The Roman Catholic Church wrongly teaches that the sacraments are acts or channels by which God gives his grace to individuals. And by taking part in the sacraments, an individual earns God’s grace.
Marriage is the formally recognised union of a man and a woman. In Matthew 19, when responding to a question about divorce, Jesus provides a good description of what marriage is:
He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.
Matthew 19 verse 4 – 6
By this definition, marriage is a man and woman leaving their paternal families and becoming a new entity as one, together before God.
So how did this simple process of a man and woman leaving their parents and uniting together, become misrepresented as a ceremony where God administers his grace to people?
In the 3rd Century, Christians who were following marriage ceremonies that were taking place in civil society, introduced blessings and the Eucharist into Roman weddings. By the second millennium European rulers had given bishops and their assistants authority to administer marriages. And in 1274 the Roman Catholic Church listed marriage among the seven sacraments instituted by Christ.
So, to conclude; marriage is a beautiful thing designed by God to unite intimately a man and a woman. Jesus attended a wedding (John chapter 2) and he used weddings to draw examples from in some of his parables. We can also conclude that weddings, the public celebration of marriage, are also good.
However, what the Bible does not say is that God uses marriage as a way for people to earn his grace. In fact, it says the opposite, that his grace is a free gift that cannot be earned:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Ephesians 2 verse 8 – 9
Paul puts it as simply as he can. We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus, not by any of our own actions. Our salvation is God’s doing. It is a free gift given by him. We cannot earn it by doing good deeds or by partaking in the ‘sacraments’.