10 How Biblical Marriage Solves Your Need for Intimacy

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Listener Warning, this particular talk concerns issues within marriage and may not be appropriate for young listeners. If you're listening with little ones nearby, you may want to save this podcast for later. Today is the 10th episode in the companion series to my book, Start Strong, A New Believer's Guide to Christianity, and we will be studying Genesis chapter 2, verses 15 through 25, which is one of the book's See for Yourself passages from chapter 10. If you haven't read chapter 10 of the book yet, don't worry, just keep listening. In this episode, we're going back to Genesis 2 to recover a vision of biblical marriage. A marriage that's not defined by a set of moral rules, but by a beautiful, compelling picture of how God created us to love and live. You'll discover three foundational commitments that can transform your marriage from a struggling partnership into a thriving covenant. And you'll understand why Hollywood's promise of freedom actually leads to loneliness, while God's design leads to the intimacy you've been searching for. Thanks for listening today. Of all the topics I teach, biblical marriage is one of the most misunderstood today and probably one of the most needed. When I first started teaching biblical marriage over 40 years ago, most people found the idea familiar, even if they didn't agree with it. But today, the whole concept of a biblical marriage often sounds foreign and even radical, not because the Bible has changed, but because culture has changed. The biblical view of marriage and sexuality is not a list of what's forbidden. It's a vision, a beautiful and compelling, deeply human vision for how we were created and where we will find the most fulfillment. For this talk, I debated whether to teach from Genesis 2 or the Song of Songs. Genesis focuses on God's design for marriage, and the Song of Solomon focuses on God's design for sexuality. And I think our culture desperately needs to hear both those messages. Modern culture has lost the vision of what marriage can be. Just listen to the language we use to talk about marriage and especially sexuality today. What was once described in Scripture with beautiful poetry and joy, like we see in the Song of Songs, is now buried under gutter talk and crude slang. What was once sacred and intimate is now often treated as a purely physical transaction. Since covering both passages is just too much information for one podcast, I decided to start with marriage and look at Genesis 2 in the hopes that I can inspire you to recover God's design for marriage. So let's get started. Let's look at Genesis. Genesis 1 gives an account of how God created the heavens and the earth. It's on the sixth day that he creates mankind. So in Genesis 1 26 through 28 we read this. Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heaven, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them, and God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. So from chapter one, we learn that mankind is unique among God's creation. We are unique in that we are the only creatures created in God's image, and we are given dominion, that is authority, over creation. Then we get to Genesis two, and it's not only a new chapter, it's a break in the timeline. Moses, who's the author of Genesis, backtracks to tell us in more detail about the creation of mankind. So we'll pick up in Genesis 2.5 and go to 2.8. When no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And then we get a description of the garden and the rivers around it. I'm going to skip all that and go down to verse fifteen. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh, and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Now there's always a lot we can talk about when it comes to Genesis, but our goal today is to figure out what we can learn about marriage from the way God created it. So I probably won't answer all your questions, but hopefully you'll get that question answered. Before Eve is created, God created Adam and put him in the garden and he gave him meaningful work to do. Adam is not drifting, he's not bored, he's not sitting around waiting for his missing piece. God gave him a task to work the garden and to keep it. So Adam is created, given dominion, given a purpose, given responsibility and authority. He's been created in God's image and given dominion and authority over the earth. But then we get the surprising line in 218. Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. Well, that ought to jar us because if you read through Genesis 1, up to this point, everything has been good. Genesis 1 recounted how God creates everything. God speaks, God creates, then he evaluates what he creates, and at the end of each day we see this repeated phrase, and God saw that it was good. So at the end of day one, God saw that it was good. At the end of day two, God saw that it was good. And that continues to the end of day six when God says that it was very good. But here we are in the middle of day six. God looks at Adam's situation and says, This is not good, but God has not finished yet. And notice who says it's not good. God says that, not Adam. Adam does not come to God with a complaint. Adam doesn't say, Lord, I feel lonely. Adam doesn't even know he's got a problem yet. God is the first one to name the problem. And that