Your Spouse is Not the Enemy

Back to the drama in the Garden of Eden.

Remember now, God gave us this story of the first marriage to help us get our bearings. It provides some very essential categories for navigating our marriages — like how gender is so fundamental to our identity, and how we were made for Paradise. How mankind fell and what that Fall did to our lives as men and women. And it also makes something else absolutely and utterly clear — we have an enemy.

Now there’s a thought.

I mean, we all feel from time to time that we have an enemy, but who would we say that is? Our spouse — right? Sometimes you just walk into the room and see them and they feel like the enemy. “One day out of three,” a friend cynically said to me.

But they’re not the enemy. There is another.

We confessed earlier in the book our naïve view of the story when we got married. We thought the plot was, “Love God. Love each other. And everything will work out!” Our naïveté nearly cost us our marriage. We learned the hard way (do any of us ever really learn any other way?) that there is a whole lot more going on here. We had to face our brokenness. That was a shock. We had to confront our style of relating. That was humbling. We needed to learn that this is a far more dangerous story than we thought, that there is so much at stake. And maybe the biggest eye-opener of all — we learned we had an enemy.

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