When I was in my teens, Magic Eye pictures were all the rage. My friends and I would compete to be the first to unlock the 3D image—a sailboat, a school of fish, a mountain range—buried within a page of chaotic, technicolour static. All it took was time, patience, a commitment to stare beyond the visual white noise, and the ability to stay cross-eyed for minutes at a time, and then suddenly the previously hidden image would snap into focus. And once you saw it, you couldn’t unsee it.
As I’ve spent the past decade or so digging deeper into what the Bible teaches about singleness, I’ve had several “Magic Eye” moments—occasions when looking at a familiar biblical passage from a fresh perspective suddenly brought it into new focus. Each time, it felt like I could finally see past the confusing static—the mistaken assumptions and incomplete teachings that often blur our understanding of those passages—and appreciate the full, 3D biblical truth about singleness (and often also marriage) that had been there all along.
One quiet Saturday morning several years ago, I was sitting in a local café, sipping a mediocre chai, when I felt the urge to open 1 Corinthians 7:32–35. I had no particular reason to turn to that passage, but looking back now, I can see that the Holy Spirit was giving me a not-so-gentle prompting.
I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.
Here’s how this passage is most often explained: Married Christians have a spouse whose needs they must prioritize, and so they have less time, energy, and capacity for things like their church family, gospel ministry, and even wider relationships. But those who are single (and therefore spouseless) are blessed with more freedom, energy, and capacity to invest in all those areas. Unlike their married counterparts, they don’t have a legitimate reason to be divided in their devotion to God and his people. One author has put it like this: The single Christian is “able to say ‘yes’ to things that require more of you than a married person can afford.”
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But if I’m being honest, this interpretation of the passage has always felt a bit unresolved to me. As a never-married Christian woman, I haven’t often found myself with a wonderful surplus of freedom and flexibility. In fact, it sometimes felt like my singleness drained, rather than added to, my capacity to serve. I had been frequently told that my singleness was good because it allowed me to say “yes” to things that required more of me than what married people couldn’t afford.
But what if my relationships and responsibilities meant I couldn’t afford to say yes either? I wasn’t sure I was allowed to admit that to myself, let alone voice it out loud to others.
What’s more, the idea that my married Christian friends couldn’t serve God or his people as effectively, consistently, or readily as I was supposed to also didn’t sit right with me. After all, isn’t serving Jesus wholeheartedly the point and privilege of being his disciple, no matter our situation? Aren’t we all meant to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind? Isn’t loving your spouse meant to be part of a married person’s devotion to the Lord’s affairs, rather than a distraction from it?
But it wasn’t only these real-life questions that left me feeling confused about a usual reading of this passage. I had also always struggled to make sense of it within the immediate and broader context of the Bible’s teaching.
Consider, for example, Paul’s comparison between the married person who is concerned with the world’s affairs and the unmarried person who is concerned with the Lord’s affairs. According to our usual reading of this passage, married Christians are rightto be concerned with these worldly affairs (pleasing their spouse).
Yet in the same letter, Paul had already said quite a lot about how Christians are—and aren’t—to relate to a world he identified as foolish, passing away, and destined for judgment (1 Cor. 1:18–31; 3:19; 11:32). His first letter to the church at Corinth confirms what so many other New Testament passages teach: God’s people are not to be shaped by this world or caught up in its concerns.
So why would the same Paul who warns against worldly troubles and distractions suddenly equate loving one’s spouse with being concerned about things of the world? And why would he commend the married Christian for being absorbed in this?
Then there is the other comparison in the passage—pleasing a spouse versus pleasing the Lord. We may automatically think that spouses shouldbe concerned with “pleasing” each other. Yet none of the New Testament passages that speak about the loving relationship between a husband and wife use that language of “pleasing.” This means there is no reason for us to automatically understand that married people who are concerned with “pleasing” their spouse are concerned with a good thing.
In fact, if pleasing a spouse comes at the expense of pleasing God (which is the comparison in this passage), Paul’s point is surely to warn against it rather than to praise it. This is consistent with how he uses “pleasing God” elsewhere, namely as a shorthand way of describing the life of godly faith in action (Eph. 5:10; Col. 1:10; 2 Cor. 5:9). While he does occasionally speak positively of pleasing others (1 Cor. 10:33), whenever Paul contrasts the impulse to please people with the call to please God, he is very clear: “We are not trying to please people but God, who tests our hearts” (1 Thess. 2:4, Gal. 1:10).
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Then why, in this passage, would the apostle suddenly commend married Christians for being concerned with pleasing their spouse over, above, or even instead of pleasing the Lord? Why would he allow their interests to be divided away from pleasing God?
So there I sat, sipping my disappointing chai, when suddenly everything snapped into focus. It really was like one of those Magic Eye moments. For the first time, I glimpsed the full 3D meaning of 1 Corinthians 7:32–35.
A slight shift of perspective allowed me to see that Paul was not identifying important marital obligations but rather warning against particular dangers that can come with marriage in a fallen world. Along with early church fathers such as John Chrysostom and Augustine, I realised that in 1 Corinthians 7:32–35, Paul is actually calling married people to not be divided and distracted by their spouse.
Put another way, instead of saying married Christians can’t afford to be like their undivided single counterparts, the apostle is saying that married Christians can’t afford not to be like them. He wants both single and married Christians “to live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.” My full explanation of my new understanding takes up a whole chapter of my latest book, Single Ever After.
When it comes to singleness and marriage, we’ve too often decided to settle for the somewhat confusing surface meaning of key biblical passages, rather than allowing ourselves to wonder if there might be depths to them that we are conveniently ignoring. We settled into the groove of what we’re comfortable thinking the Bible teaches about them.
This has led us to ignore the fuzzy passages—like deciding it’s okay for some Christians to be concerned with the affairs of a world that is opposed to God. It’s allowed us to pretend the white noise doesn’t exist—like deciding it’s okay for some Christians to be distracted from pleasing God to instead please a certain person.
This is to the great detriment of many single and single-again Christians in our churches. But it has also been very costly for many married Christians, whose relationships with their spouses have been heavily burdened by our—and their—hasty and selective reading of Scripture.
The gospel of Christ imbues both marriage and singleness with wonderful 3D meaning, making them complements rather than competitors. The question for us is whether we’ll look beyond the surface patterns we’re used to seeing until the deeper, richer picture of God’s design for both singleness and marriage comes into wonderful focus.
Danielle Treweek is the author of several books, including Single Ever After: A Biblical Vision for the Significance of Singleness, and the research officer for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney.
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