The biblical concept of husband and wife being "one flesh" is far more involved than many people think. This teaching has its origins in Genesis 2:24: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." Too many Christians pass this off as being merely an illustration of the marriage bond—that when a man and woman marry, the two become one. However, when Jesus quotes this verse in Matthew 19:6 and Mark 10:8, He states it in the negative: ". . . they are no longer two but one flesh," strengthening the principle beyond mere illustration.
This phrase "one flesh" is used only seven times in the Bible: four times in the three verses just cited, as well as Matthew 19:5; Ephesians 5:31; and I Corinthians 6:16. This final scripture elevates the "one flesh" principle, revealing a spiritual correspondence:
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For "the two," He says, "shall become one flesh." But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. (I Corinthians 6:15-17)
How sacrilegious it would be to try to force Christ into a union with a harlot! Yet, that is what members of the church do when they give themselves over to un-Christian behavior, since they have been joined to Christ by covenant. He is the Bridegroom, and the church is the Bride. Such iniquity, Paul suggests, is the spiritual counterpart to a married man having sexual relations with a woman who is not his wife.
As shown previously, coitus—whether inside or outside of marriage—binds a man and woman as one flesh. Joined in verse 16 is derived from the Greek word kolláō, which means exactly the same thing as the Hebrew word dabaq in Genesis 2:24: "to glue together," "to cleave," "to adhere." Paul is plainly stating that, as the conjugal relations of a couple bind them together like glue, so also does the illicit act of a man and a harlot unite them as one flesh.
In the Old Testament, writers often used forms of the verb "to know" as a euphemism for the sexual act (see Genesis 4:1; I Samuel 1:19; etc.). This "knowing" suggests that the actual intercourse is but the physical sign of the greater personal and emotional intimacy that is shared—even with a prostitute. "Uncovering the nakedness" of another, as is written throughout Leviticus 18, is such an intimate act that it creates a bond between the two participants.
Too many people of this generation think of sex as cheap. Since the publication of the Kinsey Report in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the doors of promiscuity have been flung wide open, spawning the sexual revolution. Nowadays, it raises few eyebrows that some have multiple sexual partners, even before graduating from high school! While Americans of all beliefs shake their heads in consternation over Tiger Woods' string of illicit liaisons, the truth is that this kind of scandalous behavior is quite commonplace in Main-Street America.
God does not consider the sexual union of man and wife as cheap. As the author of Hebrews writes, "Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge" (Hebrews 13:4). To Him, it is so valuable that every time a person engages in it, he more intimately binds himself to his spouse, making marriage even more precious. Clearly, the "one flesh" principle is vital to Christian marriage.
However, the sexual aspect of this principle should not distract us because, in fact, the focus is on the closeness of union or togetherness. Without using the term "one flesh" again, the apostle expands on how this principle applies to marriage in I Corinthians 6:18-20; 7:2-4. He writes, "You are not your own" (I Corinthians 6:19), and "You do not have authority over your body, but your spouse does" (I Corinthians 7:4, paraphrased).
This is a major Christian understanding, one that separates it from marriages in other religions. Once married—once joined as a unit—the individuals in the covenant (husband and wife, male and female) are subsumed within the bond. To use a sports analogy, the team becomes more important than the individual players. The principle of "one flesh" leads to absolute togetherness or unity—living, thinking, planning, working as one.
This is obviously the ideal. It should not embarrass anyone or make anyone feel like a failure if this kind of total oneness is not present in his or her own marriage. It may never happen. Even so, God expects married couples to work toward the goal of being so committed to the relationship, so much in love with each other, so willing to work harmoniously together, that they function as a perfectly oiled unit, as it were.
We should never forget that marriage is a type of something greater! What does God want of us? To be one spirit with Him (I Corinthians 6:17)! The marriage relationship, where a man and a woman come together as one flesh, is a training program for the majority of us to learn how to be one with Him. If we cannot be one flesh with the person closest to us, how can we hope to be of one spirit with God?
Marriage is a primary spiritual testing-ground for us to prepare to be the Bride of Jesus Christ our Savior and to be one with God. Thus, we learn how to work in tandem with another human being whom God has given to us as a mate. Like a yoke of oxen, we must learn to pull in the same direction and for the same purposes, straining to reach the same ultimate glory.
How are we married couples doing? Are we pulling together? Or have we agreed to something like a 50/50 marriage? God would frown upon a 50/50 marriage because what it implies is that one is willing to meet his spouse only halfway. God desires us to give everything up to the other—so much that we no longer even own ourselves! Each spouse owns the other. That is surrendering a great deal, but it is also receiving much in return.
In Song of Songs 6:3, the Shulamite, after experiencing the trauma of being beaten and abused by wicked men in her town, comes to realize that the "one flesh" principle is the way a marriage should work. She says: "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." She understands that her spouse has done everything for her benefit, and because she was his and he was hers, she would do everything for him.
This is as good as it gets, humanly speaking. The perfect marriage is one in which each partner is wholly committed to the other and to the relationship. Each mate is striving to the utmost to live according to the will of God by showing true love—outgoing concern—for the other. And the perfect mate is the loving Christian giving his all to develop God's character both in himself and in his spouse.
