The Christian Perspective on Marriage — Part One: Origins

In today’s world where we read and hear of failed marriages leading to divorces, adultery and of couples that no longer communicate, it’s time to take a step back and see what God intended for men and women in the institution of marriage.

What most married couples don’t realize is that God has ordained separate and distinct roles for men and women in a marriage, and that it is exactly this failure to recognize and fulfill their roles that most couples end their marriages citing irreconcilable differences.

Let’s take a step back and start from the beginning of time when the first marriage took place, and find out exactly what God intended for man and woman in a marriage.

In Genesis 2:7, we find the first man, Adam, created by God:

then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

Genesis 2:7

Adam was alone for a good time in the Garden of Eden. To keep him company, God made a variety of beasts on land and birds of the air and told him to name them. However, we are told that even with the thousands of species of animals, there was “… not found an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:20).

Wait, I hear you asking — if God was all-knowing, why did He have to create so many animals and birds for Adam to name, then realize that Adam needed someone to help him?

The answer’s simple: God already knew, as we read in Genesis 2:18!

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

God merely wanted Adam himself to be convinced that he indeed needs a partner and assistant!

Thereafter, as we read further in Genesis 2:21-25, God created woman.

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 2:21-25

Immediately, we have the ordination of marriage as we read in Genesis 2:24-25!

In the above verse, we learn two basic things about marriage:

1. Man shall leave his parents and take for himself a wife, and both shall become a family unit.
2. Marital sex is part and parcel of married life.

Thus was marriage ordained as an institution by God from the beginning.

In the second part of the series, we shall examine what specific roles God has ordained for men and women in a marriage.