Bible study amazes me in that
not only do we learn more and more of our Lord every time but that certain
things catch our attention on any given day. Something that may not have earned
so much as a pause in our reading yesterday may stick out above all else today.
Christ telling people to sell everything to follow Him was one of those things
that popped out at me just last month.
This month it’s something
completely different. Last month I watched a movie on the book of Ruth. It held
pretty close to Scripture and was enjoyable to watch. But something in it stood
out to me. I don’t remember exactly what was said it but it was something to
the effect of God preparing Ruth for Boaz. That got me thinking but it wasn’t
until I switched from the New Testament to the Old that I really started seeing
the verses, the stories, about marriage. I wasn’t looking for them but there
they were.
From the very beginning we see
God’s hand and plan in marriage.
Then
the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a
helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord 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. The man gave names to all livestock and to
the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there
was not found a helper fit for him. 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. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made
into a woman and brought her to the man. 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.”
Therefore a man shall leave his father and
his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Genesis
2:18-24
There
isn’t much said about their marriage. We’re left with only our own thoughts and
speculations on what life was like for them. Adam was created not in the Garden
of Eden but out of it and placed inside it later. At some point after that God
put him to sleep and used his body to create Eve.
This
wasn’t just any woman. This was a woman made from his body and created just for
him. She was designed by God to belong to Adam. When Adam awoke and was
presented with his new wife. Adams response… “This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh. He didn’t look at her and say ‘hmm, there’s a woman’ or ‘that
one will do’ or ‘why God? I’d have rather lain around and not have to put up
with her.’ No. He said ‘at last.’ The implication there is that he waited for
her. He wanted a wife. A helper. A partner.
Now
instead of being alone he had a wife. They were two people joined in marriage
so that they were one flesh. This is a joining of mind, body, and soul. And
they were dependent on each other. Where he was weak she was strong. Where she
was weak he was strong. They were two and yet…one.
There
they were in what amounted to paradise. They had everything and yet by our
standards today…they had nothing but each other. They had no house, no car, no
instant entertainment. They didn’t even have clothes. How much would they have
bonded and clung to each other when they had nothing else? Can you imagine
being the only two people in the world? How attached and dependent would you be
on that other person?
Adam
and Eve had each other and they had God. Not just in thought and Spirit but
walking and talking with them. He was there to give them instruction, to show
them what He expected from them but when He left them alone…they had each
other.
That
was the first marriage God created. And He did create it. He didn’t just bring
them together. He made them for each other.
That
is the first marriage He made. It is the example we should look to.
Scripture
brings us many more marriages. Genesis alone shows us Abraham and Sarah, Noah
and his wife, Noah’s sons and their wives, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachael.
We don’t get very much insight into what their marriages were like. We know that
Sarah called Abraham Lord and that they were still close enough to conceive a
child in their old age. We know the world was repopulated from the eight people,
four married couples, that were on the ark during the flood. We know Isaac was willing to work for fourteen
years to claim the woman he loved as his wife.
These
are only a handful of marriages scattered throughout Scripture. There are so
many more. The very fact that there are so many marriages in Scripture should
tell us the Lord puts importance on it.
Over
and over in Scripture marriage is mentioned. Couples are referenced. An internet search turns up the fact that
marriage is mentioned 19 times in the Bible. A search on the word wife shows
that it appears either 396 times or 407 times. I couldn’t find a number count
for the word husband. Even allowing for errors in counting, different
translations and anything else that might affect the word counts the number of
times wife is mentioned is pretty impressive.
But
what were these marriages like? Our minds tend to see them as we see marriage today.
Some good, some bad, some awful. And I’m sure they were. People were people no
matter when they lived. Sin takes hold of all of us no matter how hard we try
not to let it. We’re human. We fail. We say things we shouldn’t. Do things we
shouldn’t. Hurt those we love. That wasn’t any different just because the times
were different.
But
what did those marriages look like?
Have
you ever noticed that marriages lasted for centuries in ways they don’t today?
Part of that is the social stigma of being divorced. Even well into the 1900’s
saying you were divorced carried a burden of shame with it. But there was
another side to it. The simple fact was there was a time when men needed women
and women needed men.
In
times past a woman had no way of supporting herself or providing for her
children if she wasn’t married. There were few opportunities for employment
available to women, and when they were…if she had children what was she
supposed to do with them if she worked outside the home? Who would care for
them?
Men
had few if any domestic skills and less time for doing things like cooking and
cleaning even if they had the ability to do them. If they had children,
especially small children, they were ill equipped to care for them. It was hard
to work a field, or tend animals with a baby in their arms.
Life
was separated into men’s work and women’s work. Husbands had a role, wives had
a role. And marriages happened as often out of sheer need as they did out of
love. Life was just harder alone than it was when you were married.
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man
should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Genesis 2:18
Our modern society has taken the
need for marriage away. Women can and do support themselves and their children.
Men can cook and clean or they can throw something in the microwave. A single
parent of either sex can drop their children off at daycare and not need to
worry about them while they work. The need that held husbands and wives
together has disappeared.
We can’t know what Biblical
marriages looked like but we can know that the Lord had a plan for it in the beginning
and He has a plan for it today. We know He gave certain roles to women and
certain roles to men. He is the provider. She the caretaker. He is the
protector. She the nurturer.
What if we simply stayed in the
roles the Lord created us for? What if we realized that the Biblical model of marriage
is good and tried to follow it? What if when we started questioning whether
marriage was good we turned to Scripture? What if we looked at examples like
Adam and Eve and saw that they stuck together through everything? What if we
looked at marriages like Hosea and saw that they stuck it out when most would
have walked away?
What if we looked at our husband
and asked ‘what if God created me for him? What if I’m made ‘bone of his bone
and flesh of his flesh’?
There is a secular movie that I
saw years ago. It centers around a married couple as they work (and fight)
together. A scene at the end of the movie shows a tornado heading their way.
They take refuge in the only place that seems safe and is close enough to get
to: a well house. With the tornado headed their way they lash themselves to the
piping and hang on to it and each other. The tornado rips everything away and leaves
them in the midst of a swirling mass that is churning angrily around them. As
they’re bombarded with wind and debris swirls around them, you can see the
churning tornado that is trying to suck them into it. But the pipes they’re
anchored to hold fast and they’re swept into the air, hanging from their
anchor, alone in a swirling storm that is surrounding them with trouble.
The Lord was kind enough to give
me a Christian husband. Not just one that professes to know Christ but one that
truly believes and follows the Lord, a man that denies himself for Christ, who
puts others first, who is kind and humble. A man that I can see lives out
Scripture every day. A man that is my safe place. Since our marriage we have
been hit with many trials both big and small but with every one of them I have
noticed that they’re easier to bear because we have each other. It’s easier to
find a solution when we look for it together. It’s easier to bear the trials
when we don’t have to bear them alone.
I haven’t watched that movie in
years but the more trials that come our way the more I see my husband and I in
the center of that tornado. We are the couple being blown and tossed about,
Christ is the pipes that keep us anchored, that give us hope and strength to
hang on, life is the tornado that swirls around us. But there in the middle of
the tornado, my husband and I are anchored to the pipes, we have a firm
foundation that keeps us rooted. We may be battered by the storms (trials)
while the tornado of life surrounds us but we have each other in the midst of
it.
And we have Christ.
Could that be what God had in
mind when he created the first marriage?