Moses writes in Genesis 2:24, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." As mentioned in the previous essay, this is the "leave and cleave" verse regarding godly marriage. Notice that Moses begins the verse with "therefore," which signals a concluding statement. In other words, a man leaves his parents and cleaves to his new wife "because she was taken out of Man" (verse 23). The marriage union, then, works to restore the unity—the oneness—of humanity; the man is incomplete without the woman, and the woman, without the man. Together, they are whole.
"Cleave" is a word that we do not use very often. It is a strange word, as it has come down to us through the centuries with two diametrically opposite meanings! These meanings descended from two similarly sounding Old English (Anglo Saxon) words, clēofan and cleofian, the former meaning "to cut asunder, split," and the latter meaning "to stick fast, adhere." Obviously, the meaning that is correct in this passage is "to stick fast, adhere," as the Hebrew word under it, dabaq, means "cling, adhere to." Modern translations render this Hebrew word as "be joined to," "cling to," "hold fast to," "unite with," "bond with," even "stick with." In every case, it suggests that the couple are "stuck like glue" to each other.
In our house, there is a table in our living room where our children do their homeschool work, and around it are some Windsor chairs. A few years ago, my son, Jarod, had a bad habit of rocking back on one of these chairs, and he rocked on it so much that its back broke completely off, creating a stool. Not wanting to throw the chair away, I decided to repair it. While inspecting the break, I was interested to see that the chair broke above the glued joint. The glued joint remained solidly connected to the seat of the chair. It stuck, adhered, or clung to the seat of the chair, while the rest of the back broke off.
This simple illustration helps us to see what God means in Genesis 2:24. When a man and his wife are joined together—when they cleave to one another—the joint should be stronger than anything else. The joint between a married couple is to be so strong that, if trouble visits the marriage, the union will survive. If a break comes, one of the spouses should "break" but not the joint, that is, one or the other should submit rather than break the bond. That is God's overall intention for the marriage union.
This is the first indication in the Bible that God intends marriage to be one man and one woman for life. Notice the apostle Paul's elucidation of this point in Romans 7:1-3:
Or do you not know, brethren (for I speak to those who know the law), that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives? For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband. So then if, while her husband lives, she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law, so that she is no adulteress, though she has married another man.
The law that Paul is refers to here is not explicitly stated in the Old Testament; no verse in the Old Testament says a man and wife shall be married "until death do they part." In fact, those words are nowhere in the Bible. Neither is the phrase "as long as you both shall live," used in many wedding ceremonies, although it is implied here in Romans 7. Nevertheless, the principle is unquestionably in both testaments, showing the continuity throughout God's Word.
Paul makes God's instruction regarding the marriage union very clear. Marriage is for life, except for a limited number of circumstances that are explained by both Christ in Matthew 19 (and related places in the other gospels) and Paul in I Corinthians 7. God says that He hates divorce in Malachi 2:16, and He therefore provides only a bare minimum of "outs" from the marriage covenant.
The "marriage is for life" principle is definitely in the Bible. In I Corinthians 7:10, Paul restates the church's teaching unequivocally: "Now to the married I command, yet not I but the Lord: A wife is not to depart from her husband." With all the authority of an apostle of Christ, Paul affirms God's desire for a lifelong union, this time positing it in the negative. It should be added that, despite his commanding the wife not to depart from her husband, "what is good for the goose is good for the gander," as the saying goes.
I Corinthians 7:39 again repeats the apostle's doctrinal statement from Romans 7, adding an interesting caveat: "A wife is bound by law as long as her husband lives; but if her husband dies, she is at liberty to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord." The caveat concerns a person's conversion status. If a woman's husband dies while she is a member of the church, she is free to remarry, but "only in the Lord." In other words, she can marry only another converted member of the church, and without doubt, that is the best thing for her to do if she wishes to remarry.
Jesus comments on Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 in Mark 10:6-9:
But from the beginning of the creation, God "made them male and female." "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh"; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.
Clearly, the Bible consistently emphasizes lifelong marriage—from the Book's opening salvoes in Genesis to Malachi, throughout the Gospels, in the epistles of the apostles, and even in the final chapters of Revelation. Conversely, human beings tend to try to find loopholes for splitting up. However, the Bible is not a book that provides many legal loopholes. In fact, it contains so few regulations concerning divorce that it takes a fair bit of scholarship to figure out exactly what Jesus and Paul, especially, mean when they give the few reasons for divorce. It is not simple but a matter that must be deeply considered.
Our God is a very positive God. Throughout His Book, He emphasizes His desire—His intent—for a man and a woman to remain married for life. As we see from Jesus' statement regarding marriage, the first two chapters of Genesis provide the core principles regarding marriage. Other biblical scriptures about marriage are based on what we read about the first human couple in Genesis 1-3. In the end, it comes down to one concept: that a man and his wife are to be one flesh joined together by God. Jesus sums it up by saying that, since "they are no longer two, but one flesh," they should not be separated.
Next time, we will look more closely into the concept of "one flesh."
