The Wedding and the Feast

Thinking About Your Wedding Day

Adam wakes. He has never seen a woman before. God brings Eve unto him, and Adam speaks mankind’s first recorded words. He speaks them almost as poetry:

“This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23).

No minister officiated. There was no designated bride’s side or groom’s side, no music, and no guests. There in the garden stood the naked pair, and the LORD brought her unto Adam.

That is all.

That was the first wedding. It took place before sin entered the world.

Marriage, then, is a gift of God, a creation ordinance appointed for the blessing of all mankind.

Keep that picture in your mind. Whatever else your imagination decorates your wedding day with, remember where marriage began. As a gift from God long before it became a seventy-billion-dollar industry.

What Is Marriage?

Marriage is the Lord’s joining of one man and one woman in a public, permanent, and exclusive covenant of His own making, attended with His temporal and spiritual blessings (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-6). It is a pre-fall gift, older than the church as an instituted body and older than every human attempt to usurp, corrupt, or redefine it.

Scripture gives marriage several inseparable purposes.

First, it was given for companionship, for it is not good that man should be alone (Genesis 2:18). It also ordinarily serves the raising up of a godly seed, which forms the root of every stable society (Malachi 2:15). It confines natural sexual desire within the holy bounds of the marriage bed (1 Corinthians 7:2). It also gives husband and wife to one another as mutual helpers in the calling God has assigned to each.

Paul takes up the “one flesh” language of Genesis and declares that it bears witness to something greater: “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32).

Every Christian marriage is meant to speak of something beyond itself. It is a living portrait hung upon the wall of this world, symbolizing Christ’s sacrificial love and the church’s glad devotion to her Lord.

That is a staggering weight to place upon two young people. Still, it is true.

A husband is called to love his bride as Christ loved His church and “gave Himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). A wife is called to honor and submit to her husband, as the redeemed church of all ages honors her Lord (Ephesians 5:22-24).

The callings of husband and wife are gospel-shaped. They govern daily life, conscience, sacrifice, service, and preparation for eternity.

Before you think of photographers, flowers, dresses, tuxes or venues, fix this in your heart: your wedding is a holy occasion because the union belongs to the eternal Triune God. Every detail should be ordered in the light of that truth.

Covenant of Words

A wedding is the public speaking of a two-person covenant. The celebration afterward is the joyful response of family, church, and friends.

The LORD calls the bride “the wife of thy covenant” and rebukes the treacherous husband “because the LORD hath been witness” between him and his wife (Malachi 2:14). Before every other witness stands the LORD Himself.

The only other public event in your life of comparable importance was the day of your public confession of faith. Once more, you will stand in the sight of God and His gathered people, and make a solemn promise.

You will speak covenantally binding words

Words God will hold you to. Words the church will witness. Words by which your future conduct will be measured.

The congregation will hear them. They will witness the joining of your hands and lives, becoming one. Some of those very people will pray with you, counsel you, rejoice with you, perhaps rebuke you, and help carry you through times you cannot yet imagine.

Your vows are a covenant spoken. Everything that follows is the covenant lived.

Once you begin to see a wedding Christ’s way, the whole task of planning takes on a different color. The chief question shifts from, “How do we make this our unforgettable day?” to, “How do we pattern our day after Christ and His church?”

A Wedding Planner

Most weddings are planned by someone else, though few people realize it.

No, I do not mean a wedding planner.

Our wedding planner is a culture, a culture that has been catechizing our imaginations since childhood through books, stories, screens, films, songs, and social media. It carries its own kind of liturgy. It has expected words, poses, processions, and ceremonies. It teaches us what a wedding is supposed to feel like, what must be included, and what people will think if an element is omitted.

Leave out one of its customary elements, perhaps the father-daughter dance, personally written vows, or the first dance, selections of music, and a bride or groom may feel that something important has been taken away.

That is the power of cultural liturgy. It turns worldly customs into assumed necessities and quietly rearranges for whom, or what the day is for.

Culture tells you that the wedding is “your day,” which, in one sense, it is. Yet notice the cultural drift entering the church. How many of your parents’ or grandparents’ weddings included these cultural expectations? How many included any of them?

This world has been quietly pushing aside the God who made marriage.

There is nothing inherently wrong with personal touches. Yet weddings today are often measured chiefly by the feeling they produce, the sequence of the event, the photographs taken, and the money spent.

