Paul David Tripp on marriage

I just got Paul David Tripp's book, What Did You Expect?, yesterday and I've only read a few pages. These words really jumped out at me:

I am persuaded that it is more regular than irregular for couples to get married with unrealistic expectations. Again and again I have sat with couples who simply do not seem to be taking seriously the important things the Bible has to say about what every marriage will encounter in the here and now. Unrealistic expectations always lead to disappointment . . . Part of the problem is the way we use Scripture. We mistakenly treat the Bible as if it were arranged by topic—you know, the world’s best compendium of human problems and divine solutions. So when we’re thinking about marriage we run to all the marriage passages. But the Bible isn’t an encyclopedia; it is a story, the great origin-to-destiny story of redemption. In fact, it is more than a story. It is a theologically annotated story. It is a story with God’s notes. This means that we cannot understand what the Bible says about marriage by looking only at the marriage passages, because there is a vast amount of biblical information about marriage not found in the marriage passages. In fact, we could argue, to the degree that every portion of the Bible tells us things about God, about ourselves, about life in this present world, and about the nature of the human struggle and the divine solution, to that degree every passage in the Bible is a marriage passage.