tells us something foundational about marriage. Marriage is part of God's design. God created it for a purpose. Marriage is not a response to human whining. It's God's wise provision for a need that we wouldn't even understand on our own. But God understands the man he made. God knows what kind of life will be best for him, and it's not being alone. So it is God who defines what is good for humanity, God who defines what alone means, and it is God who defines what kind of help Adam needs. God is not improvising here, he's designing. Now the next part of the story is where this point really comes alive. God could have created Eve immediately. He could have said, it's not good for you to be alone, and then boom, here's Eve, problem solved. But he doesn't. Instead, God leads Adam through this process. He brings the animals to Adam to name them. And that can sound like just a random detail, like maybe it's there just to show that Adam is intelligent or that he has authority because he gets to name everything. But I think the naming is doing more than that. This is God teaching Adam what God already knows. Because as the animals come by, Adam does what human beings naturally do. He starts noticing patterns, he sorts, he organizes, he categorizes, and as he does, he sees something obvious. Every other creature has a match. There's a kind of correspondence in creation, as all the other species have male-female pairs, and Adam is the one exception. Adam is alone. So Adam is learning through experience that there is no partner who corresponds to him, and there is no one who can share the uniquely human call to bear God's image, steward God's world, and live in relationship with God. Genesis 2, 20 puts it this way: but for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. Or some translations might have suitable for him. That phrase means corresponding to him, of like kind, like the right puzzle piece. The two pieces are different, they're not identical, but they are truly matched. They're designed to go together. God is teaching Adam that he needs someone who is like Adam in the ways that matter most, and different from him in the ways that make a partnership fulfilling and possible. And again, this is God's idea. God recognized that Adam had a need, and in fact, God created Adam with that need. Then he taught Adam that Adam has this need, and now God designs the solution. So the storyline is not Adam decided he wanted a wife and God granted his wish. The storyline is God created Adam with a need for intimacy. Then God prepared Adam to recognize the gift that will solve that need when it arrives. Now I think we can presume from Genesis 1 that Eve is created with the same kind of need. Both men and women are created in God's image. They are both given dominion and they are matched in their need and desire for intimacy. But remember, this is pre-fall. The fall hasn't happened yet when the story is taking place. At this point in history, there is no sin, no rebellion, no shame, no corruption, death or futility, no relational games, no hiding. In Genesis 2, Adam is not living in a cold, distant universe. God is present with him in ways that we today only dream about. God speaks to him. God gives him work. God gives him a purpose. He can talk to God in a way we might describe as face-to-face. And when he speaks to God, God audibly answers. And yet, even with that kind of wonderful, opened, pre-sin relationship with God, God still says it's not good that man should be alone. That means Adam's problem is not that he lacks God. Adam's problem is that he lacks a human counterpart. Even in a perfect world, God created us to need each other. God created Adam and Eve to need someone else, someone who shares their nature, their calling, and their life, someone they can know and be known by in a way that fulfills what it means to be human. So God takes Adam through naming the animals because God wants him to understand the significance of what's about to happen. God wants Adam to receive Eve, not as an accident, not as a commodity, not as a convenience for his use, but as a profound and personal gift to solve a need that he was built with. So the first thing we learn is that God created us with a need for intimacy, and his solution to that need is marriage, sexuality, and sexual difference. And that's already a countercultural view of marriage. Genesis teaches us that God made human beings for relationships, and marriage is one of God's central created ways of meeting that need. Eve is not a social accessory. She's not his chef, cook, chauffeur, and maid. Marriage is not a human tradition. God built us with the need for intimacy, and marriage is his solution to fill that need. So God created us with a need for intimacy from the very beginning. We don't need each other because sin broke everything and now we cling to each other like life wraps. We need each other because God made human beings to be relational. He built that into our design. Now you might be thinking, hey, wait, are you saying that every person must be married? No. The Bible will later honor singleness as a good gift for some people, but Genesis is telling us something basic about human nature. You and I were made for relationship, and marriage is one of the central ways that God solves that. Now the second thing we learn is that since God created marriage, that means marriage is not ours to redefine. God