This week saw us celebrate our 48th wedding anniversary.
Ever since I first tentatively asked Eileen out more than 50 years ago I, like many a lover, have carried a picture of my love in my wallet.
It is a picture of her, regularly updated. The real her.
It is not a picture of another woman that I call her; nor a picture of my wife’s head superimposed on another woman’s body (or vice versa).
My wife would rightly be jealous if I carried a picture of another woman (or a composite of her and a photoshopped body), and claimed that by looking at that it helped me to love her.
I love my wife, not one I fantasise is her.
I love her.
To love an image, rather than the real person, is idolatry.
For this reason God forbids the use of images in worshipping Him.
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image – any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.”
. – Exodus 20:4-5
No image of God, or Christ, can represent Him anything like He is – not even to the extent that a realistic photo can represent my wife.
To love an image of God that is not God, is not to love God; it is not to love the real Person.
God is a jealous God.
Zwingli, Calvin and the other Reformed leaders of the Reformation, saw this clearly and preached against the use of images in worship.
Some of their more fanatical followers, especially in the Netherlands, took this as licence unlawfully to break into churches (not just their own) to break up the images they found there.
For this, they were known as “iconoclasts”.
We have no warrant to break into another’s property like this and physically break up what is their property.
But we are to break up the images that intrude into our own relationship with God and Christ.
The same applies in our relationship with our wife or husband.
We are not to live out our relationship with our wife or husband through distorted or unrealistic images.
This is especially horrible when it comes to pornography. Pornography is about filling your mind with idolatrous images, rather than loving the reality of who your wife or husband really is.
Gary Thomas writes in Cherish (the sequel to his Sacred Marriage):
“We can’t fill up our eyes with our wives if our eyes have been previously filled with someone else. One of the many dangers of porn is that it neurologically trains us to find our wives less beautiful.”
You are to love your wife as she is, not an idealistic picture of what you think she ought to be. Love her for who she is.
Likewise, a wife is to love her husband as he is.
Again, Gary Thomas:
“Since no one man can be everything, one of the best gifts a woman can give a man is to tell him – with her eyes, attention, words, and acceptance – ‘You don’t have to be anything other than what you are… I cherish you.’”
This doesn’t mean you should always overlook obvious sin and selfishness in the other – though be sure to know your own heart first.
Part of the blessing of marriage is that we help to sanctify the other.
Sometimes this means you have to say something.
But at other times nothing more is needed than the mere “goodness” of your own example (Matt 5:16), “without a word” (1 Pet 3:1), to lead a selfish spouse to be ashamed and change.
Think how “Christ loved the church…” (Eph 5:25). He loved the church so much that “He gave Himself for her.”
But this was the church made up of those like you and me when we were “dead in trespasses and sins”, and even when we were “by nature children of wrath, just as the others.” (Eph 2:1,3)
Christ loved that church, as it was.
But He also had in view: “that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word.” (Eph 5:26)
And ultimately: “that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.” (Eph 5:27)
Love your wife, or husband, as they are.
(Remember, you freely chose to do so; no one made you.)
Don’t marry someone to change them into your ideal.
Marry them because you love them:
– you love who they are,
– you love being with them,
– you would love to share their earthly pilgrimage.
Yes, we are to keep in view the ultimate goal: “holy and without blemish.”
You are a vital part of that in your marriage: you are helping to sanctify your spouse – with or “without a word”. And they are a vital part of that for you: they are helping to sanctify you – with or “without a word”.
Because of this, you won’t automatically overlook obvious sin and selfishness in the other; you aren’t meant to.
But you are also to love the other as they are, not an idealistic picture of what you want him or her to be to satisfy your fantasies.
Love them as they are, not as a project you are there to change.
Likewise, love your brothers and sisters in your local church as they are.
As I have commented elsewhere, please don’t join a church because you have an agenda to change it. Don’t accept a call as a pastor to a church because, in the first instance, you have an agenda to change it.
