Marriage: Covenant Or Contract? (And Why It Doesn't Matter)

July 14, 2024 Changing Us

One of the common reasons that Christians stay in destructive marriages (other than believing that “God hates divorce”) is because they believe that they made a covenant with their spouse before God to stay faithful to their spouse “until death do us part” - and they take their vows seriously and don’t intend to break them. But let’s explore the concept of “covenant" a bit more to see if you are accurately perceiving the meaning of the word and whether you’re doing right in your marriage.

The Marriage Covenant According to Some Christians

First, let’s hear what some Christians say is the definition of a covenant:

“The goal of a covenant is unity and, therefore, personal autonomy is surrendered”

“Covenant marriages are characterized by unconditional promises”

“Marriage involves a covenantal agreement to meet all of your spouse’s needs for companionship (on every level: sexual, social, spiritual, intellectual, and so on) for the rest of your life”

“The binding nature of the divine covenant assures that divorce is not an option”

To sum it up, you’ll hear people say that a covenant is an unconditional promise that requires that you stay in the marriage regardless of whether the other person keeps their vows, giving up your own needs to meet the “needs” of your spouse.

A few comments about this:

The only “needs” that we have as human beings are food, shelter, and water. Without these things, we will die. Companionship is not a need. Sex is not a need. Think about it. Jesus didn’t have sex. A lot of people don’t have sex. And they’re fine. A lot of people live alone or choose to live in isolation (monks, introverts LOL). We have no responsibility to meet any of the needs of our spouse. Your spouse is a grown adult and should be able to supply their own food, shelter, and water on their own if they need to.
If you give up your own “needs” (we’ll just call them needs for the sake of argument, since it’s the word they use), then you give up your identity - you give up your preferences, discernment, learning, your unique relationship with God, your relationships with others, maybe even your talents and your career in favor of whatever your spouse wants (“needs”). And without an identity, you have nothing to give. You don’t have your own personality, you don’t have your own values, you don’t have your own opinions, you don’t have your own feelings. You become completely absorbed into who your spouse wants you to be and you become no one. And “no one” is not a good companion. God doesn’t want you to lose yourself in order to become who your spouse wants you to be. God wants you to die to sin and live for righteousness (1 Peter 2:24), coming to maturity in Christ. To die to yourself for anyone other than God is idolatry.
It isn’t reasonable to expect anyone to make an unconditional promise. People aren’t even capable of doing that. In order to make an unconditional promise, a person would need to be able to control every aspect related to that promise in order to keep it, and even God won’t do that - he doesn’t control us, because he wants us to have free will. And we can’t control every aspect of a promise, either, because other people have free will, and there are too many variables to be able to guarantee that a promise can be kept unconditionally.
The goal of a covenant is not unity (as some have said) - rather, it’s mutuality (I do my part and you do your part - You’ll understand why I say this as you keep reading). The mutuality of a covenant also precludes the supposition that a covenant has a permanently binding nature. Human covenants do not - and CANNOT - have a permanently binding nature. The only reason that God’s covenants were, ultimately, binding (although they did not stay bound the entire time but were broken and then renewed) is because of predestination and election. God knows the end from the beginning, so he was able to know, without a doubt, that he would be able to ultimately keep his promises. But only God knows those things, we don’t. God is also eternal, so his promises are not constrained by time whereas we only have whatever time is left of our lives in order to have the chance for a broken covenant to be renewed… which may not be enough time for the renewal of a covenant. (Although more time does not always lead to what we hope for, and only God knows whether a person will turn around in time or not.)

God’s Covenants

With that, let’s see what the Bible says about covenants.

1. A covenant with a way out

Genesis 9 - God promised never to destroy all living things in a flood. It was a covenant between God and all life on earth. Notice that it wasn’t a promise never to destroy all living things. It was just a promise not to destroy them in a flood. It didn’t exclude other ways of destroying them. So if (when) the world becomes “only wicked all the time” as it did in the days of Noah, God can destroy things another way, and 2 Peter 3:10 says that, indeed, this will happen: “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.”

It’s a covenant with a way out. God promises not to destroy with a flood but that promise doesn’t exclude other ways of destroying.

2. Conditional covenants

Genesis 15 - God’s covenant/promise to Abraham: “To your descendants I will give this land.” It sounds like an unconditional promise, but in Deuteronomy 4 we see that there is a condition: “After you have had children and grandchildren and have lived in the land a long time—if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord your God and arousing his anger, I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess. You will not live there long but will certainly be destroyed. The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a few of you will survive among the nations to which the Lord will drive you.”

Genesis 17 - Another covenant of God to Abraham: “Walk before me faithfully and be blameless. Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers…. And you will be the father of many nations. Then God said to Abraham, ‘As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

These are covenant promises established on the basis that Abraham and his descendants also do something and, if they don’t, the promise is no longer valid for them.

3. God’s everlasting covenants based on omniscience

In Genesis 15, after God promises the land to the descendants of Abraham as long as they don’t arouse God’s anger, we see God’s omniscience (aka all-knowing), which gives him the ability to make the everlasting covenant: “When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the Lord your God and obey him. For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your ancestors, which he confirmed to them by oath.” ….God knew that they would return to him. He was able to make the covenant everlasting because he knew that ultimately his people would return and keep it. [Read my article on God pursuing us]

4. You don’t have to break your covenant in order for the covenant to be broken

Another important lesson from the Genesis 15 passage and covenant is that separating from your spouse may not mean that you are abandoning your covenant - it may just mean that you are allowing the separation to take place until (if or when) your spouse returns to keep their promise.

