tmeiers

God's Showcase of Covenant-Keeping Grace  43
crucified. That is, they are woven into the very meaning of marriage as a
display of Christ and the church, but they are both defined by Christ's
self-denying  work  on  the  cross  so  that  their  pride  and  slavishness  are
canceled.
We spent the first two chapters on the first of these reasons: giving
the  foundation  for  marriage  as  a  display  of  the  covenant  love  of  God.
Marriage  is  a  covenant  between  a  man  and  a  woman  in  which  they
promise to be a faithful husband and a faithful wife in a new one-flesh
union as long as they both shall live. This covenant, sealed with solemn
vows, is designed to showcase the covenant-keeping grace of God.
A Solid Basis in Grace
The  title  of  this  chapter  is  "God's  Showcase  of  Covenant-Keeping
Grace." So we are turning to the second reason I mentioned that Noël
is  right  to  say  that  you  can't  say  too  often  that  marriage  is  a  model  of
Christ and the church—namely, that this gives marriage a solid basis in
grace, since Christ obtained and sustains his bride by grace alone.
In other words, the main point in this chapter is that since Christ's
new  covenant  with  his  church  is  created  by  and  sustained  by  blood-
bought  grace,  therefore,  human  marriages  are  meant  to  showcase  that
new-covenant grace. And the way husbands and wives showcase it is by
resting in the experience of God's grace and bending it out from a verti -
cal experience with God into a horizontal experience with their spouse.
In other words, in marriage you live hour by hour in glad dependence
on  God's  forgiveness  and  justification and  promised  future  grace,  and
you bend it out toward your spouse hour by hour—as an extension of
God's forgiveness and justification and promised help.
The Centrality of Forgiving, 
Justifying Grace
I am aware that all Christians, not just married ones, are supposed to do
this in all our relationships. All of us, married and single, are supposed
to live hour by hour by the forgiving, justifying, all-supplying grace of
God  and  then bend it out to all the others in our lives. Jesus says that
all of life, not just marriage, is a showcase of God's glory. "Let your light