With Ephesians 5:32 as his starting place, Piper looks at a whole list of topics related to marriage: nakedness without shame; love and romance; forgiveness and forbearing; conformity to Christ; headship and submission; singleness; sex; procreation; evangelism; and divorce.

There were only a couple of areas in which I found myself disagreeing with Piper. The first was in his view of remarriage after divorce. His understanding of Scripture does not allow remarriage under any circumstances. Hence a woman whose husband leaves her and marries another, has no biblical defense in her desire to remarry. Though Piper admits that this is a minority view among Christians, his conscience binds him to it. I tend to disagree with this view and believe that the innocent party may remarry. Yet I understand how Piper arrives at his view and can see how it is consistent with the rest of his views. The second area of disagreement (or perhaps potential disagreement) was in his view of procreation within marriage. Again, because of his starting point at Ephesians 5, he has to raise the importance of spiritual children over natural children, saying that the absolute commands of Scripture pertain to evangelism and not to procreation. In most cases both will happen, but Piper does allow for marriages that deliberately exclude children; I am not so sure we can build a strong biblical argument for this.

But even in these chapters, as with all the rest, I learned a great deal. Particularly strong are the chapters dealing with headship (where he writes of the humbling nature of biblical headship) and the chapter dealing with the gift of sex in marriage. Also excellent was the rather unexpected (but necessary) chapter on singleness. Rare is the book on marriage that writes also of singleness and God’s plan for those who do not marry.

Perhaps the emphasis I most enjoyed is this: that marriage is not about lifelong fireworks and unending doe-eyed feelings of romance. Instead, marriage is about the long-term commitment to make a statement about God to the rest of the world. In the opening chapter Piper writes, “Marriage is a momentary gift. … As this book is published, Noel and I are passing our fortieth anniversary of marriage. She is God’s gift to me—far better than I deserve. We speak often of the wonder of being married tell one of us dies. It has not been trouble-free. So we imagine ourselves in our seventies or eighties—when divorce is not only sin, but socially silly—sitting across from each other, perhaps at Old Country Buffet, and smiling at each other’s wrinkled faces, and saying with the deepest gratitude for God’s grace: ‘We made it.’” This is a realistic book, one that is written from a gritty, true-life perspective. It is a powerful book that turns constantly to the Bible, to the Creator of marriage, to gain his perspective. It is not practical in the sense of offering six easy steps to a healthy marriage, but practical in the sense that it offers a biblical foundation that can support and sustain a healthy, God-honoring marriage. Piper waited forty years to write this book and those long years are reflected from the first page to the last.