We also see this in Leviticus 26:44 where God doesn’t have to break his covenant in order for the covenant to be broken. Leviticus 26:44 says “Yet in spite of this [their disobedience and their breaking of the covenant], when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them. I am the Lord their God. But for their sake I will remember the covenant with their ancestors.” ….Even though they have been separated from God and have rejected God, God does not completely destroy them but remembers his promise to them. That doesn’t mean that he reconciles with them right away. They stay separated from him. But he remembers his covenant and waits for them to return.

5. Covenants with “If… then…” statements and terms that must be kept

Genesis 19 - God makes a covenant with the Israelites in the desert of Mt Sinai: “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession.”

Deuteronomy 7: "If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your ancestors.”

Deuteronomy 28: “These are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in Moab: ‘If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, then the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God. However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, then all these curses will come on you and overtake you.”

These examples show that there are “terms” of a covenant that involve “if… then…” statements.

6. Consequences if someone else breaks their end of the covenant

Leviticus 26 - God makes a covenant with the Israelites to bless them: "If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands… I will look on you with favor and make you fruitful and increase your numbers, and I will keep my covenant with you. But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.

If after all this they still will not listen to God, he says:

Your strength will be spent in vain, because your soil will not yield its crops, nor will the trees of your land yield their fruit.

I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children, destroy your cattle and make you so few in number that your roads will be deserted.

I will bring the sword on you to avenge the breaking of the covenant

When you withdraw into your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands. I will cut off your supply of bread

You will eat, but you will not be satisfied

I will turn your cities into ruins and lay waste your sanctuaries

I myself will lay waste the land, so that your enemies who live there will be appalled. I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you.

Basically: “If you keep your end of the covenant then I’ll keep mine; if you don’t keep your end of the covenant, there are consequences.”

Deuteronomy 29: “All the nations will ask: ‘Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?’ And the answer will be: ‘It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt’.” …Another example of what happens when the people abandon the covenant of the Lord.

Deuteronomy 31 (God speaking to Moses): “You are going to rest with your ancestors, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them. And in that day I will become angry with them and forsake them.” ….When the people broke the covenant that God made with them, God forsook them.

7. The wrong definition assigned to covenant can provide a false sense of security

This is an interesting one: Deuteronomy 29: “When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, ‘I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way,’ they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. The Lord will never be willing to forgive them; his wrath and zeal will burn against them. All the curses written in this book will fall on them, and the Lord will blot out their names from under heaven.”

It can be likened to a person who says “I can treat my spouse however I want to without concern that they will divorce me because they’ve made a covenant.” And then look what happens when people do that: they bring disaster on the land and they will never be forgiven.

The New Testament covenant

Moving into the New Testament (aka the New Covenant), we see that there is punishment for those who break even the new covenant that God has made with them through the blood of Jesus. Hebrews 10:29 says “How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?”

Romans 11:20-22: “Do not be arrogant, but tremble. For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either. Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off.” ….We must keep our part of the covenant, otherwise we will be cut off.

Colossians 1:22,23: “He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.” ….Again, God reconciled us to himself through the new covenant in Jesus’ blood, but only if we continue in our faith.

Hebrews 7: Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant. The first covenant had regulations for worship (Hebrews 8) because “it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself”(Hebrews 9). But “if we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God” (Hebrews 10) ….The first covenant had things that had to be done (regulations) in order to represent what would have to be done under the new covenant, and if we don’t comply with the covenant, there will be judgement.

(Please note that I mention these verses not because they are referring to “apostasy” or “losing your salvation” but, rather, because they are speaking of what happens when a person does not abide by the covenant God makes with us. I’d love to say more about this, but it would be too much for this article.)

Summary of Biblical Covenants

As you can see from the above passages….

A covenant is not an unconditional promise but, rather, comes with conditions
There are consequences if those conditions are not met
Covenants are not at all about giving up your personal autonomy but, rather, keeping your personal autonomy and authority to enact consequences if the covenant isn’t kept
In fact, consequences are the only hope for unity
A covenant is also clearly not binding to the extent that it excludes the possibility of divorce [read my article on what divorce really is for a bigger perspective on this]

Your Marriage Covenant

So how does this relate to you and the covenant you made when you married your spouse? You said “I promise to be faithful - to love, honor, and cherish.” And your spouse said “I promise to be faithful - to love, honor, and cherish” (or some variation of that, but that’s the gist of it). If you are keeping your promise and your spouse isn’t keeping their promise, the covenant has been broken.

If the covenant could be represented by a rope that you are each holding onto, you’re standing there holding a broken rope. Your spouse broke the rope. You’re attached to nothing. This is why it doesn’t matter if you call marriage a covenant or a contract. It plays out the same.

You can stand there keeping your end of the promise, but it’s meaningless in terms of keeping the marriage together, because the covenant has been broken. Those who have twisted the meaning of the word covenant to say that it can never be broken may think that they are righteous in requiring someone stay with someone who has broken covenant with them, but it is not righteous - it is wrong. Malachi 2:15-16 says that it is sin for your spouse to break covenant with you, and we are not to enable sin by providing the benefits of marriage without the other person doing what it takes to maintain it.

Not only that, but it’s not honoring or submissive to be insisting that the covenant stay in tact when your spouse is insisting on breaking it. There is no control in love - only free will. You must honor your spouse’s freedom to break the covenant. 1 Corinthians 7:15 says "if the unbeliever leaves, let it be so. God has called us to live in peace.” [Read my article on whether your spouse is a believer].

The good that can come from a broken covenant

Additionally, there is good that can come from a broken covenant. After that list of consequences of the broken covenant in Leviticus 26 when their land will be laid waste, and their cities will lie in ruins, Scripture says: “Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it.” When the covenant is broken and the consequences have taken place, you will enjoy rest.

And when you stop trying to force a marriage to happen that your spouse is working against, and you start changing you instead of trying to change your marriage or your spouse, you will find that….