Stop Looking for the Perfect Spouse. They Don’t Exist.
The Idolatry of Marriage
If we want to talk about a sin that is constantly running rampant, it’s idolatry. If we want to talk about the form that is most prevalent among today’s younger (and some older) Christians, it’s marriage. A wife. A husband. A family. (I’m writing this because I’m guilty—just to get that out of the way).
Idolatry has existed since the first sin. One could make an argument that pride, which had its heavy-handed nature all over Adam and Eve’s first transgression, is one of the worst forms of idolatry—if it could be argued that one idol is worse than another—that is, self-idolatry, making oneself above God in importance. If I were to hazard a guess, it is my belief that every person on the planet commits this sin perhaps once a day if not even more often. The most popular story of idolatry is probably the Israelites at Mount Sinai, but I’m going to take us through this in a bit of a different manner here.
The Problem of a “Perfect” Spouse
The issue I’m tackling isn’t just the idolatry of marriage. That’s a well-documented struggle among everyone for all time. What I want to tackle is an issue I see on social media a lot (go figure) and has to do with a specificity for idolatry that I’m sure has come up before, but I have personally never seen this widespread. It might be because of trends, and it might be because we, as a Church, have slipped farther into a Christianity-tangential spirituality, but regardless, it’s dangerous. I’m talking about the type of idolatry that causes people to believe their spouse is going to be perfect.
It seems like I’m lambasting women and young ladies, but that’s not my goal; I’m a single guy, so I’m more likely to come across social media feeds of single women, so that’s just what I see (and I have absolutely seen guys falling into a similar heretical idolatry, and I will touch on it). Still, I see frequently posts online along the lines of, “A man of God will not…” and they’re always statements that look like really good things—some of them are—but a lot are pure idolatry.
We have two examples: 1) “A man of God will not make excuses for his faults but will seek God to renew him.”
2) “A man of God will not lead you into sin.”
You might be thinking to yourself, “Wow, both of those seem pretty fair, actually.” And you would be wrong. Point in fact, we have one man of God who did the exact opposite of both of those things in the father of all Israel. In Romans 4:2-3, it says, “If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about—but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness.” This is clear evidence of the tenet of Christianity that we are justified by faith, not by works.
Imperfect People Cannot be Justified or Approved by Works
Because if we were approved by works, Abraham would have never been chosen as the father of Israel. If we read closely enough, we can see exactly how Abraham fails on both the accounts of the statements above, specifically with his wife Sarah. Genesis 12 gives us the account of Abram and Sarai traveling to Egypt because of famine. There, Abram fears death because Sarai is beautiful and the Egyptians could kill him and take her. So he has her lie (leads her into sin) to say she’s his sister (not his wife). Technically, Sarai was Abram’s half-sister, but as the story goes, we find that God doesn’t care about this little half truth. What He does care about is Abram forcing Sarai into adultery with Pharaoh in order to save his own skin, as seen by God striking Pharaoh with plagues. So he leads her into two sins.
And then he does it again in Genesis 20. Granted, Sarah is not forced into adultery this time; God saves her from that, but she is to lie yet again for Abraham’s sake—something that he asked her to do. Right after, however, Abraham commits the first of these offenses a man of God will not commit. In Genesis 20:11-13, it says, “Abraham replied, ‘I thought, “There is absolutely no fear of God in this place. They will kill me because of my wife.” Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife. So when God had me wander from my father’s house, I said to her: Show your loyalty to me wherever we go and say about me, “He’s my brother.”’” Here is Abraham, a man made righteous, a husband, giving excuses instead of just accepting his fault.
Not to say Sarah is perfect, either. We’re talking about the woman who gave her servant woman to her husband, most likely unwillingly, because she didn’t trust God to give her a child as He said He would. Sarah forced Hagar to procreate with Abraham and then hated Hagar from then on.
How Does This Relate to Marriage and the Social Media Trend?
