“God is in the longest-lived, worst marriage in the history of the world.”

That’s from Tim and Kathy Keller in their short new book, On Marriage. But God has been faithful even when we were not. He sealed this union with us through Jesus Christ in his cross and resurrection. Tim and Kathy write, “Your marriage to him is the surest possible foundation for your marriage to anyone else.”

Any great marriage on earth points toward that one in heaven. If you’re looking for the One, you’ll only find him in Jesus. The gospel saves us from expecting too much from marriage, which makes us more likely to get divorced, and from expecting too little, which makes us less likely to ever get married in the first place. It’s no coincidence that studies link declining religiosity with declining marriage. Healthy marriages, then, are an important lived apologetic for our post-Christian culture.

“The secular sexual revolution has been weaponized to say Christianity is psychologically and socially unhealthy,” Tim told me in this episode of Gospelbound. “And so there’s no way I think for us to talk about the evidence for the resurrection and all those other things if we don’t deal with that and say, ‘No, actually the Christian approach to sexuality is humanizing as opposed to dehumanizing.’ So I don’t think we can just run away from that. I do know plenty of people want to just say, ‘Let’s talk about Jesus and the resurrection. Let’s not talk about sex because that’s just so controversial.’ It’s going to be very hard to create a plausible case for Christianity if you don’t include what the Bible says about sexuality, because it’s there, and people are just not going to go into Christianity if you let the myths about sexuality that the culture propagates intact. You’re going to have to undermine them too.”