A God-Ordained Union - Genesis 2:18–25
This week I spent some time researching the topic of marriage, and I was reminded of how much pessimism there is toward the subject. There is a seemingly endless supply of sarcastic quotes and jokes about marriage. But I did see one anecdote that was poignant. It was submitted by a man to Reader’s Digest years ago. This is the story the man told: We were visiting friends when they received a phone call from their recently married daughter. After several tense minutes on the phone, the mother asked the father to speak to his daughter. Turns out the newlyweds had their first big fight. After a few minutes, the father came back into the room and stated, “She said she wanted to come home.” “What did you tell her?” I asked. The father replied, “I told her she was home.”
The pessimism toward marriages exists, no doubt, because marriage is not easy. It is a covenant relationship, and like all covenants, the commitment is binding. You have a sinful man and a sinful woman making a lifelong commitment to one another, so it’s bound to be difficult.
But as today’s passage of Scripture reveals, marriage is good and it offers great peace, joy, and freedom because it is a God-designed, God-ordained union established by God at the creation of the world. And for that reason, we should revere marriage. All people should possess a deep respect for it.
But naturally we do not. We experience marriage on the other side of mankind’s fall into sin. At the very least, we are not as thankful for marriage as we should be. At worst, we regret marriage or despise it. We who are married do not naturally treasure and nourish our marriages as we should. Sin turns each of us in on ourselves and away from our spouse. Also we live in a world where attempts have been made to redefine marriage, to wrestle it away from God and treat it as if humans invented it and are, therefore, the final authority over it.Sin hinders the reverence that marriage deserves.
And yet, we know that God has broken the power of sin over His people through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Those who are born again, who repent and trust in Christ, can produce in our lives the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work within us. Those who are saved are no longer slaves to sin, and so we understand that through Jesus, we can possess deep reverence for marriage; we can pursue and uphold what God has commanded.
But how do we now begin to do that? These verses in Genesis 2 help us. These words of Moses outline three pillars - three essential truths - about marriage. You can find them listed on page 6 in your WG. In the beginning, at the creation of the world, God created the first marriage, and in doing so, He defined the purpose of marriage, fixed the composition of marriage, and formed the bond of marriage. The writer of the OT Proverbs said, “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.” We must first acknowledge that we need to be taught about marriage. Even if you’ve been married for a long time, you need to learn about it. And as we learn these things and then look to Jesus in repentance and faith, we can begin to grow in our respect for the God-designed, God-ordained institution of marriage. So let’s look at each one.
Notice verse [18] with me once more: “Then the LORD God,” that is Yahweh God, “said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’” The man’s purpose was to serve God and obey His Word in the garden. We saw that last week. This was the man’s worship.
Also, in previous weeks we’ve seen that everything God had observed thus far in His creation was good, this situation was not good. The man had God and all the benefits of knowing GOd, and the man had this perfect place created by God for him, but the man needed something else. He needed a “helper fit for him,” literally, “a helper for him, corresponding to him.”
Now, this does not mean that the helper was beneath the man or inferior to him. This same language of “helper” is used of God in the OT when He is described as man’s helper. Psalm 121 says, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from Yahweh, who made heaven and earth.” Describing the woman as the man’s “helper” does not mean that she is inferior to him. Rather, it means that he is inadequate without her.
Look at verse [19] “Now out of the ground Yahweh God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. [20] The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.” Man was different from the other creatures. When God made man in His image, He bestowed upon him creative intelligence, the ability to think and create, and God gave him a degree of authority. This is evident in Adam’s job naming the animals.
But as Adam went about his work of naming, he recognized something that God already knew, something that God seemingly wanted Adam to discover. Look at the rest of verse 20, “But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.” In other words, there was not one who corresponded to Adam. Adam had no counterpart in creation, like all the other creatures. Adam could not yet multiply and be fruitful as God commanded; he could not carry out God’s plans for him. He could not fulfill all those things for which God designed him.
