#DailyDevotion Your Marriage Is The Image Of God Your Children See
Genesis 2:18–25
18Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” … 21So 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. 22And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23Then 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.”
24Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
In the beginning we see a great principle at hand: It is not good for the man to be alone. God was not alone. In the Trinity, there is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God makes man in his own image in chapter one, male and female he made man. Part of the image of God is marriage while also each person is also made in the image and likeness of God as we see in Gen. 9 and James. Yet marriage is also an image of God.
It is not good that the man should be alone. The Lord brought all the animals to Adam and even the dog and the cat were not suitable helpmeets for the man. So the Lord put Adam to sleep, took one of his ribs and built a woman from that rib, hence setting up a principle upon which the image of God in marriage is established, one flesh. The man sees the woman the Lord had brought to him and he breaks forth in poetry as men are bound to do when they see he love of their life (even if it isn’t good poetry because of our fallen nature now). There may be a language out there that doesn’t have the word for woman attached to the word for man but I don’t know of any. I find that fascinating. A vestige of a more pristine age I guess. But it points us to this fact, the first woman came from man, though Paul in 1 Cor. is also quick to remind us men that we all come from the womb of a woman now.
When a man marries a woman and vice versa, they disjoin themselves from all previous relationships. This relationship formed by marriage supersedes all previous relationships including that of parents, maybe in some cases especially of parents. This person is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. They are the A, the number 1 person of our life. No one should come between them, not father, mother, mother-in-law, friends, neighbors, no one. Anyone who will not support this relationship should not be listened to and probably should be side-lined.
As an image of God, the married couple needs to be of one heart and one mind. This is not always easy in this fallen world but if we listen to St. Paul in Eph. 5:22ff we might get a chance at exhibiting the image of God to a fallen world and the image of Christ and his church: The husband sacrificing himself and the wife submitting herself for the benefit of the other.
Heavenly Father, grant us your grace that we who are married may present an image of the Trinity in our married life and give support to those who are married for the sake of Christ. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.