saw Adam's need. God created marriage and sexuality in answer to that need. We humans did not create marriage so society could deal with our sexuality. God created marriage and sexuality for us to meet our needs. So God had a purpose and a design for both marriage and sexuality, and we don't have the authority to change it. Our choice is whether we're going to obey it, ignore it, distort it, or rebel against it, but we cannot redefine it and still claim we're following God. And that point's going to become more clear as we look at the rest of the story. Notice God's answer is not to create another man, God's answer is to create a woman, and that's not a throwaway detail. God teaches us that the kind of intimacy he has in mind that he created us with is tied to the way he made us male and female. The corresponding helper, the fit companion is not simply another human presence, it is a counterpart, someone like Adam and his humanity, but also different from him. Now, a lot of people assume that sexuality came first and marriage came later. And the story we hear from anthropologists often goes something like this: humans have sexual urges, and those urges create chaos, and society needs guardrails. So we created marriage to organize sexuality and keep things stable. And if that were true, then marriage would basically be a human tool. And if it's a tool, we can redesign it whenever we want. But Genesis does not treat marriage like a tool we invented. Genesis treats marriage like a gift God created for us. And that ought to change how we think about marriage and sexuality. In Genesis 2, God does not say, oops, Adam has sexual desires. I better figure out a way to control them. Instead, God creates a marriage relationship which introduces the whole concept of sexuality and sexual difference, which means that sexuality was created for the purpose of marriage and not the other way around. So I think the logic of Genesis is God creates marriage and sexuality has its proper place in marriage. And I know that statement can sound very restrictive to modern ears, so let me put it a different way. Genesis is not trying to kill joy and limit personal expression. Genesis is anchoring joy to the thing it was made for. Think of it like train tracks. The tracks don't limit the train. The tracks make it possible for the train to go where it was designed to go without getting demolished. When the train jumps off the track, it gets in trouble. In the same way, God is not looking at humans and saying, How do I stop them from enjoying life? He's saying, I created mankind with this need, and here is this incredible, wonderful relationship that I am creating, and I'm going to give it to them as this wonderful gift, including sexuality, to express and fulfill that relationship. So marriage isn't ours to define because we didn't create it. We don't get to rewrite the rules of marriage. Similarly, we didn't create or design sexuality, so we don't get to set the rules and boundaries for it either. All right, so what is this gift of marriage that God gave us? God explains it in Genesis 2.24. Let me read that again. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. That first word, therefore, tells you the author is drawing a conclusion. Some translations might have for this cause. Therefore, because it's not good for a man to be alone, and because God created Eve and sexuality and he made us with this need for intimacy, therefore God instituted marriage, and this is what it is. And then Genesis gives us the pattern for marriage. It involves three commitments or three promises: leaving, cleaving, and becoming one flesh. And those three ideas are so foundational that everything else we talk about in marriage builds on them. If you learn nothing else from today's podcast, learn this. Marriage is three commitments. And if you can get these right, you can solve an awful lot of marital problems. Let's start with the first commitment. It comes from this idea of leaving your father and mother. When Genesis says leave your father and mother, it does not mean you stop loving your parents. It does not mean you become selfish or ungrateful. It means your primary human loyalty shifts. You were part of your father's household and your mother's household. That was your primary human loyalty. As a single person, your strongest earthly obligations are to your family of origin. And that was especially true in the ancient world. Your identity, your security, your responsibilities, your future were all tied to your family household. So children had a cultural and a religious obligation to their parents. But in marriage, God creates a new family unit. And now your new family unit is your highest priority. Your spouse becomes your closest human relationship and your highest human priority. So when you marry, you're saying, I promise to make my spouse the most special human being in my life. That means whatever was at the center of your life when you were single is no longer at the center. Maybe it was your career or financial security or your parents' expectations or your personal goals. Maybe it was your friends or your freedom or your schedule. When you marry, those things don't disappear, but they do move down the priority list. Now you have a new highest priority and it's your spouse. Now you might be thinking, well, that sounds harsh. Are you saying my spouse replaces everyone else? No, I'm