And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make an help meet for him”.
These words and those which follow in the record in Genesis 2 are unmistakable in their implication: marriage is not a mere human arrangement or social convention, but a divine institution. If confirmation of this were needed, it is to be found in the words of Jesus himself in answer to the question put to him by the Pharisees, “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” (Matt. 19. 3-6). Jesus in reply took them back to the divine intention at creation: “Have ye not read, that he which 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”.
“What therefore God hath joined, let not man put asunder.”
These solemn words emphasize the divine sanctity of the marriage relationship which raises it far above the level of all other human relationships and should hallow the union of every husband and wife from the beginning through all the changing scenes of life till death them do part. This sanctity of marriage is underlined by the fact that the figure of marriage is used in the scriptures to portray both the relationship between God and Israel and also the union between Christ and his church. Jeremiah presents Israel as a young bride following her divine spouse in the wilderness ( Jer. 2. 2), and Ezekiel traces the story of that child back to its infancy, how God found her as a new-born waif “cast out in the open field”, took pity on her, nursed and nurtured her through childhood until she was old enough to be betrothed to Him (Ezek. 16. 3-14). So too Isaiah bases his message of hope on this relationship between God and His people:
“For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called. For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God” (Isa. 54.5-6).
In the New Testament Christ’s relationship with his church is portrayed in the same figure, which Paul describes as “a great mystery” (Eph. 5. 32). In Revelation there appears the vision of the marriage of the Lamb to his bride, for which marriage “his wife hath made herself ready” (Rev. 19. 7-8).
In the forging and maintenance of the relationship between God and His people two qualities stand out, love and loyalty. The Psalmist and the prophets set forth God’s love for His people in terms of the utmost tenderness, emphasizing the wonder of the divine condescension, and in the New Testament that love finds its fullest expression in that “God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him” (1 John 4. 9). This love of God should evoke an answering response of love in the lives of those who experience it: to “love the Lord thy God” was therefore the greatest commandment of the Mosaic law and Jesus emphasized that the love of his disciples was to be a response to his love, “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15. 12).
With this love goes loyalty or, as the Bible calls it, faithfulness: “God is faithful, by whom ye were called” (1 Cor. 1. 9). Man’s hope rests on this faithfulness of God, and Psalmist and prophets alike proclaim it. In the prophets God’s faithfulness is contrasted with the unfaithfulness of His people which is likened to the disloyalty of an unfaithful wife. For example, in Hosea the enormity of the sin of adultery applied in figure to Israel is denounced with severity on the one hand, while the appeal to the back-sliding nation to forsake this evil way and return to the Lord is made with extraordinary tenderness of thought and feeling.
The importance of love and loyalty applies with equal force to the relationship between husband and wife. This begins with the love which springs up in that mutual attraction between man and woman the mystery of which has fortunately never been resolved by scientific analysis.
In the course of years this love must broaden and deepen as it grows in measure after the pattern of the love of God and of Christ, a love which gives rather than takes and tries always to seek not its own interests or desires but those of the partner of the marriage. It cannot do this unless there is complete trust and confidence between husband and wife. We are all quick enough to denounce the sin of adultery. We do so rightly because it is the supreme expression of disloyalty, but are we as ready as we should be to uphold loyalty in its many other aspects? Disloyalty can express itself in word just as much as deed, and doubt and jealousy are cancers which have corrupted many a marriage. Love and loyalty mean unity, and the lack of them, however it may be manifest, means disunity.
This unity is essential in marriage not only for its own sake but because it provides the proper atmosphere in which children may be brought into the world, nurtured and prepared for the strains and stresses of life. We all recognize the importance of what we call the “home background” in the life of any man or woman and the tragedy of broken homes is seen in broken lives as the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.
At the same time we are apt to take too superficial a view of the so-called “home background” and fight shy of some of the fundamental, intimate things which it comprehends. It is no accident but one of the wonders and mysteries of the divine purpose that the bringing of children into what should be a united home begins with the supreme union between husband and wife in which the Scripture is fulfilled that “They shall be one flesh”. Unhappily it is precisely here that the whole exalted concept of marriage can begin to be debased with disastrous results not only for parents but for children. It is a widely held view that, as it is often expressed, there is something not quite nice about sex. People therefore do not talk about it, not because it is something sacred and intimate, but because they are slightly ashamed of it; parents do not quite know how to talk to their children about it and so the doubts and perplexities are passed on from one generation to the next.
It is this kind of attitude which was probably largely responsible for the Victorian atmosphere in which sex was apt to be a matter for doubtful jokes and concealed abuses. In the twentieth century, under the pretext of throwing off these taboos, we have swung to the other extreme and sex now screams at us from the newspapers, the hoardings and the radio and the whole sanctity of the marriage relationship is threatened because the union of man and woman “in one flesh” is coming to be regarded, not as a sacred expression of a unique love and loyalty, but as something which may be indulged in between whomsoever will as the impulse moves them. In this way the divine ideal of marriage is being rapidly undermined.
An appreciation of the divine ideal should not merely protect us against such undermining influences. It should also enable us to view sex in a proper perspective, neither exaggerating its place in marriage nor being ashamed or afraid of it. Whilst physical attraction is a necessary ingredient in most marriages, it provides neither a full nor a permanent basis. Experience teaches that a happy marriage is one in which the first flush of passion has deepened into something richer and in which the physical union is not the fulfillment of fleshly lusts but an expression of “the marriage of true minds” which should show itself in every aspect of married life.
In a world where marriage has been debased and sex commercialized it behoves all of us to look to our own lives, to measure our outlook on these matters honestly and fearlessly against the divine standards revealed in the Scriptures, to be ready to amend our ideas if they are found wanting, and not to fail our own children by leaving them without help and guidance when they are surrounded by constant challenges to standards which, alas, owing to the weakness of the flesh, they may see us honouring more with our lips than in our lives.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One