Marriage, A Divine Institution

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.  (Genesis 2:23, 24)

As surely as God created Eve, just so surely did He create marriage as well.  While marriage partners are free to work out the integration of preferences and personalities within the marriage, we must respect the relationship that God has defined for marriage or suffer some form of loss in the relationship.  In the one chapter marriage manual, Ephesians, Chapter 5, Paul drew extensively from this lesson, the record of the first marriage.  "No man ever yet hated his own body."  See the reference to the woman literally being taken from the man's body?  How could he hate her?  She was a part of him!  In the comfortable setting of church or a quiet moment of Bible reading, it is easy to agree with the philosophical position of this lesson.  But in the rag-tag world of imperfections, stresses and disappointments, it is so easy to justify any particular conduct that seems convenient for us at the moment.  Friends, these words were written for the down-and-dirty trenches of life where we all live in a flawed, imperfect world, a world in which, frequently, those who hurt us most are those whom we love most.  Hurt and disappointment must be dealt with, but they should not be allowed to justify equal error on the opposite side of the moral scale.

While we will study divorce more directly later in this series, it is appropriate at this juncture to observe that when God institutes something, he gets it right the first time.  This fundamental truth is often ignored in the traditional ideas of society about marriage.  After all are we not reminded that Moses himself made specific provisions for divorce in the law?  Our modern social perception of marriage and divorce chooses to politely remember Moses and to forget Christ, "The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?  And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he who made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?  Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.  They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?  He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.  And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.  His disciples say unto him, "If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry"  (Matthew 19:3 10).  I have quoted extensively from this passage, for it records the interpretation of the lesson by the Author himself and because it provides us with more instructive truth than we will ever find in any other quarter.

Obviously, the Pharisees inferred an inconsistency between the Genesis account of marriage in the Garden and the provision of Moses in the law for divorce. Seizing this hotly debated issue, they hoped to catch him in a tangled web of reasoning that they could use against him.  Knowing their hearts and the need his family would have for clear instruction on this common-to-life, emotion-charged issue, Jesus appealed to the simple original institution of marriage and quietly reminded them that the same institution still prevailed.  God had not mysteriously changed the laws of marriage somewhere along the way.  In yet another attempt to catch Jesus in error, a wonderful flaw of disagreeing with Moses, they questioned why Moses allowed divorce, but they were not prepared for his answer.  The real problem was not the original institution of marriage, nor the permissive rule of divorce written by Moses, but it was the hardness of the human heart.  Moses suffered divorce; he didn't encourage or sanction it!  When the disciples comprehended that perhaps the original law of marriage and Moses really did agree, and that God intended for a marriage to last for a lifetime, they demonstrated the very hardness of heart that Jesus had exposed.  Their reaction that concluded, "Then perhaps it isn't good to marry at all," revealed the true sin of their hearts.  They were unwilling to consider the responsible assignment of a lifetime pledge to one marriage partner, God's intent for marriage.

Life is full of choices and priorities, and most problems arise by a faulty ranking of the various priorities in our lives.  I offer this sequence of priorities as the nearest to God's order that I have found.  We should put God as our first priority, husband or wife second, children third, and profession fourth.  If devotion to our marriage partner is second only to God and if we live out that priority, then we have just embarked on a way of thinking and living that would virtually eliminate broken homes from the Christian community.  Just as thoroughly as one partner should leave father and mother, lowering them in the hierarchy of priorities, the other partner should reduce profession and career ambitions to their lower position in the priority list.

"They shall be one flesh," is enlarged by Jesus in Matthew 19, "Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.  What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."  Contrary to the modern self-serving idea, marriage is not just a piece of paper.  It is God's prescribed commandment for a man and a woman to live together with a commitment, second only to the commitment to God himself, to keep that relationship for life, to keep it joyfully, as keeping one's own self.  In this kind of marriage God is honored, and the partners find more fulfillment and joy than can be imagined in any other relationship known to man.