meeting of human relational needs or for knowing the experience of family. Singleness and the friendship of singles are within the divine design as well. The companionship and support of friends looms in importance in both biblical testaments. The fellowship of the Church, the household of God, is available to all regardless of their married state. Scripture, however, places a solid demarcation socially and sexually between such friendship relations and marriage.

"To this biblical view of marriage the Seventh-day Adventist Church adheres without reservation, believing that any lowering of this high view is to that extent a lowering of the heavenly ideal. Because marriage has been corrupted by sin, the purity and beauty of marriage, as it was designed by God, needs to be restored. Through an appreciation of the redemptive work of Christ and the work of His Spirit in human hearts, the original purpose of marriage may be recovered and the delightful and wholesome experience of marriage realized by a man and a woman who join their lives in the marriage covenant.”1

We are all affected by the wounds and scars of severed relationships and are called to encourage one another and to build each other up. We are called to be ministers of reconciliation, healers, and repairers of the breach. While upholding God’s ideal, designed to protect us from the pain and loss that result from severing relationships, He designed to be permanent, we can love and embrace those who have suffered the agony of that loss.

"The presence of Christ alone can make men and women happy. All the common waters of life Christ can turn into the wine of heaven. The home then becomes as an Eden of bliss; the family, a beautiful symbol of the family in heaven."2

Gary Burns is the Lake Union Conference communication director.

1"An Affirmation of Marriage," General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists Administrative Committee (ADCOM), April 23, 1996.

2 Ellen G. White, The Adventist Home, p. 28.