saying marriage creates a new set of obligations. It creates a new, most important relationship on a human level. Think of it as reordering, not rejection. Leaving is not about cutting people off. It's about drawing a new family circle that puts your spouse inside it with you. The marriage becomes the center that you build your life around. And if you don't leave, if you don't make the shift, you will feel it everywhere. What happens when your spouse is not your highest priority? Then your spouse becomes a competitor. Your spouse has to compete with your parents, or compete with your work, or compete with the kids, or compete with your hobbies, or compete with your cell phone or your ambition. Sooner or later, your spouse is going to ask, sometimes out loud and sometimes silently, where do I fit in your life? Don't I matter to you? Well, leaving answers that question. You're telling your spouse you're not an add-on, you're not second place, you're not the person I squeeze in when I'm done with everything else. You are the one I am building a life with. That's leaving. You could call it specialness. You are making your spouse the most special thing in all creation. And that's the first commitment. And it's not really sentimental, it's practical. It shows up in your decisions, in your schedules, in the way you use your money, in how you spend your holidays, in boundaries with extended family. It shows up in how you talk about your spouse when they're not in the room, and in whether you protect your marriage or just assume it's going to survive. Leaving is the decision that you make again and again and again to put your spouse first. Now, I want to say one more thing before we move on, because this is where many marriages get stuck. You can't build the next two commitments if you never leave. You can't, for instance, hold fast, the one we're going to look at next. You can't hold fast to your spouse if you're still holding tight to a different primary loyalty. So if you're listening and you're thinking, well, we've got a lot of tension around parents, or we never agree on priorities, or work is swallowing up our marriage. This is a good place to start. Ask yourself, have we really left? Have we really made each other our top priority and the most special thing in all creation? Well, the second commitment comes from the next word in Genesis 2.24, hold fast, or older translations use the word cleave. It's the same idea. You leave and then you cleave, or you leave and you hold fast. You attach yourself, bond yourself to your spouse, you stay. And this is the commitment of permanence. This is saying, I promise to make you the most special thing in all creation, that's leaving, until death do us part. That's cleaving. Permanence isn't just a sweet vow for the wedding day. Permanence is the glue that makes the other commitments possible. Because you can't keep the first commitment, specialness, without the second one. Just think about it. I can't say to my husband, well, today you are the most special person in my life, but tomorrow, well, I'm keeping my options open for tomorrow. That doesn't work. That kind of half commitment is like trying to build a house on a folding table. You can set things on it for a while, but you can't build anything that lasts. Eventually you'll put too much weight on it and the table will fold. To make someone the most special human being in your life, you have to mean it. You have to be willing to say, you are special to me and I'm not going anywhere. And again, think through the logic of Genesis. It's not just leave as a one-time event, it's leave and then hold fast, which is an ongoing attitude and posture. It's not I chose you once, it's I am choosing you today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Now, this is why I think we often misunderstand permanence. Permanence doesn't mean that you will have warm, fuzzy feelings for your spouse every day. Permanence does not mean that every season of life will be easy and you will never run into troubles with each other. Permanence does not mean you never have to have hard conversations. Permanence means even when it's hard, even when you're hurt, even when you're disappointed, even when you don't know what to do next, your default position is I am staying in and we are going to work this out together. And that changes everything. Because once permanence is gone, you stop dealing with the problems and you start keeping score. You start protecting yourself, you start living like roommates with an exit plan. But when permanence is in place, you can be honest. You can repent, you can rebuild, you can take risks, and you can say, Well, that hurt without fearing, now it's over. Permanence creates the safety to communicate and to be honest, and safety is what makes the intimacy possible. Now let me add one more clarification. When I say my spouse is the most special thing in all creation, I mean on a human level, God is still our highest priority. God is the one who truly belongs in the center, but under God, my spouse becomes my primary human commitment. That means I don't treat my marriage as one important relationship among many. I treat it as the important relationship under God. It's a covenant, a binding promise before God. So if you're listening and if you're thinking, okay, well, how do I apply that to my life? Ask yourself, do I talk and act like this marriage is