Oh, the money.

Here on the East Coast of the United States, embarrassingly copious amounts are spent on a single day. Enough for a down payment on a home. This has brought many a bride’s family into debt for the sake of one memory. After all, you only get married once. At least, that is how the argument usually goes.

Taking all of this into account, a day that might have been ordered toward celebratory worship, can easily become a carefully choreographed performance for the guests, and strangers scrolling past it later on their phones. The couple becomes the center of a production, while the marriage covenant itself disappears beneath the decorations.

You are not wrong to desire beauty, laughter, a full table, a lovely dress, and a day worth remembering. Cana ran out of wine, and Jesus supplied it in abundance! (John 2:1-11).

The problem begins when we borrow empty ideas that make the couple or the event the final end, rather than the glory of God. “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Plan deliberately against the force of cultural drift.

Ask your parents and grandparents what their weddings were like. Listen especially for what was simple, familial, God-glorifying, and timeless.

Perhaps take some mental notes.

Planning It Well

Let the Word of God shape your planning.

Begin with the sanctuary, not the venue. Let everything flow from there.

Spend time with your pastor and elders in it. Ask what the church expects of you as a confessing Christian couple. Seek premarital counseling early, allowing those who will shepherd your marriage to come, help you lay a good foundation now.

A Christian wedding planned without meaningful connection to the Lord and His church can easily drift from the covenant it confesses.

Fix the vows and the liturgy in your mind first. In our churches, we use the Form for the Confirmation of Marriage. It is rich with Scripture, blessing, exhortation, and sober warning.

Sit together with your pastor and consider every line. Ask questions. Order the ceremony as worship, with Psalter singing, kneeling prayer, the reading of God’s Word, vows, and a pastoral charge to you both.

And please, let stewardship govern the budget.

Decide together, and with your parents if they are helping, what can be afforded without debt and without straining the generosity of those that love you. A modest wedding paid for in full and attended with a glad heart, honors God more than the most detailed extravagance without those things.

A marriage burdened by unnecessary wedding debt begins with a weight it was never intended to carry.

Avoid it.

Your future selves will thank you.

Build the invitation list around family and the family of God. Fill the room with people who truly love you and will actually hold you to your words. Invite those who will ask you, three years hence, with genuine concern, how your marriage is doing.

Let modesty govern your wedding party. Beauty is not the same thing as exposure. Dress and arrange the wedding party so that a godly older saint can see holiness and honor mingled with your gladness.

Order the day as worship, then as feast

The Reception

The reception is celebration, with food, laughter, singing, speeches, clinking glasses, photographs, and perhaps a few silly games. Parents may speak. The maid of honor and best man may offer their memories and good wishes. All of this may be received with gratitude and directed toward the glory of God.

This needs to be said, sadly. Mixed dancing has no place at our receptions. It imports into a holy occasion a form of bodily familiarity and public display that our fathers wisely resisted. Dance all you want together on your honeymoon. In private.

Here is where many will cringe.

So be it.

Some will appeal to biblical dancing. Yet biblical dancing involved men with men and women with women, and bore little resemblance to the romanticized dancing of modern receptions. Mixed dancing is worldliness borrowed and placed at the center of a Christian feast. Let the evening’s joy center upon fellowship, singing, speeches, laughter, and feasting instead.

Let the camera serve the memory rather than rule the day. Pay attention to photographs you will treasure when you are seventy, but do not let the photographer become the master of the occasion.

Be present.

Many couples have confessed to me months afterward, “We didn’t even really enjoy our reception. It was all a blur.”

Let the celebration swirl around you without sweeping you away from your own day. Do not surrender the lived experience for a picture of it.

Coming Back to the Garden

Just like paradise, your wedding day will end. What it represents will not.

Scripture points us beyond Eden toward the blessed wedding still to come, the marriage supper of the Lamb. There the church stands before Christ, “arrayed in fine linen, clean and white,” her bridal holiness perfected by grace (Revelation 19:7-8).

Every godly marriage between now and then is a small rehearsal, is it not?

Plan your wedding day, worthy of what it foreshadows. Speak truth before true witnesses, under the eye of the Triune God who has witnessed every wedding since the garden.

Then feast without apology, because He has given you good reason.

May the Lord grant you grace to plan with Him, to speak from the heart, to feast with thanksgiving, and afterward to walk together faithfully before Him.