An Incomprehensible vision of marriage

I have been reflecting upon two awesome pictures of marriage today. The first from Ephesians 5:22-32, the picture of marriage being like that of Christ and the church. Wives are to submit to their husbands, as to the Lord, as the church is subject to Christ. Husbands as the head of the wife are to love their wives and give themselves up for her as Christ have Himself up for the church.

The second picture I have been contemplating is the one found in Genesis 2:18-25, God makes a helper for the man, and the man says "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Verse 25 then says "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".

I am trying to get my head around both these pictures of marriage, pictures that God has established and that He desires of marriage. In every day life what does it mean to submit to my husband as to the Lord, as the church submits to Christ, and what does it mean to become one flesh?

I love the word of God and I am excited about thrashing out these passages so much more so that I may have a better comprehension and understanding of God's desire for marriage.

These words from John Piper's book, This Momentary Marriage have also got me thinking.

"There has never been a generation whose general view of marriage is high enough. The chasm between biblical vision of marriage and the common human vision is now, and has always been, gargantuan......That was the case in Jesus' day as well. But ours is worse. When Jesus have a glimpse of the magnificent view of marriage that God willed for his people, the disciples said to him, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry" (Matt 19:10). In other words, Christ's vision of the meaning or marriage was so enormously different from the disciples', they could not even imagine it to be a good thing. That such a vision could be good news was simply outside their categories.

If that was the case then - in the sober, Jewish world in which they lived - how much more will the magnificence of marriage in the mind of God seem unintelligible in a modern Western culture, where the main idol is self; its main doctrine is autonomy; and its central act of worship is being entertained; and its three main shrines are the television, Internet and the cinema; and its most sacred genuflection is the uninhibited act of sexual intercourse. Such a culture will find the glory of marriage in the mind of Jesus virtually incomprehensible.

.....I mention this cultural distortion of marriage in the hopes that it might wake you up to consider a vision of marriage higher and deeper and stronger and more glorious than anything culture - or perhaps you yourself - ever imagined. The greatness and glory of marriage is beyond our ability to think or feel without divine revelation and without the illumining and awakening work of the Holy Spirit."