And so we see the purpose of marriage: it is the joining together of a man and a woman in a God-ordained union through which the two may compliment each other and help each other glorify God. Above all, the man and the woman exist in this relationship created and decreed by God to serve and obey him together. Remember, this comes right on the heels of God putting the man in the garden and giving Him the law. The man needed the woman for the fulfillment of his responsibility.
How does this conflict today with what so many people believe the purpose of marriage to be? As we look at the landscape just in our country, we see a man-centered view of marriage. This is why it’s no surprise that divorce has become so commonplace, and why attempts to redefine marriage have been, from a human perspective, so successful. But it is only God who defines the purpose of marriage, and He did so in the beginning. Marriage is for the glory of God, for fulfilling the commands of God, but of course the human benefits are plentiful. As we see here, among those benefits is the meeting of man’s need for companionship with one corresponding to him but not one exactly like him. Look at the next verses.
[21] “So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.” This is supernatural anesthesia. God did surgery. Verse [22] “And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” Earlier in Genesis 2 we learn that God formed the man from the dust of the ground. The woman is therefore also made from the ground by way of the man.
Clearly the man and woman come from the same source, but the man has the role of authority in the marriage. We understand from Scripture that the husband is the head of wife, and likewise that the role of authority is the church is to be fulfilled by men. The Scriptures are clear that the reversal of this is not God’s design. In fact, it is sinful. This is apparently one reason why the LORD God created the woman in this way.
But there seems to be at least one other reason. John Calvin offers some help on this. He states that his opinion “that something was taken from Adam, in order that he might embrace, with greater benevolence, a part of himself. He lost, therefore, one of his ribs; but, instead of it, a far richer reward was granted to him, since he obtained a faithful associate of life; for he now saw himself, who had before been imperfect, rendered complete in his wife.”
Adam’s joy is obvious. Notice the man’s first recorded words in response, verse [23], Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” In Hebrew, the formation of these sentences is poetic and should be read with exclamation. The man is overjoyed by the one God created for him. It is not just gushy rhetoric to say that they were made for each other.
This is interesting in light of what the apostle Paul says about marriage in Ephesians 5. Paul famously compares the husband/wife relationship to the relationship between Christ and the church. He says, “wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. [23] For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. [24] Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. [25] Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, [26] that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, [27] so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. [28] In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.”
Listen to these next words: “He who loves his wife loves himself. [29] For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, [30] because we are members of his body.” Paul then quotes Genesis 2. Adam was to love his wife as his own body; after all, she was from his body. And you see, this is the unique relationship between a man and a woman joined by God in marriage. God only joins the members of the opposite sex in this way.
In the eyes of God, there is no same-sex marriage. That is an invention of man with no grounds in God’s Word. God fixed the composition of marriage there in the garden on that day. We proclaimed that earlier from the WC, a document that summarizes our belief as a church and the beliefs of our denomination. It is no big secret that we believe these things. “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman: neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband, at the same time.” God defined the purpose of marriage & he fixed the composition, the components of marriage.
Do you sense the pressure of the enemy, of the world, and of your own sinful nature to abide by and adopt a view on this that is counter to God’s Word? God dictates to mankind the purpose and components of a marriage. And finally, God formed the bond of marriage. Let’s look at these last verses.
Verse [24] “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Scholars generally think that Moses added these words as an editorial comment, obviously to benefit the Israelites reading or hearing these words. He wrote them, of course, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit of God; they are God’s words. They speak to the nature of the union between a man and woman. The Israellites had come out of Egypt. Moses was denouncing polygamy and other perversions marriage. He was denouncing adultery. The first marriage shows us that in this God-decreed union, two become one in God’s eyes. God forms the bond between them.
In the gospel of Mark, when Jesus is asked about divorce, He quotes Moses. Jesus says, “from the beginning of creation, [quote] ‘God made them male and female.’ [quote] ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, [8] and the two shall become one flesh.’” Jesus then adds, “So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
As I thought about this bond formed by God, I picked up a pen on my desk. I use the Pilot Precise V series pens. I’ve been using them since college. I normally have one in my shirt pocket at all times. And with these three pillars of marriage in mind, I examined the pen. The pen has a purpose: it’s a tool for writing. The pen has components: plastic, metal, and ink.