permanent, or do I talk and act like it's conditional? Because you can usually tell by the little things, the way you talk to and about each other, the way you argue, the way you apologize, the way you threaten or withdraw, the way you make big decisions, all those patterns reveal whether you've got one foot out the door or not. If marriage is going to be what Genesis describes, it has to include cleaving or holding fast. You don't go into it with the attitude, well, I can always get divorced. You go in with the attitude, this is not temporary, this is not a trial run, this is a covenant promise. So that's the second commitment. So we've got specialness, which is leaving, we've got permanence, which is cleaving, and now the third commitment comes from the phrase, they shall become one flesh. The third commitment is I promise to share every aspect of my life with my spouse. So it's not just about sexuality, it does include sexuality, but it's bigger than that. It's the whole idea that in marriage, God is forming a we. This is where marriage moves us from thinking about I, me, and mine to thinking about we, us, and ours. And that shift is not automatic. You don't wake up on the day after your wedding and suddenly think like a team. This is something you have to learn and something you have to choose on purpose over and over. So practically, it's things like this. I stop asking, what's God calling me to do, and start asking, what is God calling us to do? I stop building my life as if I'm a solo project, and I start building a shared life with shared goals, shared burdens, shared decisions, and a shared mission. I look at all the gifts and resources God is giving us as a couple, and I don't think, how do I use my gifts? I ask, how do we together use what God has given both of us? How do we together serve Him, love the people He's put in our lives, and build a family together? And here's the heart of it. Neither spouse holds anything back. There isn't a locked drawer in my life where I say, this part is mine, you, my husband, don't get access. And I don't treat my spouse's life like it's their business, and I have no responsibility to care about it or take an interest in it. One flesh means openness. It means involvement and partnership. It means knowing each other and being fully known. Now, Genesis 225 helps us understand the feel of it. It says they were both naked and were not ashamed. That's not just a statement about the physical coverings on their bodies, it's a statement about safety. It's a picture of a relationship with no hiding, no posturing, no fear of being exposed or rejected, because they were both totally open with each other and committed to each other unconditionally. They could be completely naked in front of each other and have nothing to fear or be ashamed of. Now they probably were physically naked, but I suspect they were also emotionally naked. They shared everything with each other. The idea of being one flesh shows up in our decision making. Do we make big decisions as a team, or do I just decide and inform my spouse later? It shows up in how we listen. Do I carry my spouse's burdens like they're my burdens too? Or do I keep an emotional distance? It shows up in how we communicate. Do I let my spouse into what I'm thinking and feeling, or do I shut down and handle it all by myself? Conversely, do I listen actively to what my spouse needs and wants, or do I just try to get him to do what I want? It shows up in support. Do I actively encourage what God is doing in my spouse's life, or do I stay detached, critical, or indifferent? One flush doesn't mean you become the same person. You don't lose your personality, you don't lose your identity, but it does mean you stop living like your independent contractors sharing an address, and you start living like you're trying to build one life together. Let me give you an example of what this looks like. Think about chores from the perspective of these three commitments, because chores are where a lot of marriages quietly bleed out. Not because the dishwasher is demonic, but because chores reveal what our priorities and attitudes are. So if I'm really trying to make my spouse the most special person in all creation under God, how does that affect my attitude toward the laundry, the dishes, and the trash? Am I going to keep a running spreadsheet in my head? Okay, I emptied the cat litter, you didn't. I unloaded the dishwasher twice and you only did it once. I put the kids to bed every night last week, you owe me. Am I going to start keeping track, keeping score, and measuring who's doing what and who isn't? And that is one way we can fail, but there's another way we can fail, and that is to act as if chores don't exist. I can simply not notice, make no effort at all, or when I'm asked to do it, do it so badly that no one ever asks me to do it again. I can let the entire burden fall on my spouse as if it's my birthright to have someone cook for me, do my laundry, and clean my house. Those attitudes, either keeping score or refusing to participate, are the attitudes we take when we're operating like two separate people, two individuals protecting our own little fiefdoms. But if I'm operating out of specialness, then my mindset changes. Instead of why don't you ever, it becomes, why don't I do it so you don't have to? Let me beat you to the dishes. Let me serve you in a way that makes your day