GOD’S PLAN FOR MARRIAGE ACCORDING TO GENESIS

 

GOD’S PLAN FOR MARRIAGE ACCORDING TO GENESIS

            When God created Adam and Eve he created marriage.  Their sexual differentiation and marital union is an important element in what it means for them to be created in God’s likeness and image: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).  God is fruitful and loving, and therefore those created in his image must also be fruitful and loving.  According to Scripture, God is revealed – “imaged” – in the one-flesh union of the man and woman.  It reveals that marriage is essential to the mission God gave them of subduing the earth: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the seas, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth” (Gen 1:28).  In the plan of God human beings can be fertile only by coming together as husband and wife.  His purpose for creating them can only be fulfilled in their marriage. 

            God could have filled the earth with humans in the same way that He filled it with animals, not by wine, dancing, and courtship, but by mating according to mere instinct.  But God, who created them in the divine image, wanted human beings to love, because He himself loves.  Genesis teaches us that the first form of human love which God created was spousal love.  This love is both spiritual and physical.  “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body” (Gen 2:24).  They cling in love and are united physically.  From this perspective sex can never be downgraded to a simple physical act.  As Pope John Paul II teaches, “Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion.  Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being…Love includes the human body, and the body is made a sharer in spiritual love…Consequently, sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such” (Familiaris consortio #11). 

            Genesis reveals that sexuality is God’s gift to humanity, given at the moment he creates them as male or female.  Their sexuality makes a man and a woman compatible with each other.  It is given to draw them together into a communion, which by God’s blessing is shared with their children.  It was never God’s intention that shame should have anything to do with sex or the human body: “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen 2:25).  It was only after they sinned that they lost the original harmony which they enjoyed with God, with each other, and within themselves.  But even after their sin God kept them together as husband and wife, clothing them with leather garments and settling them “east of the garden of Eden” where they raised a family (Gen 3:24).  Despite being expelled from the garden, God did not change the blessing and purpose of their sexuality or the nature of their marriage.  Only, unfortunately, it became a lot harder for them to live it!  The rest of the Bible is God’s story of how over thousands of years he wooed their descendants back into a holy marriage, of the Lamb and his Bride the Church, which will be consummated when Christ returns in glory (cf. Revelation 22).  Sacramental marriage is an image of this relationship.  But more on that later!