The Origin of Marriage

The Origin or Marriage

Like all of God’s laws, those regarding manhood and womanhood are part of a non contradictory and coherent unified whole. In this section we’re going to look at four factors relative to men and women that are so tightly linked and interrelated by God that they can’t rightly be considered apart from one another. They are marriage, single life, male authority, and sexuality. We’ll begin with marriage, because that’s where God laid the foundation for all righteous interactions between men and women.

It’s good to look at marriage first because it’s impossible to understand the role and significance of gender differences in God’s eyes apart from marriage. His moral laws regarding marriage are the basis for all good relationships between men and women..

Marriage, the union of a man and woman as husband and wife, came from God. It’s so important to him that he established it with Adam and Eve. Their creation is recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, where we’re also first told that humans are special to God and unique among all creation:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. (Genesis 1:27–28)

We’re created in God’s image. God addressed Adam and Eve as one. He blessed them, telling them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Telling them to subdue the earth and rule over its creatures he called them to service and appointed them as vice-regents over creation. Neither the blessing nor the appointment was to Adam or Eve alone, but to the pair.

The second chapter of Genesis adds details about the creation of Eve and the union of Adam and Eve as husband and wife:

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. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:20–25)

Adam was incomplete–he needed a helper. Though the text says no helper was found for him, it didn’t come as a surprise to God. He created Adam incomplete by design, needing a companion and helpmate who was like him but also different, one who could fill in what he lacked.

God provided that helpmate in Eve. She was like Adam, created out of him in the image of God, but different. She too was incomplete. United, each supplied what the other lacked–they were complementary. The union was so complete that they were as one flesh. God had both created man and woman and established the first marriage. He had given them all they needed to realize their blessing to be fruitful and multiply and complete their mission to rule over the earth.

Adam’s comments show he recognized that what God had done for them was the pattern for the future. Males and females would continue to find human completeness in one another. Uniting in marriage as one flesh they would leave their parent’s homes and begin new families.