The following is a message I wrote several years back as part of a class in Genesis.  It is a look at the Biblical pattern and design for marriage as God intended.  In our day and age of disposable relationships, throw-away marriages, and do what you want when you want behaviors,  we desperately need to be reminded of how this wonderful gift began and what it was meant to be.  Over the next few posts we’ll look at reminders that Marriage is Divine by Design.  -Blessings!

The Divine Origination of Marriage

Genesis 2:18-25 (NASB77)
¹⁸ Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
¹⁹ And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
²⁰ And the man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.
²¹ So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place.
²² And the LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
²³ And the man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
²⁴ For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
²⁵ And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

One of the first things we see is that marriage originated in the mind of God.

18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”

John Phillips^[1] writes that God anticipated man’s need for companionship before man even realized his emptiness and incompleteness. Before Eve would be held in Adam’s arms God had already held her in His mind. We see that the first time God declares that something is “not good” is when he looks and sees the incompleteness of man. Because God knows what is best for us we should be willing to submit ourselves to His divine plan. Marriage originated with God. He knows the needs of the heart for everyone of His children, and He plans to meet those needs.

While marriage indeed originated with God, the reality is that we live in a fallen society. C.S. Lewis in the book The Screwtape Letters^[2] used some potent and alarming words as Screwtape, a senior devil in Satan’s forces, writes to Wormwood, an apprentice devil. Wormwood’s patient, the particular human being he was supposed to be conducting safely to hell, had become a Christian. Since the overall war had been won Screwtape sought to make the best of a “deplorable situation”. He advised that Wormwood lead the Christian to a “desirable marriage.” He admitted that marriage had originated with God, but that marriage has it’s uses even for the cause of Satan. The thought being that a poor marriage would render the Christian useless and miserable. With this thought in mind we must understand that one of the reasons our divorce rate is so high, and broken marriages so numerous is that Satan seeks to attack and destroy those things that God created to make man happy, so that man may be made ineffective and kept miserable. Being aware of that truth will begin us on the way to strengthening our own marriages as well as those around us.

^[1] Exploring Genesis p. 52

^[2] The Screwtape Letters, Lewis, C. S. Macmillan, 1982