But what holds the pen together? Well, at the molecular level, it is held together like all other forms of matter: these invisible forces within atoms and between atoms. Scientists say that these forces form bonds between the building blocks of the universe in which we live. Why do these forces exist and form these bonds? The atheists and the agnostic would say, “We don’t know; they just do.” The one who believes in God would say, “God created and sustains the forces that form these bonds.” But those who are born again would go one step further and say: “Christ holds all things together by the word of His power.”
You see, the bond between a husband and a wife is formed and upheld by the living God. That is why Jesus said, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” Now, sadly, there are circumstances where divorces occurs and where, sometimes, it is permissible and even necessary. But even Jesus says in Matthew 19, “From the beginning, it was not so.” This bond is to be for life, and the breaking of it, for whatever reason, is tragic. The breaking of the bond is another result of living in a sinful world. Glory to God for His grace that covers the sins of His people, because it is not good for us to tear apart what God has joined together.
The marriage bond is special; it is sacred. There is to be deep and lasting security there. And this, in part, is why Moses then writes, verse [25] “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” This foreshadows their fall into sin in chapter 3. After they sin, they are ashamed and seek to cover themselves.
But also, this seems to speak to, as John Currid puts it, their “complete faith and trust in one another.” At that time, there was no insecurity within them; there was no chasm between them, no shame or guilt. Important to note here is that the verb which we translate “were not ashamed” indicates not just a lack of shame in that moment that they first saw one another, but that continuously, from that point on, there was no shame. There was on-going faith and trust in each other. Each was a whole person, so to speak, and secure in the acceptance of the other.
Sadly, in our marriages today, we bring our baggage into the marriage. We come not as whole persons but as fragments of a whole, though that’s normally not apparent at the start. That is why so many marriages start out “good” and then “go bad.” You get to know the person better and better, and that is a sobering experience. Often, people arrive at the conclusion that they are not as naturally compatible with their spouse as they thought they were.
But you must remember that the purpose, composition, and bond of marriage does not change. For believers in Christ, marriage is ultimately for our growth in holiness. God uses marriage to mature and change us, to remake us in the likeness of His Son, Jesus. Through marriage, God whittles away at our self-centeredness and our idolatry.
Hear me on this: just because the circumstances are different for marriage now than they were for Adam and Eve in the garden, the goal is still the same: we marry to serve God and obey His Word, to fulfill our purpose of glorifying Him in all we do. That spouse whom you resent or whom you hold a grudge against or with whom you find yourself continually disappointed: husbands, you need that woman. Wives, you need that man.
Are there special circumstances where a spouse is in danger or in a marriage where no reconciliation is possible? Sadly, yes, but those cases are very small in number compared to the high amount of divorces that are occuring in our world today. What is needed is not divorce; it is true humility and real repentance, applying the truth of the gospel of Jesus in the marriage. The gospel teaches us to say, “I have problems; I have shortcomings. I am a sinner with no place to stand before a holy God. But I have good standing with God because Jesus is my righteousness. This is love: not that I loved God but that He loved me and sent His Son to pay for my sins. So I have no grounds for making my spouse pay for their sins. I must seek forgiveness, and I must forgive, because God in Christ forgave me.”
As we go to the Lord’s Table this morning, we observe another institution of God. The Lord Jesus decreed that we remember and celebrate another God-ordained union: the union between Jesus and His church, a union that parallels that of marriage. Jesus laid down his life for those He came to save, and we must submit wholeheartedly to Him. And those who submit to Him can rest assured that He will hold together the bond He formed until the last day. The end of the NT describes that day, when the Bridegroom (who is Jesus) returns for His Bride, the Church. Revelation 19 tells us about a multitude crying out on that day. They will say, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready.”
Are you ready? Cry out to Jesus in repentance and faith, and be made ready.
Bow with me in prayer.