Join a church because you love the people:
– you love who they are,
– you love what they stand for,
– you love being with them,
– you would love to share their earthly pilgrimage.
Of course you will change them; they will change you. You are each part of the other’s sanctification in that regard.
But first and foremost, love your brothers and sisters as they are – not as a project you are there to change.
This applies in all relationships, imperfect as they are here upon this earth.
Above all it applies in our relationship with the perfect God.
We are to love God above all as He is, not an image of what we ignorantly want Him to be.
Real love loves the real person.
Love, real love, is iconoclastic.
Love breaks the image.
In the following post, Jeremy Pierre tells us that, for C. S. Lewis, breaking the image meant not even carrying a photo of his deceased wife (Helen Joy Davidman) – though, I am still going to keep mine, and in Lewis’s case, it was primarily because he didn’t have one!
Love the One You’re With
After C. S. Lewis lost his wife, Helen, to cancer, he realized he didn’t have a single good picture of her. Maybe that’s hard to grasp in our culture of profile pics from every angle, but he wasn’t upset about it. In fact, he saw the distinct advantage of lacking a quality image of his wife. He wrote:
“I want H., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.”
How could a photo of the woman he loved become a snare?
Because in the absence of the real person, he saw his tendency to fill the image with his own fancy. In fact, this was one of the prominent themes for Lewis in A Grief Observed. He was terrified at the prospect of shaping Helen into a phantom of his own making.
Particularly alarming was his inclination to long for certain aspects of Helen’s personality more than others. Of course he would never intentionally import something fictitious about her, but, he mused, “won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?”
What worried Lewis most was that Helen would become to him merely an extension of himself, of his old bachelor pipe-dreams.
Spousal Resistance
Lewis illuminates an overlooked gift in marriage: spousal resistance.
I am not talking about red-faced tension or caustic defiance. I mean the simple fact that your spouse is a real person whose very existence will not conform to the image you have of him or her.
Spousal resistance anchors you to reality, a reality in which God calls you to love your actual spouse, not your preferred one. Lewis observed:
“All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.”
And, I would argue, when she is alive, too.
As odd as it sounds, we can be thankful for the thousands of little disagreements that season the marital relationship, the countless differences of perspective that make it alive. These indicate that you are interacting with an independent being, one you’ve been entrusted with to love sacrificially.
The Original and Best
The very essence of sacrificial love is accommodating another rather than expecting another to accommodate self. Taking Lewis’s insight, then, we should be suspicious of our tendency to admire only those characteristics we approve of in our spouse and to revise those we don’t.
When remembering a deceased spouse, this is bad enough; you aren’t loving her, but an edited memory of her.
When serving a living spouse, it is worse; you aren’t pursuing her, but what you hope she would be. Far better is to love the original, not your revised edition. After all, you’re an original, too.
Loving the original requires lifelong adjustment on your part, and this deference is a key proof of the marital love that Christians are called to (Eph. 5:21-23).
Don’t be discouraged when you don’t see eye-to-eye with your spouse. Where there is no disagreement, no annoyance, no resistance, there is no opportunity for sacrifice.
If we love only what is pleasing to us in our spouse, we are loving only our preferences. We don’t need the gospel to do that.
We do need it to free us from our tendency to adjust one another constantly to our liking.
Jesus came to serve an impulsive Peter, a distracted Martha, a dubious Thomas. And he came to serve a silly person like each one of us.
And yes, Christ’s redemptive love changes us by degree, but this change is about conformity to righteousness, not conformity to personal preference.
So if your wife laughs too easily for your taste, love her for it. If she’s more pessimistic than you prefer, minister to her fears.
If your husband is quieter in social gatherings than you’d like, be grateful for it. If he has more difficulty making plans than you think reasonable, come alongside happily.
In all the little spousal resistances, celebrate the privilege of loving a person, not an image.
As Lewis said, reality is iconoclastic.
And thank God this is especially true in marriage.
“Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” (1 John 5:21)