By John Moyibi Amoda
THE Lord’s marriage was the marriage of the male and the female created in God’s image for God’s creation purpose.  The Woman created out of Adam was named by Adam; but marriage was the confession of kinship declared by Adam out of whom the Woman was made.

“And Adam said,” of the Woman brought to him by God, “this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.  Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:23-24).

The Lord Jesus made plain the process by which God produced the female created as Man by the spoken Word (Genesis 1:26-27).  Adam recognised the Woman both as “kindred person” and as “help meet”, taken out of Man.  As a kindred person, the Woman was bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She was made from Adam and so she was not only of Adam but more importantly she was also of Adam’s being, a bone of “my bones” and “flesh of my flesh”.  She was constituted of Adam out of the bones and flesh of Adam.  Although a distinct entity, the Woman was not a different person, she was a member of Adam in fact, just as the arm is “bone of the bones of a body and flesh of the flesh” of the body.

For this cause says the Lord Jesus, every man must leave his father, and his mother and be realised as Man, created male and female, by cleaving unto his wife.  It is in this cleaving unto his wife, that a man is realised in his wife and the woman in her husband as one flesh, thus reproducing Man created male and female.

Marriage is this cleaving that produces out of two entities the Adam and the Eve, the Man created male and female.  The Man is the marriage, that is the one resulting from the cleaving of the man unto his wife.  And God had and therefore did purpose that the male and the female which he created as Man should through the process by which He fashioned the woman out of Adam be reconstituted as Man.

Out of two God had manifested one, the Man, male and female.  This was what Adam confessed as God brought the ‘help meet’ to him; God did not give the “help” a name.  God had left all naming of God’s living beings to Adam.

“And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.  And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowls of the air, and to every beast of the field; (Genesis 1:19-20).

And God upon the making of “the help meet” for the man “brought her unto the man” (Genesis 1:22b).  The name that God gave to the entity created from the bones of Adam was also Adam’s name for the same person “she shall be called, Woman, because she was taken out of Man”.

It is this Beginning Realization of Adam and the Woman that define for Jehovah and Jesus what marriage is, namely was the result of a husband separating himself from his father and mother and cleaving to his wife to make of two one flesh. This was the reality of the husband-wife entity, two becoming one body.  It is for that reason that the husband and wife “were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25).

A “person” constituted of the same bones and the same flesh is a body – thus the “head” is naked, and “the body naked and both members are not ashamed.  Marriage for God and thus for the Lord Jesus is integral to the creation process.

This was what Man, the man and his wife, were at the beginning, members of the same body. After the fall, the two members of one body had become two individuals.

As two individuals, they were now aware of their nakedness and were ashamed before one another.  This transformation in the consciousness of the man and woman was the result of their disobeying God.

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked: and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons…And the LORD called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat” (Genesis 3,7,9-12).

The fall described above is evidence of the change produced by sin.  The gender differentiation of Man had become the gender alienation of the man from the woman.  She that was “the bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” has become “the woman whom thou gavest to be with me”.

The two members of one body had become two individuals separated from God by sin and from one another by guilt.  Creation marriage had died, to be replaced by cohabitation marriage.

“The Woman whom thou gavest to be with me”.  When the Law was given to Israel God recognised that the husband and wife were together only as cohabitants; it was cohabitation marriage that God addressed in the Law.

Cohabitation marriage is marriage between offsprings of Adam created in God image but who had become since the fall one who begets both sons and daughters in his own image (Genesis 5:1-5).

Cohabitation marriage is marriage between two individuals with two different minds and wills both dead in sin and transgressions.  The province of the Law however was given to Israel alone, not to the world.

Continues next week.