lighter. Let me take something off your plate because you are important to me. And it goes both ways. This isn't a wife thing, this isn't a husband thing, this is a marriage thing. In the ideal, both the husband and the wife are asking, how can I serve you today? Two people not competing, not keeping receipts and tallies of who did what and who didn't, but two people trying to live out the commitment to share life together and to make each other special, not just in their words, but with their actions. Now, I'm not saying that it's unhealthy or unwise to divide the household labor. You can do that. Healthy couples communicate, healthy couples adjust, healthy couples make plans and divide the chores in ways that work best for their family unit. What I'm trying to get at is the heart attitude behind it. Because here's the question we ought to be asking ourselves. Am I approaching my marriage like a contract or a covenant? A contract says, I'll do my part if and only if you do yours. A covenant says, I'm committed to your good even when it costs me. So when God defined marriage, he defined it as a permanent, monogamous union of one man and one woman. He created it as a gift for us to fulfill our need for intimacy, to give us one relationship where we would be fully known. The husband and the wife make three commitments, three promises to each other. First, specialness. I promise to make my spouse the most special person in my life under God. The second commitment is permanence. I promise to do this for as long as I live. And the third commitment is becoming one flesh. I promise to share my whole life with my spouse and to fully share in his life, no locked doors, no separate kingdoms, to build one life together. And if we could live those three commitments, you'd be amazed how many problems start to shrink down to size. Because so much of what we fight about is really this question: am I living like it's just me or am I living like it's us? Now, none of us keeps these commitments perfectly, consistently, and courageously 24-7 all the time. We are sinners and we will fail at this, but we can catch the vision and we can rely on God's grace and the Holy Spirit to teach us how to live and love like this. Now remember, I said sexuality was created for marriage and not vice versa. Sexuality is the language of marriage. It expresses all three of these commitments: specialness, permanence, and one flesh. When you understand that God designed marriage to fulfill our needs for intimacy, and he designed sexuality and sexual difference to express that commitment of marriage, you can see why the biblical view of sexuality can be summarized as chastity before marriage and fidelity after. Now, as I said in the beginning, we don't have time to look at a passage from the Song of Solomon today, but let me just make a couple of points. King Solomon was one of the sons of King David. He took the throne of Israel after David's death. Solomon prayed that God would make him wise, and all his life he was wise. He was able to communicate the wisdom of God to others, but he didn't live it out. And this was particularly true with respect to his relationships with women. At the end of Solomon's life, he was married to hundreds of women and had hundreds of concubines, and his heart had moved away from God and his responsibilities as king. Solomon effectively said to himself, I am the richest and smartest man in the world. I am king and I can do whatever I choose. I am going to spend myself on every sensuality. I'm going to give in to every intellectual pride. I'm going to engage all the possibilities that riches promote, and I'm going to see if that makes me happy. And we get his conclusions in two books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon. In other words, Solomon lived the lifestyle that Hollywood claims is the goal. He had enough money to do whatever he wanted and as many sexual relationships as he wanted with whoever he wanted. And after living that kind of lifestyle, what did the wisest man in the world conclude? He was miserable. In the Song of Songs, he says the one thing that will make you happiest and the most fulfilled in life is a permanent monogamous marriage between one man and one woman. That's the highest ideal. A permanent monogamous marriage between one man and one woman is the best way to live your life. Thank you for listening to Winston the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also shows you how to figure it out. The blog version of this episode, including all the links and resources, is at WednesdayintheWord.com slash Start Strong Podcast 10. You can listen to all the episodes in this series at WednesdayintheWord.com. There's no charge, no spam, and no ads. Just free, trustworthy resources to help you grow in your understanding of scripture. If this podcast has blessed you, please consider following, reading, or reviewing it on your favorite podcast platform. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. If you're reading along in my book, Start Strong, The New Believer's Guide to Christianity, you might want to read chapter 11 before listening to the next episode. And if you are reading the book, I would be most grateful if you would leave me a positive review on Amazon. If you music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can hear Reggie's wonderful music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.