Okay, let me wrap this up. The problem I see here is that we (both men and women) are forcing each other into situations where it’s impossible to please one another because we’ve turned marriage into an idolatrous transaction of works-based perfection. I have been on the receiving end of this myself—perhaps not because I was expected to be perfect by her but because I expected that she expected me to be perfect. Furthermore, I expected out of her things that I could have only gotten from God. We made mistakes, just as every person makes mistakes. It’s not the work that gets us to marriage but the grace of God to show off the relationship of Christ and His Church—an imperfect showing off.
The problem, as I see it, is that we’re expecting potential spouses to be perfect, and it’s just not possible. At the shallowest end of this, we’re expecting the person we marry to check off all the boxes in the beginning that ought to be checked off after 50 years of marriage. At the most egregious, men and women are literally expecting their wives and husbands to be as perfect as Christ from the onset. We forget that marriage is not a works-based gift. You don’t get it because you’re good enough or no one would be married. God gifts spouses to teach us about who He, Christ, and the Church are and to sanctify us more fully. Consequently, this is why a lot of marriage hopefuls never get married; their bar is so high it’s impossible to reach because the second someone makes a mistake, the relationship is over. There’s not enough grace in relationships, especially among the single population.
The Refined Gold Blessing’s “Miraculous” Transformation
I want to round out my points by bringing things back to the statement I made earlier about Israel’s idolatry at Mount Sinai because I believe it gives a fantastic illustration of what kind of relationship a lot of people expect nowadays. In this case of idolatry, Aaron makes a golden calf for Israel to worship while God gives Moses the Ten Commandments. Most people know that story, but most don’t really pay attention to what happens after because it’s a single-line excuse from Aaron in Exodus 32:24, “So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off,’ and they gave it to me. When I threw it into the fire, out came this calf!”
We know that Aaron meticulously crafted this calf out of the gold he received. We also know that gold doesn’t just come out of a fire in the perfect image of a calf. What we have is a perfect example of what people do with relationships. That gold was a gift from God, perfectly provided to Israel by God through the people of Egypt as they escaped into the wilderness. It was provision from God for knowing who He is. Moses had just received the commands on turning that very same gold into the fittings of the tabernacle and the holy instruments to worship God. If they had allowed God to use and refine the gold as He saw fit, they would have grown and been blessed with His presence among them at all times in the tabernacle. They would have been set for life.
Instead, rather than accepting this blessing and allowing God to work in the time He desires, they sought to refine the gold themselves. They set its boundaries and limits, and they expected it to do things it could never have done all while claiming it was a miracle. The Israelites worshiped the golden calf as the god that brought them out of Egypt, and they made an image that was perfect to them. But it could do nothing.
This is the perfect image of creating a characteristic list that can’t be fulfilled. We’re taking the qualities God says a husband and leader should have (or a wife and follower should have) and adding to them, shaping them, coercing them to be what they weren’t meant to be because of our impatience and lack of refining ourselves. If God says a person should follow after him, we turn it into a person should be perfect. This is like saying, “whoever has gold, take it off.” Then, we put that in the fire and shape it into the perfect idol, the perfect husband or spouse (which doesn’t exist). And when someone asks us what we expect in a relationship, we claim our hand-shaped calf is the godly person, the one who will be perfect for us, and, furthermore, that we didn’t command it but that God did, knowing, deep down, that we made it our own god.
What it really comes down to is stop expecting people to be perfect. They will always fail. Always. As you’re looking for a spouse, don’t settle for someone evil, but don’t expect them to be perfect either. Throw away your expectations and trust God to give you someone who will help refine you. Throw away your expectations and work on letting God refine you as you are now. We get marriage incredibly wrong; it’s not just for your enjoyment, it’s to make you a better believer, a more faithful child. So stop throwing away perfectly good men and women because they don’t meet your absurd expectations of perfection; your golden calf is doing you no good at all. And until you let God take that down, you’ll always be disappointed by the person He brings you to marry.