Feb 24 2009
Leaving and Cleaving
In today’s secular world, and too often even within Christendom, the concept of the unifying dimension of marriage seems to have gone by the wayside. The commitment to a spouse is second only to the commitment to Christ Jesus and today we rarely see people who are willing to take the marriage relationship as seriously as it was intended to be by God. I know that in today’s blended families the tendency is to split the duties of providing and parenting into factions of, “yours,” and, “mine,” but it doesn’t make it right. This is one area in which we should really stand out from the world and show them that there is a better way. Since Christ sanctioned the Bible and since we are claiming Christ as our Lord, we must be willing to be diligent in pursuing a Biblical pattern in marriage, but what does that look like?
It begins with a right understanding of God’s opinion of marriage, a willingness to do a bit of leg work on our own, and the commitment to persevere through the hard times knowing the God is refining us to the image of Christ as we walk through the valleys of life. God gave the institution of marriage as a lifelong union of a man and a woman, a rejoining of two parts of a whole, if you will. Looking at Genesis 2:23 we read, “… she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.” and in the next verse… “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they will be one flesh.” So we can see here that in the making of woman, God took her out of man, and in marriage they are rejoined as one flesh.
I am dismayed at the number of professing Christians that maintain separate bank accounts, deny their spouses the right to discipline the children that were parented through a previous relationship, and require prenuptial agreements before getting married. This is evidence that the marriage is lacking the, “becoming one flesh,” aspect that God’s Word teaches as the model for a Godly marriage. “Oh, but you don’t know my spouse! You wouldn’t think such things if you knew what he/she was capable of.” This is no excuse. All this says is that you didn’t apply due diligence in selecting your spouse in the first place. Nothing happens outside of the providence of God, so if you have been led to the marriage altar, then you must be in a relationship that God has allowed.
I am not suggesting that all of the marriages that God allows to happen are carefree or unconditionally protected from every bad thing, but I am saying that God knows about it and is faithful in walking through the hard times with you. I am confident that many people get married, even professing Christians, who think that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll simply divorce and go on to a new relationship, but doesn’t the vow taken before God say, “…for as long as you both shall live?” We seem to neglect the importance of the most critical earthly decision, that of a mate, as though we were picking a pair of shoes. My mother used to own a champion dachshund bitch that she bred for several years, as a result my father observed, and relayed to me, that, “…most people will spend more time and effort choosing a mate for their dogs than they will for themselves.” Sadly, I have to agree with him.
But what about the case when the spouse is not a believer? What does Scripture say? Well, if you knew that your spouse was an unbeliever before you got married, then you violated Biblical principles in yoking yourself to an unbeliever. But if this is where you find yourself, then look to 1 Corinthians, Chapter 7. Here is a wealth of marital guidance, among which we read; if we find ourselves married to an unbeliever and they are willing to remain in the relationship, then we are to let them remain. It could be that we are going to be used of God to bring them to faith. This case could be either the one where we were blinded by a false image of love and married anyway, (even though we knew it wasn’t right), or that two nonbelievers marry and later one comes to faith without the other.
There is never a moment when you can look at your situation and say that God didn’t allow it to happen. He may not have caused it, (usually our messes are the result of our own bad choices), but if we’re in it, then He has allowed it. If you are in any kind of marital strife, God knows about it. Our society has programmed God out of our lives and programmed a sort of humanism in. We need to return to the Biblical teachings of what our lives, and especially our marriages, ought to be about. Not only that, but we need to see it as essential that we teach the next generations that there is a reason to be certain about the people we decide to marry. It is vital that the Christian marry a Christian. How can a couple raise up children in the Lord if they, themselves, are divided on the issue? But the model of Biblical marriage is more than agreement in spiritual matters, it is the agreement of practical matters as well. These practicalities must be handled in such a way as to demonstrate the Christian principles to our children. Why should mommy and daddy have separate checkbooks? This indicates that one of them doesn’t trust the other with the money and further, that one may be hiding things from the other as well.
For one parent to tell the other step-parent that they are not allowed to discipline , “My,” children sends the signal that the child need not listen to the step-parent, and that the child may actually be able to intentionally play one parent off the other to gain favors. These are only a couple of examples of why it is so important that you and your prospective spouse are equally yoked in marriage. Make sure that you agree on money, discipline, your Christian faith; without these, so many areas of life will eventually become battlefields, battlefields where the children ultimately lose.
I learned what it means to, “be one flesh,” when I began to experience pains in my chest. I was under high anxiety because my wife had just had heart surgery and I began to have, what I thought were sympathy pains. Being the man, I promptly decided that I should keep this information to myself and not burden my wife with it while she was still recovering. On more than one occasion, I found myself genuinely concerned that I would die in my sleep at night; and waking up in the morning being truly surprised that I had lived through the night. Of course, I was sparing my wife the worry, but then I began to have the Spirit work on me and I kept having, “…one flesh…” in my mind. It wasn’t long before I realized how upset I would be if the very thing I was doing to my wife, were to be done to me.
I explained to her what I had been feeling and how I was wrong that as, “one flesh,” I had not told her what was going on. If she and I are one flesh, as the Bible tells us, then I had no right to keep from her what this half of that one flesh was struggling with. I have learned that my struggles are OUR struggles and that her struggles are equally OUR struggles. Thankfully there was nothing seriously wrong with me and I look back on that episode with thanksgiving because God allowed me to see His vision for a Christian marriage. Brothers and sisters, there is no division of children, money, health or debt. There is no, “her bills,” and, “my bills.” There are only bills, and there is only, “our,” money to pay them; she doesn’t suffer from cancer, you both do; one of you never receives an inheritance, you share in it.
What God took out of man, as woman, in the creation He gives back to us in marriage. The loneliness of the spinster’s life, or that of the unsatisfied bachelor, is evidence that we may not be whole beings without our mates. I am not saying that everyone must be married to be complete, God sometimes fills the void Himself. But for those who are not sated by God’s filling which allows contentment in the single life, it seems as though it may be the spouse that is lacking. Even so, we must be extremely careful about the spouse we choose. The selection of a mate is not like buying a car that you can foresee trading in after a few years. This is a choice that needs to be made from the perspective of a life-long commitment, one that you are going to ride out though good times and bad, knowing that God has promised to walk with you through every valley and to bless you in your shared, common faith.
Being salt and light to the world bears with it a certain amount of responsibility and accountability. Before you take the leap simply for the sake of an over infatuated, mistaken sense of what you believe to be love, make sure that God is in the choice. Then, once you have accomplished that, make sure to keep God in the marriage. If you do this you will surely still have occasional rocky roads, but the world will look at the commitment and wonder at a marriage that is not divided, not splintered into, “yours and mine,” but rather, one that has been able to endure the trials and tribulations leveled against it. You can end up with the kind of marriage that will cause people to ask, “How do you do it?” When they ask, (and they will), you will be able to smile and tell them that, early on, you both decided to be, “one flesh;” to cleave to one another no matter what because those are the enduring traits of a marriage that is…
All for the Glory of Christ